Christopher Uptake
Page 20
The Master’s Lodge in which the portrait was found was of a later date, but was known to have housed earlier portraits. It’s unknown exactly how the portrait came to still be in the Lodge when part of it was demolished. Various accounts suggest that the panel on which the portrait was painted had been known to be in the lodge previously, but had not been thought to be important – or that it had been put away in a cupboard and forgotten. (There is precedence for such forgetfulness. At Ingestre Hall, in Staffordshire, an immensely valuable tapestry of a Raphael painting was found bundled up and stuffed at the back of a small cupboard used as a ‘coal-hole’. And in Durham Castle, a ‘junk-room’ was found to be, when cleared out, a forgotten and untouched gem of a Norman chapel.)
Another theory suggests that, the painting had been taken down from display, and hidden, because its subject had fallen into disfavour. This fits well with the theory that its subject is Marlowe, who indeed enjoyed a somewhat fraught relationship with his college.
Corpus Christi refused to grant him his MA because he had been absent, and been rumoured to have travelled abroad, and to have been at a Jesuit seminary in Rheims. The college was then ordered, by Elizabeth’s Privy Council, no less, to hand over the MA because ‘it was not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’ affaires he went about.’
And then Marlowe left the university to become a playwright, at a time when the theatre was considered an unsavoury way of life. And he was an atheist. Shortly after his death, many sensational pamphlets circulated, telling how he had been killed in a tavern brawl, and calling him ‘a Poet of scurrilite’, and ‘a barking dogge.’ They said that he ‘cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe’ that he was killed ‘in a Baudy-house, that he was ‘a filthy Play-maker’ and that, ‘Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, worke the ende of impious Atheists.’ (These 16th century gossip-sheets were no more accurate than their modern equivalents.)
So it’s clear that the University may well have wished to forget that Marlowe had ever been at Corpus Christi – and perhaps had his portrait taken down and hidden. There is precedence for this too. Henry Butts, Corpus Christi master in 1632, worked heroically to relieve suffering during the plague, but later went insane. This was deemed ‘a disgrace’, and his portrait was taken down and hidden.
The young man in the portrait wears a splendid black velvet jacket, slit to show a gold lining, with many silver buttons. It’s notable that, instead of the ruff usual at the time, he wears a simple collar of fine, almost transparent, lawn – which would have been expensive because of its delicacy. It’s been suggested that this couldn’t be Christopher Marlowe, ‘the cobbler’s eldest son’ because the Statute of Apparel would have made it illegal for him to wear silk or velvet (which was allowed only to those above the rank of Knight of the Realm.) Those showy, glittery buttons would have been illegal too. However, it’s clear from writings of the time that these laws were treated with the contempt they deserved.
So, the portrait was found in Marlowe’s college. It’s of a young man of exactly the right age to be Marlowe in the year he gained his MA – but for some reason, it was hidden and forgotten for 361 years. And then there’s the Grafton Portrait.
These portraits are almost certainly of the same man – allowing for the fact that both have been retouched. The retouching work was done separately, by different artists without reference to each other – and yet still, a strong likeness has survived. The dates and ages inscribed on the portraits, match exactly. The man in the Grafton Portrait is three years older. The style of dress is also the same – a rich, slashed velvet jacket, but no ruff. Instead, there’s that simple lawn collar again.
The Grafton Portrait was ‘discovered’ in 1907, when it was inherited by relatives of the tenant farmers who had kept it in their possession, probably since the 17th Century. It’s likely that it once belonged to the Duke of Grafton, but, during the disturbances and looting of the Civil War, it was removed to the nearby farmhouse.
The Grafton Portrait was believed to be of Shakespeare – but isn’t it likely that, over more than 300 years, the attribution became blurred? By the 18th Century, Marlowe was largely forgotten, while Shakespeare became more and more famous. A vague family memory that the portrait was of a famous man who wrote plays during the reign of Elizabeth I might easily turn into, ‘It’s of William Shakespeare.’
The earlier portrait, whoever it is of, is certainly not Shakespeare; but it was hidden away in Marlowe’s college. And, when the later portrait was painted, Marlowe was famous, with rich patrons. Shakespeare was unknown. Which was the more likely to have his portrait painted?
I am indebted for the above to the biography of Christopher Marlowe by A. D. Wraight. [Return to Table of Contents]
Notes on ‘University’
N1
It’s wrong to think that in the past, all was peace and quiet. With stony roads and iron-shod cartwheels, smiths and carpenters hammering, street-sellers ringing bells and shouting, animals being driven through the streets – or wandering free – and church bells ringing, towns could be noisy places.
Return to story.
N2
The rules of the University may seem harsh to us, but, as given here, they are historically accurate. It can be partly explained by the fact that undergraduates were usually only 14 or 15 when they went to University – hence the need for closer supervision. Chris is older because he is a scholarship boy. [Return to story]
[N3]
All the blood-sports – dog and cock-fighting, and bull, bear and badger baiting were commonly enjoyed at the time, and for centuries later. They are, of course, still enjoyed today, though mostly illegal. In the 16th Century theatres often held bear and bull-baiting in the morning, and put on a play in the afternoon.
The ‘Bull-ring’ in Birmingham (England) is so called because that’s where bull-baiting took place (and why the shopping centre now has a statue of an angry bull.) A friend of mine, who enjoys shopping at the Bull-Ring, but had never given any thought to the name, was horrified to discover this. But history often isn’t pretty.
These blood-sports were made illegal less because they were cruel than because of fear of the mob - large numbers of town workers gathered to watch, to drink and to gamble, and the authorities feared such gatherings. If you doubt this, consider that all the blood-sports popular with the urban working class – dog-fighting, bull-baiting, bear-baiting and cock-fighting – are illegal; while the blood-sports pursued by the rural rich – fox, stag and otter hunting – have been legal until very recently, and even now, the laws forbidding them are frequently flouted.
I don’t in any way support blood-sports, but find it hard to understand why tearing a badger to pieces with dogs is punished (quite rightly) with a jail sentence, while tearing a fox, otter or stag to pieces with dogs, is not. [Return to story]
[N4]
A crown was worth 60 pennies, or 5 shillings.
20 shillings equaled £1 – so Dick is offering Chris 85 shillings, or £4 and 5 shillings. (Or four and one-quarter pounds. Or £4.25)
Labourers would have earned between £5 and £10 a year. A skilled labourer, like Chris’ joiner father, would have earned something like £13-£15 a year. So Chris is being offered, for his first play, something like a third of his father’s annual earnings, or nearly a whole year’s earnings for an unskilled labourer.
By comparison, a merchant might earn £100 a year, while a nobleman might expect £1,500 to £3000 a year. But it is extremely difficult to compare historical monetary values to today’s values, and this is meant only as a rough guide. [Return to story.]
Notes on ‘Town’
[N5] It was common practice in the theatre at this time for playwrights to work collaboratively on a play, just as several scriptwriters work on TV series today. A theatre often put on a different play every afternoon, and the demand f
or material was constant. Some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare are considered to be collaborations, written by more than one person. (Though I have no truck with all the theories along the lines of ‘Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays, it was some Earl, or the Queen, or Marlowe or Bacon.’ I have no doubt that, apart from the odd collaborative effort that was shuffled into the canon, the majority of Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare. [Return to story]
[N6} There was great unrest during Elizabeth I’s reign over the Flemish Hugonauts who came to England to escape Catholic persecution. Pamphlets of the time express hatred for the refugees in exactly the same terms as now: they’re taking our jobs, they’re ruining our blood-lines, they’re being favoured by our government over the British,, and so on, and so on. [Return to story]
[N7] Torture was not legal in Good Queen Bess’s Police State, but was commonly used nevertheless. When a prisoner was ‘put to the question’, they were tortured. [Return to story]
N8 ‘Recusant’ meant one who refused to attend services of the State’s Protestant Anglican Church. They could be Catholics, or Protestants whose faith was more extreme than that of the State church. They could be athiests – Chris is a recusant.
It wasn’t a crime to be Catholic. You could be openly Catholic, provided you attended an official place of worship every week. You could stay away provided you paid the fine, but this was beyond the reach of most – so many Catholics, (and Protestant free-thinkers) used to go to an Anglican church, and talk at the back, or even play cards.
After the 1559 Act of Uniformity, it was illegal to hold or hear private Masses, and doing so was punished by imprisonment.
Things became even more serious after Pope Pius V sent out his Papal Bill in 1570, which declared Elizabeth I a bastard, a heretic and a usurper of the English throne (which truly belonged to the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.) The Bull released all Elizabeth’s subjects from allegiance to her, and excommunicated all who obeyed her orders.
This was a spectacular own goal from the Pope, as it made every Catholic priest entering England a inciter of rebellion, and every Catholic who heard him preach became not only a recusant, but a potential traitor. Return to story.
N9. This is recorded as having happened. Finding room to bury bodies was a perpetual problem, especially in towns and cities (and remained so for centuries). The reason why so many old churches have deep banks on either side of their paths – often supported by old gravestones – is that the soil-level has risen due to the hundreds and hundreds of burials in that same small area of ground. Old graves were constantly disturbed to make new ones – and most corpses didn’t have coffins, but only a shroud. So bones easily became scattered.
All the various ghosts and goblins Chris mentions – such as ‘Boneless’ – were believed in at the time. Return to story.
N10 The priest-holes Bagthorpe describes, and the methods for finding them, are all genuine. The priest-hole under the stairs, which he mentions, is in Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. When I was a child, I was taken to see this house several times, with my school, and the short flight of stairs was lifted up to show us the hide underneath. The hall is open to visitors still, and can be found on-line. Return to story.
Notes on ‘Alston’
[N11] Brentwood’s house, Alston Hall, is closely based on Stokesay Castle, near Ludlow in Shropshire. It is described as the finest and best preserved medieval manor house in England, and is open to visitors for part of the year. It was preserved because it was used as a cattle-shed for most of its history, and so never altered.
Stokesay Castle, however, has no priest-holes – it had ceased to be lived in long before the political and religious upheavals of the 16th Century made them necessary.[Return to story]
[N12] Queen Mary of England married Philip of Spain in 1554. [Return to story]
[N13] I wish I could see it too. This is a traveller’s tale from the Elizabethan period. I never forgot the small, Macedonian, bed-warming dragons, so matter-of-factly described, and used them in my book,‘Foiling The Dragon.’ [Return to story.]
OTHER BOOKS BY SUSAN PRICE AVAILABLE IN KINDLE
Overheard in a Graveyard – a collection of short ghost stories
The Ghost Drum – Book 1 of the Ghost World Sequence
Ghost Song – Book 2 of the Ghost World Sequence
See more about this book
Ghost Dance – Book 3 of the Ghost World Sequence
See more about this book
Hauntings – a collection of ghost stories
Nightcomers – a collection of ghost-stories
Head and Tales – a collection of traditional stories.
SOON TO BE AVAILABLE
The Ghost Wife – a novel of the supernatural
The King’s Head - a collection of traditional stories.
Ghost Spell - Book 4 of the Ghost World Sequence
Susan Price’s website can be found at www.susanpriceauthor.com for information about more of her books, reviews and extracts.
Susan Price is also a founder - together with Katherine Roberts – of the Authors Electric UK blog, which aims to bring together on one site, good quality independent publishing by UK authors. It can be found at http://authorselectric.blogspot.com
PRAISE FOR ‘GHOST SONG’
Ghost Song is a dark story in which life is as hopeless as death, yet it is also a magical tale of a shaman’s power versus love and loyalty. A parallel book to the author’s The Ghost Drum, the story is set in the same dismal and cold northern land. After the hunter Malyuta speaks a wish before a dead sable’s angry spirit (“So should my first son be – black, black hair… White skin, white teeth… Red lips, red cheeks… Black, white and red: sable, snow and blood.”) he is pleased when his newborn son fulfils his wish but distressed when the child turns out to have an immortal shaman’s soul. A shaman appears on the night the boy’s birth to claim him as his apprentice, but Malyuta will not give him up. The angry shaman does everything he can to take his apprentice, but the boy is protected by his father’s love. Price’s plot is as mystical as the words she weaves (“He would drop into a deep sleep, as far below dreams as a stone in the deep sea is below the waves”), but the story is hardly fey: the shaman has Malyuta violently murdered so that his loyal son is forced to follow the shaman’s wishes in order to save his father’s soul. This complex story will appeal to sophisticated fantasy readers. – December 1992
THE BULLETIN OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN’S BOOKS
PRAISE FOR ‘GHOST DANCE’
Ghost Dance [is] the final book of an extraordinary trilogy. Russian folk and fairy lore, Norse myths, old sagas, and something unmistakeable of Susan Price herself go into the stylistic cauldron. When an old shaman ends her allotted 300 years, her grandchild is still only a young witch. She has not yet served her shaman’s apprenticeship, but she is eager to work her skills on the evil Czar who (the woodmen lament) is ruining the land, felling the trees, wiping out the animals and breaking the pact of honour between man and beast.
Taking different forms, she sits at the Czar’s ear – but even she cannot change his terrible judgements, only twist them awry. There is only one way for her to gain true power. She must pass unaided through the Ghost World Gate, enter alone the Iron Wood of the Dead, and yet keep hold of her own name and return alive: ‘It was a fearful thing she had to do.’ The reader travelling through this rich, awesome, magical book also has a journey of this kind. NAOMI LEWIS
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