Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  We have seen that in the sixteenth century, religion and politics (and therefore religion and control) went hand in hand. A terror of Hellfire was a convenient way for the Church, and behind it the government, to keep order and ensure a modicum of the rule of law.

  Some recklessly ignored the law, both God’s and man’s. One who did was Matthew Hamont, a ploughwright from Norfolk who was burned in 1578 for his belief that the Bible was ‘but mere foolishness, a story of men, or rather a fable’. His end was horrific. As David Starkey reminds us, the auto da fé was relatively merciful in Italy and Spain, where the day’s heat fanned the flames, but on a damp, cold Norwich morning, death could take two hours. Another who dared God out of his Heaven was Kit Marlowe.

  Not since Paul Kocher in 1946 have Baines’s nineteen charges been analysed in depth, yet they are crucial to an understanding of why Marlowe died. Kocher writes:

  For free thought was stirring in England in a vague, unorganised way during the last fifty years of the [sixteenth] century. Underneath the intonations of the orthodox writers, one can hear it rising, this matter of revolutionary dissidence....in Marlowe we can see the quintessence of it drawn together and revealed...of whom among the Elizabethans have we such another record? Not Ralegh, not the scientists, nor any of Marlowe’s fellow dramatists, nor any other literary Englishman whose works we know.

  The Baines Note is not in Marlowe’s handwriting. It is not in Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, his explosive blank verse and, no doubt, it is Baines’s shorthand composed from what he remembered of Marlowe’s conversations in the School of Night, so that the subtleties of argument of which we know Marlowe was capable are lost. We agree with Curtis Breight that Marlowe was a marked man, possibly for the last six months of his life or longer, and that he was being watched. One of the watchers was Baines.

  In the note he gave to the Privy Council towards the end of May 1593 ‘containing the opinion of one Christopher Morley Concerning his Damnable Judgement of Religion and the scorn of God’s Word’ Baines knew he was signing Marlowe’s death warrant and that he was doing so at the behest of the Council.

  That indefatigable researcher Charles Nicholl followed up Frederick Boas’s article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1949 to find an earlier Baines Note dated 13 May 1583, which at first sight casts doubts on the later one concerning Marlowe. It was unsigned and formed part of A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nicol. Remarking on the Spartan regime at Rheims, where he was then posing as a Catholic convert, Baines wrote ‘how far this devil [within him] would have driven me, who now wholly occupied my heart in hope of advancement in England’, and that he had

  an immoderate desire of more ease, wealth and...more delicacy of diet and carnal delights than this place of banishment was like to yield unto me...I most delighted in the profane writers and the worst of them such as either wrote against the truth, or had the least taste of religion...the next step of this stair is atheism and no belief at all.

  It was ‘the highway to heresy, infidelity and atheism, as to my great danger I have experience in mine own case.’ This was precisely the point. Baines’s own case in 1583 was that he had been caught as a double agent. Lucky to escape with his life from Dr Allen’s English college, this confession was no doubt the deal which he struck for his freedom. The fact that he was on ‘the highway’ to Marlowe’s ideological position by 1593 does not detract from the veracity of the Note of that year. Baines was either actually an atheist ten years earlier (and his being given the post of Rector of Waltham, Lincolnshire in no way precludes this!). Or he was simply saying precisely what Allen told him to say to blacken his own – and, by association, all Protestants’ – reputation.

  Baines’s first charge reads – ‘That the Indians and many Authors of antiquity have assuredly written above 16 thousand years agone whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand yeares.’ Marlowe’s knowledge of American Indians almost certainly came from Thomas Hariot’s expedition to Virginia. Magnificent drawings of these tribesmen were produced by John White, the expedition’s captain. These watercolour illustrations, which provide our earliest view of native Americans, appeared in a folio engraved by Theodor de Bruy in 1590 and took the publishing world by storm. It is possible that the originals hung in Thomas Walsingham’s manor of Scadbury, Chislehurst, where Marlowe spent his last days. The Indians whom White and Hariot met were part of the Powhatan confederacy of tribes of the Algonkian people. They were not the most civilized or powerful of native Americans, but they showed white explorers how to plant corn (maize), bake clams, eat pumpkin and squash and, of course, how to smoke tobacco. White’s drawings showed feasts of succotash, a stew of fish, corn and beans, and ceremonies in which fires blazed and gourd rattles were shaken.

  We cannot know how much of the Algonkian culture could be communicated to Hariot, but it may be that their creation myths were among the stories the Powhatan told and they did not feature Adam or Eve or a garden called Eden or a Devil disguised as a serpent. Marlowe’s date-structures are hopelessly wrong, a reminder that the Elizabethans were unable to empathise accurately with earlier cultures – hence Shakespeare’s anachronisms, the famous clocks in Caesar’s Rome or Cleopatra playing billiards with her maids. Today, despite constant shifts in date structures, most experts agree that homo erectus, the direct ancestor of modern man, dates from about 600,000 years ago. Interestingly, it is a measure of how indoctrinated Marlowe had been by the Church’s teaching that he claims that Adam is proved to have lived within 6,000 years.

  We do not know which ‘authors of antiquity’ Marlowe, through Baines, is talking about. In his university course at Cambridge, he was studying Plato and Aristotle, from a mere 3,000 years before his time. There are in fact no recorded works from over 16,000 years ago, the simple (and as yet untranslatable) cuneiform of the Sumerians being stamped on clay tablets some 10,000 years ago, more recently than Marlowe’s guess. No doubt, had Marlowe been given the benefit of the Star Chamber to defend himself rather than a confined space in ‘a little room’, his inquisitors would have challenged these figures with contempt. The point at issue is that Marlowe is attacking the story of Genesis, the story of the Creation. The Bible is a house of cards – remove one and the whole edifice collapses.

  Baines moves on – ‘He [Marlowe] affirmeth that Moyses was but a Jugler and that one Heriots being Sir W. Ralegh’s man can do more than he’. We should not be surprised at the formality of ‘one Heriots’ – it was a conventional mode of address at the time (and remember, this is Baines writing, who probably knew Hariot slightly and not Marlowe, who knew him well). The Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, dealing with the deliverance of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, portrays Moses as a hero and to modern Jews he is still a patriarch of formidable reputation. Moses did God’s bidding by forcing the pharaoh (Rameses II) to release the Israelites. This was done by a series of miracles. For example in Exodus 4:2-3, ‘And the Lord said unto him [Moses], “What is that in thine hand?” And he said, “A rod.” And he said, “Cast it on the ground.” And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.’ A whole series of weird experiences follow in which God shows Moses how he can argue effectively with pharaoh, using a multiplicity of signs from God which will culminate in the plagues of Egypt, the deaths of the first born and the parting of the Red Sea.

  Interestingly, Marlowe was not the only ‘atheist’ to challenge Moses’ place as a quack and a charlatan. A common belief in the sixteenth century was that Adam’s God-given knowledge of all things was passed down through certain ‘magicians’ including Moses. Because the man had been brought up by the Egyptians, following on from the bullrushes story on the banks of the Nile, he was also ‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’. Moses was a stock character in many of the mystery plays performed all over the country during the Middle Ages. Magicians of Marlowe’s day, from the highly regarded John Dee downwards, claimed to hav
e inherited their special powers from men like Moses and some of them tried to reconstruct magic apparatus, for instance Moses’ famous rod.

  Whereas Walter Ralegh is on record as saying ‘the art of magic is the art of worshipping God’, Marlowe clearly disagreed. It is this that makes him unusual in the School of Night; more than perhaps any of its members, he was prepared to take logic to its extremes – the Bible was a work of fiction, like any other. We do not know what Marlowe had seen his friend Hariot do in terms of ‘juggling’ but science, with its fascinating potions and powders, was in its infancy. All the plagues of Egypt can be explained by rational, natural phenomena.

  To cite Baines again

  That Moyses made the Jews to travel x1 [40] yeares in the wilderness (which Journey might have bin Done in less than one yeare) ere they Came to the promised land to thintent that those who were privy to most of his subtelties might perish and so an everlasting superstition Remain in the hartes of the people.

  The Bible makes it clear that Moses was never to see the promised land and the Books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy explain the problems he and his brother Aaron had in keeping order among the people of Israel. Starving, thirsty and with the Egyptians on their tail, they panicked, erecting images of golden calves to worship while Moses was away, as he was often, communing with God on the nearest high ground. It was an age of maps. Marlow might well have known that the distance from the Nile to Gilead was not all that great (about a thousand miles as the crow flies) and that the journey would indeed have taken far less than a year. The accusation is petty and has caused most commentators to contend that this is unworthy of Marlowe. What it does once again, however, is to challenge the Bible’s orthodoxy – if the length of the journey is wrong, what else is? Doubly, Marlowe was once again criticising Moses the lawgiver and Moses held a special place, not just among Jews (whose sensibilities all Gentiles ignored in the sixteenth century) but among Christians too. After Moses’ death, says Deuteronomy 34:10 ‘...there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord new face to face,’ and of all the prophets of the Old Testament, Moses was closest in stature to Christ himself. In the New Testament, John records Jesus saying to his persecutors, ‘For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me.’

  Baines goes on, ‘That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe.’ The history of the Christian Church up to 1593 proves Marlowe right. Its huge power, its vast lands and resources, be they Catholic or Protestant, were kept in part because of men’s terror of Hell and the damage done to their souls. The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch from the fifteenth century with their hideous, vicious creatures, and the dreadful description of Purgatory from John Milton in the seventeenth, leave no doubt that to most people, Hell was a real place. It was daubed all over the walls of churches until the Reformation and it featured as a terrible exit on the stage of medieval miracle plays. To avoid that, and to gain the kingdom of Heaven, a man would go far. He would buy his place on God’s right hand with lavish endowments and grants of land to the Church.

  It may be hypocritical of Marlowe to bite the hand that fed him – after all, it was the scholarship of Archbishop Parker that had given him the education necessary to make these accusations in the first place. But the Corpus Christi portrait – if it is Marlowe – says it all; that which feeds me destroys me. Marlowe’s comment is not merely anti-clerical, however. Martin Luther with his famous ninety-five theses nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral (a story now taken to be apocryphal) in 1517 had launched a far more effective attack; but that was on aspects of Catholic corruption (specifically the sale of indulgences, pardons for sins not yet committed) and not on religion itself.

  ‘That it was an easy matter,’ wrote Baines, ‘for Moyses being brought up in all the artes of the Egiptains to abuse the Jews being a rude and grosse people.’ The fact that Baines returns to Moses having gone off at other tangents makes it obvious that he is remembering scattered references at random. There is nothing here of an orchestrated whole, of a man skilled in the oral tradition of debate learned at Cambridge. Curtis Breight imagines Baines scribbling down notes as Marlowe talked, but if he did, the end result is a mess. This point, accusing Moses of literally misleading the Jews should clearly be tacked on to the other jibes against the prophet we have met above. No one in sixteenth century England would have been offended by reference to Jews as ‘rude and gross’; in many parts of the country, especially rural areas (where there were no Jews at all) it was still believed that they ate babies.

  ‘That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’ was however among the most offensive things Baines has to report. It is the first of several highly personal attacks on the Son of God by a man who ironically bore his name – Christopher: the carrier of Christ. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and recent interpretations of the New Testament have led us to re-evaluate who Jesus was. The complexity of Hebrew marriage rites and in particular when children could be conceived and born, was unknown to Elizabethan scholars, trained to believe every word of the Bible and not to ask, as the School of Night did, awkward questions. So the Bible’s version of Jesus’ birth, with the Angel Gabriel visiting Mary to bring her the good news depends on the two marriages that Mary and Joseph underwent as part of the Hebrew tradition. Baines/Marlowe’s version reads:

  That the Angell Gabriell was Baud to the holy ghost, because he brought the salutation to Mary.

  That he [Jesus] was the sonne of a Carpenter, and that if the Jewes among whome he was born did Crucify him theie best knew him and whence he Came,

  read Baines’s seventh point and the eighth follows:

  That Christ deserved better to Dy than Barrabas and that the jewes made a good Choice, though Barabbas were both a thief and a murtherer.

  Is this why Marlowe used the name Barabas in The Jew of Malta? Marlowe is missing the essential point. In God’s scheme of things, Barabas had to be chosen and Christ had to die, otherwise the all-important resurrection could not take place. Eight of Baines’s nineteen charges against Marlowe refer to Christ. The eleventh reads:

  That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly.

  The woman of Samaria was Mary Magdalene, who many authorities have assumed was a prostitute. Marlowe lumps her sister, Martha, in with her and says Christ had sex with them both. An inference like this would have been shocking in Marlowe’s day, but it became appreciably worse with Baines’s twelfth charge:

  That St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to C[hrist] and leaned alwaies on his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.

  So, to Marlowe, Christ was bisexual. However liberal we may be today in giving Jesus human frailties, this one is difficult to accept. There was, of course, not a shred of evidence for it in the Bible itself and no other source for Christ’s life had then been found. Was this Marlowe in his cups? The over-reacher, the maverick who liked to shock? Was he kicking around these outrageous ideas to impress his friends? If they are Marlowe’s ideas and if they are puerile, he was only in his twenties and his plays shows that he enjoyed putting contentious issues before people to see how they would react, rather as the homosexual playwright Joe Orton would, four hundred years later.

  Curtis Breight believes that what worried the authorities – and the reason that Baines was given the job of watching and reporting on Marlowe in the first place – is that he had Catholic leanings and may have been a double agent. Baines’s ninth charge:

  That if there be any god or any good Religion, then it is in the papistes because the service of god is performed with more Ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crownes, et. That all protestants are Hypocriticall asses.

  As a playwright and a man well versed in the theatre not to mention the early experience of performance in the choir at the King’s School, Canterbury, the ritualistic panoply would have had an instinctive appeal for Marlowe. The Anglicans
by comparison, were dowdy and low key, especially the more Puritanical of them, who saw rich vestments as a mark of vanity and therefore a sin. The fascination with ritual is echoed in the sixteenth point of the Baines Note:

  That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more Ceremoniall reverence it would have bin had in more admiration that it would have bin better administered in a Tobacco pipe.

  Again, the flippancy, again the mention of tobacco with its dissolute associations.

  Baines tells us that if Marlowe ‘were put to write a new Religion, he would undertake both a more Excellent and Admirable methode and that all the new testament is filthily written.’

  It is difficult for us to imagine today the claustrophobic straitjacket of the Bible. It was the only book most families owned and because of superstition was venerated out of all proportion to its actual content. The Old Testament was a garbled and distorted history of the Hebrews, very little of its detail provable historically today. The New Testament, ‘filthily written’ or not, was essentially a biography of one man. Why this man, translated in all sorts of ways from Galilee to England should have assumed the pre-eminence he has is one of the great mysteries of history. Buddha, Mohammed, Lenin and Che Guevara have all been canonised in the same way. And it was not until the 1960s that the Beatles, famously, could claim to be ‘more popular than Jesus’. And the pronouncement could outrage even then.

  ‘These things,’ wrote Baines in 1593,