We have mentioned Christopher Marlowe’s joke about tobacco and boys. It was inevitable, after Marlowe’s violent death, that moralisers should have considered it was no more than he deserved. Thomas Beard, for instance, Oliver Cromwell’s headmaster at Huntingdon Grammar School (the man who whipped Oliver for dreaming he was king), wrote of Marlowe in The Theatre of God’s Judgements. Beard’s book is a rich compilation of examples of the vindictiveness of the Deity, and in the chapter that gloats over the grisly ends ‘of Epicures and Atheists’:
It is so fell out that in London streets, as he purposed to stab one whom he ought a grudge unto with his dagger, the other party perceiving, so avoided the stroke that withal catching hold of his wrist, he stabbed with his own dagger into his own head, in such sort that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be wrought, he shortly after died thereof.
This was written four years after Marlowe died. The next year, in 1598, Francis Meres, who had overlapped with Marlowe as an undergraduate at Cambridge, added the salacious detail that the poet was ‘stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love’. So it became a brawl in a gay bar. Gabriel Harvey, the gossipy Cambridge don who reckoned he knew what was happening in ‘literary London’, believed that Marlowe – ‘He that not feared God, nor dreaded Devil’ – had been punished by dying of the plague.
In one of the most scintillating works of historical detective work, The Reckoning (published in 1992, revised 2002), Charles Nicholl reconstructed the murder of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford, in the summer of 1593. He even speculated whether the misinformation that had been fed to the normally close watcher of events – Harvey – had been deliberately put about by Marlowe’s seedy colleagues in the world of espionage. Nicholl’s book laid bare with devastating plausibility how close Marlowe’s murderer was to the network of spies and government informers who were directly answerable to the Cecils, to Walsingham, to Essex. He unearthed what another historian has called ‘the murky amoral world’, the ‘conspiratorial underbelly of Elizabethan politics’.15 One detail alone convinced me of the plausibility of Nicholl’s story: it was that when Ingram Frizier fatally stabbed Marlowe through the eye – an offence that would normally carry an automatic death-penalty – he did not go into hiding, but attended the inquest at Deptford on Friday, 1 June 1593. The inquest found that Frizier had killed the poet ‘in the defence and saving of his own life’. Just four weeks later, on Thursday, 28 June, the Queen issued a formal pardon: it was a remarkably quick outcome of the case by Elizabethan standards. Frizier lived on – at Eltham in Kent – married, became a church warden and died in 1627.16
What Nicholl did in his 1992 book, and which had never been done before in anything approaching his level of detail, was to follow up the identities and careers of the three men who were with Marlowe in the Widow Bull’s house at Deptford Strand on the day Marlowe met his end. For a start, Eleanor Bull herself. She was not some blowsy old publican. She was born Eleanor Whitney of a landed family in Herefordshire, known to Queen Elizabeth’s confidante Blanche Parry, who made a number of bequests to the Whitneys. Her husband, Richard Bull, was a sub-bailiff at Deptford and he is styled a ‘gentleman’ in the parish register.17 Marlowe was not visiting a low tavern or a bawdy-house on the day he died.
Deptford was a small village near Greenwich, on the Surrey side of the Thames. It was the site of great shipyards and docks: the Royal Dock for the navy, as well as commercial docks for innumerable merchant ships, with all the attendant sheds and warehouses. In the 1590s it had become a ‘boom town’, with as many as 4,000 new residents.
Deptford was full of a wide variety of foreign visitors, as well as those fringe members of the court who could not find anywhere to live at nearby Greenwich – minor courtiers, officials, choir members of the Chapel Royal. Records tell us that a French trumpeter, Pierre Rossel, a German singer, Dente Natrige, and a Welsh chorister, Wenfayd Royce, all lodged at Deptford.18 In this polyglot, floating population it was not surprising that there were also found secret agents.
Ingram Frizier was a shady businessman: on the make, arraigned in the Exchequer court of 1591, but by 1593 described as a ‘gentleman’. He was also a spy, and shared a spy-master – Thomas Walsingham – with Christopher Marlowe. Thomas was the young (Marlowe’s age) kinsman of Francis Walsingham. Skeres, one of the others present when Marlowe was killed, appears to have been a ‘fence’ for stolen property. He was part of the Essex circle and part of the military expedition to France in 1592 to assist Henri of Navarre. He was involved in the entrapment of the Babington Plot, and the Babington accomplices had met in the lodgings of Robert Poley, the fourth man in the room when Marlowe was killed. Poley had been a government agent for two decades. He went to Denmark, France, Scotland and the Netherlands. He lurked in prisons and eavesdropped on conversations. He was known as ‘the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld’. He tricked dozens of Catholics into indiscretion. Just back from the Low Countries, he was on government business that evening in Deptford.
It is not possible at this distance in time, and with three such rogues as the principal witnesses at the inquest, to reconstruct what, precisely, made Marlowe a potential object of embarrassment to the government. But knowing as we now do the background in sordid espionage, swindling and extortion in which his three Deptford companions moved, it is safe to suggest – more than to suggest, to state – that they were not gathered for a poetry-reading. Presumably (but it is a safe presumption) Poley, probably guided by Thomas Walsingham or Robert Cecil, wanted to have Marlowe’s assurance of silence, or collaboration, or perhaps he was asked to part with some letters. The men were together for eight hours at the Widow Bull’s house. Evidently, at some point, Marlowe lost his temper. Nothing unusual about that. In 1589 he was imprisoned after a sword-fight in Shoreditch, which had resulted in someone’s death. In 1592, again in Shoreditch, Marlowe had been bound over to keep the peace. A few months later he had fought a tailor named Cortine ‘with a staff and dagger’. He might well have drawn Frizier’s dagger, as he asserted, and Frizier might well have reacted in self-defence, when he stabbed Marlowe through the eye.
There is no doubt that Marlowe was employed as an anti-Catholic spy, and that some of those in English Intelligence feared that he would ‘go native’ or become ‘a practiser with them’. In the world of espionage, the double-agent becomes so accustomed to his duplicity that it is probably not even possible for himself, let alone his spy-masters on either side, to know where his loyalties lie. William Parry, hanged for treason in 1585 as a Catholic plotting against the government, maintained until his tearful end that he had been an agent provocateur working for the government.19 Marlowe was enlisted into the secret service while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. As a double-agent, his work took him to the Low Countries and it was there in January 1592, the seventh year of the war, that he was arrested for ‘coining’ or counterfeiting money. A letter about it by the governor of Flushing – Sir Robert Sidney – to Lord Burghley only came to light in 1976. The forging of Dutch shillings was revealed by Richard Baines, a spy who worked behind enemy lines for Walsingham, posing as a seminarian and keen Romanist for years. The man accused with Marlowe, John Poole, was known to hold subversive Catholic views. The Low Countries were Robert Poley’s special area of intrigue and he knew all about Marlowe’s activities in Flushing, his letter-drops, his Catholic contacts – Poley was especially interested, at this time of Marlowe’s arrest, in a cell of Catholic plotters in Brussels. Accounts were also brought to Burghley about Marlowe’s association with the spy-poet Matthew Roydon. Reading these stray bits of surviving evidence from the Public Record Office we can reconstruct Marlowe’s life of spying and his involvement with the low-life world of crime.
Richard Baines was the author of the celebrated note, surviving in two manuscripts of the Harleian Collection in the British Library, that indicts ‘Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion and scorn of God�
�s word’. This is the document that quotes Marlowe saying ‘that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’ . . . ‘that all the New Testament is filthily written’ . . . that ‘the sacrament . . . would have been much better being administered in a tobacco-pipe’. Similar charges to those against Marlowe were made against another spy, Richard Cholmeley – another hunter of ‘papists & other dangerous men’. An informer against Cholmeley came up with charges of amazing similarity to those that Baines brought against Marlowe: ‘That Jesus Christ was a bastard, St Mary a whore & the Angel Gabriel a bawd to the Holy Ghost’ and that ‘Moses was a juggler . . . for his miracles to Pharaoh to prove there was a God’ (Cholmeley). ‘That Moses was but a juggler . . . that it was an easy matter for Moses, being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians, to abuse the Jews’ (Marlowe, quoted by Baines).
In both cases, the atheism was regarded as subversive not only of religion, but of the government. The spy who denounced Cholmeley claimed that there was a gang of sixty such atheists, determined ‘after her Majesty’s decease, to make a King among themselves, & live according to their own laws’. It would easily be accomplished, thought Cholmeley, because there were ‘as many of their opinion as of any other religion’.
Cholmeley was arrested on 28 June 1593, the very day that Ingram Frizier was pardoned for killing Marlowe. No one knows what happened to Cholmeley after he was taken off to prison, but it surely can be no coincidence that his recorded blasphemies are so similar in word and sentiment to Marlowe’s. If Nicholl’s (to me highly plausible) speculations are correct, all this ‘evidence’ was contrived to discredit Christopher Marlowe and, by association, Walter Raleigh. Nicholl’s contention is that Marlowe had been working for Robert Cecil, who kept him out of prosecution for the coinage scam in Flushing, but was increasingly embarrassed by his connection with this flamboyant and outspoken troublemaker. Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, was also, like Mr Secretary Robert Cecil, embarrassed by how much the government agent Marlowe knew, and by how much could be said against the government if rumours of Marlowe’s atheism spread.
‘If an unfortunate accident were at this stage to befall Christopher Marlowe, neither his prosecutor Sir John Puckering nor his protector Sir Robert Cecil would be much displeased,’ wrote Nicholl.20 He did not produce enough evidence to convict Robert Cecil in a court of law. But the cumulative effect of The Reckoning is to see a world of corruption and intrigue and government-sponsored torture and murder, which undoubtedly did exist. Presumably, Marlowe’s growing fame as a poet and a dramatist made him even more dangerous to the government. There can be no doubt that the death of this marvellous poet before he was thirty is one of the greatest calamities in the history of literature.
25
The Occult Philosophy
MARLOWE’S DEATH STILLED the voice of a young poet of unexampled resonance. The poetry, and the plays, would presumably have continued to rival those of Shakespeare. Had he lived, the 1590s and the Jacobean age would have left behind an even more stupendous dramatic legacy. The decade saw an enormous growth in the popularity and quality of the theatre. James Burbage had created the first building of that name in the 1570s, thereby deliberately creating a Roman word for a Roman concept, probably based (Burbage was first a joiner and would have studied the rudiments of architectural theory) upon the ideas of Vitruvius, the first century bc Roman architect whose book De architectura had so deep an effect upon Palladio and the other architects of the Italian Renaissance. These ideas were not ‘random’. Their aesthetic was guided by notions about the world which to a modern mind might very likely seem bizarre, but which run through almost every aspect of Renaissance life – not merely its architecture, but also its poetry, its fashion sense, its politics. The Vitruvian theatre, for example, rested upon seven pillars, symbolising the ‘seven pillars of Wisdom’ of Solomon’s Temple.1 The shape and design of the building was conceived not simply to pack in as large an audience as possible, but actually, in a mystic-magical way, to stimulate memory. The philosopher Giulio Camillo, one of the most famous men of the Renaissance, constructed a wooden theatre in Venice that reflected the seven planets, with seven gangways or doors, and represented the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of Creation. It is inconceivable that some such theories did not influence the design of the London theatres.
Visitors to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, a charming piece of fantasy, have an idea that they are seeing a re-creation of the very stage on which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. They do not necessarily realise that what they are seeing is a bit of mystic geometry. We do not actually know in precise detail what Shakespeare’s Globe looked like. Much of what we know of Elizabethan theatre-design is based on one small sketch, made by John de Witt and copied by Arend van Buchell. The fact that he labels his sketch with classical terms – proscaenivum, ingresus, orchestra, mimorum aedes, and so on – shows that he was aware of the classical influences on the building.
Dr Johnson’s friend, Hester Thrale, was married to a rich brewer, Henry Thrale, who owned the land in Southwark that had housed the original Globe Theatre. She wrote:
For a long time, then – or I thought it such – my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by Mr Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling house. When it lay desolate in a Hack heap of rubbish, my Mother, one day, in a joke, called it the ruins of Palmyra, and after that they laid it down in a grass plot . . . But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which though hexagonal in form was round within.2
If you put a circle within a hexagon, you provide one of those spaces so beloved of the Renaissance, of an outstretched man within a square and a circle. The most famous of these survives in the notebooks of Leonardo, but we also find it as a frontispiece in a book by Dr Dee about the symbolic geometry of man’s relationship to the Cosmos. Within that circle-in-a-hexagon, the seven triangular apices would have provided the seven gangways of the auditorium.
The first Globe Theatre was built on Bankside in 1599, partly from materials salvaged from the demolished theatre. The builder was Peter Street, and so successful was he with this venture for the Lord Chamberlain’s company (for which Shakespeare wrote and acted) that he was employed by Philip Henslowe to build the Fortune Theatre in 1600. It was vast, the Globe. Its capacity might have been as great as 3,000–3,800 standing in the yard, and more than 2,000 in the three layers of covered galleries.3
There have been those who doubted whether Mrs Thrale’s ‘Palmyra’ was really the old playhouse, rather than the remains of a tenement building.4 But even if archaeology banished uncertainty, the work done by the great scholar of Renaissance thought, Frances Yates, remains invaluable, as a reminder to us of how different the Elizabethan mindset was from our own.
We have already encountered, in these pages, Dr Dee, the adept of occult philosophy, who was a pioneer of mathematics, and who cast the Queen’s horoscope. We have alluded to the baffled, insular, narrow grammarians of Oxford, who laughed to scorn the idea of a Copernican universe, with the revolving Sun as its centre, and the Earth – far from being the still centre of the universe – being on the move. When this was expounded to them by the visiting Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), George Abbott, later Archbishop of Canterbury, quipped, ‘in truth, it was his owne head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil’.5 Abbott was a deeply Calvinist, Puritan undergraduate at Balliol at the time of Bruno’s visit to the university in 1583. He disliked Bruno’s way of pronouncing Latin: ‘he had more boldly then wisely, got vp into the highest place of our best & most renowned schoole, stripping vp his sleeves like some Iugler, and telling vs much of chentrum & chriculus & circumferenchia (after the pronunciation of his Country language)’.6
The Elizabethans Page 43
