The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Marlowe’s original contribution to this discussion is not the ineffectual Gaveston, but rather his protégés, Spencer and Baldock. Neither of Edward’s new favourites has ever been to court. Baldock’s gentry is fetched ‘from Oxford, not from heraldry’ (II.ii.243); although Spencer is said to be ‘well allied’, he too belongs to the world of the humanist scholar seeking a place in a noble household. Because of their superior education, both men have a special facility with rhetoric and elocution; both are also ready to ‘stab, as occasion serves’ (II.i.43). All these details serve to link Spencer and Baldock with the historical Christopher Marlowe. They gave him an opportunity to speculate – even if he was not conscious of doing so – about the ways in which a man like himself could ‘cast the scholar off’ and enter the aristocratic world of politics and war.

  Young Spencer’s most valuable asset proves to be his father, Old Spencer, who miraculously appears just when King Edward’s fortunes are at their lowest ebb. Old Spencer supplies Edward with a much-needed infusion of armed might, yet he stands apart from the baronial military levies. Who is he? The old man enters speaking the heavily alliterated, strongly accented blank verse that Marlowe had introduced to the popular stage just a few years previously:

  Lo, with a band of bowmen and of pikes,

  Brown bills and targeteers, four hundred strong,

  Sworn to defend King Edward’s royal right,

  I come in person to your majesty –

  Spencer, the father of Hugh Spencer there …

  (III.i.36–40)

  Old Spencer’s self-introduction has a strong whiff of fantasy and romance. This is the first indication that Edward’s favourite even has a father, much less a father who commands four hundred armed men. The king sounds understandably incredulous: ‘Thy father, Spencer?’ (43)

  Old Spencer’s pikes and bowmen belong to a ‘trained band’ of citizen soldiers. These local militias served as auxiliary forces at times of crisis. During the late 1580s and early 1590s, when it appeared that Spain might invade England at any time, the government expanded the trained bands for purposes of national defence. Marlowe knew this institution from firsthand experience. His own father John belonged to a ‘Selected and Enrolled Band’, some two hundred strong, of bowmen and ‘pikes’ raised in 1588. According to a survey of arms in private hands, John Marlowe kept a bow, a brown bill and a pike at his home in Canterbury.

  The spread of weaponry among citizen militias served the interests of national defence, but on a local level posed a threat to baronial control. The trained bands counterfeited feudal power. In December 1591, William Lambarde, Justice of the Peace, cautioned Sir William Leveson about the selection of reliable militia commissioners for the county of Kent:

  For, as touching religion, they ought to be, not only no papists, but no Libertines, or Atheists, who are (next to the papists) the most dangerous; by cause as the Romanists desire a change, so these Epicureans care not for the present estate, persuading themselves that by that even hand which they bear, all mutations (I meantouching religion) will bear with them.

  The alliance between Young Spencer, the king’s Epicurean counsellor, and Old Spencer, with his trained band of armed citizens, gives dramatic expression to Lambarde’s fantasy that ‘Libertines’ could commission trained bands of armed men. Stranger still, Edward, his lovers and the citizen militia overcome the peers of the realm in pitched battle. In real life, such an outcome was scarcely imaginable. Edward and Spencer take the king’s project to a new level. Although they eventually fail, the play intimates that they could have succeeded in fashioning a new monarchy grounded in homosexual favouritism.

  Edward’s jailers cover his body with ‘foul excrements’ (V.iii.26) and incarcerate him in ‘the sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls’ (V.v.55–56). These are the stigmatic regalia of an anal sodomite. The king’s investiture with shit prepares him for the horrible punishment meted out in Holinshed’s Chronicles, where ‘they kept him down and withal put into his fundament an horn, and through the same they thrust up into his body an hot spit.’ There is biblical precedent for this affliction; the Lord had rained down fire on the inhabitants of Sodom. The grim overtones of homosexual rape, with Edward forever fixed in the pathic position, drives the moral home: the unrepentant criminal was consumed by his own lust. Holinshed reports that Edward resisted this role. The ‘wailful noise’ that Edward made ‘as the tormentors were about to murder him’ disturbs the story of his annihilation; many listeners ‘understood by his cry what the matter meant’.

  Marlowe prolongs this disturbance. The demonic murderer Lightborn (English for Lucifer) orders Edward’s two jailers to ‘get me a spit, and let it be red hot’ (V.v.30); then, still following Holinshed, he requisitions ‘A table and a feather bed’ (33) to pin Edward down. At this juncture the killers encounter an unexpected obstacle. Holinshed’s victim remained asleep until the murderers set about their work; his counterpart in Edward II forces himself to stay awake in order to confront his fate. Lightborn clearly intends that Edward, who has been denied sleep for the past ten days and nights, should doze off; but Edward wants to ‘see the stroke before it comes’ so that ‘My mind may be more steadfast on my God’ (75–77).

  Edward succeeds in this contest. Critics and directors usually assume that Lightborn finishes him off with the red-hot poker (Derek Jarman’s brilliant film adaptation is a notable exception). But Marlowe’s text, whether by accident or design, stubbornly omits to supply this implement. When the time comes to use it, the spit remains in the other room. The executioner’s plan goes awry when Edward cries out to God, and Lightborn calls for the table, but not the poker. The timing of Edward’s scream also merits scrutiny. Critics invariably deduce that Edward howls in reaction to the pain of being penetrated, or of being crushed between the table and the bed. Yet the original scream, in Holinshed, was a willed act of resistance that took place ‘as the tormentors were about to murder him’, when there was still something to be gained by screaming.

  The last act of Edward II, with its brooding, introspective soliloquies and drawn-out scenes of bodily torment, marks a shift in Marlowe’s sensibility. His new subject is physical suffering and resistance. He sympathizes with the victim. Despite Edward’s follies, Marlowe grants the unrepentant sodomite a measure of redemption in the end. This development coincides with a comparable shift in the course of Marlowe’s own fortunes. During the fourteen months of life that remained after his return from Flushing, Marlowe himself would be cast in the role of the victim.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Waiting for the End

  The Privy Council closed the playhouses on 23 June 1592. This order came in response to mounting complaints that the theatres posed a menace to public safety. In February, Lord Mayor William Roe warned Archbishop Whitgift that the playhouses were attracting ‘great numbers of light and lewd-disposed persons as harlots, cutpurses, cozeners, pilferers, and such like’ who ‘under the colour of resort to those places to hear the plays devise diverse evil and ungodly matches, confederacies, and conspiracies’. On Monday 12 June, Lord Mayor Sir William Webbe informed Burghley ‘of a great disorder & tumult like to grow’ that had erupted at a theatre on the previous night. When Webbe arrived at the scene he found ‘great multitudes of people assembled together’ including both liveried servants and ‘a great number of loose and masterless men apt for such purposes’. The mob had formed in response to the arrest of a serving man who had been incarcerated at the Marshalsea. Hoping to rescue their imprisoned comrade, ‘the said companies assembled themselves by occasion & pretence of their meeting at a play, which besides the breach of the Sabbath day giveth opportunity of committing these & such like disorders.’ The Council decreed ‘that there be no plays used in any place near thereabouts, as the Theatre, Curtain, or other usual places where the same are commonly used … from hence forth until the feast of St Michael’ in October. After the plague struck that August, the playhouses remained closed, as was
customary, throughout the affliction.

  Over the course of that summer Robert Greene included a moralizing letter ‘To three Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in Making plays’ in his Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance. Greene entreated the three gentlemen, Marlowe, Nashe and Peele, to stop preparing scripts for the actors. The pamphlet that precedes this letter uses fictionalized autobiography to show that the wages of sin is death. Greene has strayed and (worst of all) written for a company of players. He now senses the weight of divine wrath: ‘his hand lies heavy upon me … and I have felt he is a God that can punish enemies.’

  His letter to the three gentlemen applies this sombre wisdom to the ‘famous gracer of tragedians’, a thinly disguised image of Christopher Marlowe. Greene’s public address to Marlowe levels an extraordinary accusation of atheism, made by one ‘who hath said, with thee (like the fool in his heart), There is no God.’ Greene’s rhetorical question – ‘Is it pestilent Machiavellian policy that thou hast studied?’ – paves the way for his defamatory claim that Machiavelli ‘began in craft, lived in fear and ended in despair’, having ‘inherited the portion of Judas’, namely suicide. Although Greene is rehearsing Jesuit propaganda about Machiavelli, the thrust of his polemic comes through loud and clear. Machiavelli was an atheist and came to a bad end. Greene was an atheist and fears that he too will soon come to a bad end. Marlowe is an atheist and will suffer the same fate if he does not repent: ‘for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited’. Greene’s premonition of divine retribution soon gained authority: for he did die, after a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings, on 3 September 1592.

  When the future playwight Henry Chettle transmitted Greene’s manuscript to the printer William Wright, who published it later that month, he put Marlowe in harm’s way. Public anxiety about atheism escalated rapidly during the late 1580s and 1590s. Bishop Cooper complained that ‘the School of Epicure, and the Atheists, is mightily increased in these days’. The socially conservative Nashe warned that ‘there is no sect now in England so scattered as Atheism’. Bacon too reckoned that there was ‘no heresy which strives with more zeal to spread and sow and multiply itself than atheism’. Richard Hooker informed readers of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity that atheists had arisen in fulfilment of St Peter’s prophecy that mockers would flourish in the last days of the world. Hooker recommended reviving the penalty of Nebuchadnezzar (death by burning) to ‘restrain the fury of this wicked brood’.

  The Jesuit Robert Persons’ Advertisement Written to a Secretary of My L[ord]. Treasurer (1592) alleged that Burghley and other Privy Councillors were closet atheists. Relying on testimony from ‘such as live with him, and others that see their lives’, Persons claimed that the queen’s Privy Councillors ‘live as mere atheists, and laughing at other men’s simplicity in that behalf’. Persons portrayed Sir Walter Raleigh, who was vying for a seat on the Council, as an evangelizing Epicurean. He said that Raleigh, assisted by ‘the conjuror that is the M[aster] thereof’, maintained a ‘school of atheism … wherein both Moses and our Saviour, the Old and New Testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward’. Like the ‘attack ads’ of modern political campaigns, Persons’ accusations contained just enough plausibility to kindle public awareness. Raleigh did employ the mathematician Thomas Hariot, who tutored him in mathematics, and Hariot had a reputation for atheism. Within two years of its publication in 1592, Persons’ diatribe went through eight editions, including translations from Latin into English, French and German. Atheism was a crime in search of a perpetrator.

  The veiled allegations about Marlowe in the Groatsworth heightened public curiosity about leading figures in the atheist subculture. Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, which his printer registered on 8 August 1592, complained about ‘deep scholars’ who

  invent new sects of singularity … Whence, a number that fetch the Articles of their Belief out of Aristotle, and think of heaven and hell as the Heathen Philosophers, take occasion to deride our Ecclesiastical State, and all Ceremonies of Divine worship, as bug-bears and scarecrows … I hear say there be Mathematicians abroad, that will prove men before Adam; and they are harboured in high places, who will maintain it to the death, that there are no devils.

  The blasphemous claim that there were ‘men before Adam’ refers to the mathematician Hariot’s discussion of American Indian mythology in his Brief and True Report of the new Found Land of Virginia (1588). According to Baines, Marlowe himself proclaimed that men had existed ten thousand years before Adam, and cited ‘one Heriot being Sir W Raleigh’s man’ in the next sentence.

  Ten months later, when Thomas Kyd was charged with atheism on account of his association with Marlowe, he urged Lord Keeper Puckering

  to enquire of such as he conversed withal; that is (as I am given to understand) with Hariot, Warner, Royden, and some stationers in Paul’s churchyard … of whose consent if I had been, no question but I also should have been of their consort …

  Kyd implies that Marlowe, Hariot, the scientist Walter Warner and the poet Matthew Royden constituted an atheist clique. He does not suggest that anyone in ‘high places’ belonged to it. Of the two scientists in the clique, Hariot served both Sir Walter Raleigh and Northumberland, while Warner belonged to Northumberland’s retinue. Royden told his fellow poet George Chapman that Northumberland and Strange ‘had most profitably entertained learning in themselves, to the vital warmth of freezing science’. But there is no indication that any of the poets received employment or reward from any of the aristocrats. Marlowe knew their Lordship’s retainers; these were ‘such as he conversed withal’.

  The end of the summer found Marlowe back in Canterbury. His father, as always, lived in a twilight zone between economic self-sufficiency and dire poverty. John Marlowe reached the pinnacle of his progress through the ranks of the Shoemakers’ Guild when the company elected him Warden and Treasurer in 1589. At the end of his term the elder Marlowe could not produce the outstanding balance of 40s 10d and the company sued him to recover its assets. Yet John Marlowe landed on his feet once again. He found a new ally in the tailor John Jordan, who married his eldest daughter Margaret in 1590. He became constable for his ward of Westgate in 1591, presumably with a little help from his brother-in-law Thomas Arthur, the joint bailiff and jailer for Westgate. He found employment as churchwarden in the parish of St Mary Breadman from 1591–94. His successors, though, complained that John Marlowe ‘denieth to pay the clerk’s wages … and is now behind for three quarters of a year’. When he defaulted on his rent in St Mary Breadman, his landlord once again took him to court.

  On 15 September, the younger Marlowe was brawling on the streets again, this time in the ward of Westgate, where he attacked the tailor William Corkine with a stick and dagger. Since Marlowe’s father was the constable, and his uncle the jailer for Westgate, Marlowe may have thought that he had the law on his side. When Corkine sued Marlowe for £5 damages in the Canterbury civil court on 25 September, John Marlowe paid his son’s bail. The next day Marlowe’s lawyer John Smith prepared a criminal indictment alleging that Corkine had attacked Marlowe; but the Grand Jury at the Quarter Sessions threw out this indictment at once. Corkine vs Marlowe now went to trial, and was settled out of court during the first week of October.

  In the meantime, the defendant had broken his obligation to appear before the General Sessions of the Peace for Middlesex County during the first week after Michaelmas, which fell on 29 September. Marlowe was accumulating a substantial criminal record. He had been arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. He had been taken for coining and remanded to Lord Burghley. The justices of Middlesex County and the City of Canterbury knew him as a street fighter and violent man. He had failed to keep his bond. He had been publicly accused, albeit under an alias, of atheism, a crime punishable by death. To make matters worse, the attacks on the stage, coupled with the resurgent plague, threatened his livelihood
.

  * * *

  In the midst of his troubles, Marlowe grasped an opportunity to take Robert Greene’s advice and pursue a more reputable vocation. Thomas Watson died at the end of September. The task of seeing Watson’s Latin pastoral Aminta Gaudia through the press fell to his old ally Marlowe, who signed his prefatory letter ‘C.M.’ In keeping with Watson’s wishes, Marlowe dedicated the work to Lady Mary Herbert, wife of the Earl of Pembroke. Marlowe had written Edward II for the earl’s acting company earlier that year. He now turned to Lady Pembroke while her literary fortunes were in full flood. Just two years previously, the countess had completed her translations of Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death and Robert Garnier’s Tragedy of Antonie; both works appeared in the Stationers’ Register for 3 May 1592. She was on the verge of completing her edition of her brother Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. During these years Lady Pembroke, the ‘Muse of the poets of our time’, was inundated with dedications and tributes from Spenser, Nashe, Fraunce, Daniel, Watson and Marlowe, among others, and dispensed patronage to Fraunce and Daniel, both of whom lived on the Herbert family estate at Wilton.

  Before executing this commission, Marlowe read the dedications to Lady Pembroke in Daniel’s Delia (1592) and in Fraunce’s Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1593), incorporating phrases from both texts into his own letter to the countess. Marlowe introduces himself to Lady Pembroke as an Ovidian poet in mid-career. He has garnered the ‘sea bank myrtle of Venus’ that binds Ovid’s brows in the Amores; now the countess is ‘infusing the spirit of an exalted frenzy, whereby my poor self seems capable of exceeding what my own ripe talent is accustomed to bring forth’.