The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  The Latin poets on Marlowe’s college reading list spoke with one voice on this issue. Ovid relates that Orpheus, the fabled inventor of poetry, ‘also taught the Thracian folk a stew [brothel] of Males to make / And of the flowering prime of boys the pleasure for to take.’ Ovid himself took no interest in boys, but that was purely a matter of taste. Ovid fancied girls because he preferred ‘embraces that left both partners exhausted’. Ovid and his peers – Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Gallus – treat homosexual love with absolute moral indifference, as a fact of life.

  E. K.’s defensiveness about what Spenser and Harvey are up to illustrates the paradoxical status of Renaissance homosexuality. The venerable custom of sleeping with a same-sex bedfellow, the exaltation of male friendship, the fear of being emasculated by heterosexual passion (Colin’s infatuation with Rosalind is a disaster; Hobbinol was the right choice) and the recovery of Greek and Roman gender systems, all served to legitimate homoerotic affection, especially in the universities. Love between men was intrinsic to the humanist educational programme. Yet the medieval-Christian impulse to demonize homosexual acts persisted regardless. The so-called buggers, pathics, ingles, cinaeduses, catamites, Ganymedes and sodomites who performed such acts were still regarded with horror and disgust. The law too was equivocal on this issue. Tudor parliaments made sodomy a crime punishable by death, but the offence was almost never prosecuted, and then only in cases where a man had raped a boy.

  The reformer Henry Barrow, who may have studied at Corpus Christi a few years before Marlowe arrived, asked the readers of his Plain Refutation whether young men and teenaged boys sequestered in all-male communities where ‘God’s holy ordinance of honest marriage is by express law forbidden’ could remain chaste. The answer was obvious:

  For how possible or likely that is, for so many young men in the flower of their youth and prime of their strength, especially being noseled in such heathen vanity … let any judge; yea let the Scripture itself judge: where God showeth the reward of these sins, how he therefore giveth them up to the lusts of their own hearts, unto uncleanness, to shameful lusts contrary to nature, to work filthiness and to dishonor their own bodies amongst themselves.

  Barrow was a reformed rake who knew what he was talking about. Although he defers to St Paul’s genealogy of sodomy in 1 Romans, his analysis of sexual practices in the Cambridge colleges remains convincing on its own terms. The claim that humanism promoted love between men, or that same-sex sequestration leads to institutionalized homosexuality, finds ample confirmation in the work of cultural historians and anthropologists. The Catholic Augustine Baker made the same complaint about Oxford, where he studied in the 1590s. For Baker, ‘the greatest corruption, in our land, as to such abominable vice … cometh from the two universities.’ And yet there were no prosecutions.

  The law’s neglect stemmed from misrecognition rather than open tolerance. The signs of homosocial bonding (that is, of social ties between men) and homosexual affection were inextricably entwined. Who could tell them apart? The author Thomas Wilson complained that sodomy

  doth much wrong to those that most hate it and never use it; for when it is said that such a thing there be … jealous women most and some men also will be apt to think that any man useth it that hath but a boy or a young man to serve him.

  Harvey and Spenser had discovered an open secret, an unresolved contradiction and an irresistible subject for Marlowe’s generation of poets and playwrights.

  Marlowe would take the progression from male friendship to homosexual love to scandalous conclusions. The opening scene of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which probably belongs to his Cambridge years, portrays a pederastic Jupiter wooing his lover-boy Ganymede in phrases that resonate with Marlowe’s lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love’. Jupiter’s love for his minion sets him in opposition to his wife Juno, goddess of marriage, and explains why the father of the gods orders Aeneas to forsake Carthage for Rome, where yet another lovely boy, ‘bright Ascanius, beauty’s better work / … Shall build his throne’ (I.i.96,98). Edward II portrays a new monarchy grounded in the king’s homosexual love for his base-born favourites. Even the leader of the aristocratic faction concedes that ‘The mightiest kings have had their minions’ (I.iv.390). But when Edward invites his lowly favourite to ‘share the kingdom with thy dearest friend’ (I.i.2), he detaches the social custom of male friendship from the maintenance of class privilege.

  The question of whether or not Marlowe was a homosexual is misleading. Marlowe’s contemporaries regarded sodomy as an aspect of seditious behaviour rather than a species of person. The crime of sodomy became visible in connection with other offences – blasphemy, treason, counterfeiting, sorcery – that activated the heavy hand of the law. Marlowe avoided this predicament until the final weeks of his life, when he was accused of atheism, coining and crypto-Catholicism. In the course of producing this moral monster, his accusers further denounced him for supposedly saying ‘that all they that love not Tobacco and Boys were fools’ and proclaiming ‘that St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’. While these sensational utterances cried out for retribution, they lead us away from the flesh-and-blood Christopher Marlowe and into the symbolic universe of Elizabethan morality.

  Since the search for Marlowe’s innate sexual identity leads nowhere, consider instead the simple question of his living arrangements. By the time Marlowe began to write, he had spent the better part of his adolescent and adult life at school and university, where, as was commonly the case, he probably shared his bed with other boys and men. Whatever his sexual preferences, he could expect to remain in this situation until he was prosperous enough to support a wife and children. His endemic poverty and early death ultimately precluded that outcome. In the glimpses of his domestic life after Cambridge, he is always sharing a room with a same-sex partner. At the turn of the century, he appeared on a published list of ‘Modern and extant poets that have lived together’. Unless Marlowe was celibate, the readiest outlet for his own sexual desires lay with other men.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thinking like a Roman

  Marlowe’s BA course consumed every waking hour. From Monday to Saturday, he attended morning prayer in the college chapel between five and six. Breakfast came between morning prayer and his first class. The Fellows offered daily lecture courses on logic and philosophy between six and seven. First- and second-year students concentrated on logic; advanced undergraduates worked on moral and natural philosophy. Marlowe then accompanied students from other colleges to hear members of the university faculty lecture in the Public Schools. He returned to college for his midday meal, which might consist of a small piece of beef and barley broth, at eleven a.m. At noon, the Fellows lectured on Greek grammar and translation; at three, they lectured on rhetoric.

  Marlowe spent the rest of the afternoon learning how to defend and attack a thesis. During his first year he worked on false claims. In his second and third years, he began practising for dialectical disputations – formal academic debates that required a technical knowledge of logic. Advanced undergraduates disputed with one another and with MA candidates living in the college on Thursdays at four. On Fridays at five, Marlowe listened to two of the Fellows dispute a problem in Divinity for two hours. During his last year, he disputed with students from other colleges at the Public Schools. Prior to graduation, he had to perform in four disputations before university examiners. Like the dreaded ‘exam week’ in modern British universities, this ordeal was the main hurdle facing candidates for the BA. At five, students had a supper ‘not much better than their dinner’. Afterwards, Marlowe studied until nine or ten o’clock, when his working day finally came to an end. On Sunday mornings and afternoons, the entire university heard the sermons at the church of Great St Mary’s. Aside from the odd hour on Sunday, when he could play football or tennis in the college, or go for a walk, the Scholar’s life was all work and no pl
ay.

  The basic plan of Marlowe’s BA course was straightforward enough. The lectures on logic and rhetoric, together with the daily exercises in debating techniques, taught him how to argue; the sermons and philosophy lectures taught him what to argue about. John Whitgift, the Master of Trinity College and future Archbishop of Canterbury, drew up the core curriculum in 1570. Whitgift had limited objectives. Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley wanted the universities to produce a reliable class of educated conformists who would fill posts in the professions and the civil service. Whitgift’s statutes put this vision of higher education into practice. Most important, he contrived to keep Roman Catholic learning out of the university, and to prevent any unregulated form of sacred knowledge, be it Catholic or Puritan, from sprouting within the college walls.

  Whitgift’s list of set texts for university lecturers is a classically based simulacrum of the pre-Reformation arts course. Rhetoricians taught Cicero’s Orations. Lecturers in Dialectic, the Renaissance version of logic, had to cover just two works: Cicero’s Topics introduced undergraduates to the forms of argument that they could use in disputations; Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations showed them how to detect fallacies in their opponents’ logic. Whitgift’s set texts for lecturers in Philosophy amounted to a drastically truncated version of the ‘three philosophies’ (moral, natural and metaphysical) covered in the traditional BA requirements. The only works that survived from the historic syllabus were Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, a collection of scientific puzzles and curiosities.

  The 1570 statutes, coupled with the Elizabethan boom in higher education, created a strong demand for reader-friendly textbooks on dialectic and university-level editions of Cicero. The hundred or so printers and booksellers in the Stationers’ Company, the publishing trade guild, rapidly supplied that demand with up-to-date lists of scholarly textbooks. John Seton’s popular Dialectic … with annotations by Peter Carter was reprinted seven times between 1570 and 1584. The first English imprints of Cicero’s works in Latin began rolling off the presses in the 1570s and early 1580s. State officials stimulated the academic book trade by granting individual printers the exclusive right to publish specific texts. These monopolies encouraged domestic printers to invest in editions aimed at the student market, while making it easier for the government to dictate what students were learning. In 1574 the French Protestant refugee Thomas Vautrollier acquired a ten-year patent to print Cicero’s works in Latin. Aristotle remained out of print, apart from his Ethics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems.

  The indispensable subject in Marlowe’s BA programme was Dialectic, the all-purpose course in logic. Dialectic dispensed with the complicated, quasi-mathematical rules of formal logic. It equipped the new class of university-educated professional men with a widely applicable system of logical reasoning, guiding degree candidates through the labyrinth of dialectical disputation and exerting a major influence on the way in which other subjects were taught. It had no associations with Catholic learning. An aptitude for dialectic was the main criterion for admission to the colleges; a mastery of dialectic was the chief priority in appointments to college faculty. During Marlowe’s time at Cambridge, the one university-wide intellectual controversy was about the right way of doing dialectic.

  Marlowe began to study dialectic in his six a.m. lecture on Seton’s Dialectic … with Annotations by Peter Carter at Corpus Christi. By the autumn term, he had moved on to the Public Schools. A list of faculty and students dated October 1581 includes the pupils of Mr Jones, a university lecturer in dialectic. Mr Jones’s course enrolled a sizeable group of first-and second-year students from Corpus Christi, including Marlowe, who appears under the spelling ‘Merling’.

  * * *

  Like any old-fashioned teacher, Mr Jones ‘lectured’ in the literal sense of the word. He read aloud from the standard treatises on his subject, commenting on them as he went along. Since these works are highly repetitive, and often refer to one another, we can reconstruct much of what Mr Jones told his pupils.

  He said at the outset that ‘Dialectic is the skill of arguing credibly on any topic whatever.’ Or more expansively, that dialectic is ‘an Art to reason probably, on both parts [sides], of all matters that be put forth, so far as the nature of the thing can bear’. ‘Credibly’ and ‘probably’ were synonymous in sixteenth-century usage. Both words referred to convincing argumentation rather than to any relationship with objective truth (as in ‘more likely than not’). Probability was an effect of persuasive speech, not a claim about the real world. The word ‘probably’ likewise denoted a way of speaking that ‘approves itself to one’s reason for acceptance or belief’. Credibility lay in the argument itself, which Cicero famously characterized as ‘something probable selected to compel belief’. Mr Jones taught Marlowe how to find the forms of argument that qualified as intrinsically probable.

  He listed these forms of argument according to their schematic attributes (‘comparison’, say, or ‘contrast’) and provided rules for using each form. In drawing comparisons, for example, ‘What is valid in the greater should be valid in the less.’ If Christ came to save all mankind, then He came to save Dr Faustus. Probable arguments compel belief because they are ‘more widely accepted’ or ‘better known’ than the more dubious propositions, such as the ad hominem claim about Dr Faustus, to which they lend their measure of probability.

  Here is an example, taken from Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander, of what Mr Jones was talking about. Lovestruck Leander wants to persuade Hero, who has taken a vow of chastity, that she ought to have sex with him. What should he say? Leander proceeds like ‘a bold sharp sophister’ (I.197), a term designating second- and third-year Cambridge undergraduates. He cannot assume that making love is superior to virginity, ‘for that is in no respect more probable than that which was aimed at’. Instead, he goes ‘further back’, to the place called ‘cause’, and finds an argument taken from the formal cause (the shape that determines what something is): ‘Be not unkind and fair;’ he pleads, ‘misshapen stuff / Are of behaviour boisterous and rough’ (I.203–4). Moving on to the final cause (the end for which a thing exists), he argues that ‘Who builds a palace and rams up the gate, / Shall see it ruinous and desolate’ (I.239–40). Leander finds his knockdown punch in the material cause (the substance of which a thing is made). Since virginity consists of nothing, ‘Of that which hath no being, do not boast; / Things that are not at all, are never lost’ (I.275–76). Whatever one makes of these arguments, they sound more credible than the bald assertion that Hero ought to have sex with Leander. Indeed, his initial proposition sounds improbable on the face of it: why on earth should she? But it is probable – no? – that if you ‘take away the shape … the use also is taken away’, or that ‘a house is builded to dwell in’, or that ‘when substance is taken away, there can be nothing made at all.’

  The rules of dialectical disputation required one contestant (the Answerer) to defend a thesis, and another (the Questioner) to attack it. The Questioner’s job in this contest was to lure the Answerer into giving an answer that the Questioner could then use to overthrow the Answerer’s own position. Leander accomplishes this feat when he asks Hero ‘to whom mad’st thou that heedless oath’ of chastity (I.294). Hero’s answer, ‘To Venus’, puts her in the indefensible position of swearing to the goddess of love that she will never make love. Seeing at once that she’s been trapped, Hero sheds a tear as the words leave her lips. Leander selects his clincher from ‘contraries’. ‘Thee as a holy idiot doth she scorn,’ he counters, ‘For thou in vowing chastity hast sworn / To rob her name and honour’ (I.303–5). This is the Questioner’s knockout punch; the disputation is over, the endgame of physical seduction can begin.

  Marlowe not only learned the art of finding arguments; Mr Jones also covered the ways of arranging them into a convincing sequence. The dialecticians agreed with Aristotle that when the two initial premises of a formal syllogism are properly
stated, the third follows of necessity. If Hero follows Venus, and every follower of Venus makes love, then Hero must make love. But they maintained that this ‘machine logic’ was either too self-evident to merit further study, or too abstruse to interest anyone but professional logicians. Mr Jones quietly discarded the whole notion of formal validity, explaining that anyone who accepts the major premise of a syllogism (all men are mortal) is bound to grant the conclusion (Socrates is mortal). We don’t need to be told that Socrates is a man. This quick-acting two-part syllogism was Mr Jones’s basic model for all argumentation: x therefore y. Seton’s commentator Peter Carter puts the idea in a nutshell: ‘Maximum force in the major, which contains in itself the very conclusion.’

  The dialecticians’ radical intuition that two-part syllogisms, or ‘enthymemes’, were the common coin of sequential reasoning drastically streamlined the construction of extended arguments. If ‘any expression of thought’, as Cicero says, ‘is an enthymeme’, then a heap of enthymemes automatically qualifies as a weighty argument. Leander crams twenty of them into the space of ninety lines. Dialecticians always kept before them the ancient logical paradox called ‘the heap’, or ‘the argument of little by little’: if one grain of wheat does not constitute a heap, then neither do two, or three, or (by extension) any finite number. As a simple argument form capable of infinite expansion, the heap simultaneously exposed the limitations of dialectic and propelled it onwards: if one probable argument does not entail assent, then neither do two, or three … As enthymemes constantly multiplied, so did the counter-arguments that refuted them.