by David Riggs
The reformers overestimated the capacity of words to impose uniform meanings on the impressionable minds of young readers. Contemporaries frequently observed that the young were actually more prone to heresy than their elders were. Although the English Catechism and prayers were meant to instil belief, these foundational texts could also serve as objects of unbelief. Children who read the opening words of the Creed (‘I believe’) with the ‘annexation of understanding’, as the king put it, had the choice of denying what they were meant to affirm. The ones who understood what they were saying could readily see that Christ’s commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ did not entail submission to the king and his ministers or abject deference to all one’s social betters; nor for that matter did any of the Ten Commandments.
Unbelievers fastened on the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost for two related reasons. To begin with, the Trinity has no explicit basis in the Scriptures, as the first generation of Bible readers soon discovered. Moreover, the Trinity greatly expanded God’s power over laymen, who had not previously been required to subject themselves to Father, Son and Holy Ghost in words that they could understand. By rejecting the Holy Ghost, unbelievers disabled the supernatural agent who gave grace to the saved and withheld it from the damned. By denying that Christ rose from the dead, they discarded the vision of eternal doom inscribed in the Creed, where the Son ‘ascended into heaven … From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’
The popular theologian Henry Bullinger accused the new unbelievers of mendacity. ‘But maliciously they lie,’ he complained, ‘dissembling that they know not that, which certainly they know. For who knoweth not that Christ … was raised again from the dead?’ When Bullinger says that the nay-sayers ‘know’ Christ was raised from the dead, he means that they have read this in the Creed, and can be held accountable for what they have read. ‘For it is only when everyone can read,’ to borrow the words of a modern anthropologist, ‘that Authority can decree that “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.’ But knowing a text also involves the capacity to interrogate and refute it.
The Tudor programme of popular religious instruction created the agnostic reaction that it was meant to pre-empt. During the mid-1540s Sir John Cheke coined the word ‘Atheists’ to describe people who do not ‘care whether there be a God or no, or whether … he will recompense good Men with good things, and bad Men with what is Evil.’ In 1549 Bishop Latimer notified the young King Edward VI ‘that there be great many in England that say there is no soul, that think it is not eternal … that think there is neither heaven nor hell.’ The earliest English accounts of anti-Trinitarian doctrines, The Fall of the Late Arian (1549) and The Image of God (1550), belong to the same historic moment. Archbishop Cranmer drafted the first statute that distinguishes atheism from the older crime of heresy in 1553.
Early modern unbelievers usually did not dispute the existence of God; they denied God’s capacity to intervene in their lives via the Son and the Holy Ghost. The first wave of unbelievers rejected a fearsome God who used the threat of punishment to discipline unruly subjects. More than a century later, Unitarians preserved the idea of a benevolent God in a universe from which his menacing biblical forebear had largely been dislodged. The former was an act of resistance; the latter, of accommodation. Within the world of post-Reformation Christianity, belief in God was inextricably linked to the fear of God. A deity who could not enforce his commandments – a God without sanctions – might as well not exist. Hence, anyone who rejected the immortality of the soul, the existence of heaven and hell (especially the latter) and the operations of Providence qualified as an atheist. The fear of God was the bedrock of moral order in Marlowe’s England. His contemporaries assumed that anyone who did not dread the hand of divine correction would sin with reckless abandon.
The common synonyms for the new coinage were ‘epicure’ and ‘libertine’. Just as atheism literally means ‘without God’, these words implied a condition of freedom (however delusory) from the discipline of divine law. During Marlowe’s lifetime, atheism, a category unknown to the pre-Reformation world, became the ‘sin of sins’. Shortly after John Marlowe’s arrival in Canterbury, the queen’s tutor Sir Roger Ascham remarked that the word ‘atheist … is no more unknown now to plain Englishmen, than the person was unknown sometime in England’. Another humanist observed that ‘men are nowadays here in England glutted as it were with God’s word, and therefore almost ready to vomit up again that which they have received’: some were ‘turning to curious arts … some Epicures, some Atheists’. As the state church changed back and forth between Protestant and Catholic regimes, the dubious assertion that God upheld princely rule had the unintended consequence of compromising divine authority. In 1572, while the eight-year-old Christopher was conning his ABC and Catechism, George Carleton informed the Queen’s Secretary Sir William Cecil that ‘The realm is divided into three parties, the Papists, the Atheists and the Protestants.’
* * *
The city streets gave the shoemaker’s son his informal education in religion and politics. A resting point between London and Dover, Canterbury attracted a steady stream of diplomats, soldiers, merchants and messengers going to and from France. As Marlowe entered adolescence, the outbreak of religious warfare in northern Europe drove a growing population of Protestant refugees into the city. Many of the migrants brought bloodcurdling tales of persecution and atrocity. The story that exerted the strongest influence on Marlowe’s life and work was the massacre at Paris.
Early in the morning of Sunday 24 August 1572, a band of assassins led by the Catholic Duke of Guise murdered Admiral Coligny, the leader of the French Protestants, in Paris. Over the course of that St Bartholomew’s Day, the Guise and his accomplices liquidated the Huguenot leadership, while a bloodthirsty Parisian mob set out to exterminate Protestant citizens. They slaughtered three thousand of them during the last week of August. The murderers locked the city gates, but the raft of corpses floating down the Seine soon bore witness to the rampage at Paris. With the encouragement of the Catholic King Charles IX, the carnage spread to a dozen other French cities, where local massacres claimed the lives of another ten thousand Protestants over the first two weeks of September.
2.3 A butcher at work. From Hans Sachs, Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, 1568.
As refugees fled north across the Channel and up the Dover Road, they brought a new word into the English language. The French noun massacre originally referred to a slaughterhouse or butcher’s shambles. The word took on its modern meaning of mass murder in the wake of the notorious pogrom at Lyons. After the official executioner there, and then the soldiers, refused to kill Protestant citizens being held in the city jail, Catholic authorities turned the job over to the butchers:
Those fellows being let into the prisons, went to it with chopping knives and butcher’s axes. Such as they found prostrate at their feet, piteously holding up their hands to heaven crying upon the mercy of God and men, they did for sport cut off their fingers and the top of their hands.
The eight-year-old Christopher Marlowe, living on the edge of the town shambles, could readily grasp the sense of this metaphor. Armed men butchered their prey in a killing field; the carnage reduced human beings to the status of livestock; blood and body parts littered the streets.
The Duke of Guise sent Admiral Coligny’s severed head to Pope Gregory XIII, who was delighted to have it. The Pope and King Philip II of Spain both celebrated the massacre with a solemn Te Deum mass. On the other side of the Channel, English Protestants foresaw that they too would be slaughtered like animals under Catholic rule. The massacre bore out the widespread belief that Catholics and Protestants could never live in peace with one another. Instead, the blood of the martyrs summoned God’s elect to mortal combat with the papal Antichrist. Christians and anti-Christians had joined in a fight to the finish. The struggle continued throughout Marlowe’s life, with England always on the defensive.
/> Marlowe encountered this scenario at an early age, and it stayed with him. In three of his early plays for the public stage, 1 and 2 Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta, he incorporates a massacre into the final act. These episodes convey the harrowing sensation of living on the verge of a holocaust, at the edge of the killing fields. When the adult Marlowe imagines closure, he thinks of dismemberment, drowning and mass destruction. The Massacre at Paris, the last of Marlowe’s plays to be performed before his death, warned English audiences that militant French Catholics, the Pope and the King of Spain remained committed to a policy of brute extermination.
2.4 A butcher’s shambles. From Hugh Alley, ‘A Caveat for the City of London’, 1598.
At the end of the following summer, Queen Elizabeth visited Canterbury while on progress through the county of Kent. The queen used these state processions to put her majesty on display before her subjects. She came to Canterbury attended by her royal entourage, including her principal adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and her favourite Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and other members of her Privy Council, who brought their own servants and retainers as well. While Elizabeth rode in triumph through Canterbury on Sunday 3 September, Archbishop Parker waited to welcome Her Majesty at the cathedral:
Which I did, with the Bishops of Lincoln and Rochester, and my Suffragan, at the West door: where, after the Grammarian had made his Oration to her upon her horseback, she alighted. We then kneeled down and said the Psalm Deus misereatur in English …
May the Lord have mercy! The queen entered the cathedral ‘going under a canopy, born by four of her Temporal Knights, to her traverse placed by the communion board’. She held court for the next two weeks in the ancient palace of St Augustine, which her father had seized for his personal use upon the dissolution of the monastery. Archbishop Parker celebrated the queen’s fortieth birthday on 7 September with a magnificent feast at his own palace. The common people of Canterbury were invited to watch, at a respectful distance, from the hall.
Wherever the nine-year-old Christopher was on that splendid occasion, the pageantry of the queen’s two-week stay in Canterbury surely caught his attention. Elizabeth conceived of her monarchy as a dramatic spectacle. She told a deputation from Parliament that ‘We Princes are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed.’ The queen had a genius for incorporating the rejected symbols of the Catholic faith into her own self-image. Trading on the discarded cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Elizabeth would fashion herself into the secular counterpart of the virgin queen. Her remarkable talent for self-deification was on full view during her first visit to the ancient church capital. It was Elizabeth to whom the bishops cried ‘May the Lord have mercy’; Elizabeth who entered the cathedral under the canopy that had formerly sheltered the blessed sacrament; Elizabeth who held court in St Augustine’s Palace, which had been refurbished at Parker’s expense.
Marlowe shared the queen’s fascination with theatrical constructions of sovereignty. His early masterpiece Tamburlaine the Great considers monarchical self-fashioning from the standpoint of a young playwright at the outset of a stunning career. If sovereigns express themselves in dramatic performances, then dramatists can create kings, and players can perform them to the life. Tamburlaine the Great, the son of a peasant, hears the call to greatness in a moment of pure theatre: ‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?… Is it not passing brave to be a king, / And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ (II.v.50, 53–54)
* * *
After memorizing their ABC and Catechism tradesmen’s sons left school around the age of eight. Marlowe, however, went on to grammar school, where he began the study of Latin. Since Christopher did not win his scholarship at the King’s School until the winter of 1578–79, the boy’s whereabouts for the intervening six years are a minor puzzle. He could have entered the lower forms of the King’s School as a Commoner, that is, a fee-paying pupil; but one wonders how his indigent father could have borne this expense for so many years.
When Marlowe was five years old, Archbishop Parker organized a free grammar school for twenty-five pupils adjacent to Eastbridge Hospital, where Canterbury pilgrims had lodged before the Reformation. The school covered four of the six years that went into a grammar-school education. Unlike their counterparts at the King’s School, the masters at Eastbridge taught singing. Since candidates for the Parker scholarship that sent Marlowe to Cambridge had to read music at sight, Christopher doubtless acquired this facility in the schoolhouse across the street from Eastbridge Hospital.
Wherever he went, Marlowe encountered the same two entry-level texts: William Lyly’s Short Introduction of Grammar and A Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. The crown assigned these books for political reasons. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I ordered teachers to use Lyly’s Short Introduction, the ‘Royal Grammar’, because they wanted to nip Roman Catholic learning in the bud. Lyly based his new grammar on Roman usage from the classical period. It prepared Marlowe and his schoolfellows to think like Ovid and Cicero rather than St Thomas Aquinas. Marlowe belonged to the first generation that received this classical education on a widespread basis.
2.5 Eye-witness portrayal of the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day by François Dubois, a Huguenot refugee who died in Geneva in 1584. The Duke of Guise can be seen brandishing Coligny’s head in the centre of the picture.
On Sundays and holidays, Nowell’s Catechism drilled in the key concepts of Calvinist theology – bondage of the will, predestination, election and reprobation. These lessons taught Marlowe what the state Church expected of its educated élite: in a word, obedience. In one format or another (English, Latin, Latin and English, Latin and Greek), Nowell’s Catechism went through a remarkable run of thirteen printings between 1570 and 1580. If a boy aspired to move ahead in the school system, there was no escaping it.
Marlowe absorbed the content of his textbooks through copying them out by hand. ‘There was no shorter way to learn much,’ explained the Spanish educator Juan Luis Vives, ‘than to write fair and swift.’ Educators mapped the pedagogical distinction between liberal and mechanical arts on to the class distinction between gentleman and artisans. School was for thinkers, the shop was for handicraftsmen. But handwriting was a manual art. Elizabethan students did not just inscribe words and sentences. They mixed their ink, plucked their quills, sharpened their penknives, slit and sharpened their quills and laboriously worked their points across the surface of the parchment so as to avoid blots and blemishes. While learning to write, Marlowe accommodated his posture to the penhold and transformed his hand into a detached instrument moving along the grooves of an exterior model. The drawn-out, compulsory routines of transcription and regurgitation dissolved the antithesis between physical and mental labour. The pupil’s hands gathered in (the literal sense of ‘apprehend’) textual matter and inscribed it in the storehouse of memory. Under interrogation, he retrieved what he had recorded there and reproduced it in oral recitation. When the sons of gentlemen bridled at this newfangled discipline (Prince Hamlet held it ‘A baseness to write fair’), they created places for the sons of peasants.
2.6 The Penhold. From John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon, A Book Containing Diverse Sorts of Hands, 1602.
Whoever he was, Marlowe’s new schoolmaster relied on the same techniques of rote memorization and repetition that Christopher had encountered in elementary school; but the sheer quantity of the material that now confronted him was of a different magnitude. Users of Lyly’s grammar had to internalize page after page of Latin verb forms and syntactical constructions with no overarching system to guide them through the maze. When the eleven-year-old student of grammar finally did begin to read literary texts, he was actively discouraged from thinking about what they meant. A standard school text of Terence’s comedies published in 1574 advises teachers never to consider the work as a whole. ‘For we do not present Terence to this end, that thence youth m
ay learn to write comedies, but rather for seeking there the true and native nature and form of Latin speech.’ Terence’s moral philosophy (to say nothing of his dramaturgy) was irrelevant. The morality that ‘should be used in our schools’, the author explained, is ‘a discipline for governing boys by teaching, admonishing, rebuking, punishing and on all occasions’.
The grammar-school curriculum encouraged the most coercive styles of teaching. Boys who balked at these mind-numbing routines were usually in for a beating. The Elizabethan schoolmaster Richard Brinsley was one of many who complained about ‘that extreme severity whereby all things are done in very many schools, and the whole government maintained only by continual and terrible whipping’. The course had less to do with learning Latin than with learning obedience, especially in the lower forms. Like wild colts, boys had to be ‘broken and bridled while they were young’. Mulcaster reckoned that the most important criterion for advancement in Elizabethan grammar schools was a generalized attitude of deference to authority that suited the needs of Renaissance princes. ‘The fittest subject for learning in a monarchy’, he wrote, is the child ‘which in his tender age shows himself obedient to school orders.’
To grasp the full impact of this regimen, consider the adolescence that Marlowe was deprived of. His peers had plenty of free time between the age of eight, when they left petty school, and their teens, when they were bound over as apprentices. Even apprentices were at leisure during the late afternoon, Sundays and holidays. Classes at the King’s School ran from six or seven in the morning until seven in the evening, six days a week, with Sundays and holidays devoted to religious instruction. The pace at the schoolhouse across the street from Eastbridge Hospital was doubtless more relaxed, particularly for boys who just wanted a smattering of Latin. Aspiring scholars like Marlowe had no choice but to put in very long hours; there was no other way to keep up with the boys who toiled in the cathedral close. Before they entered the upper forms, around the age of twelve, Gresshop’s pupils had to know Latin grammar in its entirety, ‘so that no noun or verb may be found anywhere, which they do not know how to inflect in every detail’.
