Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The ninth point concerns a deep fear and loathing of homosexuality, and we will return to it in Marlowe’s case.

  The tenth is a maximisation of sex differences, especially in dress. Whereas dandies (‘gimblets’) and some courtiers like Ralegh wore earrings and expensive finger jewellery, the actual shape of men’s and women’s garments differed widely. The ‘peascod’ doublet or stomacher was the only similarity. Ruffs were of different shapes for each sex and for a woman to appear in the hose, pantaloons and buskins (boots) of a man would have been unthinkable.

  The eleventh point, again closely associated with the Puritans, is an asceticism amounting to a morbid fear of pleasure. Smoking, drinking, whoring, play-going, even dice and backgammon, were regarded as the Devil’s practices. In the next generation, the innocent maypole would be dismantled from a thousand village greens, not merely because it represented a ‘lewd’ and pagan phallic worship, but because it was symbolic of people enjoying themselves.

  Finally, the major hallmark of the patrist society is the association of religion with a father image. God was male, Christ was male, the disciples were male. All priests were male. Only one woman, Mary, was allowed elevation to sanctity – and that because the male Lord had sent his male angel Gabriel to tell her she would be the mother of the male saviour. And the only branch of Christianity which extolled womanhood via the cult of the Virgin Mary, the Catholic, was rapidly being expunged from England.

  In this patrist society, homosexuality was a taboo not to be tolerated, but oddly, there was a dichotomy here that fitted the hypocrisy of Elizabeth’s Court and government. Sexual matters were originally the concern of the Church, in that a sin had been committed and that God’s laws, rather than man’s, had been broken. The Ten Commandments given to Moses were fairly unequivocal, but homosexuality had no specific mention in the Bible. The word itself was coined by the daring pioneers of sexual psychology in the 1890s. Before that, a whole range of euphemisms, mostly classical, could be found in various forms of literature – sodomite, catamite, ingle, ganymede, pathic, cinaedus, and the much ill-used, bugger. In the Old Testament’s version of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the compilers of the King James Bible in 1611 used euphemisms. ‘All vices vile’ according to du Bartas, including rape, incest and heterosexual prostitution, led to the most depraved sin of all, sodomy. It is equally clear, however, that in the literary usage of the day, sodomy was equated with heterosexual sex and bestiality. Edward Coke, one of the greatest jurists in English history (but, perhaps by definition, a man of the Establishment) defined it as a sin ‘by mankind with mankind or with brute beast or by womankind with brute beast’.

  Given the vagueness of definition, which may itself account for the very taboo of the subject, it is not surprising that double standards existed. On the one hand, there were prosecutions for homosexual acts. For example in 1580, Matthew Heaton, a priest from East Grinstead, Sussex, was put on trial for his relationship with a young male parishioner. Forty years before Heaton, Nicholas Udall, the future writer of the comic play Ralph Royster Doyster, was dismissed from his post as headmaster of Eton after it was discovered that he was having an affair with (and possibly being blackmailed by) a former pupil. Fourteen years after Heaton, as the dust began to settle on Marlowe’s death, Mr. Cooke, the headmaster of Great Tay in Essex, was up before the church courts as one who ‘teacheth [his pupils] all manner of bawdry’; ‘a man of beastly behaviour amongst his scholars’.

  The ambiguity of attitudes and of English law is demonstrated by the fact that both Udall and Cooke got away with their offences. In an age far less hysterical than ours over the fate of children, Cooke did not even bother to attend court and Udall, although dismissed his post and imprisoned for a while, was made Prebendary of Windsor by Edward VI, where presumably he could continue to swish his cane with his usual fervour in charge of the chapel’s choirboys.

  Less lucky, however, was John Atherton, the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, who was hanged in 1640, along with his lover and proctor, John Childe. We are perhaps cheating a little with this example, as it took place in Ireland fifty years after Marlowe’s death and probably reflects the changing attitudes of a different generation. As historian Alan Bray has pointed out, however, trials for sodomy tended to hit the headlines at times of other tensions. John Swan and John Lister were executed in Edinburgh in 1570 at the height of the Catholic-Calvinist crisis there. It is likely that Atherton and Childe were victims of the same sense of upheaval. The actual number of trials concerning homosexuality is small. Between 1559 and 1625 there were only four indictments for sodomy in the counties of Kent, Sussex, Hertfordshire and Essex put together.

  The evidence that Marlowe was actively homosexual is circumstantial. We do not know enough about the relationships within his family in Canterbury to identify the classic patterns of homosexual development, but he was brought up in an essentially female household where he was the only boy. The all-male environment of the King’s School, at a time when boys naturally experiment out of curiosity, may have had its influences on him, but a far more likely place was Cambridge. At Bene’t’s, as at other colleges, the practice was for Fellows to share rooms with scholars. At seventeen, Marlowe was older than most, but here was an environment, at once claustrophobic and incestuous, in which homosexuality may well have been practised. Was the atheist Francis Kett one such Fellow who engineered such bedroom-sharing for his own ends?

  If we are right in that Marlowe was recruited to Walsingham’s secret service while at Cambridge by Nicholas Faunt, this may explain how it happened. As we have seen, Faunt became a firm friend of Anthony Bacon, an active intelligencer for Walsingham, operating from Paris. The letters that have survived between the two while they travelled Europe separately reporting to the spymaster, are gushingly sentimental and may well be symptomatic of a homosexual relationship. In the summer of 1586, Bacon was accused, while monitoring the French Catholic-Huguenot situation in Bearn, of an act of sodomy with a young male servant. Servants were in a highly vulnerable position for the predatory homosexual in Elizabethan England (or Europe). Living in, with little approximating to human rights and utterly dependent on their masters for a living, an unknown number of them may have included bedroom games as part of their duties. Although there are no English documents relating to the case, Bacon’s misogyny (he even avoided his mother and the Queen whenever possible) had made him enemies among the wives of the Huguenot aristocracy and they saw to it that the case came to court.

  A series of witnesses testified before the royal historian Claude de la Grange that Bacon, oblivious to casual observers, kissed and fondled his page, Isaac Bougades, in exchange for sweets and cash. Other servants were involved and the evidence implies that Bougades was something of a rent boy in the local town of Montauban. As always, French society was even more hypocritical than English. Male prostitutes – Henri III’s mignons – were an accepted part of court life but it was a repeated offence of sodomy that under French law could lead to execution. In the event, Bacon obtained financial support from (of all ironies) local Catholic lords and everyone seems to have turned a blind eye.

  The link between Marlowe, Faunt and Bacon is tenuous, but the taint of homosexuality has lurked under the surface in male universities for centuries and it has also refused to travel far from the secret service. A city like London, with its quickly growing population, much of it flotsam and jetsam, provided temptations too. One of the books (including Marlowe’s works) burned by order of the Bishop of London at the Stationers’ Hall in June 1599 was by John Marston and contained the following description of a man-about-town:

  Rags [fashion], running horses, dogs, drabs [prostitutes], drink and dice

  The only things that he doth hold in price.

  Yet more than these, naught doth him so delight

  As doth his smooth-skinned, plump-thighed catamite.

  There were probably homosexual ‘stews’ in Southwark, but the problem with identifyi
ng homosexuality, in London as elsewhere, is that there was no discernible underground subculture of literature, clothing or meeting-places that could be called homosexual.

  There were traditions, however, that may well have had an important influence on Marlowe; the first is classical culture. Ancient Greek society prized male relationships as being superior to heterosexual ones. The purpose of the latter was procreation whereas male-male bonding, seen in the homosexual pairings of the Spartan army and in Homer’s Iliad in the love between Achilles and Patroclus, was on an altogether higher plane. It even found acceptance in the Old Testament relationship between David and Jonathan – ‘passing the love of women’. Marlowe, like all scholars of his day, was brought up in the culture, borrowed from the cradle of civilization. When Marlowe’s friend the playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested he wrote to Sir John Puckering, apportioning blame in all directions. Kyd’s second indictment against Marlowe reads: ‘He would report St John to be our saviour Christes Alexis. I cover [report] it with reverence and trembling that is that Christ did love him with extraordinary love.’ Christ’s homosexual leanings towards John the Evangelist are included in the Baines Note, but Alexis is the crucial word and refers to a character in Vergil’s second eclogue, a beautiful youth loved by the shepherd Corydon.

  This was the second influence on Marlowe’s homosexuality – literature. Poets and playwrights such as John Marston, Michael Drayton, Ben Johnson, Edward Guilpin, Richard Braithwaite, Thomas Middleton and John Donne all wrote satires which have a homosexual theme or references.

  In the 1590s, John Donne was still a student at Lincoln’s Inn and about to embark on Essex’s expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores as part of the on-going war with Spain. He can have had no direct influence on Marlowe, but his description of Elizabeth’s Court in his Satires is a vivid lightning flash illuminating those ‘hypocritical asses’ who surrounded the Queen – ‘who loves whores, who boys and who goats’. Both Ben Jonson and John Marston linked homosexuality and bestiality. In Sir Voluptuous Beast Jonson’s character teases his wife – ‘Telling the motions of each petticoat/And how his Ganymede moved and how his goat.’ John Marston’s The Scourge of Villanie has his hero, Luscus, turning for solace in his mistress’s absence to his ‘Ganymede’ and ‘perfumed she-goat’.

  The other influence on Marlowe was of course the theatre. The Puritan Philip Stubbes was not alone in believing the London stage to be a centre of all kinds of debauchery. In The Anatomie of Abuses he wrote of audiences, ‘And in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites or worse.’

  Again we are in the realms of the boy-actress and the whole androgynous world forced on impresarios and playwrights by the obsessive straitjacket of the Church’s laws prohibiting women from acting. One of Ben Jonson’s characters in The Poetaster asks, ‘What? Shall I have my son a stager [actor] now, an ingle for players?’ Another interesting link between Marlowe and the shadowy world of homosexuality is Robert Poley. There is circumstantial evidence for his homosexuality too.

  In common with many English kings, Edward II was perhaps more sinned against than sinning. Modern biographies concentrate on the cultured man, fond of art and architecture, even if he was not the general his father had been. It was quite probably Edwards’s friendship with Piers Gaveston that fascinated Marlowe, although perhaps the fact that the king was an early patron of the theatre had an appeal too. Evidence for a homosexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston is almost non-existent, but it has come down to us in the form of a weak, idle monarch cavorting in unnatural frivolity while his country went to the dogs, humiliated by the Scots for example at Bannockburn. ‘Obstinate sodomy’ was prevalent among the clergy in Edward’s day, but the strongest evidence of the king’s leanings seems to come from the manner of his murder in Berkeley Castle, sometime in late September 1327. He was, according to one account ‘slayne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale’. If this is true, it is an early example of symmetrical reversal, the principle, still used in Elizabethan times and perhaps applicable to Marlowe’s own death. Edward had sinned, according to gossip, by taking part in anal intercourse – it was only fitting that he should die the same way.

  Those who see no homosexual overtones in Edward II have clearly not been looking. In the play, Mortimer says

  The mightiest kings have had their minions:

  Great Alexander lov’d Hephaestion;

  The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;

  And for Patroculus stern Achilles droop’d;

  And not kings only, but the wisest men.

  The Roman Tully lov’d Octavius;

  Great Socrates, wild Alcibiades.

  Horrified by the frivolity and self-seeking of the upstart Gaveston, the nobility’s patience wears thin. ‘The King,’ said Mortimer, ‘is lovesick for his minion’, and this situation is not excused by the pedigree of homosexual love just described. Outmanoeuvred by his council, Edward is forced to let Gaveston go. It reads like a lovers’ parting – ‘But to forsake you, in whose gracious looks/The blessedness of Gaveston remains.’ And Edward, lost, snaps at his queen, Isabella, ‘Fawn not on me, French strumpet, get thee gone.’

  Many commentators have noted that Isabella is the only important female character in any of Marlowe’s plays – Helen of Troy in Dr Faustus for example, is a mere sex object, not a real person – and since he cannot portray women properly this proves that he was homosexual. This theory, of course, conveniently overlooks Dido, Queen of Carthage. In Edward II he is bound by the historical sources he used (Holinshed) and naturally, alongside the male power of Edward himself, Isabella pales. She is, however, the ‘she-wolf of France’. Frequently unfaithful to her husband, and in his chauvinistic characterization, Marlowe does her justice by conveying her deviousness. Realizing that Gaveston has Edward’s heart, she laments in a soliloquy, ‘The cup of Hymen had been full of poison.’

  Marlowe’s murderer in Edward II is Lightborn, and the name is fascinating. Here is the carrier of light, Lucifer, with all the connotations of the unholy trinity of magic, homosexuality and heresy. In keeping with the galaxy of murderers we find in Shakespeare too, Lightborn is sympathetic and engages his victim in conversation. Prophetic souls like Robert Greene would have seen something portentous in this – a conversation between friends ‘in quiet sort’ at the house of Eleanor Bull in Deptford just before the ‘hotte broche’ struck. Lightborn, like Frizer at Deptford, needed help and two others enter – Matrevis and Gurney; another unholy trinity to augment the first. They carry a table and a spit. ‘So,’ says Lightborn, ‘lay the table down, and stamp on it,/But not too hard, lest that you bruise his body.’

  There is no mention of the heated poker through the anus and in all staged productions since, good taste dictates that the murder is carried our behind the table or in some other way. Unlike Deptford, where all the killers walked away, Gurney turns on Lightborn and stabs him. Frizer, it is true, went to prison, but merely to await the Queen’s pardon; the analogy, ultimately, does not work. There is no symmetrical reversal here. An acknowledgement of Christopher Marlowe’s homosexuality is important because of the bearing it had in his time. Edward Coke wrote of it that homosexuality was a ‘detestable and abominable sin amongst Christians, not to be named’. In his opinion, ‘it deserveth death’ and it seems likely that Coke’s (and therefore the Establishment’s) attitude came about as a result of an increasing tendency by the late sixteenth century to equate homosexuality first with Catholicism and then with atheism.

  There was an air of magic and the supernatural about homosexuality. It was, according to the poet Walter Kennedy, akin to the unnatural predations of the werewolf and the basilisk, mythical creatures who ripped out the hearts of men or turned them to stone with a single glance. As we shall see, Christopher Marlowe was linked in the minds of some people with the Black Arts because of his recreation of the Faust legend and of his membership of the School of Night.

  On a more practical level
, homosexuality was equated with the enemy that was Catholicism. Coke railed against the unholy trinity of ‘sorcerers, sodomites and heretics’. Rome was called, in England, ‘new Sodom’, ‘second Sodom’ and ‘Sodom Fair’. William Lithgow, convinced that it lurked in the enforced celibacy of Catholic priests, wrote – ‘Lo, there is the chastity of the Romish priests who forsooth may not marry and yet may miscarry themselves in all abominations, especially in sodomy, which is their continual pleasure and pastime.’ John Marston was even more specific, bearing in mind Marlowe’s mission for Walsingham in 1585-6. In The Times’ Whistle he wrote

  Hence, hence ye falsed, seeming patriots,

  Return not with pretence of salving spots,

  When here ye soil us with impurity

  And monstrouth filth of Douai seminary.

  What though Iberia yield you liberty

  To snort in source of Sodom villainy?

  Douai of course was the home of John Allen’s English seminary before its move to Rheims.

  Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit was published posthumously by Henry Chettle. His accusations against Marlowe for his atheism and Machiavellianism are discussed elsewhere, but it is obvious from Chettle’s later response that at least two of those libelled by the dead poet had complained. It is not known whether one was Nashe or Shakespeare, but the other is likely to have been Marlowe. It is clear that Chettle did not know him personally – ‘With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted and with one of them I care not if I never be.’ In his own defence, Cherttle explained that he had censored Greene’s vitriolic purple prose – ‘For the first [Marlowe] whose learning I reverence, and at the perusing of Greene’s booke, stroke out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ; or had it been true, yet to publish it was intolerable...’.