The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  On entering the dining hall, Marlowe had his first glimpse of the 122 faculty and students who lived in the college. The Master and Fellows dined at High Table on a raised platform at the far end of the hall. Several Fellow Commoners, well-heeled auditors who had no interest in pursuing degrees, ate there as well. Scholars sat beneath the Master’s table. The Pensioners, who paid for their commons and other expenses, occupied the rest of the tables in the Hall. The Sizars, who earned their ‘sizes’, or rations, by working in the dining hall, waited on their fellow students. These groups were highly stable. The same names fill the same columns of the college Buttery Book week after week, term after term, year after year. Degree holders and advanced undergraduates appear at the top of their columns; newcomers surface at the bottom and work their way up until they either drop out or graduate.

  Everyone sat with his own kind. The four Bible Clerks held the most prestigious scholarships, received the most lucrative stipends and ate together in the group that sat next to High Table. The six Nicholas Bacon Scholars and two advanced students whose awards had expired came next. The adjacent table included all the remaining Scholars who were on stipend. Robert Thexton, on the verge of receiving his MA and moving up to the bottom of the Fellows’ list, came first in this final group of twenty Scholars. Marlowe, the most recent arrival, came last, under the spelling ‘Marlin’. The rest of the students fell into clusters divided along similar lines. There was a group of Pensioners who mostly had their BAs in hand, and two tables of undergraduate Pensioners.

  As the weeks and months passed by, Marlowe formed a clearer idea of who these people were. Master Norgate and the twelve college Fellows were an unprepossessing group of career academics and ecclesiastics. Since none of them published any work, their subject specialities remain a mystery. Norgate had been chaplain to Archbishop Parker and was married to Parker’s niece. Thanks to the archbishop and the queen, he was a wealthy man, having accumulated half a dozen ecclesiastical livings in addition to his Mastership. Norgate’s real forte was fund-raising. Under his leadership, the college acquired six more endowed scholarships, doubled its enrolments and erected an elegant new chapel. In so far as individual college Fellows achieved success, their stories resemble Master Norgate’s. They filled administrative posts in the university, collected tithes from parishes in the neighbouring counties, held sinecures in great cathedrals and kept a low profile.

  The Fellow Commoners attended college for a year or two and rarely took degrees (except ‘by special favour’). They came ‘to the University not with intention to make Scholarship their profession, but only to get such learning as may serve for delight and ornament’. The young gentlemen seated at High Table on Marlowe’s first night were a representative sample of the Fellow Commoners he would encounter over the next six years. One was the son of a Baron of the Exchequer; he went on to study law at Gray’s Inn. Another, the son and heir of a Lincolnshire landowner, returned to his estate, was knighted and became the county sheriff.

  The talented, hard-working Scholars had a high graduation rate. Thirty-one of the thirty-three at dinner that night took their BA; twenty-six of them went on to complete their MA. They had every incentive to succeed at this task. Those who really were poor, like Marlowe, had forfeited their place in the artisan class, but stood a good chance of gaining a livelihood in the Church. According to the Venns’ directory of Cambridge alumni, twenty-one of these thirty-one degree holders found employment after graduation – and the Venns missed the odd jobholder.

  Of course it helped if the Scholar was well connected, or was not really poor in the first place. Marlowe’s roommate Robert Thexton succeeded his father as rector of Trunch in Norfolk. The Bible Clerk Robert Perne, who would eventually acquire Church livings in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Ely Cathedral, benefited from the fact that his uncle was Master of Peterhouse and Vice Chancellor of the University. The Master of St John’s College complained about students ‘that having rich friends’ were ‘fain to creep into colleges and put poor men from bare livings’. Harrison observed that the college scholarships had been endowed ‘for poor men’s sons … but now they have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so encroach upon them’. On ‘being placed’, he continued, these would-be Scholars ‘study little other than histories, tables, dice and trifles, as men that make not the living by their study the end of their purposes’. A parliamentary bill of 1574–75 sought to prohibit the sale and purchase of university scholarships, but the queen, acting on Chancellor Cecil’s advice, rejected it.

  The Sizars closely resembled the Scholars. They too had been ‘bred up in the schools’ for ecclesiastical and educational work, and were unprepared for other employment, aside from waiting on tables. They too consistently completed their degrees: fourteen of the sixteen Sizars working in the dining hall at the time of Marlowe’s arrival took their BA, although only four went on to the MA. Seven of the fourteen eventually found places in the Church.

  The Pensioners were far less apt to graduate than the Scholars and the Sizars. Twenty-three of the fifty-two Pensioners who were in the dining hall on Marlowe’s first day at Corpus left without taking their degrees, as did a lot of the young men who replaced them. Like Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow and his friends, many of these young men were out to have a good time, work on their tennis and acquire enough learning to qualify for the post of Justice of the Peace in their home counties. Harrison reports that the influx of wealthy undergraduates brought

  the universities into much slander. For standing on their reputation and liberty, they ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparel and haunting riotous company (which draweth them from their books into another trade.) And for excuse, when they are charged with breach of all good order, think it sufficient to say that they be gentlemen, which grieveth many not a little.

  The rich could roist it out with impunity because social connections exerted such a powerful influence on the Elizabethan university.

  The poor scholar could not wear gorgeous apparel, nor frequent riotous company, nor make the excuse that he was a gentleman. Marlowe’s ilk was still required to wear the Scholar’s plain black gown and put in eighteen-hour days, from four o’clock in the morning until ten at night. Scholars were forbidden to go out in the evening, unless accompanied by Proctors. Marlowe’s friend Thomas Nashe, another Scholar, found the atmosphere at St John’s intolerably repressive:

  Our fathers are now grown to such austerity, as they would have us straight of children grow to become old men. They will allow no time for a gray beard to grow in. If at the first peeping out of the shell a young Student sets not a grave face on it, or seems not mortifiedly religious, (have he never so good a wit, be he never so fine a scholar), he is cast off and discouraged.

  The stringent dress code imposed on Scholars was a particular bone of contention. University regulations decreed that ‘no scholar wear any long locks of hair upon his head’; that ‘no scholar shall wear any barrelled hose, any great ruffs, any clocks [i.e. decorative patterns woven in silk thread] with wings, etc.’ Silk was reserved for men with graduate degrees. The authorities further stipulated that no graduate ‘claiming to enjoy the privilege of a scholar, do wear any stuff in the outward part of his gown but woollen cloth of black, puke, London brown, or other sad colour’. The Chancellor, Lord Burghley, insisted that ‘all scholars being graduates upon the charges of any house, do wear a square cap of cloth’, while permitting ‘the sons of noblemen, or the sons and heirs of knights, to wear round caps of velvet’.

  Marlowe’s six years at Cambridge sharpened his awareness of social inequality. At the King’s School, everyone was, or wanted to be, a Scholar. The students all wore the same gowns and, at least in theory, obeyed the same rules. At Cambridge, the Scholars occupied a privileged position in the academic hierarchy, but were also subject to regulations that publicized their inferior social status. They enjoyed less freedom of movement and had fewer opportunities for self-indulgence than their more a
ffluent schoolfellows.

  Marlowe’s later representations of the scholar’s position in society convey a strong sense of repressed desire and class animosity. When Dr Faustus first imagines what devils can do for him, he refers to the Cambridge dress code: ‘I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk; / Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad’ (I.i.92–93). The public schools were where humble Scholars, who were expressly forbidden to wear silk, honed the special skills that qualified them for university degrees. In Marlowe’s plays, to dress above one’s station is an infallible sign of social mobility. The base-born Tamburlaine magically enters the aristocracy when he exchanges the rustic attire of a shepherd for the shining armour of a gentleman:

  Lie here, ye weeds that I disdain to wear!

  This complete armour and this curtle-axe

  Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine.

  (I.ii.41–43)

  Tamburlaine looks like a warrior, but thinks like a university man: who else would care about the symmetry between his adjuncts and his essence?

  Marlowe returned time and again to the mutual enmity between the scholar and the gentleman. The plebeian Dr Faustus torments an insolent knight and warns him to ‘speak well of scholars’ in the future (IV.i.95–96). The narrator of Hero and Leander laments the fact that ‘to this day is every scholar poor; / Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor’ (I.471–72). Marlowe rewrites French history so that the Duke of Guise can murder the celebrated scholar Peter Ramus in The Massacre at Paris. In Edward II, the scholar Baldock speaks knowledgeably about the psychological consequences of enforced humility. When his friend Spencer tells Baldock ‘you must cast the scholar off’, and ‘now and then stab, as occasion serves’, the scholar replies:

  Spencer, thou knowest I hate such formal toys,

  And use them but of mere hypocrisy.

  Mine old lord, while he lived, was so precise

  That he would take exceptions at my buttons,

  And, being like pins’ heads, blame me for the bigness,

  Which made me curate-like in mine attire,

  Though inwardly licentious enough,

  And apt for any kind of villainy.

  (II.i.31, 43, 44–51)

  With wry self-knowledge, Baldock explains that his lord’s ‘precise’ regulation of the scholar’s outward deportment has produced his inward villainy. Baldock’s university education confirms his sense of alienation from the hereditary élite. ‘My name is Baldock,’ he tells the king, ‘and my gentry/I fetch from Oxford, not from heraldry’ (II.ii.242–43).

  Since the base-born scholar who took a university degree counted as a gentleman, Baldock imagines that he can discharge the courtier’s role in lieu of a man who was born to it. In the real world of Elizabethan society, a poor scholar’s prospects of finding preferment at court were virtually nil. Lord Burghley, the Chancellor of Cambridge University, firmly believed that educational institutions should reinforce the existing social hierarchy. He even drew up legislation stipulating that no one could ‘study the laws, temporal or civil, except he be immediately descended from a nobleman or gentleman, for they are the entries to rule and government’. Burghley recognized the need for a complement of poor scholars who could fulfil the degree requirements and fill vacancies in parish churches; but such men were expected to remain in the lower echelons of the university and the Church. There were no more Cardinal Wolseys in Tudor England. Marlowe’s Parker Scholarship was designed to implement this policy. The archbishop endowed these awards for boys ‘who were likely to proceed in the Arts and afterwards make Divinity their study’. The scholarships were tenable for three years, but candidates who intended to enter Holy Orders could hold them for an additional three years after the BA, and proceed to the Master of Arts degree.

  Yet the scholars’ university education left them ill prepared to grasp their proper station in life. Protestant Tudor monarchs banned from Oxford and Cambridge the study of scholastic theology, the cornerstone of Catholic learning. In its place, they installed a humanities course based on classical Latin authors. The directing of arts graduates into the ministry meant that expertise in classical Latin now qualified scholars for employment as parish priests, despite the fact that this training was irrelevant to their pastoral duties. Roman rhetoric and philosophy prepared the sons of gentlemen and aristocrats – students such as Lord Burghley’s son Robert Cecil and Robert Devereaux, the future Earl of Essex – to serve the monarch. The same training taught base men like King Edward’s favourite Baldock, ‘one of those that hath … a special gift to form a verb’ (II.i.55), and the Cambridge lecturer Gabriel Harvey to aspire beyond their appointed place in society. Baldock is the first in a long line of displaced scholars who become the villains of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies. It was all very well for Archbishop Parker to sponsor degree candidates who were likely to ‘make divinity their study’; in practice, divinity resided on the second tier of the post-Reformation arts course.

  * * *

  John Parker renovated a storeroom on the north-western corner of the college quadrangle to house the students who held the last of the scholarships that his father had endowed. Marlowe lived there for a fifth of his life. Like most college rooms, it held three or four students, or a Fellow and two students. Marlowe took up residence there with Robert Thexton, the MA candidate from Norfolk, Thomas Lewgar, a beginning Parker Scholar from Norfolk and Christopher Pashley. This chamber played an integral part in his day-to-day existence at college, especially during the inclement winter months. The rooms reserved for Parker Scholars held little in the way of furniture – a standard inventory lists two beds, two chairs, a table and three stools. Like other members of the college, Marlowe and his roommates would have slept with one another.

  Marlowe shared beds with other boys – a brother, an apprentice, or another student at the King’s School – from an early age. Unmarried individuals in early modern England ordinarily had a same-sex bedfellow, and men did not marry, on the average, until their late twenties or early thirties, when they could afford to head a household. Bed-sharing proved beneficial in many ways. It enabled men to maintain stable, intimate relationships without the risk of illegitimate children; it provided an affective basis for working alliances in domestic households, the military, trades, ecclesiastical foundations and the professions; it gave people a warm body to sleep with; and it helped them to accumulate enough resources to begin a family (two could live as cheaply as one).

  While bed-sharing occurred across the entire spectrum of Elizabethan society, it took on a pedagogical cast at Oxford and Cambridge. Humanist educators conflated instruction with friendship. Mutual affection facilitated the transmission of knowledge; the fruits of learning were the tokens of amity. In a well-known passage from his Schoolmaster, Sir Roger Ascham recalled that ‘John Whitney, a young gentleman, was my bedfellow, who, willing by good nature and provoked by mine advice, began to learn the Latin tongue.’ They began with Cicero’s On Friendship. The rising young poet Edmund Spenser had this kind of relationship with his Cambridge tutor and bedfellow Gabriel Harvey. In the last of their Three Proper and Witty and Familiar Letters Lately Passed Between Two University Men (1580), Immerito (Spenser) asks G. H. (Harvey) about his recent verses: ‘Seem they comparable to those two, which I translated you ex tempore in bed, the last time we lay together in Westminster?’

  The university curriculum familiarized students with the seminal ancient works on male friendship and homoerotic love, including Book Four, Chapter 26, of Aristotle’s Problems, Cicero’s On Friendship and Virgil’s Second Eclogue. Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus were newly available in the great edition prepared by Henri Estienne. These texts provided the philosophical rationale for humanistic theories of education, amity and male bonding. Spenser modelled the first poem in his Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) on Virgil’s Second Eclogue. Where Virgil’s lovestruck Corydon desires the boy Alexis, Spenser’s alter ego Colin Clout yearns for Rosalind; but Spenser
’s Shepherd’s Calendar does not leave it at that. At the end of the poem, Spenser’s editor ‘E. K.’ informs the reader that Rosalind has a rival named Hobbinol (Gabriel Harvey), who loves Colin (Spenser) in his own right. E. K. notes that Hobbinol’s infatuation with Colin carries ‘some savour of disorderly love, which the learned call paederastice’ (pederasty); but Plato has shown E. K. the way around this problem:

  For who hath read Plato … may easily perceive that such love is much to be allowed and liked of, especially so meant, as Socrates used it: who saith, that indeed he loved Alcibiades extremely, yet not Alcibiades’ person, but his soul, which is Alcibiades’ own self. And so is pederasty much to be preferred before gynerasty, that is the love which enflameth men with lust toward woman kind.

  Lest anyone fail to grasp his point, E. K. warmly denies that he is defending the ‘execrable and horrible sins of forbidden and unlawful fleshiness’. Spenser’s friend is standing on shaky ground: for Plato, whom E. K. has not got around to reading yet, does indeed incorporate fleshly pleasure into his account of love between men. The fact that the younger male beloved gradually ‘feels a desire … to behold, to touch, to kiss him, to share his couch and now ere long the desire, as one might guess, leads to the act’ brings Plato to the main problem in homoerotic love, which is knowing when to stop.

  Aristotle’s Problems, one of two science texts in the list of set books for Lecturers in Philosophy, taught undergraduates that homosexuality is both an innate disposition and a cultural practice that can be learned under the right conditions. In Chapter 26 of Book Four, ‘Problems Concerning Sexual Intercourse’, Aristotle asks: ‘Why is it that some men enjoy being acted upon sexually, whether or not they also enjoy being active?’ Aristotle gives two answers to this question. The first has to do with plumbing. The internal conduits that normally carry sperm to the genitals, the proper site of desire, can also transport it to the rear, or to both places. Some men are unnatural by nature. The second answer is that some men learn to enjoy the passive position ‘out of habit, since whatever they regularly do they come to enjoy, even emitting their fluid in this fashion. So they desire to do whatever … brings this pleasure, and actually habit (ethos) becomes, as it were, their nature (phusis).’ A man ‘develops the habit of being acted upon sexually’, Aristotle continues, at adolescent maturity, ‘And if a male is both hypersexual and effeminate, all the more so.’