Christopher Marlowe

Born in Canterbury the son of a shoemaker, Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on a scholarship and received his bachelor of arts degree in 1584. In 1587 the university hesitated to award him his master's degree because of a rumour that he had converted to Catholicism and gone to the English college at Rheims to prepare for the priesthood. However, his degree was awarded on schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the queen^[1]. The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but their letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although Marlowe obviously did serve the Queen in some capacity.

Literary career

The brief Dido, Queen of Carthage seems to be Marlowe's first extant dramatic work, possibly written at Cambridge with Thomas Nashe.

Marlowe's first known play to be performed on the London stage was Tamburlaine (1587), a story of the conqueror Timur. It was one of the first popular English plays to use of blank verse, and along with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, it is often considered to mark the beginning of the mature phrase of the Elizabethan theatre. Tamburlaine was a smash success, and Tamburlaine Part II soon followed. The sequence of his remaining plays is unknown. All were written on controversial themes. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the recently published German Faustbuch, was the first dramatic version of the Faust legend of a scholar's dealing with the devil. The Jew of Malta, depicts a Maltese Jew's barbarous revenge against the city authorities, featured a prologue delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. Edward the Second is an English history play about the dethronement of Edward II by his dissatisfied barons and his French queen (the possibility that Elizabeth I might be dethroned by pro-Catholic forces was very real at the time). The Massacre at Paris is a short, sketchy play portraying the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomews Day Massacre in 1572, an event that English Protestants frequently invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery.

Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn. He was unusually tall for the time, and the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written especially for him. Marlowe's plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.

Marlowe also wrote poetry, including the first book of a minor epic, Hero and Leander (published with a continuation by George Chapman in 1598), the popular lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia.

The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe's other works were published posthumously. In 1599, his translation of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive material.

The Marlowe legend

As with other writers of the period, such as Shakespeare, little is known about Marlowe. Most of the evidence is legal records and other official documents that tell us little about him. This has not stopped writers of both fiction and non-fiction from speculating about his activities and character. Marlowe has often been regarded as a spy, a brawler, a heretic, and a homosexual, as well as a "magician", "duelist", "tobacco-user", "counterfeiter", and "rakehell". The evidence for most of these claims is slight. The bare facts of Marlowe's life have been embellished by many writers into colourful, and often fanciful, narratives of the Elizabethan underworld.

Spying and death

Marlowe is often described as a government spy, and his early death at the hands of men associated with the London underworld has often been described as an assassination.

Possible evidence of spying

As noted above, in 1587 the Privy Council ordered Cambridge University to award Marlowe his MA, denying rumours that he had been to the English Catholic college in Rheims, saying instead that he had been engaged in unspecified "affaires" in the Queen's service.

It has sometimes been theorized that Marlowe was the "Morley" who was tutor to Arbella Stuart in 1589, described by Arbella's mother as "much damnified by leaving the University" ^[2]. This possibility was first raised in a TLS letter by E. St John Brooks in 1937; in a letter to Notes and Queries, John Baker has added that only Marlowe could be Arbella's tutor due to the absence of any other known "Morley" from the period with an MA and not otherwise occupied^[3]. This possibility has not been acknowledged in any Marlowe biographies; some consider the "Morley" in quesion to have been a son of the musician Thomas Morley^[4], although Thomas Morley (who was born 1558) could not have had a son old enough to attended university at this time. If Marlowe was Arbella's tutor, it might indicate that he was a spy, since Arbella was at the time a possible successor to the English throne.^{[citation needed]}

In 1592, Marlowe was arrested in the Dutch town of Flushing for attempting to counterfeit coins. He appeared before the Privy Council but was not charged.

Arrest and death

In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel"[1], written in blank verse, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed "Tamburlaine." On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a fragment of a heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted, possibly under torture, that it had belonged to Marlowe. Two years earlier they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange,^{[citation needed]} and Kyd suggested that at this time, when they were sharing a workroom, the document had found its way among his papers. Marlowe's arrest was ordered on 18 May. Marlowe was not in London, but was staying with Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham.^{[citation needed]} However, he duly appeared before the Privy Council on 20 May and was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary." On 30 May, Marlowe was murdered.

Various versions of Marlowe's death were current at the time. Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for his "epicurism and atheism".^{[citation needed]} In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight, and this is still often stated as fact today.

The facts only came to light in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report on Marlowe's death in the Public Record Office [2]. Marlowe had spent all day in a house (not a tavern) in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, along with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot. Frizer was a servant of Thomas Walsingham. Witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had earlier argued over the bill, exchanging "divers malicious words." Later, while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch, Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and began attacking him. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was accidentally stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The coroner concluded that Frizer acted in self-defense, and he was promptly pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, on 1 June, 1593.

Marlowe's death is considered by some to be an assassination for the following reasons:

1. The three men who were in the room with him when he died all had links to the intelligence service as well as to the London underworld.^{[citation needed]} Frizer and Skeres also had a long record as loan sharks and con-men, as shown by court records.
2. Their story that they were on a day's pleasure outing to Deptford is considered implausible. In fact, they spent the whole day closeted together, deep in discussion. Also, Robert Poley was carrying confidential despatches to the Queen, who was at Greenwich nearby, but instead of delivering them, he spent the day with Marlowe and the other two.^{[citation needed]}
3. It seems too much of a coincidence that Marlowe's death occurred only a few days after his arrest for heresy.
4. Marlowe's arrest for heresy was handled by the Privy Council in an unusual way. He was released in spite of prima facie evidence, and even though the charges implicitly connected Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Northumberland with the heresy. This suggests to some that the Privy Council considered the heresy charge to be a set-up, and/or that it was connected with a power struggle within the Privy Council itself.^{[citation needed]}
5. The various incidents that hint at a relationship with the Privy Council (see above), and by the fact that his patron was Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis' second cousin, who was actively involved in intelligence work.

For these reasons and others, some believe there was more to Marlowe's death than emerged at the inquest. However, on the basis of our current knowledge, it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions about what happened or why. There are many different theories, of varying degrees of probability, but no solid evidence. Since we have only written documents on which to base our conclusions, and since it is probable that the most crucial information about Marlowe's death was never committed to writing at all, we are unlikely ever to know for certain the full circumstances of Marlowe's death.

Atheist

Marlowe had a reputation for atheism. The only contemporary evidence for this is from Marlowe's accuser in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had reported that both men had accused one another of instigating the counterfeiting and of intention to go over to the Catholic side (considered atheism by Protestants), "both as they say of malice one to another". Following Marlowe's arrest on a charge of atheism in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word"[3]. Baines attributes to Marlowe outrageously blasphemous ideas such as, "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest [unchaste]", "the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly" and, "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom" (cf. John 13:23-25) and "that he used him as the sinners of Sodom". He also claims that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are merely skeptical in tone: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". Similar statements were made by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture[4][5](see below); both Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh's circle. Another document claims that Marlowe had read an "atheist lecture" before Raleigh. Baines ends his "note" with the ominous statement: "I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped".

Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists. ^{[citation needed]} However, plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be performed, and the censorship of publications was under the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any of Marlowe's works to be unacceptable (apart from the Amores).

 

 

"Sodomy"

Marlowe is often described today as homosexual, although the evidence for this is inconclusive.

It should be noted that the question of whether an Elizabethan was 'gay' or 'homosexual' in a modern sense is anachronistic; for the Elizabethans, what is today termed homosexual or bisexual was more likely to be recognised as simply a sexual act, rather than an exclusive sexual orientation and identity (see History of homosexuality).

Documentary evidence

Two documents suggest that Marlowe may have been homosexual, though all are clearly circumstantial, or reported by people of questionable motives.

• The most graphic is the testimony of Richard Baines, an informer who made a long list of allegations against Marlowe after his arrest in Flushing (see above). Most of these allegations concern Marlowe's atheism, but Baines also claimed that Marlowe said "all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools" and that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom".
• In 1595, after Marlowe's death, his one-time roommate and fellow dramatist, Thomas Kyd was tortured and imprisoned when atheistic papers were found in his room. After claiming Marlowe's responsibility, Kyd produced on request a shorter list of allegations, which include the claim that Marlowe "would report St. John to be our saviour Christ's Alexis ... that is, that Christ did love him with an extraordinary love."

In addition, it has been pointed out that there is no evidence of any marriage or female companionship for Marlowe.

Some scholars argue that the evidence is inconclusive and that the reports of Marlowe's homosexuality may simply be exaggerated rumours produced after his death. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen describe Baines's evidence as "unreliable testimony" and make the comment: "These and other testimonials need to be discounted for their exaggeration and for their having been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witch-hunt" ^[5]. It has also been noted that Kyd's evidence was given after torture, and thus may have little connection to reality.^{[citation needed]}

Literary evidence

Marlowe's writing is also notable for its homosexual themes.

• Edward II (c.1592) is one of the very few English Renaissance plays to be concerned with homosexuality, since Edward II had that reputation. The portrayal of Edward and his love, Piers Gaveston, is unflattering, but so too is the portrayal of the barons who usurp him, and the play's numerous modern revivals have demonstrated that Edward's tragic decline and death can elicit sympathetic responses; it is thus conceivable that some contemporary audience members might have responded similarly.
• In Dido, Queen of Carthage, he opens with a scene of Jupiter "dandling Ganymede upon his knee" and says "what is't, sweet wag, I should deny thy youth?, whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes." Venus complains during the play that Jupiter is playing "with that female wanton boy."
• In Hero and Leander, Marlowe writes of the male youth Leander, "in his looks were all that men desire" and that when the youth swims to visit Hero at Sestos, the sea god Neptune becomes sexually excited, "imagining that Ganymede, displeas'd... the lusty god embrac'd him, call'd him love... and steal a kiss... upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb", while the boy naive and unaware of Greek love practices said that, "You are deceiv'd, I am no woman, I... Thereat smil'd Neptune."

The mere inclusion of same-sex love themes, often in very tender terms, in Marlowe's works is seen by some as a significant ^{[citation needed]}.

It has been noted that the argument from his plays and poems depends on a circular argument ^{[citation needed]}: that only someone who was homosexual would have written them. Furthermore, much of Marlowe's work is also concerned with heterosexuality. However, heterosexuality is frequently presented negatively, such as when Hero commits suicide after consummating her relationship with Leander (a significant departure from the plot of the original myth), or when Aeneas must escape the clutches of Dido in order to fulfil his destiny. In Marlowe's work, heterosexuality is most frequently presented as a restriction of freedom, lacking the elevated nature of same-sex attraction.^{[citation needed]} However, this could also be interpreted as a contrast between love and friendship; love presents difficulties not inherent in a non-erotic relationship.

For debates of a somewhat similar nature, compare Sexuality of William Shakespeare.

Marlowe's reputation among contemporary writers

Whatever the particular focus of modern critics, biographers and novelists, for his contemporaries in the literary world, Marlowe was above all an admired and influential artist. Within weeks of his death, George Peele referred to him as "Marley, the Muses' darling"; Michael Drayton noted that he "Had in him those brave translunary things/That the first poets had", and Ben Jonson wrote of "Marlowe's mighty line". Thomas Nashe wrote warmly of his friend, "poor deceased Kit Marlowe". So too did the publisher Edward Blount, in the dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham.

The only contemporary dramatist to say anything negative about Marlowe was the anonymous author of the Cambridge University play The Return From Parnassus (1598) who wrote, "Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell."

The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in his only reference to a contemporary writer, in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander (Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?") but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." This appears to be a reference to Marlowe's murder (which involved a fight over the 'reckoning' - the bill).

Recent Marlowe controversies

In November 2005, a production of Tamburlaine at the Barbican Arts Centre in London was accused of defering to Muslim sensibilities by amending a section of the play in which the title character burns the Koran and excoriates the prophet Muhammad; the sequence was changed so that Tamburlaine instead defiles books representing all religious texts. The director denied censoring the play, stating that the change was a "purely artistic" decision "to focus the play away from anti-Turkish pantomime to an existential epic". This however shifts a considerable degree of focus from a number of anti-theist (and specifically anti-Muslim) points within the play and changes, significantly, the tone and tenor of the work. ^{[citation needed]}[6] [7]

Marlowe as Shakespeare

Main articles: Shakespearean authorship and Marlovian theory

Given the murky inconsistencies concerning the account of Marlowe's death, an ongoing conspiracy theory has arisen centred on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. Authors who have propounded this theory include:

• Wilbur Gleason Zeigler It Was Marlowe (1895)
• Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955)[8]
• Louis Ule, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography
• AD Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell (1994)

Works

The dates of composition are approximate.

Plays

• Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1583) (with Thomas Nashe)
• Tamburlaine (c.1587)
• Doctor Faustus (c.1589, revised c.1592)
• The Jew of Malta (c.1589)
• Edward II (c.1592)
• The Massacre at Paris (c.1593)

Poetry

• Translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (c.1582)
• Translation of Ovid's Elegies (c. 1582)
• 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' (1590s)
• Hero and Leander (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598)

Marlowe in fiction

• Marlowe features heavily in the Harry Turtledove alternate history novel Ruled Britannia (2002), about an England ruled by Catholics. He is depicted as a contemporary and friend of Shakespeare.
• Marlowe is played by Rupert Everett in the film Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which helps Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet. His last line is a cheery "Well, I'm off to Deptford!" After Marlowe's murder, screenwriter Tom Stoppard has Shakespeare say, "I would change all my plays to come for one of his that will never come".
• Marlowe survives his assassination in the tangentially alternate history novel Armour of Light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett.
• In Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman, Marlowe makes a brief appearance in a pub. He and Shakespeare are discussing the content of "Faustus" while Morpheus and an immortal human have their own conversation. Marlowe is represented as a great playwright with the young and inexperienced Shakespeare in awe of his friend. Marlowe is also referenced in a later Shakespeare-centric Sandman comic, in which Morpheus tells Shakespeare of his friend's assassination.
• Marlowe is a central character in Lisa Goldstein's fantasy novel Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon
• Louise Welsh's Tamburlaine Must Die is a novel based on a fictitious theory about the last two weeks of Marlowe's life.
• Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer, a novel, intertwines Marlowe as a possible spy in his time and events in the present, Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7434-3292-4
• Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford is an account of Marlowe and his death; according to Burgess, it is fictionalized but does not depart from any known historical facts.
• The School of Night (ISBN 031228778X), by Alan Wall, features a protagonist/narrator who constructs a theory identifying a not-really-dead Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare's works, with the Stratfordian merely a cat's-paw enlisted to pass them off as his own for money and/or because Marlowe's espionage on the continent discovered that Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic.
• Marlowe is the central character in One Dagger for Two by Philip Lindsay, which includes some speculation about his death.
• Marlowe is one of the guest characters, having allegedly survived his murder sixteen years previously, in Andy Lane's The Empire of Glass, a Doctor Who Missing Adventure featuring the First Doctor and set in Venice.

Additional reading

• Brooke, C.F. Tucker. The Life of Marlowe and "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage." London: Methuen, 1930. (pp. 107, 114, 99, 98)
• Marlow, Christopher. Complete Works. Vol. 3: Edward II. Ed. R. Rowland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (pp. xxii-xxiii)
• Louis Ule Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography, Carlton Press, 1996. ISBN 0806250283
• David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, OUP, 1998; ISBN 0192834452
• J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, eds., Constructing Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge 2000. ISBN 052157255X
• Constance Kuriyama,Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell University Press, 2002. ISBN 0801439787
• Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Vintage, 2002 (revised edition) ISBN 0099437473
• Alan Shepard, "Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada", Ashgate, 2002. ISBN 075460229
• M. J. Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe?, Sutton, 2002; ISBN 0750929634
• Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford, Carroll & Graf, 2003. (novel about Marlowe based on the version of events in The Reckoning) ISBN 0786711523
• David Riggs, "The World of Christopher Marlowe", Henry Holt and Co., 2005 ISBN 0805080368
• Louise Walsh "Tamburlaine Must Die", novella based around the build up to Marlowe's death.
• John Passfield, Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe (novel) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-1558-X
• John Passfield, The Making of Water Lane (journal) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-2020-6