Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  George Chapman was described by Anthony à Wood in the seventeenth century as ‘a person of most revered aspect, religious and temperate – qualities, rarely meeting in a poet.’ A graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, Chapman’s deep intelligence led him to spend years on an epic translation of the works of Homer, published in 1616. He was probably encouraged to write by Marlowe who no doubt introduced the older man to Thomas Walsingham, whose protégé at Scadbury he became after Marlowe’s death. It was Chapman who finished Marlowe’s last work, the poem of Hero and Leander, left three quarters complete when the playwright set out for Deptford. He was not always the stolid poet-scholar, however. In the year of the Gunpowder Plot, he did time with Ben Johnson (always a reckless friend to have) for scurrilous comments about James I in a play called Eastward Ho!.

  Matthew Roydon was a lawyer from Thavies Inn. We have seen already that he knew Nicholas Skeres as early as 1582 and was perhaps, already living in the same shoemaker’s house in Blackfriars that he was still occupying in the year of Marlowe’s death. In that year too, Roydon was writing poetry with Thomas Watson and it seems logical that this was the original link between Roydon and Marlowe. He wrote flattering poetry in 1586 for Philip Sidney – A Friend’s Passion for His Astrophel, and was probably a member of Aeropagus. Three years later Thomas Nashe was talking about Roydon’s ‘most absolute comic inventions’, but none of his comedy has survived. What, again, makes us believe that ‘good Mat’ was more than just a literary friend to Marlowe is a rather cryptic letter from Lord Burghley dated May 1591:

  I have cause to thank you, and so I do heartily for your good, kind letter, sent to me by our countryman, Mr Roydon, who maketh such good report to you, as doth every other man that hath had a conversation with you.

  The letter was written to Edward Kelley, the charlatan associate of the magus John Dee, then in Prague. What Roydon was doing in distant Bohemia is anybody’s guess, but the fact that he was carrying letters to Burghley speaks volumes. It is likely that he, like Marlowe, was on the Queen’s business in the twilight world of the intelligencer.

  The last of the ‘university wits’ to remain Marlowe’s friend, even when the heat was on in 1593, was Thomas Nashe. He does not seem to have been as close as Peele, Chapman and Roydon, perhaps because he had no known connection to the School of Night, but he wrote an elegy to Marlowe, and, like all the playwright hopefuls in London in the late 1580s, was knocked sideways by the instant success of Tamburlaine. It is difficult for us to imagine the effect of the ‘mighty line’ and blank verse, on a literary set untrained to it and an audience for whom the thrilling experience was new; the first radio, cinema and television audiences would have understood.

  ‘Idiot art-masters,’ Nashe stormed (he never took the higher degree) in the Preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, published in 1589, ‘that intrude themselves to our ears as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.’ Although Nashe would go on to deny that he ever ‘abused Marlowe’ this is surely an attack born of sour grapes. After Marlowe’s death, Nashe edited the play The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage which in the original version contained the Latin elegy ‘a diviner muse than him, Kit Marlowe’.

  Robert Greene deserves a special place in Marlowe’s circle because he left it spectacularly, first because he resented Marlowe’s success far more than did Nashe and second because, after a dissolute life, and knowing he was dying from syphilis, he turned belatedly to God and slammed those who had not in A Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance. It was Greene, through his publisher Henry Chettle, who libelled Marlowe over his homosexuality. He was to die in a shoemaker’s house near Dowgate by the Thames, not according to Gabriel Harvey, who visited and stole his notes, ‘of the plaguye or the pockes...but of a surfeit of pickle herring and rennish wine.’ The nauseating Harvey wrote, almost while Greene was still warm,

  Who in London hath not heard of his dissolute and licentious living; his foul disguising of a Master of Arte with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company: his vaineglorious and Thrasonicall braving; his pipely Extemporizing and Tarletonizing [Richard Tarleton was the most famous clown of his day]; his apish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy; his fine coosening [con-artistry] of Jugglers and finer juggling with cooseners; his villainous cogging and foisting [cheating]; his monstrous swearing and horrible forswearing; his impious profaning of sacred Textes; his other scandalous and blasphemous ravings...

  Harvey continued to rant, accusing Greene of frequenting brothels in Southwark, pawning his belongings, moving on frequently without paying his rent. It is difficult, bearing in mind the petty petulant attacks made by both men, to decide who is the more despicable, Harvey or Greene.

  The most difficult relationship to fathom is that between Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Rejecting as we do that they were the same man (at least after 1593), we have no way of measuring their friendship. There is no actual documentation to tell us whether the pair ever met, but given that they arrived in London in the same year, both wrote for the theatre and were only two months apart in age, it seems unlikely that they never did. The first part of Henry VI, now usually attributed to Shakespeare alone, was probably co-written by Marlowe and there were likely to have been other collaborations in what is now the Shakespeare canon. For a time in the early 1590s, both men were chasing the same patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. It is the implied rivalry for a common love which is evident in the series of Shakespearian sonnets numbered 78 to 86.

  The story the sonnets tell is a tortuous one and by no means certain, but the likelihood is that they were written in two sections, the first in 1592-3 when Shakespeare was hit especially hard (as actor as well as playwright) by the closure of the theatres because of plague. Along with almost everybody else involved with the young lord (Southampton), Shakespeare seems anxious to get him to do the correct thing and marry. The fact that Southampton was only twenty, quite possibly homosexual and not ready to settle down, made all this rather difficult. Shakespeare met the ‘dark lady’ to whom the sonnets refer at this time and among a host of likely contenders, the most likely is Emilia Lanier (nee Bassano), the half-Italian mistress recently discarded by Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, Privy Councillor and the Queen’s chamberlain. This is certainly A.L. Rowse’s theory and it makes a degree of sense. Every line of Shakespeare’s reveals his awe of the more famous and superior poet.

  I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument

  Deserves the trail of a worthier pen.

  (Sonnet 79)

  And

  O, how I faint when I of you do write,

  Knowing a better spirit doth use your name...

  ...He of tall building and of goodly pride;

  Then, if he thrive and I be cast away,

  The worst was this; my love was my decay.

  (Sonnet 80)

  And

  Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,

  Bound for the prize of all too previous you...

  ...Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write

  Above a mortal pitch, hath struck me dead ?

  (Sonnet 86)

  And tantalizingly, is Shakespeare referring to Marlowe as Faustus in the supernatural implication of the last lines?

  Recent works have implied different relationships. A new biography of Shakespeare has the Stratford man visiting Deptford on the night of 30 May 1593 to view Marlowe’s corpse and say his farewells (for which there is no evidence whatsoever).

  There is no doubt that Shakespeare owed a huge literary debt to Marlowe. Despite the similarity in their ages, Marlowe’s school and university background, not to mention the astonishing hit of Tamburlaine, made him very definitely the senior partner. Shakespeare probably went in awe of him, and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Shakespeare went on to help himself not only to Marlowe’s style of iambic
s, the blank verse which annoyed Nashe, but the notion of the Jew of Malta and the whole range of English history plays of the type of Edward II. Alone of his contemporaries, Shakespeare actually quoted Marlowe in As You Like It -’Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might/“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”’ In the same play, the character Touchstone makes a veiled reference, perhaps to Marlowe’s death in Eleanor Bull’s house at Deptford – ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.’ Shakespeare may have been overawed by the man; he may have owed him a great deal, but he was not Marlowe; nor was he one of his immediate circle. J.B. Black makes a valid point:

  But by a curious coincidence, chance and circumstance combined to eliminate all rivals from [Shakespeare’s] path, when most he needed a free field for the development of his genius. Greene died in 1592, Kyd in 1594; Lodge gave up letters for medicine; Lyly ceased work; and Peele plunged into dissipation. In fact from 1593 to practically the close of the century, Shakespeare had the stage to himself...

  Today, in their search for someone who might benefit from Marlowe’s death, the police would look very closely at Mr. Shakespeare.

  We will never know all the people linked with Christopher Marlowe. The booksellers Thomas Thorpe and Edward Bound published his works posthumously and speak with affection of him. A lawyer on the fringes of the literary set, John Marston, calls him ‘kind Kit Marlowe’.

  The only name remaining is that of Thomas Kyd. A scrivener’s son from London, he probably attended Merchant Taylor’s School and wrote an earlier version of Hamlet, which Shakespeare later plagiarised. His recent play The Spanish Tragedy was among the most popular of Elizabethan plays. He shared lodgings with Marlowe in 1591, probably in Shoreditch, and it was his testimony under the torture of Richard Topcliffe that led to Marlowe’s arrest and subsequent death. Whatever brought down Marlowe, brought down Kyd too.

  We do not know the exact sequence of Marlowe’s success on the London stage. Tamburlaine was the first, a second part following on almost by popular demand. It would be a brave man who tried to chronicle the writing or even first performance dates of anything else. The time frame we have is the autumn of 1587 to the early summer of 1593. Within those years, Marlowe wrote five plays, although Dido, Queen of Carthage may have been completed by Nashe and The Massacre at Paris has only survived in a much hacked about form and again may have been a collaboration with Nashe. Edward II was entered to William Jones in the Stationers’ Register, which recorded all plays, on 6 July 1593. Marlowe had by then been dead six weeks. The troublesome reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, king of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortymer was first published in 1594, attributed to ‘Chri. Marlow’.

  Like Shakespeare in his History plays, Marlowe’s major source was Ralph Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland of 1577, but one scene may well have been suggested by a passage in John Stow’s Annales, which gives it a late date of 1592. It was first performed by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men. The Jew of Malta was recorded at the Stationers’ Hall by Nicholas Ling and Thomas Millington as ‘the famouse tragedie of the Riche Jew of Malta’ on 17 May 1594. Dating for this one is easier, because it refers to the death of the Duke of Guise, 23 December 1589, and we know it was performed by Philip Henslowe’s company on 26 February 1592. It may be that the cutpurse character was lifted by Marlowe (perhaps a deliberate act to annoy him) from Robert Greene’s underworld pamphlet A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, published in December 1591. The play was performed thirty-six times between February 1592 and June 1596, mostly by Lord Strange’s Men.

  There is a date structure of a sort in The Massacre at Paris. It must have been written after the death of the French king Henri III on 2 August 1589 and possibly after that of Pope Sixtus V, in August 1590. Its first recorded performance was in January 1593, with Marlowe at the height of his fame and only five months away from Deptford. Henslowe’s company at The Rose performed it then and the Admiral’s Men ten times the following year. The tragicall history of the horrible life and Death of Doctor Ffaustus, written by C.M. was based on an English translation of a German edition of 1587 not available in England until 1592. Edward Alleyn played Faustus for the Admiral’s Men at the Rose twenty-four times between September 1594 and January 1597.

  Edward II, The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus, The Massacre at Paris – these are the plays, along with Tamburlaine, that resound with Marlowe’s mighty line. With the likely exception of Tamburlaine, they were, indirectly, but surely, the plays that killed him.

  SIX

  TOBACCO AND BOYS

  That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.

  The Baines Note (May 1593)

  T

  hree days before the end of Marlowe’s life, an extraordinary document found its way into the hands of the Privy Council. It was written by Richard Baines, a shadowy figure whose denunciation of the poet-playwright would make his murder inevitable. He was a gentleman pensioner, in other words a rich undergraduate, at Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1568 and transferred to Caius shortly after 1573. Caius was one of the most Catholic of the university colleges at a time of growing Puritanism and it comes as little surprise to know that Baines left for the English College at Rheims in 1578. Taking to the monastic regime like a duck to water, he became a sub-deacon on 25 March 1581 and an ordained Catholic priest on 21 September of the same year.

  All this seems to be taking his part rather too far, because according to a confession he made later to Dr Allen who ran the college, Baines’s role was actually that of projector: ‘I found means,’ Baines wrote, ‘to insinuate myself to the familiarity of some of the younger set, that methought might be easily carried into discontentment.’ Further, Richard Baines was an assassin. Of him, Allen wrote:

  They resolved to begin another way of persecution, which was to put sedition among ourselves by sending over spies and traitors to kindle and foster [disconnect]. Such a one was one Bayne, who besides other ill offices was to poison also Dr Allen at that time in the seminary.

  Among nineteen accusations made by Baines against Marlowe in May 1593, number thirteen reads: ‘That all they that love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles.’ Since the twelfth charge that immediately precedes it reads: ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to C[hrist] and leaned alwaies in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’, we must assume that Baines’s thirteenth charge of loving boys is literal. Sodom was, with Gomorrah, one of the cities of the plain in the Dead Sea area of Palestine. Synonymous with wickedness and especially homosexual acts, Sodom was destroyed by God with fire and brimstone, according to Genesis.

  The projector’s brief, according to some commentators, was to blacken Marlowe’s reputation. We believe that in essence what Baines was reporting was the truth. Marlowe did smoke tobacco and he was probably a practising homosexual. Whereas only fanatics like James VI of Scotland loathed and denounced the ‘noxious weed’, homosexuality was a capital crime. It is important that we understand where this places Marlowe. More than simply a dissolute ‘roisterer’ on the lines of his friends Greene and Nashe, he was what he remained for the rest of his life; an outsider, a man on the edge, and dangerous company.

  What do we know about Marlowe’s relationship with the ‘noxious weed’? King James’s ‘counterblast’ was not the only attack on the substance. In 1628, John Earle wrote of tobacconists in Microcosmographie – ‘No man opens his ware with greater seriousness, as challenges your judgement more in the approbation. His shop is the rendezvous of spitting, where men dialogue with their noses and their communication is smoke.’ The King went into print on the subject in 1604:

  And for the vanities committed in this filthy custom, is it not both great vanity and uncleanness, that at the table, a place of respect, of cleanliness, of modesty, men should not be ashamed to sit tossing of
tobacco pipes, and puffing of the smoke and tobacco one to another, making the filthy smoke and stink thereof to exhale athwart the dishes, and infect the air, when very often men that abhor it are at their repast? ... Have you not reason then to be ashamed, and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, having yourself both in persons and goods and taking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you: by the custom thereof making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

  James sounds uncannily modern in his conclusion that tobacco was dangerous and he is also right when he refers to the revulsion to the weed among foreigners. Paul Hentzner, a German travelling in England in the 1590s, wrote:

  ...the English are constantly smoking the Nicotian weed which in America is called Tobaca – others call it Paetum – and generaly in this manner; they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder, and lighting it, they draw smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it, plenty of phlegm and defluxion from the head.