Christopher Marlowe

[fajrdrako]

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl.

After reading Will in the World, I was feeling curious about Marlowe, the popular young playwright who died violently just before Shakespeare's first play was performed. This was the first book I got from the library - a book not about his life, but about his death. Not written by a historian, but by a journalist, and hence, written with style. It has one of the most interestingly artistic book jackets I have seen, designed by Peter Dyer - the face of Marlowe, hidden, peeking out mysteriously from behind a screen.

It was a fascinating look at Elizabethan espionage and Elizabethan life.

Christopher Marlowe was born at about the same time as Shakespeare, the son of a cobbler in Canterbury. In his teens, he got a scholarship to Cambridge. Since Cambridge kept good records, the historians know what he spent on his food and lodging - he spent 1shilling (the scholarship allotment) till suddenly, when he was about 21, he suddenly started squandering 18 shillings per week on food - it sounds like the Renaissance equivalent of switching from McDonald's to expensive steak houses. If a certain portrait is Marlowe, as speculated, he suddenly had the money for expensive clothes - and a portrait. Then when it came time for the authorities to award him his M.A. they hesitated, because, it seemed, he'd been absent without reason on several occasions, and was suspected of Catholic sympathies. So the Privy Council intervened - not so, they said; he was doing important work for the Queen, and should be given his degree. So the Cambridge authorities did so, but I can picture them scratching their heads and thinking, "Huh?" Just like the historians. All right, concluded Nicholls and (some) other historians: he was doing undercover espionage for Sir Francis Walsingham, posing as a secret Catholic to infiltrate and root out other secret Catholics and their seditious acts at Cambridge.

Then Nicholls paints a picture of Walsingham's secret police, and the darker side of life in Elizabethan England. But not before dealing with Marlowe's death at the age of 29. The story put about at the time and long accept as the truth was that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl in a quarrel over the bill - the 'reckoning'. But it wasn't a tavern and there was no brawl. What was it, then? Nicholls spends 350 pages of analysis of the lives of the three other men present, their connection to the Catholics/counter-Catholic plots, and their motives for wanting rid of Marlowe - or, more precisely, the motives of the Earl of Essex for wanting rid of Marlowe. It was fascinating, at first. All this underworld scheming, the remarkable availability of records - even the details of the life woman who owned the house in which Marlowe was killed - she was a slightly-distant cousin by marriage of the Earl of Essex, whose husband had died a few years before the murder.

Then it began to seem like the same stories over and over. It began to remind me more and more of the Cold War McCarthy witch hunts, with the difference being that those being hunted were not communists but Catholics, and the enemy power was Spain not Russia. To some extent the fear was real - there was an Armada, they were at war with Spain in the Netherlands - and to some extent it was paranoid fantasies made real by the Walsingham Secret Police playing agent provocateur and, by their oppressions, driving Catholics to treason. Interestingly, though, there were two great ideological crimes that Walsingham's people were trying to ferret out - Catholicism and atheism, one as bad as the other. Catholicism of course made a person suspect of being a Spanish agent. Atheism, I suppose, made a person suspect of having no allegiance at all, and therefore being untrustworthy.

As the theme of the wandered through various shifty individuals - including Marlowe's apparent involvement in counterfeiting money in the Netherlands - the fact that he was an incredibly successful playwright was pretty much ignored. In fact, Marlowe himself was pretty much ignored, because once we get past those records of what he spent on food at Cambridge, the record of his life is pretty sparse. Massive crowds were going to his plays and then to the sequels of his plays. They were controversial - and spectacular - and grandiose. People were lapping it up, that grandiosity.

Then he died, young and violently. The most interesting and moving comment on Marlowe was by William Shakespeare in As You Like It: he actually quotes from one of Marlowe's poems, and then has Touchstone say,
"When a man's verses cannot be understood... it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."

Trust Shakespeare to get it right, and movingly, in so few words.

Tired of reading Nicholls go on about the tangled knot of who was spying for whom and when and why and what the evidence is, I was glad when he got back to the real point - Marlowe's murder. I was not entirely convinced the Earl of Essex was behind it - and was left wondering all sorts of things. Was Marlowe really connected to the "School of Night", the mysterious scientific/occult faction of the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Walter Raleigh? It all seemed more and more obscure and unconvincing to me, and somewhere in all the plotting the personality and writing ambitions of the young Cambridge scholar were lost.

So I read a bunch of articles about Marlowe. Some dismissed the 'espionage' angle as speculative fiction,
others thought it was possible but the evidence is all circumstantial and inconclusive. Of course it is; secret police
don't advertise themselves. One article, who called Nicholl's book fiction, even doubted whether Marlowe wrote
Tamburlaine, his first and most popular play, since there is no written evidence of it before his death. But
everyone said he wrote Tamburlaine, he was famous in his time for writing Tamburlaine....

I was trying to think why he may have been absent from Cambridge without permission, and making
money at whatever he was doing, if he were not involved in espionage for Walsingham. Writing plays? That
sprang to mind first, but the Privy Council would hardly call that important business for the queen, even if she had
commissioned the plays. Which would probably not be a state secret. Maybe he really was into counterfeiting,
and just didn't get caught, as he did later in Holland. But then why would the Privy Council step in?

Nicholls mentions a few other theories about the death of Marlowe only to dismiss them - one being the
theory that Marlowe was killed in a lover's quarrel, or triangle, or by a jealous rival. No evidence either way.
Nicholl also opts out of answering the question of whether Marlowe was gay with the (rather odd statement) "we
do not know quite what it meant to be gay in Elizabethan England." Marlowe shows sympathetic portraits of gay
characters in his plays, and was said to be gay (and an atheist) by two people who knew them - but one of them
hated him and the other spoke under torture. "He's dead, so nothing I said about him can harm him," said his
former roommate, Thomas Kyd, who had (under torture) accused him of writing a seditious and atheistic
document which historians now think was in Kyd's own handwriting, found among Kyd's own papers. But
Marlowe was still alive when Kyd gave his testimony. From my perspective, being an atheist and being gay isn't a
bad thing, or even particularly shocking or unusual. Kyd said that Marlowe said that Christ, besides being an
ordinary man and not God, was St. John's lover. His actual words were, "Jesus was St. John's Alexis." Nicholl
didn't explain and I had to scramble to find out what the classical allusion was - it turns out that one of Virgil's
lovers was named Alexis. You get to know these things when you have a classical education at Cambridge.

Richard Baines, a former friend turned enemy, quoted Marlowe as saying "All those that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Perhaps it would be illuminating to look at references to smoking in his plays.

There's another aspect to this book that I enjoyed. This was a library book. Someone had used yellow highlighter on the book - not enough to interfere with reading it, thank goodness: there's a special circle in hell for people who use highlighters on library books. And someone else wrote notes in the margin.

Whoever wrote these marginal notes is a devotee of the other big Marlowe myth: that he became Shakespeare. Reading this person's comments on Nicholl's book was as entertaining, sometimes, as reading Nicholl's text. I don't know the details of the "Marlowe became Shakespeare" theory, though the gist is pretty clear from this man's notes. He says that the 'glorious truth' is that Marlowe was the lover of Sir Thomas Walsingham, and when he saw that Marlowe was about to be arrested and killed on charges of atheism and sedition because of the accusations of Richard Baines, he spirited him away and created a new identity for him under the name of William Shakespeare, making it appear that Marlowe had been murdered by substituting another body. Marlowe was then able to stay in London and become an even more successful and famous playwright than he had been before. But how could "Shakespeare" avoid all the people who had ever known Marlowe, when they moved in the same circles and put on plays for the same audiences with some of the same actors? And what happened to the real Shakespeare? Yes, I know, I have to read the books by the proponents of these theories to know. I'm not sure I want to. I'm a big proponent of the "Shakespeare was Shakespeare, and he wrote this own plays" theory.

Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life by Constance Brown Kuriyama. This is a scholarly biography of
Marlowe, not nearly as much fun to read as the more informal style of Nicholl, but it has its virtues. One is that the last fifty pages or so of the book reproduce in print form the various documents relating to Marlowe's life - precious few though they are. This includes his christening, wills he witnessed, his various encounters with the law, and the testimony against him by Richard Baines -both originals and translations of the Latin. She quotes an interesting piece of anonymous poetry about Marlowe from 1601 (four years after his death):

Pitty it is, that wit so ill should dwell
Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.

After reading Nicholl, it was interesting to see Kuriyama's perspective on the same material. She gives more credence to Baines' testimony than Nicholl does, on the grounds that an informer who told outright lies would soon be out of work, and Baines had at that time been working for Walsingham for at least seven years. Besides, she thinks the verbatim line, "St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ" has "a distinctly Marlovian flavour" and she concludes that Baines' comments were true: "telling the truth can often do more damage than lying." She believes Marlowe had by that time a reputation for atheism and "unorthodox opinions".

Otherwise the information about his life is pretty much bare bones. She does have this interesting statement: "In the twentieth century, Marlowe's reputation continued to rise, and he was regularly described as a genius.... What we know of Marlowe himself was tweaked to fit new iconic molds and political agendas: he was now the intellectual and social revolutionary; the jaded spy; the openly gay man; the anarchistic bad boy; and ultimately, the victim of corrupt, oppressive authority or political machinations." She describes the theories that Marlowe was Shakespeare as "deliberate selection and distortion of evidence and unrestrained fanciful speculation.... Theories that Marlowe was Shakespeare seem to satisfy some deep psychological need to dethrone an authority figure, and who better than Marlowe, the anti-authoritarian poster boy, to meet that need?"

Her final summarizing comment: "[Marlowe was] an exceptionally talented poet, a daring innovator whodied young and violently, from whom Shakespeare learned part of his trade. Beyond that bare outline, we invent our own Marlowe. But perhaps it is better to exist merely as a figment of others' imaginations - especially such an alluring, seductive, glittering figment - than not to exist at all."

I suppose the problem is that to me he isn't an alluring, seductive, glittering figment. He's a series of negatives and unknowns. He isn't Shakespeare. He's a poet I haven't read, a playwright whose plays I haven't seen - he hasn't often been performed in my lifetime, not compared to Shakespeare or Neil Simon, though I see that Edward II is being done at Stratford this year. He is an elusive mystery, and his charisma isn't the charm of a strong personality so much as the intriguing void of an unsolved puzzle.