by David Riggs
No wonder masters warned their pupils to avoid ‘needless’ contacts with ‘apprentices and idle boys’. The idle boys had fun! While Marlowe conjugated irregular verbs, his old playfellows gathered at the Vernicle, where they whiled away the hours drinking ale, talking, playing at cards, dice and shove-groat, or just ‘being merry’. In the afternoon, apprentices displayed their prowess at football, skittles, archery, swordplay, hurling the sledge and wielding cudgels. Teenagers spent evenings and Sundays cruising the streets – ‘walking from place to place for pleasure’, as one apprentice put it – or drinking and gambling in alehouses. They went to cockfights on Shrove Tuesday and ran around the maypole with girls like Dear-to-God Chapman. They danced in barns, frequented fairs and wakes and amused themselves with jest books and ballads. Grammar schools made it difficult, if not impossible, for their students to enter this world of free and easy recreation. Learning Latin was the labour-intensive alternative to indigenous youth culture.
Language lessons translated literary forms into class distinctions. Educators drilled in the importance of avoiding vulgar words. Thomas Norton’s line-by-line translation of the Catechism into English fashioned subjects who were both Christians and humanists, so that ‘youth might at once with one labour learn the truth of religion and the pureness of the Latin tongue together’. Nowell’s Latin in fact emphasizes the difference between vernacular and classical formulations of the same idea. Medieval Latin incorporated the English word order; classical Latin dissolved it. Marlowe’s introductory work on prose translation emphasized style at the expense of piety. It implied that the Holy Scriptures were inferior to the work of classical Roman authors.
The humanists’ attitude towards the style of the Scriptures sheds light on another of Marlowe’s so-called blasphemies. Baines quoted Marlowe as saying ‘that all the new testament is filthily written’. The remark sounds shocking out of context, but Marlowe was merely applying the criterion of ‘pure’ speech to the text of the gospels. He had been taught to think this way since the age of ten. When Marlowe went on to say that Christ’s apostles ‘were fishermen and base fellows neither of wit nor worth’, he weighed them on the scales of humanist ideology and found them wanting. The irony of these ‘damnable’ opinions is that the apostles were supposed to be base fellows. That was why Jesus chose them for his ministry; they spread the Word to all who had ears to hear in language that anyone could understand.
* * *
Where Latin lessons made aspiring scholars obey instructions that they could scarcely understand, Nowell’s Catechism taught them the meaning of obedience in explicitly religious terms. Nowell’s God was much more authoritarian than His counterpart in the ABC and Catechism. Christopher now discovered that God made the Ten Commandments ‘not only for outward works, but also and chiefly for the affections of the heart’. Thoughts and intentions were no less culpable than behaviour. When Marlowe reached the Tenth Commandment, which directly forbids unlawful desires (‘Thou shalt not covet’), he discovered that this prohibition encompassed the most fleeting and involuntary impulses: ‘all corrupt thoughts, although our consent be not added to them, do proceed of our corrupted nature.’ In short, obedience lay beyond the capacities of sinful man. Yet God ‘accepteth none other sacrifice but obedience’.
True obedience depended on faith, the gift of God. In expounding the opening words of the Creed, ‘I believe’, Christopher learned to distinguish between the ‘true and lively faith’ of believers that have obtained pardon through Christ and the ‘general’ or ‘dead’ faith that merely ‘believeth those things to be true that are contained in the Scriptures’. True believers, the Catechism explained, ‘were predestined to this so great felicity, before the foundations of the world were laid, whereof they have a witness within them in their soul, the spirit of Christ.’ In teaching his pupils how to discover that spirit within themselves, Nowell returned to the core idea of obedience. When Christ willed his own crucifixion, he became, as Paul says, ‘obedient unto the death, even the death of the cross’. The Catechism inserted the boys into this narrative so that they could ‘more easily obey and yield to the spirit’: ‘He was crucified and we are crucified with him,’ they declared. ‘He rose from death and we also are risen with him.’
But were they? Nothing could secure forgiveness but a true and lively faith that one had already been forgiven. Even self-abasement, the sole remedy available to sinful humanity, could only produce despair ‘unless God bring comfort’. Comfort, when it came, brought a sense of ecstasy, a ‘running of the spirit’, that assured the fortunate few of their place among the elect. Nowell’s pupils were ill prepared to experience this surge of assurance. By this point, these ten-year-old boys had rehearsed over a hundred pages of esoteric Calvinist theology. Much of what they were saying must have been incomprehensible. It was Sunday. They had been at this for hours and were dying to go outside and play. When they declared that the Holy Ghost had assured them of their place among the elect, how many of them simulated a sensation that never occurred? Having been taught that many were called but few were chosen, the boys were prepared to remain unvisited by the Holy Ghost; that was part of God’s plan. Those who did not experience a running of the spirit would naturally feel dissociated from the words they were saying. That too was part of God’s plan.
Nowell assured Christopher that duplicity was perfectly acceptable: ‘Many by hypocrisy and counterfeiting of godliness do join themselves to this fellowship, which are nothing less than true members of the Church.’ The Catechism refers here to the visible Church of England rather than the invisible Church of Christ. Like every post-Apostolic institution, the visible Church was peopled by the ungodly as well as the godly. Nevertheless, ‘we count all that whole company to be the Church of God, seeing that Christ also promiseth that himself will be present with two or three that be gathered together in his name.’ In the Calvinist theology of the Catechism, only two or three of Marlowe’s schoolfellows were presumed to speak from the heart, and God alone knew who they were. The Catechism did require the others to retain a ‘general’ or ‘dead’ faith in the God who had doomed them to everlasting torment. Since the only God the reprobate could ever know was a God of wrath, they had a strong incentive not to believe in Him. But even if they took that path, the all-embracing criterion of outward submission made it easy for atheists to carry on as hypocrites within the Church of England.
Nowell’s Catechism supplied the text for a performance that enabled Marlowe to move ahead in the system, regardless of whether or not he believed what he was saying. While Christopher was committing Nowell’s Catechism to memory in 1574, no less an authority than John Whitgift, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and future Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledged that the Church was ‘full of hypocrites, papists, atheists and other wicked persons’ – that is, ‘drunkards, dissemblers, whoremongers, etc.’ Whitgift showed no misgivings about this state of affairs; it was just the way things were in the corrupt, post-apostolic Church.
Under Elizabeth I, external conformity became the master principle of church discipline. The queen took a firm Calvinist line on questions of doctrine, but imposed control over her Church through legally enforceable types of ritual observance – many of them anathema to Protestant reformers. While Elizabeth outlawed variant forms of religious practice, she maintained a tolerant stance on the question of belief. The essayist and statesman Francis Bacon applauded her compromise position: not ‘liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,’ he wrote, the queen ‘tempered her law so, as it restraineth only manifest disobedience, in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her majesty’s supreme power’.
Bacon’s fine aphorism epitomized the limited aims of conformist Church policy. Queen Elizabeth, Archbishop Parker and Lord Burghley sought outward compliance with the state church, rather than inner assent to its doctrinal content. While Bacon endorsed this ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach, he recognized that it had a
downside. In his essay ‘Of Atheism’, Bacon concludes that ‘the great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.’ The tacit acceptance of hypocrites, commonly known as ‘close’ or ‘inward’ atheists, explains why unbelievers rarely came out of the closet. Despite the widespread perception that atheists were a major public menace, hardly anyone was accused of openly attacking religion. There was biblical precedent for this compromise. ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’ (Psalms 13:1), but the fool kept his mouth shut in public. Christopher Marlowe was the great exception that proved this rule. Closet atheists were part of the social order; open atheists cried out for swift and violent retribution.
CHAPTER THREE
Speaking like a Roman
Marlowe began attending classes at the King’s School around the age of fourteen. The school took up a range of old monastic buildings in the north-western corner of the cathedral grounds. The monks who formerly lived there had distributed alms to the poor, and the area continued to be called the Almonry. Archbishop Parker converted the monks’ chapel into classrooms in 1573. The old domestic buildings housed the Master, the Second Master and the boarders who lodged with them.
The school provided scholarships for ‘fifty poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends and endowed with minds apt for learning’, in the words of its founding statutes. When the statutes were drawn up in 1541, several commissioners objected to this provision, ‘and would have none admitted but sons, or younger brethren, of gentlemen’. Before the Reformation, cathedral schools were an avenue of social mobility for poor boys. Cardinal Wolsey, who became the second richest man in England while in the service of King Henry VIII, was the son of a butcher. After the Reformation, however, the interests of the Church of England merged with those of the hierarchical nation state. The dissenting commissioners told Archbishop Cranmer that ‘it was meet [fitting] for the ploughman’s son to go to plough, and the artificer’s son to apply the trade of his parent’s vocation,’ while ‘gentleman’s children are meet to have the knowledge of government and rule in the commonwealth.’
The Archbishop conceded ‘much of your meaning herein as needful in a commonwealth’, but he also maintained that ‘poor men’s children are many times endowed with more singular gifts of nature, which are also the gifts of God … and also commonly more apt to apply their study.’ By way of conclusion, Archbishop Cranmer (himself the son of an obscure squire) predicted that ‘the poor man’s son by painstaking will for the most part be learned, when the gentleman’s son will not take the pain to get it … if the gentleman’s son be apt to learning, let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man’s child that is apt enter his room.’ Cranmer’s intuition proved correct in the early days, when many middle- and upper-class fathers remained unconvinced that mastering Lyly’s grammar would enhance their sons’ career prospects, or that Calvinist theology would stay the course in England. Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581) ruefully confirmed the archbishop’s prediction. While Mulcaster believed ‘that learning was wont to be proper to nobility’, he had to admit ‘that through their negligence it is left for a prey to the meaner sort’. Poor scholars pursued their studies with ‘pains and diligence’, while the rich, by and large, did not.
Boys could compete for scholarships at the King’s School any time between their ninth and fifteenth birthdays. Fee-paying Commoners who supplemented the Master’s income attended the school along with the Scholars. The scholarships were tenable for up to five years, but any boy who turned out to be slow-witted or ‘repugnant to learning’ was to be ‘expelled and sent elsewhere that he may not like a drone devour the honey of the bees’. The Commoners competed for the places vacated by the dropouts, so that the total number of Scholars remained at the statutory level of fifty. The statutes obliged John Gresshop, Marlowe’s headmaster, to devote a lot of his time to the business of admission, promotion and expulsion: ‘every week he ought to visit the whole flock, once, twice, or three times, and diligently test the abilities of the scholars and ascertain their progress in learning.’ Scholars who did well had three chances a year to prove that they were ready for the next form; the drones were subject to expulsion at any time; the Commoners could take up vacant scholarships at the beginning of any term.
Other headmasters supply firsthand accounts of this gruelling process. The Master, the Scholars and the Commoners were cheek by jowl in overcrowded classrooms. The Commoners competed with one another, and with the weaker Scholars, for the handful of available scholarships. One Master urged his students on by ‘provoking them, every way, day by day, to excel one another … by striving who can find most errors in each other’s exercises and the like.’ ‘You shall see them come on apace,’ another remarks, ‘and an earnest strife to be wrought amongst them.’ Small wonder that these exercises provoked ‘good wits to strife and emulation’, for the stakes ran high in this game. Mulcaster approvingly noted that the sons of farmers and artisans frequently had to leave school because their fathers could not keep paying the fees, or needed their sons at the workplace. There were too many contenders for too few places. The Master, the ‘first chooser of the finest, and the first clipper of the refuse’, had to decide among the boys who stuck it out. Mulcaster’s ‘finest’ included the poet Edmund Spenser and the playwright Thomas Kyd.
To succeed in this contest, the artisan’s son had to be physically present in the classroom, and put himself forward with dispatch, before his father’s assets ran dry. If we insert Christopher Marlowe into this scenario, he would have become a Commoner at the King’s School by the age of fourteen. When John Elmley lost his scholarship after the autumn term of 1578, Gresshop awarded it to Christopher Marlowe. He was just six weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday, the cut-off point for incoming Scholars.
3.1 Grammar school lessons.
How did John Marlowe manage to pay his son’s school fees while Christopher was a Commoner? The answer could well lie in the settlement of headmaster Gresshop’s estate two years later. John Marlowe told the probate court that he provided footwear and board for two boys who were Commoners entrusted to the Master’s care; since Gresshop had never paid for these goods and services, the court awarded John Marlowe 16s from the headmaster’s estate. The butcher William Potter’s transactions with Gresshop were similar to Marlowe’s. Potter supplied the Master with meat, and his son William won a scholarship at the King’s School; after Gresshop’s death, the butcher recovered 24s for unpaid bills from Gresshop’s estate. While Master Gresshop was alive, he had not needed to pay these bills, presumably because the goods and services helped procure places at school for the two tradesmen’s sons. Even if the shoemaker and the butcher lacked ready money, they could barter their stock-in-trade in exchange for school fees.
Although Christopher Marlowe won a scholarship, he could lose it at any time. Academic achievement did not suffice in this environment. Despite the highly competitive atmosphere, the scholar had to suppress any sense of his own superiority. ‘If he have any excellent towardness by nature,’ Mulcaster explained, ‘whereby he passeth the residue in learning, it will show itself so orderly, and with such modesty, as it shall soon appear to have no loftiness of mind, no aspiring ambition, no odious comparisons joined withal.’ The aspiring scholar had to maintain a high level of deportment. Gresshop’s pupils were required to observe ‘due decorum both with their body and their mouth’. Desiderius Erasmus’s enormously influential treatise On Good Manners for Boys provided schoolmasters with exacting criteria for assessing bodily decorum, organ by organ:
It is boorish to wipe one’s nose on one’s cap or clothing; to do so on one’s sleeve or forearm is for fishmongers, and it is not much better to wipe it with one’s hand, if you then smear the discharge on your clothing. The polite way is to catch the matter from the nose in a handkerchief, and this should be done by turning away slightly if decent p
eople are present.
The school statutes further codified the process of segregating the Scholars from their boorish contemporaries:
When leave to play is given they shall play and sport together, lest, wandering about here and there, they incur some loss of character, and wanting to do other things their minds gradually become estranged from learning. And they shall not practice any games which are not of a gentlemanly appearance and free of all lowness.
As if this were not enough, the final injunction stipulates that even ‘in play, they shall never use any language but Latin or Greek.’
In return for this heavy load of work and renunciation, Marlowe received his first taste of preferment. King’s Scholars received an annual stipend of £4; entire families got by on less than that. The Scholars dined on beef and mutton, peas, prunes and bread, and drank beer with their meals. The holiday season ushered in a period of festive recreation. On Christmas, New Year’s Day, Twelfth Night and Easter, they feasted on plum pudding. The King’s School had a tradition of Christmas plays; these merry occasions gave Marlowe his first chance to take part in a dramatic production. He prepared Dido, Queen of Carthage (1584–85?), evidently his earliest play, for a company of child actors. While he probably wrote Dido in his early twenties, the play harks back to his grammar-school days.
Dido’s lover Aeneas was the moral hero of grammar-school ideology. Dutiful Aeneas excels at obedience, subordinating all his desires to the paternal will of Jupiter, the father of the gods. Dido, Queen of Carthage – feminine, bountiful, loving and exotic – embodies everything that the hero has to give up. Aeneas wants to stay in Carthage with Dido, but Jupiter orders him to set sail for Italy. The story readily lent itself to an allegory of education: Aeneas inspires the scholar to persevere in his own quest for manly discipline. Marlowe’s Dido turns this ideology upside down. Jupiter becomes a cynical pederast; Aeneas is a hollow man and a heartless prig; Dido, the victim, bears witness to the fraudulence of Roman piety. Whenever Marlowe first conceived of it, Dido falls within the festive tradition of inversion and misrule. It affords a precious glimpse of the desires that grammar school tried to repress.
