Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  In part, the reason for the aversion to tobacco of James and others was its sheer novelty. Like the theatres, it was new. Christoforo Colon, better known as Columbus, first saw the Arawaks of Espanõla smoking the nicotine leaves as early as 1492, either through inhalation via the nostrils or through a hollow tube called a tobago. The Arawaks used tobacco as a mild hallucinogenic and as an offering to their gods in religious festivals. Its first introduction to England seems to have been the year of Marlowe’s birth, when John Hawkins, explorer and slave-trader, brought back a small amount from an American voyage. For twenty years smoking remained the pastime of sailors, although two scholars, Penn and Lobel, published a herbal containing drawings of the plant in London in 1570.

  While Francis Drake brought back larger amounts of Nicotinia tobacum in 1573 European doctors (usually ahead of their British counterparts) were looking at the weed as a potential cure for a whole range of ailments and diseases including toothache, worms, lockjaw, migraine, labour pains, asthma, bubonic plague, cancer and halitosis! In the year in which Marlowe was recruited to Walsingham’s secret service, Francis Drake introduced smoking to Walter Ralegh. Three years later, Thomas Hariot wrote a treatise about the weed and is generally regarded as England’s first recorded lung cancer victim as a result of his own addiction. Since Ralegh and Hariot were part of Marlowe’s circle by 1588, their links with the man and his murder are important and extend to their use of tobacco.

  Hariot visited Ralegh’s colony of Virginia in 1585 or 1586 and brought back the clay pipe possibly invented for smoking by Ralph Lane, the colony’s first governor. The astronomer and mathematician so extolled its virtues to Ralegh (‘it purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body’) that within a year, tobacco had become the new craze at Court. Years later, when James was king and counterblasting the weed with vigour, he focused the blame on Ralegh, whom he detested, as the instigator of the foul habit – ‘it seems a miracle to me how a custom springing from so vile a ground and brought in by a father so generally hated, should be welcomed.’ To spite the sanctimonious hypocrite who had ordered his execution in 1618, Ralegh enjoyed one final pipe of tobacco on his way to the scaffold.

  Edmund Spenser is probably the first poet to refer to tobacco, in The Faerie Queen written in 1590, but there are other references and they oddly revolve around Marlowe. Giordano Bruno, the atheist whom Marlowe may have heard lecture in Oxford and whose works he had certainly read, wrote Work for Chimney Sweepers and the verse that prefaced it ran ‘Better be choked with English hemp than poisoned with Indian Tobacco’. This piece refers to Giovanni della Porta, whose De Furtivus Literarum Notis was, as we have seen, the standard reference work for codification used by Walsingham’s code-breaker Thomas Phelippes.

  There is a sense that the substance which Ralegh, Hariot, Marlowe and others smoked was a great deal more powerful than the modern version with its low tar and government health warnings. Various accounts of its effects, not influenced by the antipathy of the Puritans, describe a light-headedness and loss of control more associated with cannabis smoking. A French witness of the trial of the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601, spoke of English lords making themselves ‘silly’ by smoking. It may be that the tobacco imported in the 1580s and 1590s was of a particularly strong strain – or that it was not tobacco at all, but marijuana.

  We have seen already, through the drama of his plays and the licentiousness of his poetry translations, that Marlowe loved to shock. His use of tobacco is simply another example of that, at a time when the revolutionary substance was the smart thing with which to be associated, exciting the senses and the Court. It was the stuff of Ralegh’s and Hariot’s School of Night and it smacked of the forbidden.

  In the year before Marlowe died, Robert Greene went into print with his idea of what a poet was in A Quip for an Upstart Courtier. Whether it was intended to refer to Marlowe himself we do not know, but it sums up the image of the man that has come down to us:

  A poet is a waste-good and an unthrift, that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar. If he have forty pounds in his purse together, he puts it not to usury, neither buys land nor merchandise with it, but a month’s commodity of wenches and capons. Ten pounds a supper, why ‘tis nothing, if his plough goes and his ink-horn be clear. Take one of them with twenty thousand pounds and hang him. He is a king of pleasure....

  And London provided plenty of places where pleasure might be taken. The bustling life of the city is most vividly recreated by Marlowe’s fellow-dramatist Ben Johnson, in The Devil is an Ass:

  I will fetch thee a leap

  From the top of Paul’s steeple to the standard in Cheap

  And lead thee a dance through the streets without fail

  Like a needle of Spain, with a thread at my tail.

  We will survey the suburbs and make forth our sallies

  Down Petticoat Lane, and up the Smock-alleys,

  To Shoredith, Whitechapel, and so to St Kather’n’s,

  To drink with the Dutch there, and to take forth their patterns.

  From thence we will put in at Custome-house quay there,

  And see how the factors and prentices play there,

  False with their masters; and geld many a full pack

  To spend it in pies at the Dagger, and Woolsack.

  Nay, boy, I will bring thee to the bawds and the roysters

  At Billingsgate, feasting with claret-wine and oysters;

  From thence shoot the Bridge, child, to the Cranes i’ th’ Vintry,

  And see there the gimblets how they make their entry!

  Or, if thou hadst rather, to the Strand down to fall,

  ’Gainst the lawyers come dabbled from Westminster Hall,

  And mark how they cling, with their clients together,

  Like ivy to oak, so velvet to leather.

  London’s underworld developed like a cancer in the growing city. The area of the Savoy along the Strand was already one centre; so was the no-go rabbit warren called Alsatia. Other places adopted colourful names like Devil’s Gap and Damnation Alley and there was a plethora of taverns where ‘roysters’ or ‘roaring boys’ could drink, smoke their tobacco and whore to their hearts’ content. The scale of the problem was huge and honest men worried about it. George Whetstone wrote A Touchstone for the Time in 1584:

  Now remaineth the discovery of the third sort of these haunts, which are placed in alleys, gardens and other obscure corners out of the common walks of the magistrate. The daily guests of these privy houses are masterless men, needy shifters, thieves, cutpurses, unthrifty servants, both serving men and prentices. Here a man may pick out mates for all purposes, save such as are good....

  Of particular concern to the authorities were the theatres and the liberties, those areas, like Shoreditch in the north-east and Bankside across the river which were beyond the City’s official jurisdiction. At the end of July 1597, the Lord Mayor and aldermen, clearly at the end of their collective tethers – ‘neither in polity nor in religion are they to be suffered in a Christian commonwealth, specially being of that frame and matter as usually they are, containing nothing but profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices and scurrilous behaviours.’ Theatres, the City fathers agreed, ‘give opportunity to the refuse sort of evil-disposed and ungodly people that are within and about this city to assemble themselves and to make matches for all their lewd and ungodly practices’. They demanded nothing short of ‘the present stay and final suppressing of the said stage-plays, as well as the Theatre, Curtain and Bankside...’.

  But the government had tried this before and to no avail. In June 1584, William Fleetwood, Recorder to the City of London, had written to Lord Burghley himself concerning riots outside the rival houses of The Curtain and The Theatre:

  Upon the same night I sent for the Queen’s players and my lord of Arundel his players, and they all willingly obeyed the lords’ letters. The chiefest of her highne
ss’s players advised me to send for the owner of the Theater [James Burbage] who was a stubborn fellow and to bind him. I did so. He sent me word that he was my lord of Hunsdon’s man and that he would not come at me, but he would in the morning ride to my lord.

  That was the problem. Although Fleetwood seems to have won that particular battle, men like Burbage believed themselves to be under the protection of great lords, which they were. Hunsdon was, like Burghley, a member of the Privy Council and a power in the land. So the theatre-owners, the actors in theatrical companies and quite possibly the playwrights who wrote for them, saw themselves, if not exactly above the law, at least alongside it.

  South of the river lay the stews of Southwark, where professional card and dice cheats rubbed elbows and no doubt other parts of their anatomy with the ‘Winchester Geese’, the prostitutes who plied their trade on land formerly belonging to the bishop of that diocese. Southward too was theatre-land, the home in the later 1590s of The Swan and The Globe. Marlowe was dead before they reached their zenith, but the theatrical link was already established. Philip Henslowe, who put on most of Marlowe’s plays, and Ned Alleyn who acted in them, both owned brothels here. Alleyn’s wife (Henslowe’s stepdaughter) was dragged at the cart’s tail through the streets in 1593; this was the traditional punishment for habitual prostitution.

  The Elizabethans called such establishments ‘stews’ in a long forgotten folk memory of Roman baths where relaxation and prostitution went hand in hand. With deep irony, Henry VIII had outlawed such places, but then, as now, prostitution provided for a need and the ban was largely ignored. Lord Hunsdon was here again, owning Paris Gardens and farming them out to Francis Langley, who owned The Swan and who asked few questions when it came to nightly behaviour in the theatre’s precincts. Such favours could be expensive. The author of A Mirror for Magistrates of Cities wrote in 1584 that a gentleman may need ‘forty shillings or better’ to but his pleasures in ‘some blind brothel house about the suburbs; which would include ‘a bottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French welcome’. The ‘French welcome’ was the pox, gonorrhoea or syphilis which the English attributed to their ancient enemy, just as they attributed it to the English.

  Robert Greene, as always bursting with rabid born-again indignation, gave an account of the methodology of these women in 1592 in a scene he had probably witnessed. In A Disputation Between a He Coney Catcher and a She Coney Catcher, he wrote:

  I removed my lodgings and gat me into one of those houses of good hospitality whereunto persons resort, commonly called a trugging-house, or to be plain, a whore-house, where I gave myself to entertain all companions, sitting or standing at the door like a stale, to allow or draw in wanton passengers, refusing none that would with his purse purchase men to be his, to satisfy the disordinate desire of his filthy lust.

  Greene is describing his former life and, incidentally, the acquisition of the syphilis which was killing him. Theatres, drink, tobacco; these were as nothing when compared with prostitution in the Puritan canon of vice. Philip Stubbes railed against it in The Anatomie of Abuses:

  it dimmeth the sight, it impaireth the hearing, it informeth the sinews, it weakeneth the joints, it exhausteth the marrow, consumeth the moisture and supplement of the body, it rivelleth the face, appalleth the countenance, it dulleth the spirits, it hurteth the memory, it weakeneth the whole body, it bringeth it into a consumption, it bringeth ulcerations, scab, scurf, blain, botch, pocks and biles; it maketh hoar hairs and bare pates; it induceth old age, and, in fine, bringeth death before nature urge it, malady enforce it or age require it.

  If we accept the version of Marlowe’s murder written by Anthony à Wood in 1691, we get a flavour of this world of the ‘frail sisterhood’ with their bare breasts under their velvet cloaks – ‘For it so fell out that [Marlowe] being deeply in love with a certain Woman had for his Rival a bawdy serving man, one rather fit to be a Pimp...;. We know that Ingram Frizer does not fit this pattern, but it raises interesting questions or Marlowe’s sexuality that we cannot answer. The Baines Note talks of tobacco and boys and on this, the most taboo of subjects in Elizabethan England, even the most rabid Puritans are silent.

  In 1614 William Lithgow wrote his Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations and describes an aspect of his visit in Padua, in the north of Italy:

  The Schollers here in the night commit many murthers against their privat adversaries, and too often executed upon the stranger and innocent, and all with gun-shot or else stillettoes: for beastly Sodomy, it is rife here as in Rome, Naples, Florence, Bullogna, Venice, Ferrara, Genoa, Parma not being exempted, nor yet the smallest pastime, making songs and singeing sommets of the beauty and pleasure of their Bardassi, or buggerd boys.

  There are fascinating echoes or Marlowe here: the link with murder, specifically by stiletto, the slim-bladed Italian dagger; the link with scholars; the link with sonnets. That Lithgow wrote this at all is, says historian G. Rattray Taylor, a testimony to the frankness of writing on such matters. This we doubt. Lithgow’s ‘frankness’ probably has more to do with the facts that his king was James I, openly homosexual, as many of his courtiers could testify, and that the Scots traveller was writing, after all, about a foreign culture, albeit an admired one. On the same ‘grand tour’, Lithgow visited Malta and saw the authorities’ punishment for the same activity he had witnessed in Padua:

  The fifth day of my staying here, I saw a Spanish soldier and a Maltese boy burnt into ashes, for the public profession of sodomy; and long or night there were above a hundred bardasses, whorish boys, that fled away to Sicily in a galliot [boat] for fear of fire...

  The sixteenth century was one of rampant patrism in which certain attitudes prevailed towards homosexuality, which explain why it was a capital offence. G. Rattray Taylor outlines twelve attitude systems, most of which fit the Elizabethan period, although some require qualification.

  First, there was a restrictive attitude to sex. Virtually all of this stemmed from the Puritan zeal that grew throughout Elizabeth’s reign. So normal sexual appetites became to Robert Greene ‘filthy lust’ and paved the way for the hysterical prudery of the following century which saw ‘witches’ hanged in Pendle, Lancashire and Salem, Massachusetts. In the latter case, one of the ‘crimes’ that most appalled the bigoted village community was that the teenaged girls concerned were dancing.

  Second, there was a limitation on freedom for women. Here we have the curious anomaly of a monarch who was, by accident of birth alone, a woman, yet who treated her own sex as second rate. In fact, Henry VIII had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent this situation from occurring. In her turn, almost as a subconscious effort to please him, Elizabeth had tried to prove more of a man than most of her male counterparts in Europe. Playing the little woman when she needed to, she was nevertheless notorious for her fierce temper and short fuse. The Queen aside, however, Elizabethan England was run entirely by men. Women could inherit titles, although these passed on marriage to their husbands, but every profession, even the dubious one of acting, was barred to them. So Eleanor Bull, in whose house Marlowe died, owned the property in Deptford Strand, but her clients were exclusively male and she held the position she did because of her links with important men.

  Third, women were seen as inferior and even sinful. Both Puritan and Catholic ideologies reflected this. One of the most obnoxious books ever written, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches) was the work of two misogynist priests, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. For page after page these two, creating the bible of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunters, heaped every sort of guilt on woman. ‘For as she is a liar by nature...Her gait, her posture, and habit, in which is vanity of vanities....All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.’ It is this ideology, deeply ingrained and viciously chauvinistic, that even today criminalises prostitutes in Britain, but rarely their male clients. The unique publication, in 1589, of Jane Anger’s pa
mphlet A Protection for Women, defending their honesty and integrity, made no impact at all.

  Fourth, chastity was considered more important than welfare and was a virtue held in greater esteem than any other. Note the Queen’s disapproval of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s wife because she had been brought up to believe that the Church hierarchy should be celibate.

  Fifth, the sixteenth century was politically authoritarian. We have seen already the stream of legislation and the monopolistic control that ran from the dissolution of the monasteries to the death of the Queen and beyond. The power of the Privy Council was immense; it literally held men’s lives in its hands. The Church made and broke men. The Stationers’ Company decided what literature Englishmen should read. The Master of the Revels opened and closed theatres at will. Elizabeth even prescribed the length of the rapiers carried by her subjects (36 inches in 1580).

  Sixth, the age was conservative, opposed to innovation. This is one area that threatens not to fit Rattray Taylor’s thesis. It was an age of adventure, exploration, novelty. Yet the argument holds because of the rising Puritan backlash against the shock of the new. The theatres were an innovation and detested by many; so was tobacco. The very novelty of the Protestant ascendancy and the eclipse of Catholicism smacked of conservatism once the move had been made.

  The seventh point is linked with this – a distrust of research and enquiry. The whole nature of Ralegh’s School of Night became suspect as a result – it was not only the Catholic Church that demanded total acceptance of every word of the Bible.

  Rattray Taylor’s eighth point, a sense of inhibition and fear of spontaneity, is difficult to fit into the Elizabethan age. Where it exists, however, is yet again among the Puritans, whose sense of wonder at the existence of God had become increasingly deist as the century drew to a close. Keith Thomas, in his superb thesis on the decline of magic, shows how the Protestants tried to deprive religion of its miraculous nature, an aspect which had characterised the medieval Church. Spontaneity came with the theatres and the power of drama and poetry to move men’s souls. It was over this that Philip Sidney counterattacked the Puritans in defending his poetry in 1580.