In its depiction of how succession can lead to tyranny, Thomas Preston’s Cambises contains scenes of tremendous pathos and suffering: the public execution of the corrupt deputy Sisamnes witnessed by his son; the grotesque killing of the counsellor Praxaspes’ son by the king and the lament for this child by his mother; the murder of Cambises’ brother; and, perhaps most emotive of all, the encircling of the queen by Cruelty and Murder as she sings a psalm of forgiveness at the point of her death. It is this tragic potential that Preston developed from his source: the creation of a luminous sequence of moments where death is confronted, endured, and lamented. There is also a significant causal pattern at work in this inasmuch as all this suffering and loss is the responsibility of the sovereign who acts outside both positive and natural law. In this account, sovereignty is indeed ‘a power that having its origin in itself, is thereby released from any control’ (Moretti 1988: 45). The theatrical elaboration of this bears further scrutiny as the prerogatives of sovereignty begin to disclose their tragic potential.
It is important to remember that, at the outset, Cambises is not simply the ‘other’ face of sovereignty, cruel and pitiless. Indeed, the succession, to begin with, is a successful one. The king upholds a monarchical system where supreme authority does not belong to him alone but to the king and his council, an assumption, according to John Guy, that remained central to the period’s understanding of sovereignty (Guy 1995: 292-3). Cambises fulfils expectations in this respect by seeking advice from his ‘counsel grave and sapient’ on his determination to invade Egypt: ‘Extend your counsel unto me in that I ask of you’ (line 14). The decision to appoint the judge Sisamnes as his substitute is a collective one reached after mature deliberation. Yet in the moment of delegating supreme power, Cambises lets us see how easily the regulation of monarchical will can lapse as Sisamnes realizes: ‘Now may I abrogate the law, as I shall think it good; | If any one me now offend, I may demand his blood’ (117-18). In this way, the play begins to tell a more fateful story concerning the powers of majesty and to concentrate attention on the quality of the decisions made by Sisamnes as he descends, with the encouragement of Ambidexter, into the iniquitous exploitation of his office.
Yet the play also presents the exercise of sovereign prerogative that brings this corrupt official to account in an equally unsettling way. We have already been warned that Cambises now imitates the ‘tiger’s kind’ (346), yet his decision to execute Sisamnes is not unjust. Its excess leads, however, to the first of the play’s great scenes of tragic spectacle. Sisamnes’ son offers his own life for his father’s; instead, the king insists he witness his father’s death. The fearful punishment that follows marks a crucial shift in the play’s balance of sympathies. Cambises’ instruction after the decapitation is carried out is savage, as is the subsequent stage direction: ‘Pull his skin over his ears to make his death more vile [...] Flay him with a false skin (463, 464 s. d.). As importantly, this action provokes a moving lament from Sisamnes’ son on the consequences of the king’s retribution; this reduces both himself and his father to tears as they realize ‘the king hath no remorse’ (446). The laments shared between Sisamnes and his son make it far less easy to answer Cambises’ question ‘Have not I done a gracious deed?’ (477).
This qualification of sympathy is intensified as this pitiable scene moves immediately into the king’s sadistic killing of his counsellor Praxaspes’ son and the cutting out of his heart. This gruesome action is again accompanied by striking passages of public mourning and lament; these disclose the human devastation caused by the king’s insensate will. Praxaspes’ ‘sweet child’ and ‘only joy’ (517) is killed because of his father’s wise advice concerning the king’s drunkenness, and the atrocity that results from this shatters the conciliar system, revealing Cambises to be completely lawless. The counsellor asks, ‘Is this the gain now from the king for giving counsel good’? (543), as he witnesses the horror of his child’s death and evisceration. From Cambises’ perspective and that of his sycophants this spectacle is indeed relative, an occasion for triumphant hilarity, but it is weighed against the experience of Praxaspes, the ‘woeful man’ (570), and his wife. Their laments for their dead child freeze the fast-flowing action of the play, and the inconsolable mother recollects in moving terms the physical presence of her lost child and the destruction of her political faith: ‘O king, of tiger’s brood! | O tiger’s whelp, hadst thou the heart to see this child’s heart-blood?’ (593-4). These sustained passages of lament are as integral to the play as its equally energetic depiction of immoral intrigue and action, and they call this latter form of theatrical pleasure to account. The sharing of sorrow over these tragic events also involves the dissolution of political trust, and it implies ‘that the institution of absolute monarchy itself may encourage the unnatural and unkind behavior that the play portrays’ (Vanhoutte 2000: 231).
This way of considering Cambises draws upon some of the emphases Walter Benjamin discerned in his study of the baroque Trauerspiel, or ‘mourning play’. Benjamin’s work has not been central to recent interpretation of Renaissance tragedy, although there is now a revival of interest in its far-reaching implications (Strohm 2006). The detail of his argument lies beyond the scope of this chapter; however, some of its key elements are of exceptional interest because they illuminate how tragedy may share political preoccupations and theatrical effects across a broad sweep of time. Principally, this derives from Benjamin’s interest not only in the mood of mourning aroused by tragic theatre but in its political implications. At the centre of the mourning play is the suffering human body, and this affects, in turn, understanding of the nature and imperatives of sovereignty. These works stress the violent and arbitrary capacity of sovereign power, and, in the drastic situations this produces, subjects degrade into sycophancy or they become powerless victims to be dispatched according to the imperatives of lawless will. In the same way, a country or a ‘kingdom’ is succeeded to as a personal possession to be disposed of according to peremptory desires.
In this respect, there was also an important principle of dramatic form that characterized mourning plays, and this, as much as their forbidding content, allowed consideration of how states of emergency also reveal foundational problems. The theatrical mode they adopt involves a constant principle of interruption, whereby dramatic episodes interpose and disconcert each other. This does not preclude the comic; indeed, ‘the comic interior of the Trauerspiel’, Benjamin insists (1998: 128), is integral to its effect. As we see in Cambises, the power of decision also belongs to an intriguer like Ambidexter, or to the goddess Venus, who engineers the king’s erotic obsession with his cousin; these figures are equally substantive authors of the plot. In the scenes where they dominate, the autonomy of the sovereign is demeaned, although the plots of these intriguers also fail in the end as they are unravelled by their own method of dissimulation and reversal. For Benjamin, such actions typify the mourning play as it claims its own theatrical authority to punctuate and scrutinize the exercise of sovereign will. Ultimately, the latter also pursues its own undoing as its motives and decisions are subject to an irregular dramatic rhythm of sudden change that reveals its limitations and illusions. This constant shifting of focus and perspective exposes the myth of sovereign self-sufficiency both to the audience and, ultimately, to the sovereign within the play who has to confront his or her own finitude. Crucial to this are scenes of tragic consequence, of mourning and lament.
Even in this brief account, the tenor of Benjamin’s suggestions about the attractions of tragic form as a way of thinking about sovereignty can be noted. For example, it allows a reconsideration of what might appear to be merely playful in Cambises. Ambidexter interprets the play in a mischievous spirit and he debunks lament, mocking Praxaspes’ wife for mourning her son and taking delight in the fate of Sisamnes at the hands of ‘this tyrant Cambises’ (616). Similarly, he indulges in mock lament after the highly charged killings of Cambises’ brother—‘With sorrowful lamentations I am in such a heat! (741)—and his queen: ‘Very grief so torments me that scarce I can speak’ (1130). In one sense, this is an expected part of Ambidexter’s carnivalesque antagonism to all serious forms of discourse as mere posturing:
But, Lord! So the ladies mourn, crying ‘Alack!’
Nothing is worn now but only black:
I believe all the cloth in Watling Street to make gowns would not serve.
(1133-5)
Yet his disdain for this community of female mourning is continuous with his failed endeavour to domineer over women such as Marian May-be-good and Meretrix in the play’s comic sequences. These are also attempts to diminish the political force of lament by a figure whose only interest is domination.
Other figures in the play break through into new kinds of insight very different in temper from Ambidexter’s. For instance, Cambises’ brother Smerdis disapproves of the king but accepts the Vice’s counsel to be quiescent and to adopt a public language of obedience and fidelity. Yet once Cambises has fallen prey to Ambidexter’s false accusations concerning his brother’s ambitions, he orders his assassination. It is only when Smerdis confronts his annihilation at the hands of this violent and capricious king that he is able to reach a new understanding of his brother by naming him: ‘tyrant tyrannious |[...] all his doings be damnable and pernicious’ (724-5). Later, Cambises’ new queen remembers this shocking act of fratricide. When the king tells the cruel story of setting one of two weak ‘whelps’ to fight a young lion and how his ‘brother whelp’ came to his assistance, ‘Which thing to see before mine eyes did glad the heart of prince’ (1018-29), the queen’s response is very different: ‘At this tale told, let the Queen weep’ (1029 s. d.). She recollects, ‘to shame of royal king’, the killing of the king’s brother Smerdis: ‘faithful love was more in dog than it was in your grace’ (1034, 1040). It is this tragic sympathy that provokes Cambises to commit his final outrage: the killing of the queen as she sings a psalm while being surrounded by Cruelty and Murder. This is one of the most powerful ways of perceiving and judging sovereign power in Cambises: from the viewpoint of the suffering body it has ostracized and condemned.
What kind of political lesson is to be drawn from the play? Its own conclusion is an unremarkable one that returns us to the simple polarities of gratitude for Tudor beneficence in contrast to ‘oriental’ tyranny. No resistance is ever countenanced against this monstrous tyrant, whom, it appears, providence disposes of in a suitably arbitrary manner. Yet, as Eugene D. Hill suggests in a fine essay, the Protestant subjects of Elizabeth had just emerged from a period of persecution under Mary that had produced a range of dissentient arguments concerning the powers and capacities of sovereigns and subjects (Hill 1992). Could literary and theatrical representations of tyranny also produce reflection in this mode? We have a fascinating and neglected piece of evidence from Preston’s source, The Second Book of the Garden of Wisdom, that this was possible. In this work, the significance of Cambises’ reign is debated after his death by the chief Persian lords as they consider who should now be elected king or whether they should have a king at all. The latter view is put forcibly:
No more kynges shulde be chosen, but that by leage and sure confederacie made betwene them, all the lordes myght rule alyke, so shuld libertie be maynteyned and kept on every syde and every man at libertie, for before, it was wel proved by examples that where one man is lorde of so many and so great thynges, he maye easyly be to proude and hawtie, and sone growe out of kynde and degendre unto tyrannye, even as now of late it was seen of Cambyses.
(Taverner 1539: C6r-v)
This is not the only lesson to be drawn from Cambises’ reign in Taverner’s text and it is opposed successfully; monarchy is restored under Darius. Yet the latter’s ascendancy is achieved by trickery and Taverner’s attitude to Darius remains ambivalent; a few pages later, the Persian monarchy lapses again into tyranny under Xerxes. What conclusion is to be drawn from this is left open, and this is also part of the unpredictable effect of the play’s concentration on the sorrow produced by sovereign power. One implication of this is that succession under absolute sovereignty does indeed appear to be a tragedy waiting to happen.