The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

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  Despite the statutory requirement that the Scholars be poor boys, Marlowe shared his school bench with children drawn from a wide spectrum of the local hierarchy. Lists of Queen’s Scholars for the years 1578–79 and 1580–81 (just after Marlowe left) survive in the cathedral archives. They give the names of seventy-eight Scholars in all; the Canterbury archivist William Urry has identified about half of them at one stage or another of their lives. Eleven of the seventy-eight were connected to the landed gentry. Thirteen were the sons or relations of local clergymen. Of the remaining fifty-four Scholars, two were the sons of yeoman farmers and two (Potter and Marlowe) of local tradesmen. The origins of the rest remain obscure; many of them doubtless were the ‘poor boys … with minds apt for learning’ designated in the founding statutes.

  Marlowe was used to the society of boys like William Potter and Leonard Sweeting, another scholarship holder. Now he found himself among the sons of prominent landowners and clerics. Matthew Parker was Archbishop Parker’s grandson. Samuel Kennet’s father had served Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I; his great-great-grandfather was among Henry V’s standard-bearers at the battle of Agincourt. The fathers of Bartholomew Beasley and Barnabas and Philemon Pownall were Protestant ministers who had fled into exile under Mary I; on their return they joined the select ranks of the Six Preachers on the cathedral foundation.

  Although Marlowe’s scholarship put him in close proximity to his social betters, his workload set him apart from the sons of the Canterbury élite. None of the eleven boys who were connected to the local gentry went on to university, nor – with one exception – did the sons of the prominent local clerics. Barnabas Pownall did not require a BA or MA to qualify for a place in the Church; his father’s reputation sufficed for that purpose. Since these boys completed their formal education in grammar school, they were not obliged to perform in the oral declamations and extemporaneous verse compositions that readied Scholars for the degree requirements at Oxford and Cambridge. Marlowe would encounter this distinction between the gentleman’s son who wanted a reading knowledge of the classics, and the poor scholarship boy who did the technical work of speaking in classical Latin, for the remainder of his time in school.

  When Marlowe joined the ranks of the King’s Scholars, his classmates were midway through the fifth form, or the second-to-last year of the course. The school statutes state that ‘In the Fifth Form they shall commit to memory the Figures of Latin Oratory and the rules for making verses.’ The figures of Latin oratory taught the Scholars how to make a coherent speech on a set topic. The rules for making verses prepared them to devise lines of poetry. The speeches and poetry had to be composed in classical Latin. The best Scholars composed them out loud, as if they really were native speakers of that abstruse and difficult language. The Elizabethan teacher Richard Brinsley, our best guide to the academic side of grammar school, is quite explicit about what Marlowe was trying to accomplish: the ‘chiefest labour’ of the school is ‘to make those purest Authors our own, as Tully [i.e. Marcus Tullius Cicero] for prose, so Ovid and Virgil for verse, so to speak and write in Latin for the phrase, as they did.’

  Within the overall scheme of the course, poetry belonged to the art of grammar, while oratory fell within the province of rhetoric. This two-part curriculum recalled the Roman school system, where grammarians taught ‘the art of speaking correctly and the interpretation of the poets’, using the one to explain the other, and rhetoricians gave instruction in oratory. Roman students began with their grammarian, who taught them to speak properly, and then moved on to their rhetor, who prepared them to plead in courts of law. Elizabethan schoolmasters revived this curriculum in a radically different linguistic environment. Since their pupils did not have the remotest idea of what classical Roman Latin sounded like, ‘the art of speaking correctly’ was infinitely harder for them to acquire than rhetoric, which came down to a set of user-friendly strategies for generating arguments in Latin or English (‘the figures of oratory’).

  Gresshop’s most diligent and talented pupils, who aspired to scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge, studied oratory and poetry side by side. The textbooks made it easy, however, for the gentlemen’s sons to sidestep the burdensome and non-functional work of verse composition and to concentrate on rhetoric, which was as easy to understand then as it is today.

  The figures of oratory have no intrinsic relationship to Latin and readily lend themselves to any European language. Like modern American textbooks in freshman composition, Susenbrotus’s Epitome of Schemes and Tropes, Marlowe’s introductory textbook in rhetoric, was practical and easy to use. The early chapters showed the orator how to liven up his prose with figures of speech, but counselled him to use these devices with discretion. A bit of metaphor or an apt simile came in handy once in a while, but the orator’s main assets were the ‘figures of thought’. These appeared in the final section of the Epitome, where the pupil encountered the perennial warhorses of prose composition courses: paraphrase, cause and effect, contrast, comparison, example and vivid description.

  Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata taught Master Gresshop’s charges how to organize their thoughts into a continuous argument. The system was disarmingly simple. Aphthonius relocated the figures of thought on to a linear series of ‘places’: all the student needed to do was take his thesis from place to place until he had built up a convincing argument. Exercise Four, the pupil’s first lesson on arguing a thesis, began with a nugget of proverbial wisdom: ‘To flee poverty, O Cyrnus, one must fall down from the rocky heights into the sea.’ In working through this lesson, Marlowe not only acquired the rudimentary forms of classical rhetoric; he also learned the rudimentary ideology of a two-class society. In the sections that followed, Christopher proved this thesis with arguments drawn from the ‘places’ of paraphrase (the poor should be content to die), cause and effect (since the poor do not form a good character when they are young, they will do bad things in adulthood), contrast (the rich do form a good character when they are young), comparison (just as chains obstruct action, poverty hinders freedom of speech), example (when Odysseus pretended to be poor he was thrown out of his house) and the testimony of the ancients (Euripides says that it is evil to be in want since poverty is inconsistent with nobility of the soul). Once the pupil had mastered this system, he had essentially completed the grammar-school course on rhetoric. Aphthonius was easy to understand and enormously popular; everyone used him.

  The text of Exercise Four divides humanity into two innate species, the rich and the poor, while stigmatizing the latter as crooked, reprehensible, ignorant, venal, homeless and mean-spirited. Aphthonius presents poverty as an all-encompassing destiny. If you want to escape from it, jump off a cliff! The poor must remain in their place. At the same time, however, grammar school encouraged the poor boys who toiled at Exercise Four to imagine that they actually could flee poverty if they acquired enough verbal expertise. The base-born Scholars who pursued this opening separated the form of Exercise Four from its content, extracting the rhetorical assets in the ‘places’ from the proverbial wisdom that poverty is inescapable. Aphthonius presented Marlowe with an implicit social contract: To flee poverty, O Christopher, one must renounce his origins!

  The upwardly mobile scholar’s path to preferment led from rhetoric to the more complex and demanding ‘rules for making verses’. Technically speaking, poetry belonged to the part of grammar that dealt with pronunciation. In the final chapter of his grammar, Lyly explains that the pronunciation of Latin syllables varies according to the length, or quantity, of their vowel sounds: long syllables take twice as long to pronounce as short ones. Since syllable quantities (as opposed to stress accents) form the basis of classical metres, the arts of poetry and pronunciation were two sides of the same coin. In a well-made line of Latin verse, the quantity of every vowel in every word matches up with the set pattern of long and short vowel sounds that constitute the metrical line. The ability to make such lines s
pontaneously, with no recourse to dictionaries and reference works, presupposes an awesome mastery of Latin grammar.

  Gresshop’s scholar-poets laboured under a double disadvantage. They not only lacked any firsthand knowledge of what classical Roman Latin sounded like; they also had no sense of what syllable quantities, which are not readily audible in English, were in the first place. Hence, Marlowe had to learn the entire system from scratch out of books, a task that entailed an enormous expenditure of time and energy. The most arduous ordeal of all was the extemporaneous oral composition of Ovidian and Virgilian hexameter lines. Renaissance academics had a professional stake in the literary tradition that Ovid and Virgil had composed their verses out loud, and they required their keenest pupils to substantiate this fanciful idea. Brinsley reports that ‘my scholars have had more fear in this, than in all the former, and myself also driven to more severity: which I have been enforced onto, or else I should have done no good at all.’

  The Elizabethan social historian William Harrison explains which students did this work and why they did it. In his Description of England (1587), Harrison reports that the schools in ‘collegiate churches’ such as Winchester, Eton and Westminster, house a

  great number of poor scholars, daily maintained by the liberality of the founders … from whence after they have been well entered in the knowledge of the Latin and Greek tongues and rules of versifying (the trial whereof is made by certain apposers yearly appointed to examine them) they are sent to certain special houses in each university.

  Harrison describes the way in which the sons of humble tradesmen acquired the cultural capital of higher education. They were recruited into élite grammar schools and drilled in Latin prosody; the ones who proved most adept at composing lines that sounded like Ovid and Virgil ‘for the phrase, as they did’ were sent to select colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. At the King’s School, the winners went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Archbishop Parker’s son John, who lived in Kent, oversaw the Parker Scholarship that sent Marlowe to Corpus Christi. Parker wrote the career path that Harrison describes into the terms of his father’s bequest. John Parker wanted this award to go to ‘the best and aptest scholars well instructed in their grammar and if it may be such as can make a verse.’

  Twelve of the seventy-eight Scholars on the two lists of Marlowe’s contemporaries pursued university degrees; all but one went to Cambridge. Two of the twelve, Benjamin Carrier and William Place, were the sons of minor clerics. Thomas Coldwell’s father was chaplain to Archbishop Parker and a future Bishop of Salisbury. Oxford and Cambridge gave preferential treatment to applicants from clerical families. If the three clergymen’s sons had enough Latin to pass the college entrance requirements, they qualified for admission without having to pass a special examination on the rules of versifying. None of the three held a scholarship at university. The affluent Coldwell went to Corpus Christi as a Pensioner, paying his own expenses. Carrier went there as a Sizar, or student-servant, and waited on Coldwell while he ate in the college dining hall. Place became a Sizar at St John’s.

  Parker and Master Gresshop found their ‘best and aptest scholars’ among the poor boys. What little we know about the other nine Scholars who were university bound indicates that Parker’s student-poets came from the lower end of the middling classes. The shoemaker’s son Christopher Marlowe succeeded to the Parker Scholarship that had been held by Christopher Pashley, the son of a Canterbury weaver. William Potter, the butcher’s son, won a scholarship to Caius College, Cambridge. Henry Jacob, who came from a family of yeoman farmers at Folkestone, in Kent, found a place at Oxford. The other six have no apparent connection to the gentry or the Church – or if they did, it was too ephemeral to find its way into the Venns’ directory of Cambridge alumni from the earliest times to 1751. The old matriculation books noted the parentage of students whose fathers belonged to the clergy or the landed gentry, but did not keep track of parents from the lower social orders.

  Apart from Potter and Jacob, Marlowe’s peer group at King’s School has come down to us as a list of names. Thomas Consant was related to a future teacher at the King’s School; he went to Corpus Christi on a college scholarship, as did Henry Brownrigg. Thomas Taylor held a scholarship at St John’s. John Reynard was a Sizar at Clare College. John Marshall went to Pembroke, and Thomas Scales found a place at Queens. There were eighteen Parker Scholars whose tenure at Corpus Christi overlapped with Marlowe’s. Only one of the eighteen has been identified as the son of a clergyman, and none of them had any apparent ties to the gentry. The bulk of them were most likely the sons of small tradesmen, yeoman farmers and schoolteachers. It would be stretching a point to claim that all these boys could make a verse, but that was the kind of scholar John Parker was looking for.

  In a school system where social prestige was an acceptable substitute for work, the rich could hardly be told to slog through the thousands of syllable quantities that had to be memorized before one could speak the Latin of Ovid and Virgil ‘for the phrase, as they did’. The gentleman’s son sensibly refused to take the ‘pains and diligence’ needed to attain this level of fluency in classical Latin, especially at a moment when the long-range value of such training had yet to be proven in the market-place. In the meantime, the labour-intensive regime of poetry lessons provided a convenient mechanism for distinguishing the deserving from the idle poor.

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  Although Marlowe – like Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton and Marvell – spent much of his teens mastering ‘the rules for making verses’, it is hard for the non-specialist to grasp what these were. ‘If thou desirest to know whether a Syllable be Long or Short,’ says the maddeningly concise account of a seventeenth-century grammarian, ‘thou must consider what Syllable of the Foot it is. If thou desirest to know the reason why it is long or short, thou must observe what Syllable of the word it is.’ Whenever these two grids intersected for the space of an entire line, the result was poetry.

  Marlowe’s textbook On the Computation of Syllables and Verses gave the correct quantities for thousands of syllables, covering its subject matter with a thoroughness far beyond the scope of its modern analogues. The boys memorized hundreds of variant forms that could be used because, and only because, the best poets had used them. Although these instances had no warrant apart from poetic licence, everyone agreed that ‘the most certain and perfect way of learning syllables consists in examples. For you are allowed to use any quantity that the approved poets used.’ Gresshop’s Scholars learnt all these quantities by heart before he began teaching them ‘how these same syllables are to be arranged into feet, and feet in turn into a certain legitimate order and arrangement and hence into a poem.’

  The poets’ ‘licence’ to employ strange coinages positioned them at the margins of barbarism and propriety. Their equally notorious ‘ear’ gave them the authority to determine what did and did not count as felicitous language. The poets’ freedom of speech was both driven by metre, which required makers to seek out vagrant coinages, and legitimated by metre, which enabled them to compose such usages into ‘a just and lawful number of feet’.

  The grammarians’ scattered remarks on the poet’s vocation, reinforced by the daily discipline of verse composition, taught the Scholars that making poetry was a valuable activity in and of itself, and not just a means to the end of winning a university scholarship. The culture heroes of Marlowe’s prosody lessons were the ‘approved’ poets who enlarged the expressive powers of their native language. When Michael Drayton likens Marlowe to the ‘first poets’, or Ben Jonson singles out ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’, they are judging him by this standard. The early tributes to Marlowe never mention his plays; they refer instead to his innovative verbal craftsmanship. For his peers, Marlowe’s great achievements were an English blank verse line that stood up to Virgil’s stately measures, and a rhymed English couplet that reproduced the elegance and wit of Ovid’s love poetry. These breakthroughs came about eight years later, in Marlowe
’s early twenties, but Master Gresshop’s translation workshop instilled the habits of mind that underlay the later innovations.

  When Marlowe turned to the Epitome of Tropes and Schemes he discovered that there were figures of poetry as well as figures of oratory. The fifteen schemes of spelling appear ‘only in the kingdom of poetry’ because poets were the only ones who cared about the letters that made up individual syllables. In their quest to get each syllable into the right position, poets frequently turned to the thirty-two schemes of syntax, which enabled them to rearrange sentences for the sake of the poetry. The nineteen species of trope furnished Marlowe with an inexhaustible reservoir of alternative words. The king of the gods was Jupiter, but he could be Jove if the metre called for a one-syllable word. Hyperbole, the figure that lies in order to secure belief, contained a treasure trove of variant forms. There were four ways to make them, and nine fountains from which they flowed. First came ‘the thing itself’ (‘there sits imperious Death / Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge’) and then a multitude of stock expressions: sweeter than honey, slower than a snail, more beautiful than Venus, chaster than Penelope. Tamburlaine the Great, Marlowe’s upwardly mobile poet-hero, serenades his future queen with hyperbolic epithets that recall the rhetoric manuals: ‘lovelier than the love of Jove, / Brighter than is the silver Rhodope, / Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills…’ (I.ii.87–89).