Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  It was a superstitious age. The plays of Shakespeare and of Marlowe himself are littered with the strange, the supernatural. Elizabethan audiences loved them, because the Protestant Church had not quite extinguished the notion of magic. The Catholic Church preached transubstantiation, that the wine and bread miraculously became the blood and body of Christ at the communion altar. The Protestants took the low ground, that all this was mere symbolism; and in doing so, they destroyed the magic and the wonder. The gullible groundlings flocked to witness the last remnants of magic, wherever they found it – in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the prognostications of Michel of Notre Dame as in the ‘real’ world. In Loch Fyne, Strathclyde, a monster with two crowns on its head was seen in the loch’s murky waters in July 1570, a sure sign of troubled times for Scotland. In Oxford seven years later, nearly three hundred died from a mysterious fever that did not affect women or children. Death stalked the city – ‘Think you on the solemn ’sizes [assizes] past/How suddenly in Oxfordshire/I came and made the judges all aghast.’ And in the same month in Suffolk, a huge black dog chewed the church door of Bungay, before hurtling round the nave and tearing out the throats of two of the congregation. Whatever the reality of these incidents, in the sixteenth century men accepted them as supernatural. The only decision that had to be made was the source – God or the Devil?

  The Devil was real enough in Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus, to the extent that legends circulated early in the seventeenth century to the effect that the incantations executed on stage to raise him had really worked, terrifying the actors. Marlowe’s hero (the first time he appeared in English) may be based on a real character practising magical arts in early fifteenth-century Cracow in Poland. Marlowe transferred the scene to Wittenberg with its associations with Martin Luther, who sparked the Reformation in 1517. For this reason, the German states were seen as the centre of dissent and it was precisely this anarchic rejection of God that Marlowe wanted to discuss in Dr Faustus. Faustus, like Marlowe, is a scholar. He uses Latin tags as part of everyday speech and his natural bent is away from the traditional religious philosophy of the universities towards science, medicine and alchemy. Faustus’s character is flawed and greedy. He wants riches, he wants power and he sees magic as the way to get them – ‘A sound magician is a demi-god.’ And he denounces religion – ‘Divinity is basest of the three/Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile.’ It was this hatred of all that is holy that actually conjures up Mephistophilis, but it was the heretical Latin incantations that probably frightened Marlowe’s audiences and perhaps some of his actors. Ignei, aerii, aquatici, terreni spiritus, salvete! (Hail, spiritis of fire, air, water and earth!) In conjuring up the four humours, Marlowe is merely referring to the physical world of his day, in that it was believed that these four, together with their bodily fluid counterparts of bile, phlegm and melancholy, shaped a man’s personality and even predicted the length of his life.

  ‘Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha’ chants Faustus (‘Beelzebub, eternal king of the inferno’) and at his appearance, audiences quaked. Unlike Barabas, however, Faustus is not a double-dyed villain, but is apprehensive and torn between good and evil. Only with reluctance does he made his 24-year pact, signing with his blood. Such a document supposedly exists – the document signed by the priest Urbain Grandier at Loudon in 1632. Like most other accusations against Grandier, this is clearly a forgery.

  The powers that Faustus receives from Mephistophilis are typical of those given to witches – he can change the weather and his own shape and, the alchemist’s dream, he can conjure gold. He longs for learning – of astronomy and herbalism in particular. ‘The only sin,’ Marlowe famously wrote, ‘is ignorance.’ The anti-religious theme is strong once again – ‘Now, friars take heed/Lest Faustus make your shaven crowns to bleed.’ And when the invisible Faustus makes mischief like a poltergeist, stealing food, priests are sent to exorcise him: ‘How now? Must every bit be spiced with a cross? In the list of ‘miracles’ that Faustus makes happen – he is viciously attacked by Benvolio and Frederick, yet survives; his horse turns to straw; his amputated leg grows back – is Marlowe lampooning, as he was to do on many occasions, the sleight of hand of the prophet Moses?

  Faustus’s end is telling. His twenty-four years up, hated by almost everybody, he conjures up Helen of Troy as a last gasp of his power. An old man, who may perhaps be synonymous with Marlowe’s erstwhile friend Robert Greene (certainly old before his time) implores Faustus to repent – ‘Oh gentle Faustus, leave this damned art,/This magic that will charm thy soul to hell...’. Faustus is threatened by Mephistophilis in a strongly prophetic echo of Marlowe’s visit from the Privy Council in May 1593 – ‘Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul/For disobedience to my sovereign Lord.’ ‘Sweet Helen,’ Faustus begs, having been allowed to conjure up her sprit for one last time, ‘make me immortal with a kiss.’ In the end, three devils come for the soul of Faustus and, screaming in agony, he is carried off to Hell:

  My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.

  Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.

  Ugly hell, gape not; come not, Lucifer!

  I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!

  Finally the chorus arrives to speak the lines carved in stone in St Nicholas Church, Deptford:

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

  And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough

  That sometime grew within this learned man.

  The witch fever began in Essex when Marlowe was two. In Chelmsford, Elizabeth Francis and Agnes and Joan Waterhouse were accused of bewitching a child. Their confessions contain all the classic components of later witch trials which can be interpreted as natural incidents hitched to the Devil’s star.

  Essex was the focus of witch trials for the next eighty years, with mass executions in 1579 and again ten years later, when Marlowe was in London and something of a celebrity. By this time, the essence of English witchcraft was changing rapidly thanks to the European influences crossing the Channel. The bible of the witch hunters – Malleus Maleficarum – had been in existence since about 1486 and ran to fourteen editions between 1487 and 1520 and sixteen more up to 1669. Most of them emanated from presses in Germany, Italy and France. As the twentieth-century occultist Montague Summers wrote

  The Malleus lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature. In fine, it is not too much to say that the Malleus Maleficarum is among the most important, wisest and weightiest books in the world.

  It is also one of the most pernicious, chauvinistic and dangerous ever written, because, as Summers contends, it was accepted as fact.

  Witch hunting had begun in northern Italy and Germany, the home of Dr Faustus, in the late fifteenth century, spurred on by the Malleus and the papacy. Later, in the panic that ensued when the Catholic Church was under attack during the Reformation, this supposed mass movement to Devil worship took hold, exacerbated by the novelty of Renaissance science and the recurrence of serious economic depression, in which crops failed and animals died in unusual numbers.

  The reason that the 1560s and 1590s should see concentrations of witch activity in England is, according to one theorist, the result of a government wishing to show its authority over the State. In the 1560s, Elizabeth’s government was new. It, and especially its religious settlement, had to impose itself firmly and quickly on a people bewildered by the speed of religious change and counter-change. In the 1590s, the same government used the same tactics to disguise its tottering nature. England was still at war with Spain; the Queen was old and heirless; rampant Puritanism which produced James VI’s Daemonologie was replacing the rampant Catholicism that had produced Malleus.

  In the super charged hysteria of the witch trials, the normal use of evidence was disregarded. Hearsay was accepted and accounts for well
over 90 per cent of convictions. Children, given no status under the law in other circumstances, were placed on the witness stand and their coloured imaginings accepted as hard fact. Alibis were useless, because it was well known that witches, with the devil’s help, could change shape and fly; the hares that James VI swore he saw bobbing about in the sea of Berwick were clear proof of this.

  By Marlowe’s day, the concept of witchcraft was actually two separate ideas merged by the existing law into one. To that notoriously elusive character, the average man in the street, a black witch was one who carried out ‘maleficium’, either for money or the hell of it, which usually involved crop failure, sudden deaths of animals or occasionally children – in other words, incidents and events that were actually part of everyday life. To the scholar, however, and that included all churchmen, magistrates, judges and legislators – in effect, the important men who made the decisions – witchcraft was Devil worship, with pacts with Satan written in blood, the services of familiars and rampant sex at sabbats.

  Christopher Marlowe has no direct link with witchcraft, but in the public mind, and the mind of the government by the 1590s, heresy and devil worship were one and the same. And Christopher Marlowe was a member of the School of Night.

  When Marlowe was five years old, the pamphleteer Nicholas Allen attacked the prevalent obsession with almanacs. In The Astronomer’s Grave Allen compared three sets of predictions to expose the whole charlatanry, as he saw it, of prophecy. Like Reginald Scot who wrote his eminently sensible and modern Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, Allen was sadly out of joint with the times. The mathematician Robert Recorde wrote, ‘No dearth and penury, no death and mortality, but God by the signs of heaven did premonish men thereof.’ This was the scholar’s answer, the educated man’s belief. Just as the shoemaker John Marlowe may have consulted the stars in February 1564 at the birth of his first son, so courtiers, aristocracy, the Privy Council, even the Queen herself, made no crucial decision without such consultation. Almanacs came in three varieties: there was the Almanac proper, listing astronomical events, eclipses, conjunctions and so on; the Kalendar, which listed days, months and church festivals; and the Prognostication, which gave a prediction of the coming year’s events. These were hugely popular; Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic believes there were over six hundred different Almanacs available in England by the end of the sixteenth century. Their popularity is explained by the craze for astrology which was sweeping Europe.

  The Earl of Leicester was particularly fascinated by the subject and through him, the Queen. Richard Forster and Thomas Allen both offered Dudley their astrological expertise. Burghley wrote notes on it and the Earl of Essex owned treatises on it. Sir Christopher Hatton, the Lord Chancellor, owned an astrological textbook and Marlowe’s friend and later bitter enemy, Robert Greene, dedicated his Planetomachia to Leicester in 1585.

  King of the astrologers, however, in the 1560s and ‘70s was John Dee, and his work and the attitudes to it are illustrative of the body of charges building against Marlowe in the early 1590s. Born in London in July 1527, Dee attended St John’s, Cambridge and travelled widely in Eastern Europe, especially that traditionally occult country, Bohemia. Here he experimented in spiritualism, crystal-gazing and astrology, in fact with the whole pseudo-science called, in his day, alchemy. Back in England, Dee was consulted by Leicester over the most propitious date for the Queen’s coronation. She consulted him again over the appearance of the comet of 1577; his advice was that she should not lok at it, as it was an omen. On the practical side, all that remains of Dee’s work is the Gregorian calendar, not actually adopted until 1751, which he presented to the Queen nearly two centuries earlier. It is the negative side, however, that is remembered. In the 1580s, Dee was touring Europe with an unscrupulous assistant called Edward Kelly. Accused, among other things, of necromancy and attempting to raise the devil, the pair were kicked out of no less than four countries. During his absence, while a desperate Burghley tried to secure the man’s aid for defence against the Armada, a furious mob destroyed Dee’s house at Mortlake, burning his books and smashing his chemical apparatus.

  Dee was a magus, a master magician and sorcerer who was believed by many, high and low, to have genuine powers. Men like him spread wonder and terror among their peers. It took someone as brave and level-headed as the playwright Ben Jonson to write in the Alchemist in 1610:

  Sir, I’ll believe that alchemy is a pretty kind of game

  Somewhat like tricks o’ the cards, to cheat a man

  With charming ... What else are all your terms

  Whereon no one o’ your writers ‘grees with other?

  Less well-associated than Dee, but no less a good example of a magus was Simon Forman, from Quidhampton in Wiltshire. Twelve years older than Marlowe, Forman received a basic education in Salisbury before claiming, in 1579, that he had acquired miraculous powers. These landed him with a jail sentence of fourteen months but after his release he set up as a doctor in London. There was a College of Physicians by this time and it did its best to keep Forman out of what was actually a monopolistic guild. Almost the whole of his first year in London, 1583, was spent in prison, for he lacked a physician’s licence and continued to pour scorn on the current practice of blood-letting and urine examination – ‘paltry piss’ he called it. Modern scientists of course would applaud Forman – blood-letting achieved nothing but loss of blood, based as it was on the spurious premise of the four humours. And even examination of urine was pointless unless it led, which it did not in Forman’s day, to correct diagnoses based on chemical and microbiological analysis.

  The range of Forman’s activities, as much as John Dee’s, illustrates the fact that no line was drawn between science and magic, and that between wisdom and charlatanry was an eminently fine one. Bishops, merchants and sea captains visited him to divine the future. Lady Hawkins, wife of the explorer and Armada hero, sought out Forman in March 1595 to learn the fate of her husband. That was the adventurer’s last voyage – neither he, nor his cousin, Francis Drake, returned. Forman was a finder of stolen goods as well as missing persons and seems to have acted in this context as a sort of early private detective. Quack, scoundrel, womaniser and possibly poisoner (he provided Lady Frances Howard with the mixture with which she killed Thomas Overbury in 1601), Forman’s reputation as a practitioner of the Black Arts was summed up, in a contemporary ballad – ‘Forman was that fiend in human shape,/That by his art did act the devil’s ape.’ The fact that Forman stayed in London during the plague year of 1592-3 when 15,000 people died and many members of the College of Physicians made off for the safety of the countryside was conveniently overlooked by his detractors; this was not the behaviour of the devil.

  A devil of a different kind was Walter Ralegh, and his links with Christopher Marlowe explain a great deal about the death in Deptford. The most universal of Renaissance Englishmen; courtier, statesman, explorer, he was also a fine poet, answering Marlowe line by line and producing some of the most effective literature of the era. In The Conclusion, he wrote:

  Even such is Time, that takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys and all we have,

  And pays us but with age and dust;

  Who in the dark and silent grave,

  When we have wandered all our ways,

  Shuts up the story of our days:

  And from which earth, and grave, and dust,

  The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

  Ralegh, (like Marlowe, there are many spellings of the man’s name) was born in 1552 at Hayes Barton, near Sidmouth in Devon. His half-brother and fellow explorer was Humphrey Gilbert, who would drown during his return from America in 1585. Ever a man to put action before words, Ralegh left Oriel College, Oxford to fight for the Huguenots in France, at Jarnac and Moncontour, but his greatest love was the sea. In 1578 and again in 1583 he was involved in his half-brother’s expeditions to Newfoundland and Virginia. In 1580, he showed the cruel side of his natu
re by putting down the rising of the Desmonds in Ireland. The revolt by James Fitzgerald in the previous year was merely one of several bloody incidents there in Elizabeth’s reign. When an army of 2000 Irishmen assembled under the papal banner, they were defeated in Connaught and a systematic slaughter was carried out. Those who had joined Fitzgerald in the Pale (the ‘civilized’ strip of Protestant Ireland) had their property confiscated and were hanged, drawn and quartered, the traditional end for traitors.

  The storybook meeting of Ralegh and the Queen, when the unknown young soldier fresh from the Irish wars threw his cloak down over a ‘plashy place’, as Fuller described it in 1662, is almost certainly apocryphal. More likely, he attached himself in an age of patronage to Leicester, as had John Dee, which, in the words of the contemporary chronicler Naunton, ‘would have done him no harm’. And, in any case, he was the nephew of Kat Ashley, the maidservant and close confidante of Elizabeth when she was still a princess.

  Ralegh had the same dark good looks as Leicester and the Queen’s other favourite, Christopher Hatton, and he soon became ‘the darling of the English Cleopatra’/ He was made Captain of the Guard and, like Hatton, was showered with lands and preferments. He had the ‘farm of wines’, a monopoly whereby all vintners had to pay him for the privilege of importing and by the year that Marlowe joined Walsingham’s secret service, he was Lord Warden of the Stanneries and Vice-Admiral of Devon and Cornwall. His sponsorship of Gilbert’s expedition to Virginia and the doomed settlement of Roanoke led to his name being linked indelibly with the introduction of both tobacco and potatoes into England.