The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  A manuscript list of theses dating from around 1580 reveals that students disputed such propositions as: ‘The style of sacred Scripture is not barbarous’; ‘There is a place of hell’; ‘The reprobate do not truly call on God’; ‘God does not want everyone to be saved’; ‘The will acts freely’; and ‘Nothing is done without prior consent and volition by God’. Since dialectical disputation took up ‘both parts of every question’, one of the students had to argue that the style of the sacred Scriptures is barbarous, that there is no place of hell, that the reprobate truly call upon God, that God wants everyone to be saved, that the will does not act freely, and that things are done without God’s prior consent and volition. Any doctrine could be made credible; none could be proven.

  The intellectual licence of dialectical disputation made a strong impression on Marlowe. His notorious remark ‘that all the new testament is filthily written’ simply restates, in stronger language, the academic commonplace that ‘the style of sacred Scripture is barbarous’. Marlowe’s crime was to broadcast such teachings, to carry the debate outside the privileged space of the university. Dr Faustus, another academic renegade, reckons that the reward of sin is death, but takes comfort in the thought that there is no place of hell. He pleads for mercy, only to find that God does not want everyone to be saved. But does Faustus’s will act freely? Is everything done with prior consent and volition by God?

  The cultivation of scepticism in questions of religion played a central role in the Conformist intellectual programme. Since the English Church had already been reformed, Conformists argued, the purpose of higher education in religion was to maintain the status quo. Queen Elizabeth, Lord Burghley and Archbishop Whitgift discouraged the intellectual pursuit of theological truth, and fell back on the minimalist criterion of external compliance with the rites and forms prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. As doctrinaire Calvinists, they recognized that these practices had no spiritual efficacy in and of themselves. In his last letter to Burghley, Archbishop Parker asked, ‘Does your lordship think that I care either for cap, tippet, surplice, or wafer-bread, or any such?’ He did not: ‘But for the laws so established I esteem them.’ The state religion was a matter of behaviour rather than belief. Conformist dons stuck to the letter of the statutory degree requirements. Their mission was to enforce a solid professional standard, strictly defined as the possession of certifiable learning and skills.

  Puritan academics opposed the conformist regime. After resigning his Fellowship at Trinity College, Walter Travers charged the universities with ‘neglect and almost contempt of all Religion’ and urged Burghley to reinstate the ‘study of divinity and maintenance of the sacred ministry’. Thomas Cartwright, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity until his attacks on the Church hierarchy cost him his job, complained that the universities ‘made a mockery of God’. In place of religious instruction, they followed ‘the heathenish tradition of profane schools which rather seek by such title to advance learning … than by their learning to advantage the church of God’.

  Puritan dons launched programmes of Christian education. The President of Magdalen College, Oxford, instituted a Christian curriculum that concentrated on biblical studies, while excluding Virgil’s Aeneid and anything written by Ovid. At Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Master Chaderton introduced a rigorously philological course based on Scriptural exegesis. Puritan logicians championed the simplified, anti-Aristotelian dialectic of Peter Ramus because it claimed to derive from the operations of natural reason and so had no ostensible ties to pagan learning. The purified Arts of Logic and Rhetoric, which substituted Scriptural allusions for all Ramus’s classical references, took the quest for a Christian logic to its pristine conclusion.

  Puritans gathered at a select group of Cambridge colleges. St John’s had led the Puritan revolt against such conformist practices as kneeling at the altar, wearing ecclesiastical gowns and using wafer bread at Holy Communion. Christ’s College stood out because its Fellows and its Master, Edward Dering, set the highest standard of Christian education. Emmanuel was founded in 1585 expressly to promote the cause of godly learning. In words that summed up the Puritans’ quarrel with the Conformists, the first Master of Emmanuel, Laurence Chaderton, pledged that

  I will set the authority of Scripture before the judgement of even the best of men … I will refute all opinions that be contrary to the Word of God, and that I will in the cause of religion always set what is true before what is customary, what is written before what is not written …

  The strongholds of Conformity attracted little attention, for the simple reason that the members of these colleges obeyed the rules and kept out of trouble. As head of the queen’s High Commission, the state agency that enforced Conformity in religion, Archbishop Parker kept a close watch on his alma mater Corpus Christi. When Thomas Aldrich, whom he had made Master of his old college, took a Puritan stance, Parker forced him to resign and secured the Mastership for his future nephew by marriage, Robert Norgate. Although the Archbishop’s interventions won him the sobriquet ‘Pope of Benet College’, no one questioned his effectiveness.

  The students and Fellows of Corpus Christi are conspicuously absent from all the petitions and lists of Puritan activists at Elizabethan Cambridge. None of them supported Cartwright when he was deprived of his professorship and forbidden to preach; nor did any of them participate in the Presbyterian movement of the 1580s, or join in the widespread protest over the imprisonment of Francis Johnson for refusing to testify against himself in court. A few of Marlowe’s fellow students later exhibited Puritan leanings, but their numbers are minuscule compared to the legion of godly ministers trained at St John’s, Christ’s and Emmanuel.

  On the other hand, key leaders of the radical Puritans who advocated total separation from the English Church did attend Corpus Christi. Robert Browne, the charismatic founder of the Separatists, took his BA from Corpus in 1572, returned to Cambridge six years later, and soon attracted a congregation in the church of St Benet, hard by his old college. Browne had come ‘to be a witness of that woeful state of Cambridge, whereunto those wicked prelates and doctors of divinity have brought it’. He persuaded Robert Harrison, another Corpus man (BA 1567, MA 1572), not to take Holy Orders in the English Church, and the two graduates founded an independent Church at Norwich. When the local bishop complained to Burghley in 1581, the entire congregation migrated to Middelburg, in Holland. Another of Browne’s followers, John Greenwood, still resided at Corpus during Marlowe’s first six months there. A notation in the Buttery Book indicates that Marlowe bought him dinner during one week in spring of that year. Greenwood fell under arrest in 1586. His collaborator and co-religionist Henry Barrow took his BA at Clare College, but may have been admitted to Corpus Christi in 1576 to study for his MA.

  The predominance of Corpus men in the Separatist leadership has been taken to mean that the college was hospitable to Puritanism. But the Separatists’ experience of college life played a crucial part in their decision to leave the Church. The radical Puritan mentality developed in reaction against life at Corpus Christi. Unlike the students who studied under Chaderton and Dering, the Separatists’ time at Corpus Christi persuaded them that the entire system of grammar school and university education was irremediably corrupt.

  It ‘cannot be denied’, Barrow wrote, that scholars in the arts ‘learned and learn the Latin tongue from the most heathenish and profane authors, lascivious poets, etc.’ Aristotle instructed the scholars

  of the Soul, and of the world in large and special books, of the heaven, of natural and supernatural things, of Nature, Fortune, the eternity of the world and perpetuity of all the creatures in their kind … the making of the winds, clouds and of the whole sky, far otherwise than is set down in the Genesis.

  Harrison and Browne shrewdly characterize dialectic as a self-referential language game based on bogus dichotomies. Combining dialectic with rhetoric only makes things worse,

  For if Rhetoric prove and conf
irm, what should Logic do?… And wherefore doth Logic show the Method and order of handling matters, as to begin, to proceed and to conclude, if Rhetoric do the same? Well they help one another like two good sisters, which else should be idle.

  The only student at Corpus Christi known to have defied authority during Marlowe’s time there was charged with blasphemy, not Puritanism. Shortly after Marlowe’s arrival, the MA candidate Tobias Bland composed a mock catechism ‘to be read every Sunday morning’. It began ‘in the name of the son, and the old wife’ and included an attack on the pious statesman Sir Thomas Walsingham. Although the authorities promptly expelled Bland from Cambridge, Lord Burghley let him take his MA without completing the required number of terms, despite a protest from the faculty senate. Bland later published a book defending the use of pagan authors in Christian theology and held several livings in the Church of England. He seems to have lived happily ever after.

  Educators voiced alarm about the spread of moral licence in Elizabethan Cambridge. Robert Beaumont, the Master of Trinity, urged Burghley to impose a stricter discipline on the student body: ‘then should licentious youth be kept in awe, learning flourish and pure religion take better root, to the confusion of our epicures and careless worldlings.’ The establishment of colleges dedicated to Christian education was meant to counter the drift towards a blatantly secular way of life. If the godly could not convert their wayward colleagues and schoolfellows, at least they could withdraw into their own societies. The Calvinist doctrines of election and reprobation encouraged the impulse to imagine an academic community consisting of the saved and the damned. Browne’s mentor Richard Greenham, a Fellow of Pembroke College before he became pastor at nearby Dry Drayton, concluded that ‘every University hath both land and dunghill, howsoever we shuffle them together.’

  Since Calvin was the one theologian everyone read, this precept cut both ways. Prolonged meditation on the question of election and reprobation could induce a powerful sense of spiritual assurance. Chaderton led many undergraduates through an introspective process of repentance and conversion that brought them to the inner presence of the Holy Spirit, ‘the voice and calling of God himself’, summoning them to eternal life. But these same doctrines could also produce a sense of utter alienation from God. For the reprobate, who were predestined to sin and damnation, study and meditation only made things worse. In his Advice for the Study of Divinity, the Oxford lecturer John Rainolds warned that ‘without the grace of the holy spirit, all study, especially in divinity, is vain.’ Even simple Bible-reading could have ruinous consequences. Just as the Lord calls the elect to salvation, Calvin explains, so ‘the Lord sendeth his word to many, whose blindness he will have to be more enforced.’ Sometimes ‘he taketh away the power to hear his word, and sometime … he directeth his voice to them, but that they may wax more deaf.’

  Calvin’s warning looks ahead to the first scene of Dr Faustus. After discarding logic, medicine and law, Faustus decides that ‘divinity is best’ (I.i.37). He takes up the Bible and turns to Scriptural verses that contain God’s promise of forgiveness and everlasting life; but Faustus is blind to the words that bear that promise; he literally cannot see the texts that would save him, even though he is looking straight at them. So he abandons hope for the future (‘Che serà, serà / What will be, shall be’) and turns to sorcery (I.i.49–50). What does he have to lose? Since the only God the damned could ever know was a God of wrath, they had ample incentive, in Calvin’s words, to rob ‘him of his justice and providence’ and ‘shut him up idle in heaven’.

  * * *

  Marlowe completed the residency requirement for his degree in the winter of 1583–84. Every candidate for the BA had to participate in four public disputations, appearing twice in the role of Answerer and twice in that of the Questioner, at the Public Schools. The students disputed from one to five in the afternoon, with an hour-long break between three and four. The prescribed form of these statutory ‘acts’ epitomized the negative orientation of Elizabethan dialectic. Each time Marlowe presented his thesis, in Latin, he had to defend it against three Questioners from other colleges (two graduates and one BA candidate like himself) who spent the remainder of the afternoon tearing his presentation apart.

  The sole surviving transcript of a public disputation from this period recounts a vacuous parade of tactical manoeuvres. The Answerer, Mr Boyes, proposes that the threat of punishment is an adequate deterrent of crime. His opponent counters with a two-part syllogism: ‘The end of contemplation is action. Therefore, the experience [of punishment] exceeds the knowledge of it [the threat of punishment].’ Mr Boyes objects that this maxim only applies to actions that are praiseworthy in themselves, which is not the case with punishment. The Questioner tries to make the Answerer grant that punishment is praiseworthy in itself; he will prove it out of Aristotle, the Philosopher himself. ‘The destruction of one contrary rears up its opposite, Therefore, what deters from crime conduces to virtue.’ Mr Boyes replies that good and evil are not directly opposed to one another, since some things are morally indifferent (like punishment). His opponent adopts another line of attack. And so it goes on, until the time is up. The purpose of these exercises was not to discover the truth, or even to win. Dialectical disputations certified that the contestants were rational subjects; it set them above the ignorant crowd.

  Marlowe completed the requirements for his Bachelor’s degree on Palm Sunday, 1584. He fell roughly in the middle of the university rank list, and doubtless would have been placed higher were it not for his class origins. The terms of his scholarship permitted him to remain at Cambridge for another three years of work towards his Master’s degree if he intended to enter Holy Orders. This was an offer that Marlowe could ill afford to refuse. If he did seek employment in the Church or the university, the MA enhanced his prospects of finding a good post. If he did not, the three-year scholarship gave him time to explore other lines of work. The ecclesiastical job market was fast becoming a dubious proposition. Even with his Master’s degree, Marlowe would have to contend with the diminishing supply of vacant parishes and the late Elizabethan influx of gentlemen’s sons, who had finally decided that a degree in the liberal arts was a secure route to a place in the Church. Marlowe would be hard put to compete for employment with these young men. He needed to find an alternative career.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Teacher of Desire

  The new BA now appears as ‘Master Marlen’ in the college records. Having taken a crucial step beyond his plebeian origins, Marlowe was a nominal gentleman. BAs had more freedom of movement than undergraduates did, and Marlowe soon took advantage of this opportunity. During the first year of his MA course, he began to leave his college for weeks, then months, at a time. He missed most of autumn 1584, came back early in December, but was gone for the last three weeks of January. He remained in residence from late January to Easter, went away again and then returned for the first half of the summer term. All told, he missed about half the year. The absences persisted throughout his MA course. Marlowe remained at Corpus Christi for almost all of autumn and winter 1585–86, dropped out again during the spring and again returned for the summer term. He was at his college for most of the autumn and about half the winter of 1586–87, the term in which his scholarship expired. He last appeared at Corpus Christi in March 1587.

  Where did he go?

  Bachelors of Art often took extended leave of absence. Marlowe’s roommate Thomas Lewgar, another BA, left Corpus during the same weeks that Marlowe was away in the summer of 1585. The two scholars came and went together twice more in the spring term of 1586. There was nothing strange about this behaviour. Degree-holders were not ‘strictly tied’ to their colleges if they chose to be ‘discontinuers’ during their three years of study for the MA. ‘Discontinuers’ could earn their keep as schoolmasters or clerks while they studied privately for their examinations, provided that they furnished testimonials from their landlords and three clergymen stating that they had
‘lived soberly and studiously the course of a scholar’s life’ while away.

  Marlowe’s only recorded appearance during these absences occurred at Canterbury in the summer of 1585. Christopher Marlowe had gained a brother-in-law and lost a sister since his initial departure for Cambridge five years earlier. In April 1582, John Moore, the son of the migrant blacksmith Richard Moore, married Marlowe’s youngest sister Jane. He was twenty-three and she was twelve. Since John Moore’s sister Ursula was already married to Christopher’s maternal uncle Thomas Arthur, this alliance strengthened the bonds that tied the three immigrant families to one another. It also brought John Moore the freedom of the city. His bride Jane, perhaps unready to shoulder the burdens of being a wife and mother, bore her first, short-lived child the following January and died, apparently in childbirth, at the age of thirteen.

  On Sunday 19 August 1585, Christopher was present when the widow Katherine Benchkin executed her last will and testament in her house on Stour Street, near the parish church of St Mildred’s. James Benchkin, the widow’s son and heir, had been admitted to Corpus Christi earlier that summer. Benchkin asked the elder Marlowe to witness his mother’s will and doubtless invited Christopher, his acquaintance from college, to do so as well.