Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  Slowly the college began to build its reputation and its wealth. Plate, money, land and houses were bequeathed to the place, including the drinking horn and the Swan Mazer, still used at college dinners. Medieval universities were often lawless institutions and the cause of frequent rifts between ‘town and gown’ which Bene’t’s College may in part have been established to heal. All students (the term in Marlowe’s day was ‘scholar’) had to be in holy orders. Their entire curriculum was canon law and theology. They ate communally, to the rhythm of Bible readings in Greek or Latin. There were penalties (the Statutes from 1356 have survived) for crimes such as sacrilege, perjury, theft, adultery and murder.

  The college that Christopher Marlowe joined in the winter of 1580-81 had undergone something of a renaissance after a century of neglect. The Duchess of Norfolk and her sister, Eleanor Botelar (Butler), endowed the place -the buttresses in Old Court are a reminder of their cash input. New rooms and galleries were built by Dr. Cosyn, Master until 1515, who also provided books and desks at a cost of £170. All windows, previously shuttered, were now glazed, and attic rooms with gables and roofs were built around Old Court. Much of the grandeur of Bene’t’s is attributable to Matthew Parker, who had provided Marlowe’s place there. He was Master for nine years (1544-53) and under him the Master’s Lodge was extended into a long gallery with a covered walkway below it.

  Parker joined the college in 1521 and was a Fellow (lecturer) six years later. In 1553 he was invited to London to become chaplain to the queen, Anne Boleyn, which threw him into the centre of Reformation politics. It was Anne who gave birth to Elizabeth, the future mistress in a political sense of both Parker and Marlowe, and the arrival of another daughter merely estranged the increasingly desperate Henry VIII from her. Seeking solace with Jane Seymour, he eventually accused Anne of adultery, treason and even incest and she was executed, at her own request with a sword, on 19 May 1536. It speaks volumes for Parker’s political acumen that he survived the fall of his mistress to become Master of Bene’t’s College. His acceptance of the new Protestantism quickly manifested itself and he became the first married Master of what had, of course, been a Catholic institution, marrying the Lodge’s hostess, Margaret Hailstone in 1547. When Elizabeth was queen and Margaret the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the last Tudor’s bigotry was exposed in her attitude towards married priests – ‘Madam I may not call you; and Mistress I am ashamed to call you; so I know not what to call you; but yet I do thank you.’ There were many who received such scant courtesy from Her Majesty.

  In the year of Marlowe’s birth, Bene’t’s had thirty-two scholars; by Parker’s death eleven years later, there were more than ninety. Space was at a premium; the ‘Christopher’, a house outside Old Court, and the unfinished bakehouse were both renovated as accommodation for pensioners (undergraduates). Three years before Marlowe arrived, Sir Nicholas Bacon, an old Bene’t’s man and Keeper of the Great Seal, endowed a chapel to replace an older one adjoining St Bene’t’s church. The great and the good of Elizabethan England contributed to its building; Francis Drake, soon to begin his epic voyage of global circumnavigation, sent cash; the Earl of Bedford had 146 tons of stone carted from Thorney Abbey on his estates; the Queen herself sent thirty loads of timber for scaffolding and the roof. But it was years before the full debt was paid.

  The regimen followed by Marlowe at Cambridge was probably more strict than in Canterbury. Most scholars entered the various colleges at the age of fourteen and some as young as ten so that in one sense Cambridge colleges were merely schools, not unlike the King’s School that Marlowe had just left. Dr Robert Norgate was Master when Marlowe arrived and under him regulations were tough.

  The scholars’ day began at four in the morning, when the Siberian winds for which Cambridge is legendary, would have been at their most biting. The sixteenth century saw a mini Ice Age with temperatures much lower than today. We do not know precisely where in the college Marlowe lived, although the external appearance of all the upper rooms of Old Court remains unchanged since his day. In 1898 the official history of Corpus Christi said that Marlowe ‘kept in the ground floor room on the right-hand side of the old court staircase...this room had long been used as “the store house” but it had lately been fitted up as a chamber where three of the Parker scholars might live’. Wherever he lodged, the place had no heat and the furniture was probably a wooden box bed, a table and a chair. By definition, the room’s only artificial light came from candles. Typical of an institution created for the clergy and in which its scholars still read for the Church, the first hour of the day was spent in the new chapel. Breakfast, probably of bread or oatmeal, followed at six. The morning was then given over to study and even in casual conversation scholars could talk to each other only in Latin or Greek. The gamut of study at Cambridge was the traditional medieval diet in which Latin and Greek dominated, but with a peppering of mathematics, philosophy, divinity, logic and Hebrew. J.J. Ingram, writing in 1904 of Marlowe’s time includes details of the mid-day meal – ‘a penny piece of beef among four, having a pottage made of the broth of the same beef, with salt and oatmeal’.

  The afternoon was spent in ‘discourse’, as the fashionable Italians called it, philosophical arguments and debates. Marlowe was building on the tradition he had already learned at the King’s School and it was this ability to shoot his mouth off that would lead to his death. After that, in the Cambridge day, came private study in his room or perhaps even Parker’s admirable library. To avoid the freezing cold of Cambridge streets at bed time, scholars were – ‘fayne to walk or runne up and down halfe an hour, to gette a heate on their feete’. There were distinct rules too about appearance; Archbishop Parker himself had laid them down. Dress was a long woollen gown of black or brown, a a colour which no doubt appealed to the growing number of sombre Puritans at the university. For Parker scholars, laundry and haircuts were free, but the regulation haircut insisted on polling, knotting or rounding, distinctly unfashionable for any would-be young men about town!

  Each scholar received a weekly allowance of one shilling to supplement the meagre diet at the Buttery, where a wider variety of more exciting fare was on offer. Richer students could, of course, spend more there, but in the college’s hierarch this meant the Fellow-commoners who were sons of gentry. The pensioners, usually schoolmasters’ boys and, by Marlowe’s day, sons of the Anglican priesthood too, were by definition poorer. It was only his holding of a Parker scholarship that placed Marlowe here – ‘Secundus Convictus’ – rather than among the third group, the sizars, who were effectively servants to the rest. It was Kit Marlowe’s sudden change in spending habits that gives us a clue to the new direction his life had taken by 1585.

  The structure of Bene’t’s in 1580 reflects the vertical nature of Elizabethan society. Below the Master were thirteen Fellows, twenty scholars, four Bible-clerks and fifty-four students in the modern undergraduate sense. Records have survived from Marlowe’s time at Cambridge and give us a glimpse of the pecking order among the faculties too. The Nomina Professorum et Auditorum (Names of Professors and Auditors) of the university is dated 19 October 1581. First come the Regius and Lady Margaret Professors of Theology, Shitaker and Baro; then Lyler, Professor of Hebrew; Bing, Professor of Law and Medicine; philosophy and mathematics bring up the rear. Marlowe’s name appears in the Corpus Christi list as ‘Merling’, reading dialectic (logic) under Professor Johns. By this time, Marlowe was in his second year, the first having been devoted to rhetoric.

  Until he obtained his Bachelor of Arts Degree, Marlowe would have been under strict college discipline. That meant a curfew. No one could leave college without a chaperone and the gate was locked at nine o’clock between Michaelmas (autumn) and Easter; ten o’clock for the rest of the year. Floggings were carried out on scholars who transgressed, in front of the whole college ‘to encourage the others’, every Thursday at seven in the evening. Other punishments included fines, imprisonment or expulsion. When Dr Nor
gate was libelled by a student, the lad was forced to make a public apology and spend a night in the stocks before being sent down.

  The ever-critical Queen was not overly impressed by Cambridge on her only visit there, in the year of Marlowe’s birth. Despite the usual adulatory address in Latin and Greek (to which she replied in those languages) and numerous presents including a pair of locally made gloves, she found the students’ habits and hoods were torn and too much soiled and in the services she attended ‘their voices were small and not audible’.

  The fact of university life, of course, is that there was a great deal more to it than the narrow curriculum and the winning of a degree. During the holidays, from June to October, students were encouraged to help with the harvest and by statute had to spend four days in local parishes repairing the roads. This brought them into contact with the town and often caused problems. The traditional student pastimes of archery, tennis and bowls were considered dull, probably because the university authorities tolerated them. Football was altogether more fun. Although allowed in college quadrangles, it was banned with townspeople because of the trouble it caused – there was a celebrated battle between scholars and a team from the local village of Chesterton late in the Queen’s reign. The same village laid on bear-baiting in 1581 and was far enough out for the university proctors to have no jurisdiction there. Despite an outright ban on swimming, the Cam must have had its appeal for the more adventurous undergraduates.

  Wealth created its own problems. The Fellow-commoners were the sons of the seriously rich, young men whose status was already superior to some of their fellows and even the Masters. Such students used their cash to outdo each other in dress, flagrantly flouting college rules. Their one aim seemed to be to ‘ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparel’. Their numbers were increasing in the 1580s and it may be from them that Kit Marlowe learned his fencing skills. The Stourbridge Fair, held in the fields between the Cam and the Stour from St Bartholomew’s Day to St Michael’s Day each September, was the source of most trouble. The fair had its own courthouse dealing with debt, assault and double-dealing and there seems to have been plenty of that; the town provided the stalls but the university the weights and measures. Punch-ups were frequent.

  Who were Marlowe’s contemporaries at Cambridge? One, who became his friend, was Thomas Nashe, from Lowestoft. Younger than Marlowe by three years, he was a scholar of St John’s and although this was a centre of rabid Puritanism at the time, Nashe seems not to have been an extremist. Physically small, notoriously pugnacious and boyish, he is typical of the set, including Marlowe, who would become known in London as ‘the university wits’ and it may have rankled with lesser men, like William Shakespeare, that they were not among them. Nashe may have begun his first work The Anatomie of Absurdity while still at Cambridge. He was resident there between 1582 and 1586, taking his BA degree then.

  Robert Greene was a very different kettle of fish. He would defame both Marlowe and Shakespeare later in lines delivered when he was already dying. A woodcut shows him scratching away with his pen, sitting already wrapped in his woollen shroud, a bitter and resentful man. Like Nashe, he was a scholar at St. John’s returning there in 1580 after a dissolute life in Europe. ‘I light among wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth’. Probably a manic depressive, he turned from a friend to become one of Marlowe’s bitterest enemies. He was enormously proud of the MA degrees he took both from Oxford and Cambridge by 1584.

  Another enemy was Dr Gabriel Harvey, the arrogant Fellow of Pembroke Hall who seemed to resent scholars generally. To his far more sensitive friend, the poet Edmund Spenser, he wrote in the year before Marlowe went up to Cambridge:

  You cannot step into a scholar’s study but (ten to one) you shall likely find open either Bodin or Leroy’s Exposition upon Aristotle’s Politics or some other like French or Italian political discourses. And I warrant you some good fellows amongst us begin now to be pretty well acquainted with a certain parlous book called, as I remember me, Il Principe di Nicolo Machiavelli and I can peradventure name you an odd crew or two that are as cunning in his Discorsi...

  Harvey was a prig and no doubt Marlowe would have been one of the ‘odd crew’ he was referring to by the summer of 1581. Harvey and his brother Richard were well known in Cambridge and Thomas Nashe later remembered Marlowe’s complaint about him – ‘Kit Marloe was wont to say he was an ass, and fit to preach only of the Iron Age.’ Both Harveys enjoyed the cut and thrust of literary debate and were litigious. Gabriel would later try to sue Robert Greene for libel, but death caught the prose writer first. He had been tutor to Edmund Spenser at Pembroke Hall and basked in the poet’s reflected glory for the rest of his life. He was a pedant and it was probably this that made him loathe Marlow – ‘all fire and air’ as he was. The Harveys’ background was as humble as Marlowe’s; the sons of ropemakers from Saffron Walden, Gabriel’s brothers, in strange quirks revolving around the fate of Kit Marlowe, went into tantalising career areas. John became an astronomer and Richard rector of Chislehurst, Kent, where Marlowe was to spend the last days of his life.

  It was at Cambridge that the scholar became the poet and the free thinker; the one passion leading to immortality, the other, paradoxically, to his death. William Urry provided, for the quattro-centenary exhibition of Marlowe’s birth, a collection of books he might have read as part of his ‘official’ study. The New Testament of 1544, The Apology of J. Bale (1541) and his Arts of the English Votaries (1550), Tyndale’s English Bible of 1551, and the Book of Common Prayer (1552). Although Urry does not list it, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, the second most popular book after the Bible in the country, was also likely to have been on the scholar’s reading list.

  He also read Aristotle and Ramus, very much in vogue among serious scholars in the Cambridge of the 1580s, but what marked him out as a rebel (who probably became something of a legend among other undergraduates) were his translations of Ovid and Lucan. The particular poems he worked on, and which fascinated him, were Ovid’s Amores (Elegies) and Lucan’s Pharsalia. One spoke of love, the other of war – titanic themes which were to mark Marlowe’s early plays that took London by storm in the years ahead.

  In Ovid’s Elegy V of the Amores, Marlowe translated (not always very accurately) the seduction of Corinna:

  Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,

  Not one wen (mole) on her body could I spy.

  What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,

  How apt her breasts were to be press’d by me!

  How smooth a belly under her waist saw I!

  How large a leg and what a lusty thigh!

  To leave the rest, all like’d me passing well;

  I cling’d her naked body, down she fell;

  Judge you the rest; being tir’d she bade me kiss;

  Jove send me more such afternoon as this.

  How much of this is Marlowe and how much Ovid is impossible to say. His ‘judge you the rest’ is the sixteenth-century equivalent of the row of coy dots that Victorian writers were forced to employ to avoid offending the sensibilities of their readers. But the humour of the last line give the lie to those literary critics who can find no humour in Marlowe’s writing at all. We have to remember, however, that Elizabethan attitudes are different from our own. ‘The past,’ wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, ‘is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ Marlowe was nineteen or twenty when he worked on the Amores, but he was working secretly by candlelight in a college which was exclusively male and which fitted young men for a career in the Church. It had only been a generation since that Church allowed its priests to marry for the first time and thus implicitly sanctioned the heterosexual relationship among its scions that that implied. Tame stuff as it seems today, the Amores would have been regarded as soft porn at best – it is highly likely that Marlowe’s translations were passed around the student population in Cambridge, with knowing winks and sniggers.

  Certai
nly, after Marlowe’s death the Amores were publicly burned on the instructions of both the Archbishop of Canterbury, the sanctimonious John Whitgift, and the Bishop of London. It would be 250 years before the German poet Heinrich Heine said, ‘wherever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned’. The Tudors were quite happy to do both. The illicit nature of the Amores meant that publication was difficult. After June 1566, censorship was virulent in England. It was in that month that the Stationers’ Company obtained a monopoly of publishing for Elizabeth. The Stationers were both publishers and printers, their name deriving from the stalls or stations set up in cathedral precincts from which they sold their wares. St. Paul’s in London quickly became an unofficial headquarters and book titles, like plays, had to be registered there in advance of publication. This was a sensible attempt to control copyright and plagiarism, but a more pernicious angle was that the Bishop of London ruled (often quite arbitrarily) on a book’s legality. Anything deemed unsuitable (clearly the Amores) was burned in the kitchens of Stationers’ Hall.

  The answer, rather like pornographic videos until recently, was to manufacture elsewhere and smuggle the finished article back into the country. The title page of one edition – All Ovid’s Elegies – is cryptically inscribed ‘By C.M., Epigrams by F.D.’ and was printed at Middlebourgh, the prosperous cloth centre in Walcheren, four miles from Vlissingen (Flushing), a place which was to feature prominently in Marlowe’s life. Apart from the obvious first glimpse of Marlowe’s genius as a poet, his work on the Amores tells us something else; it give us a fleeting picture of the young man behind the flimsy facts we have here. Had Marlowe been caught in possession of Ovid, still less producing English translations, he would have been flogged and sent down. Like his later heroes Tamburlaine, Faustus and Edward II, Marlowe is a tragic hero in the Shakespearean sense – a man of greatness whose own weaknesses will one day bring him down. There are signs of this already in the Matthew Parker scholar at Bene’t’s College.