Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  If I were to paint Sloth...by Saint John the Evangelist I swear, I would draw it like a stationer that I know with his thumb under his girdle, who, if a man comes to his stall and ask him for a book, never stirs his hand or looks upon him but stands stone still and speaks not a word; only with his little finger points backwards to his boy, who must be his interpreter, and so all the day, gaping like a dumb image, he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then, he is as quick as other three, eating six times every day.

  The other reason we believe that Marlowe lived in Shoreditch was his new association with the theatre. The whole issue of the date of plays is a tortuous one, given the fact that the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly of printing was so complete and that all plays had also to be vetted by the Queen’s Master of the Revels, nominally responsible for all forms of public entertainment. Writers like Marlowe would have to find an impresario like Philip Henslowe or an actor like Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage and persuade them of the work’s commerciality. Copies of the script would then have to be written out in longhand, often by candlelight and always with a quill. In that sense, Marlowe’s plays, like Shakespeare’s, were more like modern film scripts; they represented works in progress and were often altered to suit individual players or adapted to accommodate technical difficulties.

  For the rest of his life, Marlowe was bound up with the theatrical life of London and this, rather than the rest of his colourful existence, is his legacy to us. We believe, however, that there was more to Marlowe’s creativity – what Ben Johnson called his ‘mighty line’ – than the mere acquisition of a groat or even a desire for fame.

  Theatrical performances were well known in the Middle Ages in the form of mystery or miracle plays. Coventry, Chester and many other cities performed these routinely in town squares or cathedral cloisters. Many of them were performed by the guilds and they always showed virtue triumphant over the forces of evil. From the late sixteenth-century, travelling companies of actors, usually attached to great households, went on the road, bringing their religious or secular performances to wider audiences. Early London theatres, like the Swan and the Globe, had movable stages and were open to the elements, a silent reminder of these origins. By Marlowe’s day, these companies had become far more professional and were the plaything of the aristocracy. Moreover, troupes had to have a patron before being allowed to perform. Leicester’s Men, Worcester’s, the Lord Chamberlain’s, the Lord Admiral’s, Arundel’s and the Queen’s vied with each other to find the best playwrights, the most dramatic tragedies, the most entertaining clowns.

  Marlowe, who may well have finished his play Tamburlaine by the time he left Cambridge, gravitated towards the Lord Admiral’s company. It was formed in 1576 under the patronage of Charles Howard, later Elizabeth’s Lord High Admiral. It probably toured the provinces, perhaps Cambridge where Marlowe may have seen a performance, before the first surviving record of it in London in 1585. When Edward Alleyn joined the company, probably in that year, it had become, with the Queen’s Men, the most famous and elite of the theatrical troupes.

  Alleyn, who was to play all of Marlowe’s anti-heroes in the next six years, was born the son of an innkeeper in the parish of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. He was two years younger than Marlowe and, with Burbage, dominated the theatrical scene at the end of the century. Thomas Nashe wrote in awe that he was the best actor since before Christ was born and Ben Johnson was equally lavish in his praise – ‘others speak but only thou dost act.’ In keeping with the tradition, and indeed law, of the time, Alleyn may have played female roles (women were not allowed on stage) with Worcester’s Men before making the switch to the Lord Admiral’s. Alleyn became the richest actor of his day, later founding the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich (it helped of course that his step-father-in-law was the nearly as well-off Philip Henslowe).

  The Elizabethan theatre played to mixed reviews. On the one hand, Henslowe, Alleyn, Burbage and eventually Shakespeare made serious money and filled houses with a surprisingly wide social range of audiences from the Queen to the groundlings. On the other, the increasing Puritanism of the age brought sharp and obsessive criticism. Philip Sidney, the doyen of scholar-knights, felt obliged to defend poetry against the Puritans in 1581. The anonymous writer of A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theatres in 1580 was in full cry:

  The writers of our time are so led away with vainglory, that their only endeavour is to pleasure the humour of men...the notable liar is become the best poet; he that can make the most notorious lie, and disguise falsehood in such sort that he may pass unperceived, is held the best writer.

  Thomas White thundered from the open-air pulpit of St Paul’s cross outside the cathedral in 1578 – ‘Look but upon the common plays in London and see the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth them. Behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monument of London’s prodigality and folly.’ He went so far as to blame not merely the theatres for the spread of the plague but the plays themselves – ‘The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ Young Marlowe was on his way to Cambridge when this sermon was preached. One wonders what his Professor of Logic would have made of it !

  John Stockwood, however, went further. In the same place, in the same year, he ranted, ‘Will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred? ... What should I speak, of beastly plays, against which out of this place every man crieth out?’ Three years before Marlowe went to London however, the most hysterical Puritan attack came from Philip Stubbes in The Anatomie of Abuses:

  Do not they [plays] maintain bawdy, intimate foolery and renew the remembrance of heathen idolatry? Do they not induce whoredom and uncleanness? Nay, are they not rather plain devourers of maidenly virginity and chastity? For proof whereof but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide...where such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes...is wonderful to behold. Then, these goodly pageants being ended, every mate sorts to his mate...and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites or worse...’

  Plays, Stubbes maintained, were the breeding ground of every kind of sin and depravity:

  If you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest and fleer, to grin, to not and mow; if you will learn to play the Vice [the character of Evil in the Medieval Mystery Plays], to swear, tear and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, flay, kill, pick, steal, rob and more; if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures...to deride, scoff, mock and flout, to flatter and smooth...and finally, if you will learn to contemn God and all his laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell...you need to go to no other school...

  In Kit Marlowe’s day, men like Stubbes, riding on the backlash of the Counter-Reformation and fear of Catholics, were increasing in number and beginning to inherit the earth.

  We do not know precisely where Tamburlaine was first performed. Alleyn usually used The Theatre, in Shoreditch to the north of Finsbury Fields, but a rift with James Burbage, who owned it, in May 1591 led to Alleyn and the Admiral’s Men decamping to The Rose, Henslowe’s theatre south of the river on Bankside. Historian Derek Traversi writes:

  What the new theatre needed was a figure of outstanding genius capable of firing the imagination of audiences in the process of creating fresh dramatic worlds. Such a need was met in the short and meteoric career of Christopher Marlowe...

  And J.B. Black:

  But it was Marlowe who invented the true medium of the Elizabethan drama. His ‘drumming decasyllibon’ and ‘bragging blank
verse’, coupled with the spirit of revolt and defiance which animated all his plays, took the public by storm....More than any of his contemporaries, Marlowe displays the terribilita of the Italian renaissance.

  It is a mistake to ignore Marlowe’s works as irrelevant to the cause of his death. If for no other reason, the meteoric rise which Marlowe’s plays brought about for the man made him enemies. And enemies have motives for murder. In The Epistle to Perimedes entered in the Stationers’ Register 29 March 1588, the ever-bitter Robert Greene railed against the contemporary fad for tragedy – ‘daring God out of heaven with that Aetheist Tanburlan.’ Men who wrote such drivel, he calls ‘mad and scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race’. This phrase is important in our understanding of Marlowe’s death and it gives the lie to the official publication date of Tamberlein the Cithian shepparde at the Stationers’ Hall on 14 August 1590. Marlowe’s name does not appear on any early edition. The two parts of the play were published by Richard Jones in 1593 and 1597 and later by Edward White in 1605 and 1606.

  If the incident described by Philip Gawdy which took place on 16 November 1587involving the Admiral’s Men refers to Tamburlaine, then clearly the first production was already under way by then, probably within three months of Marlowe’s leaving Cambridge. In the second part of the play, an actor is tied to a tree and shot dead, but in pre-blank firing days, when the petronels of the time were notoriously unreliable, one or more members of the audience died instead.

  What can we learn of Marlowe the man from his first venture on to the London stage? His choice of hero fascinated the Elizabethans. Timur-i-lang, the lame, was born in 1336, the son of a chief of the Berlas tribe, in Kash, near Samarkand. Marlowe’s ‘Scythian shepherd’ gives a totally distorted view of a rags to riches story and even a whiff of the pastoral so common and popular in classical culture. The Berlas were nomadic warrior-tribesmen who followed their flocks, and this was as close as the play gets to reality. A general of some distinction, he invaded neighbouring Karashan in 1358 (Marlowe was the same age in fact as his hero when he wrote about him) and was made governor of the province. It was the Machiavellian mix of courage and cunning that Elizabethan audiences liked and it was these qualities that won Timur the crown of Samarkand by 1369. His armies smashed westward towards the Caspian, clashing with the Persians and routing the lords of the Golden Horde. In 1398 he turned south to India, sacking Delhi and carrying home mountains of booty. By 1402 he had defeated both the Turks and the Egyptians, capturing Aleppo and Damascus. His planned invasion of China never happened because he died of natural causes on 17 February 1405.

  There is nothing historically in Shakespeare’s plays to compare with Timur. The ‘upstart crow’ from Stratford specialised in Roman history and the appallingly biased Tudor version of English history before the sixteenth century. Timur falls between both stools. Neither a barbarous thug nor a ruler of great sophistication, Timur was a combination of the two. Like Marlowe himself, he was an over-reacher, an ambitious man who made too many enemies and took on too much. The sources that Marlowe probably used were Thomas Fortescue’s The Forest, an English translation of 1571 of Pedro Maxim’s Siva de Varia Leccion written in Seville in 1543; more current and possibly a book that spurred Marlowe to write was George Whetstone’s English Mirror. Equally, he could have read Petrus Resondimus’ Magni Tamerlais Scytharum Imperatis Vita published in Florence in 1553. The only significant areas in which Marlowe departed from these sources for the sake of dramatic effect were the characters of Zenocrate and her son Calyphus. The two parts of the play went into print in August 1590, having astonished audiences already. Richard Jones ‘neere Holborne Bridge’ produced the typeset:

  Tamburlaine the Great, who, from a Scythian shepherde by his rare and wonderful conquests, became a most puissant and mighty monarque, and (for his tyrrany and terror in Warre) was termd the Scourge of God. Divided into two Tragicall discourses, as they were sundrie times shewed upon stages in the Citie of London by the right honourable the Lord Admyrall, his servants. Now first and newlie published.

  Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ burst on to the London stage and took the world by storm. One of the problems of studying Marlowe the man is that most writers feel they too have to be poetic. So Charles Norman in The Muses’ Darling, writes of his style ‘like combers making towards the land, treading the offshore deeps with flashing, rhythmic thunder, the music of his marching iambics surges forward, thundering harmony to the shores of consciousness.’

  There are themes in Tamburlaine which need to be understood if we are to understand what happened at Deptford. Dissent is a common idea in the prologue – ‘threat’ning the world with high astounding terms’. No writer can be divorced from the personal experiences of his life or the broader experiences of his nation. So, ‘Unhappy Persia, that in former age/Hast been the seat of mighty conquerors...’ may well be a nostalgic farewell to the English empire in France, lost finally under Mary Tudor. And was Marlowe firing a barb at explorers like Ralegh, Hawkins and Drake in

  Trading by land into the Western Isles

  And in your confines with his lawless train,

  Daily commits incivil outrages...[?]

  The Spaniards are parodies as the enemies of England – ‘With costly jewels hanging at their ears/And shining stones upon their lofty crests.’ And surely, in Tamburlaine’s own arrogance, there is an echo of Philip, the most powerful ruler in Europe – ‘All through my provinces you must expect/Letters of conduct from my mightiness.’ Tamburlaine’s character is flesh and blood, however, and the detail makes it possible that here was a real individual whom Marlowe knew and admired. Is he Ralegh, whom Marlowe may already have met in Cambridge? Or Walsingham, on whose service he had already been?

  Running throughout both halves of the play is an anti-Christian element which is more apparent in Marlowe’s later works. Tamburlaine the atheist sees Christians as a common enemy, akin to Moroccans as examples of pure evil:

  Now hear the triple region of the air,

  And let the majesty of heaven behold

  Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.

  Come let us march against the powers of heaven,

  And set black streamers in the firmament

  To signify the slaughter of the gods.

  There are ideas in Tamburlaine which we would expect to find in a play about a non-Christian conqueror; conquest itself, empire, monarchy and the role of kings. In the realms of internal conflict and dissent, especially perhaps of atheism linked with this, Marlowe was treading increasingly dangerous ground.

  One thing is certain; Tamburlaine was an overnight success, establishing Marlowe as perhaps the foremost playwright of his day. He was feted among the university wits, fellow poets who had made their way from Cambridge or Oxford. Perhaps closest to Marlowe in the years of his fame was Thomas Watson, whose lodgings he shared in Norton Folgate. Best known for the infamous fight in Hog Lane, Watson was some six years older than Marlowe and a Londoner, dying in September 1592 and commemorated by their mutual friend George Peele – ‘To Watson, worthy many epitaphs for his sweet poesy, for Amyntas’ tears and joys so well set down.’ ‘Witty Tom Watson’ wrote sonnets in the mid-1580s from which Shakespeare borrowed – Ekatompathia, Amintas and Amintae Gaudia. Widely read, he translated from French, Italian, Latin and Greek and wrote plays (none of which has survived) for which Puritans like Francis Meres criticised him – ‘he could devise twenty fictions and knaveries in a play, which was his daily practice and living.’ ‘He was a man,’ wrote Thomas Nashe, ‘that I dearly loved and admired, and for all things hath left few his equals in England.’ They drank together at the Nag’s Head in Cheapside.

  But there is more to Watson than a fellow literatus of Marlowe’s. A Wykehamist at a time when the school at Winchester was pro-Catholic, he went to school with Henry Garnett, later to lead the Jesuits in England. Having attended Oxford University, Watson travelled widely in Europe in a ‘grand t
our’ that lasted seven years. He was at Douai, the English seminary, in 1576 and lodging with a preacher named Beale in London three years later. We need not read anything into the contemporary phrase ‘lie with’ as it simply meant shared lodgings in what was, after all, an expensive and overcrowded city. It is possible that Watson joined Sir Philip Sidney’s literary circle Aeropagus for a whole. By 1581, Watson’s Catholic leanings were being monitored by the authorities. He appeared in an official description as a yeoman of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate as one of the ‘strangers that go not to church’. The term usually referred to continental Europeans and the enormously cosmopolitan Watson would have fitted that bill closely enough. An extraordinary link, though an unprovable one, is that the poet’s sister may be ‘one Watson’s daughter ‘ who married the intelligencer, Robert Poley. Since Watson wrote an elegy on the death of Francis Walsingham it is at least possible, given his knowledge of the Continent, his linguistic ability and his Catholic leanings, that he too was a spy for the secret service. This would make perfect sense to explain his being drawn to Marlowe; the two shared the same literary skills and perhaps the same secrets.

  From Marlowe’s friend George Peele comes the title of this chapter, ‘And after thee [Watson] Why hie they not, unhappy in thine end, Marley, the Muses darling, for thy verse fit to write passions for the souls below.’ It was a dedication published some months after Deptford and addressed to another mutual friend, the Earl of Northumberland, in The Honour of the Garter. Some of the poetry that Peele, graduating from Oxford in 1579, has left behind deals with the occult and the emerging science of his day - ‘ following the ancient revered steps/of Trismegistus and Pythagoras.’ Warned to repent by Robert Greene, Peele lived the typical Bohemian life of a ‘roaring boye’. He flattered the Queen in his Arraignment of Paris in 1584, and the Earl of Essex in Ecologie Grantulatory five years later; like any self-respecting Elizabethan poet, he was always on the lookout for a likely patron. His plays include Edward I and The Old Wives’ Tale. He died of the pox three years after Marlowe.