by M. J. Trow
Frizer was charged and imprisoned but released under the Queen’s pardon in record time (twenty-nine days) and no further punishment followed. Today, most books on the period, even the well-written ones, contend that Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl over a bill and that Frizer acted in self-defence.
All this would be acceptable if the three men with Marlowe in Deptford were anonymous travellers, but recent research has revealed that all of them, especially Robert Poley, worked for or on the fringes of Elizabethan espionage, as did Marlowe himself. There is nothing in Marlowe’s character to suggest that he would lose his temper over what amounted to small change. He was almost certainly an atheist at a time when such beliefs, or lack thereof, incurred the death penalty by burning. He was undoubtedly a rebel – most of his plays were contentious and shocked polite society in his day and later. He may have been homosexual – and that ‘crime’ carried the death penalty too.
That Marlowe was a dangerous man cannot be doubted, but we have no idea why he was in Deptford at all. We know that he was arrested by Henry Maunder, the Queen’s Messenger, on unspecified charges and that he had to report daily to the Court of the Star Chamber (in effect the Privy Council) in the weeks before his death. Coroner Danby worked for the Queen’s government. He was a personal friend of Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chancellor. Eleanor Bull, who kept the Ordinary, was Burghley’s cousin. There is a sense of a net tightening on Kit Marlowe in May 1593 that makes the ‘tavern brawl’ seem an unlikely and superficial explanation.
Will we ever know what really happened at Deptford? Probably not, but today, Kit Marlowe is once again ‘all fire and air’, ‘that pure elemental wit’. He is Shakespeare’s ‘dead shepherd’ and the ‘Muse’s darling’, he of the ‘mighty line’. His ghost can be found in cobbled Canterbury, scholastic Cambridge, roaring London or anywhere where men’s hearts and souls are free.
For more information, do read M.J. Trow and Taliesin Trow’s gripping non-fiction account: Who Killed Kit Marlowe?
