The World of Christopher Marlowe Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Reinventing Marlowe

  1. Citizen Marlowe

  2. Lessons Learned in Childhood

  3. Speaking like a Roman

  4. Scholars and Gentlemen

  5. Thinking like a Roman

  6. The Teacher of Desire

  7. Plots and Counter Plots

  8. Proceeding in the Arts

  9. In the Theatre of the Idols

  10. Notoriety

  11. ‘He is like Dr Faustus’

  12. Double Agents

  13. The Counterfeiters

  14. Waiting for the End

  15. In the Theatre of God’s Judgements

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Picture Credits

  Index

  By the same author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Elaine and Matt

  List of Illustrations

  The Conversion of St. Paul by Caravaggio

  Distant View of Canterbury. From William Somner, Antiquities of Canterbury, 1703

  View of Canterbury in 1588. From Sir Thomas Wilson, The Particular Description of England with Portraitures of certain of the chiefest cities and towns,

  Shoemaker’s shop. From Hans Sachs, Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, 1568

  Street scene. From The Roxburghe Ballads

  A schoolroom. From the Small Catechism for Boys, London, 1578

  A horn book

  A butcher at work. From Hans Sachs, Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, 1568

  A butcher’s shambles. From Hugh Alley, ‘A Caveat for the City of London’, 1598

  The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day by François Dubois

  The Penhold. From John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon, A Book Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands, 1602

  Grammar school lessons

  Map of Cambridge. From Franz Hogenberg and Georgius Braun, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1575

  Signatures of John and Christopher Marlowe. From the will of Katherine Benchkin, 1585

  The scene of pastoral poetry. Detail of woodcut from Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, 1579

  Extract from George Gascoigne’s Certain Notes of Instruction, 1575

  Raffaele da Montelupo, Jupiter Kissing Ganymede, drawing, mid-sixteenth century

  Sir Francis Walsingham, attributed to John de Critz the Elder

  Richard Baines, incarcerated behind the first letter of his confession. From William Allen, A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nichols…, 1583

  Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Rainbow Portrait’

  The Persecution of English Papists. From Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Heareticorum nostris temporis, 1587

  Memorial portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots

  Abraham Ortellius’s World Map. From Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570

  Miniature portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, by Nicholas Hilliard

  ‘Universal apprehension’ from Everard Digby, Theoria Analytica, 1579

  The Christian Philosopher contemplates the word and works of God. From George Hartgill, General Calendars, 1594

  Detail from the title page of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, 1616

  Title page to John Dee’s Propaedeumata Aphoristica, 1568

  Sir Philip Sidney

  Map showing Bishopsgate Street and Norton Folgate, 1577

  Exterior of the Curtain Playhouse, London. From a drawing in the manuscript journal of Abram Booth 1597–8

  The Bear-garden, the Rose Theatre and the Globe. From Civitas Londini, an engraved panorama of London by John Norden, 1600

  Interior of a brothel. Engraving by Virgil Solis (1514–62)

  ‘The Engraved image of the great-hearted Charles Howard’, by Thomas Cockson, 1596

  Sturdy beggar. From The Roxburghe Ballads

  Sir Francis Drake, engraved portrait by Robert Vaughan, 1628

  The end of the world. From John Doleta, Strange news out of Calabria, 1586

  Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. From Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, 1597

  ‘Poverty obstructs the progress of the most gifted minds’, image on the title page of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, 1604. From Geffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems, 1586

  Dr Faustus’s dismembered body. From the Dutch translation of the German Faust book, 1590

  Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange

  Interior of the Swan Theatre, from a contemporary sketch by Johannes de Witt, 1596

  The covetous boiled in lead and oil. From the Shepherdes’ Kalendar, 1570

  Ganymede from Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna, 1612

  Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Miniature by Nicholas Hilliard

  ‘Modesty’ from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1613

  Henri III as a hermaphrodite. From Thomas, Sieur d’Embry, Les hermaphrodites, 1605

  The assassination of the Duke of Guise

  Archbishop Whitgift

  Double portrait of William and Robert Cecil

  Acknowledgements

  Many of the individuals who helped in the preparation of this book deserve special mention. They are: Paul Alpers, Emily Bartels, Austin Burke, Patrick Cheney, Jay Fliegelman, Jonathan Goldberg, Lisa Hopkins, Roy Kendall, Elizabeth Leedham-Green, Leah Marcus, Jack Macrae, Charles Nicholl, Stephen Orgel, Richard Priess, Sue Riggs, Rob Watson and Alex Woloch. I thank Don Lamm for his expert and unstinting guidance at every stage.

  This is also the place to remember the teachers who introduced me to Christopher Marlowe – Dan Seltzer and Harry Levin.

  D.R.

  Prologue: Reinventing Marlowe

  Christopher Marlowe was born on the threshold of modern theatre, before the words playwright and dramatist had entered the English language. The earliest playhouses appeared during his boyhood, when custom-built theatres sprouted on the outskirts of London. These new establishments had a limited purpose: skilled actors performed makeshift dramatic entertainments for an audience of unpracticed theatregoers. Marlowe endowed this rickety start-up venture with a precious legacy of intellectual property. He offered spectators a thrilling repertory of poetic tragedies that spoke to their most urgent concerns – grinding poverty, class conflict, erotic desire, religious dissent, and the fear of hell. Marlowe’s eight-year career exploded with masterpieces. Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II transformed the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity.

  He was the greatest playwright that England had ever seen. William Shakespeare, who gained prominence just a few years later, mourned Marlowe’s passing in As You Like It: ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might / “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”’ Ben Jonson hailed the inventor of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’. The dramatist’s enemies were just as adamant about his vices. During the months leading up to Marlowe’s murder in a hired room near London, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the ‘famous gracer of tragedians’ did not repent his blasphemies, God would soon strike him down. A few days before Marlowe was killed, the spy Richard Baines informed the Queen’s Privy Council that he was a proselytizing atheist, a counte
rfeiter, and a consumer of ‘boys and tobacco’. Protestant ministers saw Marlowe’s violent death at an early age as an act of divine vengeance.

  This is a book about Marlowe’s life, his works, and his world. He was born in 1564, when the earth was just beginning to revolve around the sun. In dislodging the world from its fixed place at the centre of the universe, Copernicus bridged the divide between heaven and earth. The individual’s physical location no longer corresponded to his metaphysical status vis à vis the rest of creation. The radical Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was living in Oxford and London while Marlowe attended Cambridge University, deduced that ‘God pervades the whole world and every part thereof’. Hence, matter ‘is an absolutely excellent and divine thing’. We need not ‘search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are’. Tamburlaine, Marlowe’s first and most popular hero, expressed the dangerous thrust of the new cosmology. ‘I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains’, he proclaims, ‘And with my hand turn fortune’s wheel about’ (1.2.173–74).

  Marlowe was a poor boy on scholarship throughout his education. This situation made him keenly aware of the wealth and prestige that he would never have. His peers at university were needy scholars who competed for a dwindling supply of low-paid jobs in the Church of England. Marlowe found a symbol of their predicament in Dr Faustus, the learned magician who sells his soul to the devil in return for twenty-four years of wish-fulfilment. Although Satan agrees to give Dr Faustus whatever he wants, the base-born wizard cannot imagine a way out of his bookish existence. At the climax of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, he conjures up Helen of Troy:

  Enter Helen.

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss (v.i. 89–91)

  The apparition of Helen fills the scholar’s humdrum surroundings with imaginative splendour. He finally gets what he wants: the most beautiful woman in the best book ever written, Homer’s Iliad. Dr Faustus’ belief that the answer to his question (‘Was this the face…?’) is yes reminds the spectator that this is not that face! From the standpoint of an early modern Christian, what Dr Faustus sees is a succubus – a devil who assumes the form of a female in order ‘to work a twofold harm against men, that is, body and soul, so that men may be given to all vices’.

  The contrast between the hero’s bookish fantasy life and the exterior world that he is up against gives Dr Faustus a subjective depth that was new to European theatre. A decade later, during the golden age of Spanish drama, the novelist Miguel de Cervantes incorporated this contrast between fantasy and reality into prose fiction. In his novel’s most famous moment, Cervantes’ hero Don Quixote charges into a bunch of windmills, imagining that they are evil giants. His squire points out that these are windmills, but the would-be knight remains deluded, explaining that an evil magician ‘has turned these giants into windmills in order to deprive me of the glory of defeating them’. Dr Faustus inhabits an older, more supernatural plane of reality than his Spanish contemporary does. The enchanted landscape of Dr Faustus is haunted by demons that expect the audience to believe in them. Where Dr Faustus is possessed, Don Quixote is crazy. Where Dr Faustus comes at the end of a waning tradition of Medieval religious drama, Don Quixote marks the birth of the modern novel.

  The Church of England trained aspiring scholars to ‘walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit’ (Romans 1:8). Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus put St Paul’s exhortation into reverse gear. Marlowe made the unregenerate flesh come alive on the stage. The same impulse pervades the work of Marlowe’s younger contemporary Caravaggio. In Caravaggio’s painting The Conversion of St Paul, Saul of Tarsus, as St Paul was called before his conversion, is journeying to Damascus when ‘suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven’ (Acts 9:3). This was the pivotal moment when the Lord transformed the fanatic persecutor of Christians into the zealous advocate of the Christian faith. Caravaggio’s masterpiece tells a different story. The heavenly light shines from within Saul’s massive horse. The horse’s right leg and shoulder change into a satyr-like body poised above Saul’s outstretched arms, extended fingers, and open thighs. These details revivify the flesh that Saul’s Biblical prototype relinquishes. Marlowe too conceived of Scriptural events in entirely physical human terms. The core of Marlowe’s atheism lay in his refusal to read the Bible ‘after the spirit’. In taking Scripture literally, he read it ‘after the flesh’.

  Caravaggio, The Conversion of St Paul, 1600–01.

  Marlowe’s ‘damnable Judgment of Religion’ drew him into Elizabethan court politics, a snake pit that consumed the lives of many, including the royal favourite and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. Richard Baines mentioned a corrosive commentary on the Bible that Marlowe gave ‘to some great men who in Convenient time shall be named’. Another spy wrote that Marlowe told him he had ‘read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh & others’. These reports set the stage for the murder of Christopher Marlowe. He was killed in his thirtieth year, but this brief span contained, in his own words, ‘infinite riches in a little room’.

  Marlowe’s reputation went into eclipse with the closing of the theatres at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. After a century and a half of oblivion, he returned to prominence during the nineteenth century, when Romantic and Victorian writers claimed him for one of their own. The question of Marlowe’s moral character soon clamoured for attention. Baines, for example, had quoted Marlowe as saying ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom.’ The stories about Marlowe’s atheism and homosexuality put pressure on the time-honoured opinion that ‘it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man’. Could a bad man become a great writer?

  The answer to this question had to be no. The first line of defence was denial. The Victorian Marlowe was an author and a gentleman. Marlowe’s earliest biographer dubbed Baines a ‘pitiful culprit who strove to avert punishment from himself by becoming the accuser of others’. Every contemporary of Marlowe’s who questioned his morals received similar treatment. Greene’s eerily accurate prediction that Marlowe would soon be dead became the ‘crazy death bed wail of a weak and malignant spirit’. The testimony of Thomas Beard and other clerics went by the wayside because Protestant ministers disapproved of playwrights. Another accuser, Marlowe’s roommate and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, was cast as a mean-spirited hack writer who betrayed his friend to save his own skin.

  The second line of defence was displacement. While Victorian scholars denied that Marlowe was guilty as charged, Victorian critics invented a romantic Marlowe whose blasphemies stood for an impulse that was acceptable to modern readers – free thought, anti-philistinism, the quest for transcendence. Marlowe turned into a prototype of the romantic poet who lived for his art, suffered for his excesses, and died young. His immorality, like that of Byron and Shelley, was part of the artist’s unrelenting search for truth.

  Marlowe could not become a classic merely on the basis of his intellectual daring; Victorian educators expected great authors to affirm sound moral values. The proof of Marlowe’s struggle to be good came in the form of Dr Faustus. Before the mid-nineteenth century, even his admirers found little to praise in this tragedy, apart from a few individual speeches. By the 1880s it had become one of the greatest plays in the English language. Marlowe’s masterpiece not only had the satisfying contours of a moral tale; it also gave a conservative twist to the reports about his atheism. In telling the story of an educated unbeliever who sold his soul to the devil, Marlowe reconsidered his own excursion into free thought from a mature perspective. As an intellectual, Marlowe identified with his protagonist; as a Christian, he repudiated him. The precise balance of his sympathies remained an open question, and thus supplied a vast quantity of grist for the mills of interpretation. Like every great poe
t, Marlowe was ambivalent.

  This gentrified free-thinker dominated biographies of Marlowe until well into the twentieth century, when he finally outlived his usefulness. New Historicists have recently shown that Marlowe’s writing voiced the aspirations of blasphemers, sodomites, foreigners, unemployed scholars and the mutinous poor in Renaissance England. New archival work has revealed the depth of his father’s poverty and the extent of his own criminal record. We now know that Marlowe was a counterfeiter and landmark figure in the history of atheism and sedition. The mass of evidence assembled in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning makes it more likely than ever that the dissident playwright was murdered at the order of the higher-ups. The intriguing question of who Marlowe was remains to be answered.

  The Victorian Marlowe was a romantic individualist who freely organized his own life and inscribed his beliefs in his writings. The Elizabethan Marlowe cannot enact this part, for the simple reason that he has left no first-person utterances behind for us to interpret (the sole exception being a cryptic Latin dedication published six months before his death). The facts of his adult life are few, scattered and of doubtful accuracy. Only one of his works was published during his lifetime, and his name appears nowhere on the text. Despite his lengthy criminal record, Marlowe never went to trial, apart from two brief hearings. He was never convicted of anything. All the evidence about his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice. It consists of reported speech transcribed by informants, observations by unfriendly witnesses, and passages drawn from his plays. Sceptics rightly insist that the atheist, sodomite, spy, and insurrectionist exists only in these documents. He is an irretrievably textual being.

  Where does a biographer go from there? The familiar assertion that everyone who repeated the charges against Marlowe was an ignoramus or a charlatan begs the question of whether or not their testimony was well founded. Seven of Marlowe’s contemporaries refer in writing to his blasphemies; the number increases to eleven if we include writers who refer to him by pseudonyms. This dossier is unprecedented in its intricacy and scope, its points of contact with literature and politics and its murderous outcome. Within the history of modern unbelief, Marlowe bestrides the moment when English atheism comes out of the closet and acquires a public face. In his Theatre of God’s Judgements, Beard correctly nominated Marlowe as the first Englishman to rival the great blasphemers of antiquity: ‘not inferior to any of the former in Atheism and impiety, and equal to all in manner of punishment’.