The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Sidney duly sent all three men back to Lord Burghley ‘to take their trial as you shall think best’. Another prisoner, Evan Flud, appears to have killed one of his fellow Catholics while serving in Stanley’s regiment. The convoy arrived at court prior to 3 March, when Sidney’s ensign David Lloyd collected £13 6s 8d for conveying the prisoners there. One of Burghley’s clerks endorsed Lloyd’s warrant ‘taken for coining, to be tried here for that fact’. Since Marlowe had been caught red-handed – ‘that fact’ was not in question – Burghley had the authority to hang him. There is no indication, however, that Marlowe underwent any punishment or received a pardon.

  Why did Lord Treasurer Burghley release him? Even if Burghley had sent Marlowe on a covert mission to gather intelligence, Baines’s allegation that his roommate intended to go to the enemy cast doubt on Marlowe’s loyalty to the state. On the other hand, Marlowe’s contacts with John Poole and Lord Strange, together with his initiative in Flushing, meant that he still could help lead Burghley to the Stanley conspirators. The Lord Treasurer held Marlowe and Baines in reserve, ‘banking his tools’ like one of John Le Carré’s spymasters, until the time came to use them.

  * * *

  Marlowe was back on the streets by 9 May, when he was taken before Justice Owen Hopton for his threats against a constable and beadle. The incident took place on Holywell Street, just above the Strand. Marlowe had appeared before Justice Hopton on suspicion of murder two and a half years previously, after the slaying of William Bradley. Hopton now required Marlowe to enter into a bond by which he promised to ‘keep the peace’ towards the two constables, Allen Nicholls and Nicholas Helliott, and to appear at the next General Sessions of the Middlesex County Court in October. Should Marlowe fail to keep either article of his pledge, he stood to forfeit £20.

  Strange’s Men had begun a long run at the Rose Theatre earlier that year. Marlowe may have been at large when the company revived his Jew of Malta on 26 February. Philip Henslowe’s diary lists receipts of £2½ for this performance, the top figure for the fledgling winter season. The Jew of Malta and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy were the most popular plays in the company’s repertory until the beginning of March, when a new and potent rival appeared on the theatrical scene, just at the time of Marlowe’s return from Flushing.

  On 3 March 1592, Henslowe recorded the first performance of ‘harey VI’, his shorthand for the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. Shakespeare’s debut with Strange’s Men brought in the remarkable sum of £3 16s 8d. The company performed the play fourteen times before the theatres were closed on 23 June. That August the ever alert Thomas Nashe hailed Shakespeare’s vivid portrayal of ancient English manhood. In an unmistakable allusion to Lord Talbot, the hero of 1 Henry VI, Nashe exclaimed, ‘How it would have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his Tomb, he should triumph again on the Stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times).’

  By the time Nashe’s tribute appeared in print, Shakespeare had completed the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI and Marlowe had written Edward II, his own version of the English history play. The up-and-coming Earl of Pembroke’s Men performed Edward II, 3 Henry VI and probably 2 Henry VI. There is no record of the new company’s existence before the autumn of 1592, when Pembroke’s Men began to turn up in provincial records; by the holiday season of 1592–93, they ranked alongside Strange’s Men as one of the two leading companies in London. The little we know about Pembroke’s Men mainly derives from the remarkable group of texts that were sold to the printers when the company broke up later in the following year. According to the title pages of four plays published in 1593–94, the company’s repertory included Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York and The Taming of a Shrew, along with Marlowe’s Edward II. The True Tragedy and The Shrew were adaptations of Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew. The Contention between the Houses of York and Lancaster, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, almost certainly belonged to Pembroke’s Men as well. Shakespeare was a player as well as an aspiring playwright. When Pembroke’s Men became the major producers of his works, he could well have acted in the plays that he had written.

  Despite the silence of the records, Pembroke’s Men must have been more than a minor provincial company when Shakespeare and Marlowe entered their employ. They had the nucleus of a powerful repertory and a patron on the Privy Council. The Earl of Pembroke is the only English aristocrat that Edward II portrays in a favourable light. The company had a number of first-rate actors, including two former members of Strange’s Men, and quite possibly the talented young Richard Burbage. When the Admiral’s Men left the Theatre in 1591, Richard’s father James Burbage had houseroom for new tenants, and would have welcomed a company of their stature. The value of a ‘share’ in the company’s revenues was £80, an enormous sum for this decade. The earl’s wife Mary Herbert, née Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was a major literary patroness and a dramatist in her own right. Although her own work was academic rather than popular, Lady Pembroke wrote in blank verse and took an active interest in her husband’s acting company. Simon Jewel, an actor in Pembroke’s Men, mentions the countess as a patroness in his will. At a time when civic politics and the worsening plague threatened the actors’ future livelihood, both Marlowe and Shakespeare were well advised to cultivate a patroness of her stature.

  Marlowe never mentions Shakespeare, nor would Shakespeare allude to Marlowe until the turn of the century, when his mighty rival had been dead for seven years. Yet they must have been aware of one another. They both wrote for Strange’s Men and they both moved on to Pembroke’s Men. They both lived in Shoreditch, near the Theatre; they were both supremely talented. Marlowe, the university man, ranked a cut above the Stratford glover’s son turned actor, and this disparity could have been a source of friction. During that same summer of 1592, Robert Greene famously attacked Shakespeare as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,’ much as Nashe had attacked Kyd three years previously.

  Shakespeare and Marlowe were now responding to each other’s work. The first line of influence runs from Tamburlaine to the three Henries. Henry VI, Part One begins with a long purple patch of funerary verse in Marlowe’s cosmological style. Shakespeare invests the late King Henry V with Tamburlaine’s heroic aura, and then turns to consider the foreign and civil wars that erupt under the hero’s weak son – the issue left dangling at the end of Marlowe’s triumphant two-play cycle. In 2 Henry VI, the Duke of York appeals to Tamburlaine’s creed of sovereign virtue (‘let them obey that knows not how to rule / This hand was made to handle nought but gold’) to justify his own rebellion. In Part Three, the future Richard III’s major soliloquy recalls Machevill’s celebration of his own cunning in The Jew of Malta:

  Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

  And cry, ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart,

  And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

  And frame my face to all occasions.

  I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;

  I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;

  I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,

  Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,

  And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

  I can add colours to the chameleon,

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

  And set the murderous Machivel to school.

  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

  Tut!, were it further off, I’ll pluck it down.

  Marlowe’s influence surfaces in the ubiquitous figure of hyperbole, the heavily stressed, end-stopped lines, the heap of model instances segmented by metre, the ‘out doing’ (over-going, one-upping) formula and Richard’s anticipatory grasp of the crown. Indeed, for two centuries the pervasive debt to Marlowe’s style and sensibility persuaded scholars that Marlowe actually
did write most of Henry VI.

  Yet Shakespeare made a decisive break with the Marlovian conqueror play. Henry VI uses matter drawn from Raphael Holinshed’s English Chronicles (1587) to explore the topical issues of weak monarchy and civil war. In staging the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare’s early trilogy depicts the breakdown, rather than the assertion, of princely rule. Shakespeare’s initiative caught Marlowe’s attention. While writing Edward II, he in turn lifted a couple of lines from 2 Henry VI – this time there is no question that Marlowe was the borrower. He adopted the odd phrase that struck his fancy (‘She wears a lord’s revenue on her back’), sufficient only to indicate that he had seen 2 Henry VI. Marlowe was more interested in the grand design of Shakespeare’s play. He followed his rival to Holinshed’s Chronicles, where he found yet another story of a strong king (Edward I) whose weak son (Edward II) is destroyed by over-mighty barons (Mortimer) and a masculine queen (Isabella). The ‘weak king’ formula was well suited to Pembroke’s Men, who lacked a leading actor of Edward Alleyn’s stature. The plays that Marlowe wrote for Alleyn (Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris) tend to be one-man shows; in Edward II, he distributes the speeches more evenly among the cast.

  Marlowe preserves Shakespeare’s framework, but alters the emphasis: Edward, the weak king, becomes the main attraction and a remarkably strong character in his own right. Shakespeare’s Henry VI is a cipher, an absent centre that creates misrule by default. Marlowe’s Edward II has a ruling passion, his love of other men, which provokes mortal combat with his peers and his wife. The echoes of Edward II in the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda suggest that Marlowe wrote the play in the first half of 1592, around the time of his ill-fated expedition to Flushing.

  Holinshed’s Chronicles relate that the newly crowned Edward revoked the banishment of his ‘old mate’, Piers Gaveston, and ‘received him into most high favour’. Gaveston ‘so corrupted’ Edward that he ‘gave himself to wantonness, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excess’ until the peers finally kidnapped the king, abducted his minion and chopped off Gaveston’s head, whereupon the king’s rule was restored. Marlowe transforms the Gaveston affair, which is an isolated incident for Holinshed, into the defining crisis of Edward’s monarchy. Hugh Spencer, who joined the historical Edward’s court six years later, in Edward II becomes the king’s new favourite immediately after Gaveston’s execution. The Earl of Mortimer, who led the revolt that eventually toppled King Edward and Spencer, now takes this role from the outset. Holinshed’s Mortimer revolts in a dispute over land purchases; Marlowe’s Mortimer is a homophobic crusader. The ongoing clash between the king’s unbridled desires and the earl’s fantasies of royal pollution creates a work unlike any other from this era. Edward II is the only Elizabethan play that portrays a homosexual relationship in the terms in which orthodox moralists conceived of it – as illicit, compulsive and intolerably destructive.

  Following Marlowe’s lead, Shakespeare would return to the weak king formula in his own Richard II (1594); but Shakespeare suppresses, where Marlowe emphasizes, the homoerotic overtones of his chronicle sources. The most vivid modern analogues to Marlowe’s conception were the Lennox plot and the French court of King Henri III. Richard Baines had played a part in exposing the Lennox plot, and offered Marlowe a ready source of firsthand intelligence about it during the winter of 1591–92. In France, Catholic League propagandists maintained that Edward and Gaveston’s true successors were King Henri III of France and his amorous favourite, the Duke of Epernon. From the League’s standpoint, the tragic history of Edward II and his lovers had set the appropriate precedent for dealing with Henri III and his ‘Court of Sodom’. Edward’s horrible death at the hands of the baronial faction was a clear sign of divine displeasure. Holinshed drew the same conclusion. Edward’s sodomitical regime was ‘the ready mean to overthrow all, as if Gods goodness had not been the greater, it must needs have come to pass’.

  Marlowe’s version of King Edward’s story depicts homophobia, but does not endorse it. Even the leaders of the baronial party concede that homoerotic love is a venerable ruling class prerogative. With stunning aplomb, the socially conservative Old Mortimer reminds his nephew that ‘the mightiest kings have had their minions’ and ‘not kings only, but the wisest men’ (I.iv.390–94). In reply, Young Mortimer assures his uncle that the king’s ‘wanton humour grieves not me’. His homophobia is contingent on the underlying issue of class: his grievance is ‘that one so basely born / Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert / And riot it with the treasure of the realm’ (401–04).

  What enrages the hereditary nobles is that a commoner should enjoy the lucrative offices that would ordinarily fall to them. The base-born Marlowe presses hard on this issue. He knew from the chronicles that both of Edward’s favourites belonged to the gentry, but deliberately debased them in rank, turning Young Spencer, in historical fact a powerful member of the lesser nobility, into a client of the upstart Gaveston. Since both of Edward’s lovers are lowly interlopers, the king’s decision to elevate them above his peers inevitably provokes civil war; there is no other way to resolve the issue.

  The play offers two perspectives on the Renaissance complex of the absolute monarch, the underclass favourite and the hereditary aristocracy. Gaveston’s sphere of operations is the court. At the outset of the play, he calls for ‘wanton poets, pleasant wits’ and ‘Musicians that, with touching of a string / May draw the pliant king which way I please’ (I.i.50–52). Gaveston will turn Edward’s life into a space of Ovidian recreation:

  Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

  With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

  Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

  And in his sportful hands an olive tree

  To hide those parts which men delight to see,

  Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by,

  One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove,

  Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,

  And, running in the likeness of an hart,

  By yelping hands pulled down and seem to die.

  (60–69)

  Actaeon, the hunter who inadvertently glimpses the naked goddess of chastity, was a stock figure of transgression, like Icarus and Phaeton. His transformation into a stag proved that ‘A wise man ought to refrain his eyes, from beholding sensible and corporal beauty,’ as writes an Elizabethan critic, ‘lest, as Actaeon was devoured of his own dogs, so he be distracted and torn in pieces with his own affections, and perturbations.’ Gaveston’s masque of Actaeon recuperates the polymorphous pleasures of uncensored spectatorship. Instead of a naked woman, the viewer beholds the sportive hand of a cross-dressed boy holding a fetishistic olive tree over the parts that men delight to see. The hidden ‘parts’ could be either masculine or feminine: the boy actor concealed beneath the falsely female body disarms the myth of any regulatory force. Gaveston’s transvestite stage is a ‘school of abuse’ in the anti-theatrical tradition of Stephen Gosson. The ‘lovely boy in Dian’s shape’ teaches the viewer how to be wanton.

  Young Mortimer proclaims that Edward’s minion actively threatens the heterosexual status quo:

  He wears a lord’s revenue on his back,

  And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court

  With base outlandish cullions at his heels,

  Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show

  As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.

  (I.iv.406–10)

  What upsets the earl is Gaveston’s ominous capacity to create new and impure gentlemen. The favourite invests his cullions (the word meant both ‘rascals’ and ‘testicles’) with ‘proud fantastic liveries’. Liveries were not just individual outfits but suits of clothes bestowed by a nobleman upon his followers. The favourite’s ability to reproduce himself without procreation evokes the proverbial analogy, which survives in the Amercian expression ‘queer as a three dollar bill’, betwe
en counterfeiting and sodomy.

  Henry Peacham’s emblem of Ganymede shows a nude youth riding on a cock. One of his ‘foul sodomitious’ hands holds Circe’s wand; the other grasps ‘Medals, of base metals wrought, / With sundry moneys, counterfeit and naught’. Ganymede’s aristocratic medals are meant to signify his aristocratic status; but they too are ‘counterfeit and naught’. In her history of Edward’s reign, Lady Elizabeth Cary uses the same analogy to describe the king’s relationship to his minions: ‘his wandering eyes now ravage through the confines of the great Court, made loose by his example. Here he seeks out some Piece, or Copper metal, whom by his Royal stamp he might make current.’ The analogy between sodomy and counterfeiting takes on added interest from the fact that the playwright and his roommate Richard Baines were involved in a counterfeiting scheme around the time Marlowe wrote Edward II. Gaveston’s success at minting counterfeit nobles replicates the playwright’s capacity to demystify the tokens of nobility, and to create a realm where counterfeit nobles are the coin of the realm.

  13.1 Ganymede from Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna, 1612.

  The king’s commitment to a politics of mimicry erodes his authority by undermining the singularity of his identity. Mortimer calls Edward’s bluff on the eve of Gaveston’s first and last battle. ‘When wert thou in the field with banner spread?’ he asks. ‘But once! And then thy soldiers marched like players, / With garish robes, not armour’ (II.ii.181–83). The transvestite monarch, ‘Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest, / Where women’s favours hung like labels down’ (185–86), laughed at the regular soldiers. The king’s success at deconstructing the signs of manliness comes full circle with his ineffectual army of minions. Mortimer’s indictment resonates with the commonplace notion, recurrent throughout the anti-theatrical literature, that plays make spectators unfit for the manly exercise of war. It also recalls the notorious defeat of Edward and his favourites at Bannockburn, and Henri of Navarre’s surprising victory over Henri III’s army of effetes at the battle of Coutras. These instances all reinforced the prejudice that gay men lacked the ability to wage war.