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History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe
Rodney Bolt


What if Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to the Continent and went on to write the works we now attribute to Shakespeare?'About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.' T. S. EliotMark Twain likened writing the biography of Shakespeare to reconstructing the skeleton of a brontosaurus – using 'nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris'. We work with a handful of facts and a pile of conjecture. All biographies of Shakespeare, from the wayward to the academic, use the same few-score hard facts kneaded together with legend, then leavened by a dash of zeitgeist and a large dollop of author's imagination. Poems and plays are plundered for booty, even by those who profess scepticism as to the inferences that can be drawn about the life from the work. Like statistics, quotations can be turned to very different facts.This book is not, of course, an attempt to prove that Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to the continent, and went on to write the work attributed to Shakespeare. It, however, playfully assumes that as its starting point, and swings the old bones around, viewing them from a different angle to build a different brontosaurus. It does so in a spirit of fun, and with the intention of a little saucy iconoclasm. Shakespeare's works are unassailable, and will survive any amount of subversion, but by playing with our commonplace history, Rodney Bolt argues that the quasi-religious idol the man has become is perhaps in need of the efforts of a wicked woodworm.Where other writers have looked at the evidence and deduced a story, Bolt has imagined a story, then supported it with the same sparse evidence. At this distance, the difference between deduction and speculation is paper thin. The point of the take is not only to question our view of history and the validity of biography, but to show how people travelled, how cultures crossed, and how art gets made.







Rodney Bolt

History Play







Dedication (#ulink_acd33368-e801-5eb5-a54e-fee659a89428)

For my parents


Epigraph (#ulink_735ba71f-f3d2-56ec-8a2e-48d39af60b72)

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

T. S. ELIOT


Contents

Cover (#ue721cc7c-9433-52ff-b4d3-671422b05bf9)

Title Page (#u953fbad6-3f75-50f5-921d-57f37a367ec0)

Dedication (#ulink_62586060-162b-56ac-a2f9-7fcf5acbd203)

Epigraph (#ulink_c62295cc-d8bc-561a-a020-064af6491ec2)

Foreword (#ulink_cb0c2625-3022-5c06-9f96-4ae661212b53)

PROLOGUE A Dead Man in Deptford (#ulink_4fc49651-160f-5014-890b-56203f676330)

PART I (#ulink_1a29339e-eca7-546b-9e65-f767dc44a746)

CHAPTER ONE Prefaces to Shakespeare (#ulink_1a5cd984-7c65-5ab4-9e21-291cab5e2f24)

CHAPTER TWO Une Histoire Inventée (#ulink_17b28964-f48c-5dd6-99cf-676b88937943)

CHAPTER THREE Catch My Soul

CHAPTER FOUR Gentlemen of a Company

Interlude

PART II

CHAPTER FIVE West Side Story

CHAPTER SIX Gypsy Soul

CHAPTER SEVEN Men of Respect

CHAPTER EIGHT Shakespeare in Love

CHAPTER NINE Theatre of Blood

CHAPTER TEN The Mousetrap

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Reckoning

Interlude

PART III

CHAPTER TWELVE His Exits and His Entrances

CHAPTER THIRTEEN In the Bleak Midwinter

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Renaissance Man

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Under the Mask

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Themes and Variations

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Prospero’s Books

Afterword



Appendices

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author



Praise



Copyright



About the Publisher


Foreword (#ulink_fe9faa8c-e5cc-5c82-bf1a-5e74c201686c)

How curious and interesting is the parallel – as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned – between Satan and Shakespeare. It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in tradition. They are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. By way of a preamble to this book, I should like to set down a list of every positively known fact of Shakespeare’s life, lean and meagre as the invoice is. Beyond these details we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures – a tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

FACTS

He was born on the 23rd of April, 1564.

Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not sign their names.

At Stratford, a small back-settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to ‘make their mark’ in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names.

Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank.

On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Whateley.

Next day William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns.

Within six months the first child was born.

About two (blank) years followed, during which period nothing at all happened to Shakespeare, so far as anybody knows.

Then came twins – 1585. February.

Two blank years follow.

Then – 1587 – he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind.

Five blank years follow. During this period nothing happened to him, as far as anybody actually knows.

Then – 1592 – there is mention of him as an actor.

Next year – 1593 – his name appears in the official list of players.

Next year – 1594 – he played before the Queen. A detail of no consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And remained obscure.

Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then

In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.

Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.

Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no protest.

Then – 1610–11 – he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbour who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.

He lived five or six years – till 1616 – in the joy of these elevated pursuits. Then he made a will and signed each of its three pages with his name.

A thorough businessman’s will. It named in minute detail every item of property he owned in the world – houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on – all the way down to his ‘second-best bed’ and its furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money still lacking. No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare’s will.

He left her that ‘second-best bed’.

And not another thing; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood with.

It was eminently and conspicuously a businessman’s will, not a poet’s.

It mentioned not a single book.

Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he gave it a high place in his will.

The will mentioned not a play, not a poem, not an unfinished literary work, not a scrap of manuscript of any kind.

Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that has died this poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a book. Maybe two.

If Shakespeare had owned a dog – but we need not go into that – we know he would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog, Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have got a dower interest in it. I wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business way.

He signed the will in three places.

In earlier years he signed two other official documents.

These five signatures still exist.

There are no other specimens of his penmanship in existence. Not a line.

Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn’t write and couldn’t tell her husband’s manuscript from anybody else’s – she thought it was Shakespeare’s.

When Shakespeare died in Stratford it was not an event. It made no more stir in England than the death of any forgotten theatre-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears – there was merely silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Ralegh and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his.

So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.

So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, he never wrote a letter to anybody in his life.

So far as anyone knows, he received only one letter during his life.

So far as anyone knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that one – a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to this day. This is it:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones

Sam L. Clemens, D.Litt,

Missouri, USA


PROLOGUE (#ulink_98804b5f-99e4-570a-9a90-76fdb0c000e5)

A Dead Man in Deptford (#ulink_98804b5f-99e4-570a-9a90-76fdb0c000e5)

Friends in high places can give you a pain in the neck, and Eleanor Bull’s connections were positively stratospheric. She was cousin to Blanche Parry, who was a close confidante of the Queen, and also related to Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister and the most powerful man in the land. She had an ear in court when she needed one, but was a servant of the court when her connections required it. They had made inconvenient demands of her before. But this time it was different. This time she had a dead poet on her hands.

Widow Bull had a maxim: ‘A friend i’ th’ court is better than a penny in purse.’ She had said it to the poet that morning. In a later age she might well have embroidered the wisdom and had it framed, hanging above the fireplace. Her husband Richard, sub-bailiff at the local manor house, had died three years earlier, leaving her with some standing but little money. It was her friends in court who helped put the pennies in her purse; in return they called on her discretion and enlisted her hospitality. Mrs Bull ran what we would today call a ‘safe house’ and letter-drop, in Deptford Strand.

History has dealt Eleanor Bull a double blow. It has turned her respectable, if somewhat clandestine establishment into a rowdy tavern, and it linked her name for ever with the death of the brilliant young poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, who (as tradition would have it) was ‘killed in a drunken brawl over a bill in Deptford’. We now know that was not the case. Recent research suggests that Marlowe was murdered as a consequence of his involvement in the shady world of Elizabethan espionage and behind-the-scenes politicking. The subsequent obfuscation of the story was deliberate.

Deptford, in 1593, was an ideal location for a safe house. It was within easy reach of London, and a convenient dock for ships that trafficked the Thames, to and from the open seas. Queen Elizabeth’s favourite residence, and a frequent meeting place of her cabinet, the Privy Council, was less than a mile down river at Greenwich. Two shipyards, one for the navy and one for merchant ships, filled the air with the smells of pitch and fresh-sawn timber as they churned out vessels to plunder Spanish treasure, explore the globe, and protect the realm. The Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham, had a house on Deptford Green. Foreign musicians from the Queen’s consorts and the Chapel Royal choir lived in Deptford, as did the joiners, chandlers and ropemakers of the ship industry, cadets from the naval college at Trinity House, and a transient population of seamen … and spies. Sailors, travellers, foreigners and minor courtiers could mingle unheeded on the streets. English and French, German and Dutch might be heard around tables in taverns. Some 4,000 incomers arrived to live in Deptford in the l590s, and most of them descended on the lodging houses in the riverfront area known as Deptford Strand. Mrs Bull’s ‘victualling-house’ would not have stood out at all.

She was used to taking in tired travellers from across the Channel – the ‘projectors’ and ‘intelligencers’ of the secret service network controlled by the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, and after his death by Lord Burghley’s hunchback son, Sir Robert Cecil. She soothed spies ravaged by seasickness with her famous posset (milk and egg yolks ‘seethed on a fire’, poured from on high into a bowl of warm ale or sack, and with a little ‘ginger and synomon cast on’*), passed on letters and packages from one unnamed man to another, or waited quietly out of earshot while visitors spoke to men from court.

Of the four men who arrived at Eleanor Bull’s on the morning of Wednesday, 30 May 1593, two were known to her. The poet had been coming in every morning at ‘the tenth hour before noon’ for the past ten days. No reason was given. He simply stayed for an ale, then left. She knew not to ask any questions. It was something to do with Sir Robert Cecil. She was to send Cecil a message ‘incontinent’ (immediately) if the poet did not appear. She didn’t like Sir Robert. An ambitious little bunch-backed toad, she thought, and had said as much to the poet. She was generally wise enough to keep such opinions to herself, but she had liked the poet, and he seemed to hold no high opinion of Sir Robert himself.

She may well have heard of Christopher Marlowe before he started appearing daily on her doorstep. Just a few years earlier his play Tamburlaine had been the talk of London, even in respectable circles, and he had followed it with further successes. But then, in Elizabethan times, it was the theatre company not the playwright that took the credit, and a play’s title not its author that achieved renown. If the name Kit Marlowe was familiar to her, it was more likely that she had heard it murmured during quiet conversations under her own roof.

The second man she knew better, though not always by the same name. Robert Poley was a frequent visitor – a university man with a flattering tongue; a king of smiles and a beguiler of women. ‘Sweet Robyn’ they called him. Lately, he was close with Sir Robert, and seemed to have some position of control. He frequently arrived to collect packages from other visitors, or (it seemed) to pass on instructions or make introductions. Often he had about him large amounts of good gold. In the past few months he had been travelling a lot to the Low Countries. Word slipped out about who was boarding which ship, even when coins closed lips and eyes. The other two men, she was to learn later, were Ingram Frizer and Nicholas Skeres. Of them she could say nothing, except that Skeres was most certainly not a gentleman.

They had come at about ten o’clock. The poet and Frizer arrived together. Sweet Robyn and Skeres were there to meet them. She had given them a room apart, as asked. They talked ‘in quiet sort together’ most of the day, but this was not unusual. Eleanor Bull was accustomed to the hushed back-and-forth tones as agents imparted their information. She gave them a passable lunch: pottage, neat’s-tongue pie, a little cold lamb (‘goode from Easter to Whitsun’ – she had just made it, Whitsun in 1593 fell on the following Sunday), a ‘sallat’ of boiled onions served with vinegar, oil and pepper, capon with prunes, currants and dates, and as a treat ‘baken stagge’ (another May favourite, probably gained through one of her connections – there were royal hunting grounds at Lewisham and Blackheath).* That would customarily have been at eleven o’clock. Later they walked in her garden, staying there until six, when they came back to the same room for the supper she had laid out. Sweet Robyn took her aside to talk about the bill. She didn’t see the others come in.

The poet Marlowe was resting when the supper was cleared. There was one bed in the room, against the wall. In front of it, Robert Poley and Ingram Frizer were seated playing ‘tables’ (backgammon). Skeres was drinking ale. Later, voices were raised and there were sounds of a scuffle; she was called in to the room. Frizer had two gashes on his head and the poet was dead. He had been stabbed above the eye, and his face was covered in blood. (The blade severed the internal carotid artery, and probably also caused an air embolism.) Sweet Robyn hastened to calm her. It was too late for a surgeon, and he didn’t call the watch. Instead, they waited for the coroner.

It was thirty-six hours before a coroner came. Not the district man, but William Danby, ‘Coroner of the household of our … lady the Queen’. Normally, such a grand official wouldn’t be bothered for a minor stabbing, but Danby had jurisdiction ‘within the Verge’, defined as the area within a twelve-mile radius of the body of the sovereign. Eleanor Bull’s house was under a mile from the palace at Greenwich, and the Queen was in residence. At the trial, sixteen mostly local men made up the jury: gentlemen and yeomen, a couple of bakers, a grocer and the miller of Deptford. They were told how ‘malicious words’ were uttered between ‘Christopher Morley’ (Marlowe) and Ingram Frizer about the ‘payment of a sum of pence, that is, le recknynge’, and that Marlowe, who was lying down, ‘moved in anger’ against Frizer, who was sitting at the table with his back to the bed, with Poley and Skeres sitting on either side. Drawing Frizer’s dagger ‘which was at his back’, Marlowe attacked him from behind, wounding him twice on the head (‘two wounds … of the length of two inches & of the depth of a quarter of an inch’). In the struggle to retrieve his dagger (valued at l2d) Frizer stabbed Marlowe, causing a wound ‘over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch’, killing him instantly. Frizer ‘neither fled nor withdrew himself’, and the inquest found that he had acted ‘in the defence and saving of his own life, against the peace of our said lady the Queen, her now crown & dignity’. Frizer was briefly imprisoned but quickly received a royal pardon. The body was carried that day along the Common to St Nicholas’s church, and buried in an unmarked grave.

If Eleanor Bull wondered why Ingram Frizer’s dagger was so easy to get at, why the argument with Marlowe reached such a pitch without Frizer turning to face him, why the other men appeared not to intervene, or how in the struggle Frizer had managed to dispatch the poet with such apparent neatness and efficiency, she wisely said nothing. William Danby was an experienced and high-ranking official, a friend of her kinsman Lord Burghley from their days together at the Inns of Court. Perhaps she scented the hand of Sir Robert Cecil in this. But Eleanor Bull never made a fuss and, as ever, Robert Poley paid her handsomely. With a little extra for the inconvenience. We can only imagine her displeasure with the world of spies as she cleaned away the blood and set her room to rights. Assignations are one thing, assassinations quite another.

There we could leave Widow Bull (she died peacefully three years later), were it not for something that not even she suspected.

The body on the bed that May evening was not that of Christopher Marlowe.


PART I (#ulink_a1e9aee4-e69e-52c0-910a-7f1ec1115255)


CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_d57cf993-0514-5f6c-a70a-13b497ea79c9)

Prefaces to Shakespeare (#ulink_d57cf993-0514-5f6c-a70a-13b497ea79c9)

In the year that Calvin died and Galileo was born, when the world was racked by religion and beginning to dream of science, two babies were baptised whose lives fortune’s fingers would entwine in a knot that we still cannot completely untie. In the parish of St George, near the great cathedral in Canterbury, Christopher Marlowe, the newborn son of a local shoemaker, was carried howling to the font on Saturday, 26 February 1564. Exactly two months later, on 26 April, in the country town of Stratford, William Shakespere, mewling son of a glovemaker, was entered in the parish register. By the late 1580s they would both be living in London and working for the same company of players, their affairs becoming increasingly entangled. Then in 1593, Marlowe would disappear from view and Shakespere would publish Venus and Adonis, calling it ‘the first heir of my invention’. The two events were not unconnected. We have learned that the incident in Widow Bull’s house in Deptford was not all we perhaps thought it was – or rather, that it was a little more than we thought it was. To reconstruct what happened up to that point, we begin with the story of baby Marlowe.

The infant that Goodwife Roose, the local midwife, pronounced ‘lusty and like to live’ was John and Katherine Marlowe’s second child in a string of nine, and by far the brightest. Perhaps he owed that to his father, who – fairly uncommonly for a shoemaker at the time – could read. Perhaps it was from his father too that little Christopher inherited a venturesome curiosity, which at times could be insatiable. No-one knows from whom he got his beautiful singing voice. For his infant howls soon transmuted into a tinkling treble, far superior to the singing of any of his siblings, and he was taken up by Thomas Bull, the cathedral organist and master of the choir, who lived almost next door to the Marlowes near St George’s church.*

John Marlowe (or Marloe, or Marley, or Marlyn, as he was also known in that lackadaisical way Elizabethans had with spelling in general and surnames in particular) was an immigrant to Canterbury. In the mid-1550s, when he was about twenty, he had walked there from Ospringe, near Faversham in Kent. Soon after arriving he took up an apprenticeship with one Gerard Richardson, a shoemaker, and by the end of April 1564 was already a freeman of the city. This would suggest that he was at least part-qualified when he arrived in Canterbury, and that his apprenticeship was something of a ruse as a short cut to citizenship (apprenticeships usually lasted seven years and began at the age of fifteen). Being a freeman was a coveted position that raised a man a notch above his fellow artisans, enabling him to have his own shop (‘hold craft and opyn windowes withoute leve’), take on apprentices and participate in city council meetings. Marlowe married Katherine Arthur, whose family came from Dover, and they settled in the parish of St George.

Leafing through the Canterbury borough plea books, we find John Marlowe to be belligerent and litigious, setting himself terrier-like against everyone from fellow shoemakers to the local gentry. In return, there were various suits launched against him, once for assaulting his apprentice and drawing blood, but mostly for debt. He did not pay his rent, he did not pay his rates, and his business finances were generally in a state of chaos. This lack of business sense was something else his son was to inherit. That and a sharp temper. Life in the little house behind the cobbler’s shop was not calm. At least one other of the Marlowe brood, Christopher’s younger sister Anne, showed the characteristic family quarrelsomeness. Later in life she was publicly criticised for being ‘a scowlde, comon swearer, a blasphemer of the name of god’, and as a fifty-five-year-old widow laid into one William Prowde with ‘staff and dagger’, and the following year with ‘sword and knife’. Nor was the family home in a particularly reposeful part of town. St George’s parish, though close to the cathedral, lay between the cattle market and the butchers’ shambles. This may have been convenient for the leather that was the material of John Marlowe’s trade, but it wasn’t terribly salubrious. Just yards away, animals would bellow and scream as they were herded to slaughter. Barrows of blood and stinking entrails were trundled past the Marlowe front door (cf. ‘Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher’s offal?’ Merry Wives III v). The acrid smell of crowded cattle and the earthy pungency of manure hung in the air and clung to clothes. We may imagine that the young Marlowe whiffed. He certainly knew his blood and butchery. The knowledge he shows in his plays of how blood spurts ‘like a fountain’, how it darkens as it coagulates, forms black clots, and follows a withdrawn knife, is impressive; and his haunting recollection of a slaughterhouse quite moving:

And as the butcher takes away the calf

And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays,

Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house …

And as the dam runs lowing up and down,

Looking the way her harmless young one went,

And can do naught but wail her darling’s loss …

(2 Henry VI III i 210–16)

He also, incidentally, shows a fine knowledge of leather, no doubt gleaned from his father’s workshop. He knows, for example, that cow’s leather was used for shoes, sheep’s leather for bridles, and how far cheverel will stretch.

As if the screams of cattle and cantankerous sisters were not enough, the sturdy steeple of St George’s housed the great waking bell, which was rung at 4 o’clock every morning and was loud enough to get the whole town out of bed. Just across the way from the church tower was Newingate, the medieval gate that was the highest point in the city wall. Scholars have argued that these two looming structures inspired the ‘Two lofty Turrets that command the Towne’ mentioned in The Jew of Malta.

The town that these turrets commanded was not a large one. A point of pilgrimage ever since the assassination of Thomas à Becket in 1170, Canterbury was also renowned for its cloth market and the quality of its fish, and in the late sixteenth century had a population of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000. It was, as the Marlowe biographer William Urry points out, a city close to the countryside: ‘Cows grazed within a hundred yards of John Marlowe’s shop and local women went milking every morning. Gleaning went on at harvest-time in Barton Fields, stretching into St George’s parish. Fifteen minutes’ walk would have taken the young Marlowe far out into the meads, the orchards and primrose lanes. His contact with the open countryside was as close as that of the small boy Shakespeare.’ We know that he enjoyed country jaunts. It took just ninety minutes to walk to the stretch of coastline between Sandwich and Deal, a trip he made often with his father, and perhaps also with a playmate Nat Best, the son of a tanner from Wingham (a village just six miles east of Canterbury) with whom John Marlowe had business dealings. Later in life Marlowe was to leave us an extraordinarily evocative recollection of how, as a young boy visiting his maternal grandparents in Dover, he would lie at the very edge of the cliffs, gazing below him or staring out to sea.

. . . How fearful

And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the mid-way air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire – dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark

Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge

That on th’ unumb’red pebble chafes

Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;

Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight

Topple down headlong.

(King Lear IV vi 11–23)

Young Christopher got on well with his irascible father – though rather less so with his mother, who like her daughter Anne was sarcastic, frosty and domineering. As Tony Bordel points out, most of the families in Kit’s plays are single-parent ones, or involve step-parents. Sons and mothers – such as Hamlet and Gertrude, or Coriolanus and Volumnia – have especially volatile relationships.*

Fiery he might have been, but John Marlowe had a sharp wit and amongst his friends a reputation as a raconteur. A court case of 1565 gives us a glimpse of the company he kept. He was called to testify in the defamation hearing of Hunte [or Hurte] alias Chapman v. Applegate. His close friend, the Canterbury tailor Laurence Applegate, who had a shop on the High Street near the Vernicle alehouse on the corner of Iron Bar Lane, had been sowing scandals about Godliffe, the daughter of Goodwife Chapman. On the road to Dover, one summer’s day in 1564, Applegate had boasted to John Marlowe that he had ‘hadd [his] pleasure of godlyve Chappmans Daugher’. Though he made Marlowe promise to keep it secret, the news was soon all round the town, and an outraged Goodwife Chapman in retaliation refused to repay Applegate two shillings she owed him. Applegate was heard to say in mixed company in the Vernicle tavern, and later in the shop to two of John Marlowe’s apprentices (and, it would seem, anywhere else where Marlowe could egg him on to tell the tale, at ‘divers tymes syns and in sondrie places’), that it was quite a bargain ‘for that I occupyed Godliffe hir Daughter fower times which was for everie tyme vj d [i.e. sixpence – the sums do work out, as the old shilling was worth 12d, so that two shillings equalled four sixpences]’. As Godliffe was about to get married, an outraged Goodwife Chapman took Applegate to court. The case was inconclusive, but Applegate had to perform public penance.

Such stories linger, and this one was no doubt still being narrated with embellishment and delight by the time Christopher was old enough to listen in. Wisps from the world of adults float in to young minds; sometimes they snag and remain, perfectly preserved if not fully understood. Later we may reexamine them: odd, untarnished strands in our fabric, suddenly seen with a fuller perception. In Christopher’s case, he worked them into his plays.

Two other stories gleefully gossiped around St George’s reached the ears of the little boy who, watchful and inquisitive, was known to eavesdrop from the corner of his father’s shop, or from behind the thin walls of the family house. The first, the tale of Dorothy Hocking, happened in the year Christopher was born, but so delighted the good folk of Canterbury that it was firmly lodged in local legend for years to come.

Dorothy was comely but a little dim, and was kept in drudgery and virtual imprisonment by her mother and stepfather. They lived in the parish of Holy Cross, near Canterbury’s Westgate and next door to the tailor Robert Holmes. Between the ‘backsydes’ (back yards) of the houses there was a wall. It was built of stones and earth, bonded with hair and coated with lime or roughcast. It probably had a capping of thatch to keep off the rain, and it certainly had a hole. We know this because Dorothy Hocking’s dog had nipped through the gap and stolen a conger eel from the Holmes’s yard. Under the pretext of discussing this incident, Robert Holmes’s wife drew Dorothy ‘from her mothers busyness in hir mothers backsyde’ for a secret discussion through the hole in the wall. Dorothy had fallen in love with one Richard Edmundes, and Goodwife Holmes had a mind to help her out. It was ‘about five or six of the clock in the afternoon’. Dorothy agreed that Goodwife Holmes should send for Richard, so she could speak to him through the hole in the wall. Robert Holmes found him nearby, playing bowls in ‘the backsyde of goodman podiches house’, and brought him to the hole. By then Dorothy’s parents had gone out. Goodwife Holmes took Dorothy’s hand through the wall, and gave it to Richard to hold by the finger, asking ‘knowe youe who this is that hath youe by the finger’. Dear but dull-witted Dorothy answered ‘no not yet’. Robert Holmes told her ‘it is Richard Edmundes’, and open-mouthed she asked ‘what … he wold have with her?’. Richard replied: ‘well my wench I beare youe good will and if thow canst find it in thie harte to love me and wilbe ruled by me I will delyver thee out of thye miserie’. She answered she could ‘find it in her hart to love him above all men’, and Edmundes asked her how old she was, saying, perhaps with a fillip of flattery, ‘I thinck you bee neere hand 16 or 17 yeares of age’. This seems to have somewhat thrown Dorothy who replied ‘yea that I am, for I am neerer 20 yrs ould but my age is kept from me’. Edmundes then asked her if she was betrothed to anyone else, and when she answered ‘no’ said, ‘can you finde in your harte to forsake father and mother and all men lyving for my sake?’, and she replied with a heartfelt ‘yea’.

We are told that Robert Holmes then called his journeyman, Harry Jenkinson, from indoors to act as a witness. ‘Where and whan, Edmundes toke Dorothie by the hand throughe the hole in the wall and then said Dorothee unto Edmundes these words, viz. I Dorothee take youe Richard to my husband forsaking all other for your sake and thereuppon I give you my faith and trouthe. Then said Edmundes, in faith wench, I were too blame if I would not speak the like woords unto thee.’ He did so, and ‘called for a drinck and dronck to Dorothy’, giving her ‘an ould angell [gold coin]’ to seal the ceremony. Now that she was betrothed, Dorothy – perhaps not so dim after all – was freed of her parents’ tyranny. As soon as her circumstances had changed she broke off the engagement, bringing down a breach of contract case against herself, thus leaving us a record of her story. This droll titbit of Canterbury gossip was, of course, to re-emerge as the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The second Canterbury tale overheard by the young Marlowe, perhaps from customers in his father’s shop, perhaps as he slipped in and out of neighbours’ kitchens, centred on William Darrell, who was a canon at the cathedral, and Clemence Ward, a notorious harlot. The story was told by Goodwife Pratt as she sat working at her door at harvest-time 1575, with Goodwife Thomasina Newen, overheard by the newly widowed Goodwife Culverhouse as she suckled her child, and repeated by a Mrs Hunt to Goodwife Joan Moyse, who told it in her kitchen to Clemence Ward’s landlord John Foster. Clemence lived near the Marlowes, in the neighbouring parish of St Alphege, and was of sufficient ‘suspect behaviour’ to be required to do penance clad in a white sheet on the porch of St Alphege before the Sunday morning service, and to be excommunicated when she refused to comply. Goodwives Newen and Pratt opined ‘Yt is a pity she is not carted out of the town.’ However the core of the tale they told sitting at Goodwife Pratt’s front door at harvest-time concerned something Goodwife Lea had witnessed in the cathedral precincts. She had seen two people staggering with a peculiarly heavy laundry basket, through the Christchurch Gate, along the great length of the cemetery, through the Norman gateway to the inner cemetery until they came to Canon William Darrell’s house, where they put the basket down among a clump of oak trees. But soon, seeming to act on a tip-off, one of the cathedral’s lay clerks – Mr Whyting, perhaps, or Mr Wade – appeared, drew his dagger and plunged it into the basket. Out leapt a furious Clemence Ward, wounded in the arm. We do not know if it was this that destroyed Canon Darrell’s reputation (he had already been accused of misbehaviour at court while chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, and had run up considerable debts), but he was eventually suspended from his canonry. The canon’s downfall inspired Falstaff’s nemesis in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the sack-swilling knight is tricked into hiding a laundry basket during his attempt at seducing Mistress Ford.

Noisy, nosy and malodorous though the parish of St George was, it was home, in addition to the goodwives and gossips, to a number of artists and musicians. Residents included Thomas Bull, the cathedral choirmaster; William a Lee, a tabor player; and John Johnson, who in addition to painting, made rude labels to pin to witches. It is a city quarter that was also evidently a nursery for playwrights. In Sun Street, in the parish of St Alphege near the cathedral gate, lived John Lyly. Some ten years older than Marlowe he was to become famed for his Euphues, a prose romance written in a peculiar, heightened style, giving us the word ‘euphuism’. Like Marlowe, he was to move to London, and in the 1580s and 1590s wrote plays – not the rough-and-tumble theatre preferred by the young Kit, but finely crafted dramas for court and boy actors. However the neighbour who perhaps most influenced the course of Marlowe’s youth was Stephen Gosson, a grocer’s son who was the same age as John Lyly, and who was also to become a dramatist. New evidence, in what appears to be rough copy for a pamphlet on Marlowe, probably written in the early 1590s while Gosson was rector of Great Wigborough, and recently discovered among material that once belonged to the great Elizabethan actor (and Gosson’s lifelong friend) Edward Alleyn, points to a relationship between Gosson and his younger neighbour that amounts to a form of hero-worship on Marlowe’s part.* Both boys appear to show an early desire to escape the stifling air of St George’s, and Canterbury, and it is Stephen Gosson who shows the way.

In 1568, when Christopher was four, his sister Mary died – leaving him as the eldest child and, for a while at least, the Marlowes’ only son. It was a hard year for the family. Katherine gave birth to another son at the end of October, but he survived only a few days. John’s business, however, was doing well enough for him to take on a third apprentice, Richard Umbarffeld. But it was neither to Richard nor his fellow apprentices Lore Atkynson and Harman Verson that little Christopher looked as a role model. Christopher’s earthly paragon had walked into the shop when the lad was three, to get a pair of new shoes. Stephen Gosson was about to enrol at The King’s School, quite a step up for a grocer’s son, and one that evidently warranted being better shod.

According to tradition, the school, which occupied part of the cathedral precinct, had been founded by Archbishop Theodore in the year 600. What is known for certain is that it was re-established and given its royal title by Henry VIII in the 1540s, and that by Marlowe’s time it enjoyed a brilliant reputation. Stephen, who was thirteen at the time he enrolled, later described the little boy he encountered in the cobbler’s shop as a ‘prating, parlous boy’ with a ‘sharp-provided wit, ingenious, forward, capable’ – a babbling, shrewd boy with a quick wit, clever, precocious and gifted.* The lad could already read well. John Marlowe, himself educated beyond his station, had taught Kit using his own old horn-book – a suitably indestructible reading aid comprising a tablet of oak inscribed with the alphabet and Paternoster and covered with a protective sheet of transparent horn. It was an English invention, and John would himself have used it at a ‘petty’ or ‘ABC’ school, which (not being quite as ‘forward’ or ‘capable’ as his son) he would have attended from the age of four. Possibly he had also kept his ABC and Catechism, a volume combining the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments and short catechistical exercises, which was the follow-on from the horn-book (cf. ‘to sigh like a school-boy that had lost his ABC’, Two Gentlemen of Verona II i, and ‘That is question now;/And then comes answer like an Absey book’, King John I i, and the pedantic Holfornes who ‘teaches boys the horn-book’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost).

Writing was an altogether different matter. It was not a skill taught at the ABC school, though we do know that John Marlowe could write a few words – he was sometimes called in during business negotiations as a witness, or to draw up inventories, and in 1589 was elected to the responsible position of warden and treasurer of his guild, the Shoemaker’s Company (an office he held with characteristically disastrous consequences, being completely unable to balance the books at the end of the year). The usual recourse was for townspeople to call on a peripatetic scrivener, or the local clergy (‘a pedant that keeps a school i’ the church’). Unfortunately for St George’s, its rector, the Reverend William Sweeting, was, as William Urry reveals, none too literate, leading to his parish registers becoming muddled. Nor, it seems, was he much good at preaching, bringing in another clergyman to do it for him or encouraging his flock to go to the cathedral and listen to the sermons there.

These regular cathedral appearances may be the reason that, a year after starting ABC school in 1568, Christopher left and came under the private tutelage of Thomas Bull, the cathedral organist and choirmaster, who was a neighbour of the Marlowes. Certainly, Christopher hated the ABC school. The monotony of the lessons blunted his quick mettle, and he was indeed the ‘whining school-boy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like a snail/Unwillingly to school’ (As You Like It II vii 145). He also developed a lasting scorn for his windy Welsh schoolmaster, and was to lampoon him as the pedagogue cleric Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (William Urry points to what he calls the ‘strong Welsh contingent’ of Davys, Joneses, Vaughans, Williamses and Evanses that along with Germans, Italians, the Spanish, French, Dutch and Walloons made up the extraordinarily ethnically diverse population of Canterbury.)

Where the money to leave the ABC school and study under Thomas Bull came from is not clear. Though John Marlowe was frequently in court over debts and financial squabbles with his neighbours, he seems also to have been a bit of a ‘Johannes factotum’, a Jack of all trades, dipping into all manner of affairs. City records offer hints of prosperity alongside proof of poverty. Perhaps the newly made freeman, upwardly mobile and himself benefiting from his learning, made his son’s education a financial priority. As Richard Mulcaster (the schoolmaster who championed the teaching of vernacular English, favoured proper schooling for girls, and encouraged music and drama in education) wrote in 1581: ‘The midle sort of parentes which neither welter in to much wealth, nor wrastle with to much want, see-meth fittest of all … to bring forth that student, which must serve his countrey best.’ Or perhaps Thomas Bull knew talent when he saw it and Christopher, like an exact contemporary of his, one R. Willis in Gloucester, moved in as one of the pupils who boarded with his new Master:

The Master Downhale having very convenient lodgings over the school, took such a liking to me, as he made me his bedfellow (my father’s house being next of all to the school). This bedfellowship begat in him familiarity and gentleness towards me; and in me towards him reverence and love; which made me also love my book, love being the most prevalent affection in nature to further our studies and endeavours in any profession.

Julia Wells suggests it was Christopher’s singing as much as his learning that attracted Bull’s attention, and indeed, even when his voice ‘got the mannish crack’, it was to develop into a fine tenor that would stand him in good stead his whole life. But we have it from Stephen Gosson that Christopher’s sights were set higher than reading with his choirmaster through the Primer, a dismal devotional book containing prayers and metrical versions of the psalms, the successor to the ABC. Besides, Bull was too busy with his other activities in the cathedral to give the boy the attention he demanded. And the boy did demand. Although Stephen would not have had much free time as a scholar at The King’s School (school kept six days a week, from six in the morning until seven at night, with only short vacations and the odd church holiday) Christopher clung to Stephen every moment that he could, ‘like fruit unripe sticks upon a tree’.*

Kit would accept nothing less than the King’s School. Behind him loomed the goodwives of St George’s, and worse – Mother Bassocke who begged from door to door, holding out her apron for scraps; or poor ‘Agnes that makes strawen hattes’. Up ahead were the sons of local landowners, professional men, royal servants and clergy, who took their lessons at the school that had been founded by the Queen’s father. He was determined that whatever his background, that was where his future lay:

What glory is there in a common good,

That hangs for every peasant to achieve?

That like I best that flies beyond my reach.

Set me to scale the high Pyramides …

(The Massacre at Paris I ii 40–3)

Christopher’s knight errant appeared in the form of Sir Roger Manwood, an awesome – and it would seem incorrigibly corrupt – Justice of the Peace, who lived in the manor house of Hawe, two miles outside Canterbury in the village of Hackington. Known as the ‘scourge of the night prowler’, he was a taker of bribes and a bender of justice. (Maybe it was he who inspired the lines ‘Hark, in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? … Robes and furr’d gowns hide all’, King Lear IV vi 153 ff.) Years later Marlowe was to encounter him from the wrong side of the bench, and the Latin epitaph on Manwood’s magnificent marble monument in Hackington church bears Marlowe’s name as author.

But in the 1570s it was Sir Roger’s interest in the clever young boy that would give him the step up he desired. He promised his patronage to ease Marlowe’s passage to The King’s School.* First the boy had to improve on his basic education, and was sent, at the age of seven with Sir Roger’s support, not to one of the two grammar schools in St George’s parish, but to a superior establishment in St Peter’s Street, founded by Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1569. So once more he joined the other boys as they tramped to school with heavy looks. He began to study Latin grammar, later venturing into composition, and reading works such as Cato’s Puerilis and Aesop’s Fables. After a year or two his masters switched to Latin, rather than English, as the medium of instruction, and he may even have begun a little Greek – all the better to equip himself for his next school. But as time wore on and Kit became easily eligible for King’s, Sir Roger appears to have become curiously unwilling to pay for his protégé. Whether or not he still enjoyed Sir Roger’s patronage when he got to King’s is unclear. Cathedral accounts for the school show that ‘Chr’opher Marley’ received a scholarship payment of £1 a quarter under a statute that allowed ‘fifty poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends, and endowed with minds apt for learning’ and who were over nine and younger than fifteen, to enrol. And it was not until Christmas 1578, when he was just a few months short of the maximum admission age, that he finally made it to the exalted institution in the cathedral precincts.

Stephen Gosson was not there to greet him. In 1572 he had gone up to Oxford, giving Christopher a new goal, but leaving him bereft of a soul mate. The boy who filled Stephen’s place in Christopher’s quiver of friends was Oliver Laurens (or Lourens).† Oliver was the same age as Christopher, and he had just escaped from France with his life. Tension between the Catholic monarchy (dominated by the house of Guise) and the Protestant Huguenots had bristled yet again into violence. In the summer of 1572 the Duc de Guise, at the instigation of the Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici, fired up a rabid Catholic mob in Paris to an act of shuddering ferocity. Hundreds of Huguenots had gathered in the city for the wedding of the Protestant Henri of Navarre to Catherine’s daughter, Marguerite de Valois. Juan de Olaegui, secretary to the Spanish ambassador, reported the atrocity:

On Sunday, Saint Bartholomew’s Day [24 August] at three o’clock in the morning, the alarm was rung; all the Parisians began killing the Huguenots of the town, breaking down the doors of the houses in which they lived and pillaging what they found within.

[The Duc de] Guise, Anevale and Angoulême went to the Admiral’s [the Huguenot leader Coligny’s] house … they went up to his room and in the bed where he was lying, the Duc de Guise shot him in the head with a pistol; then they took him and threw him naked out of the window into the courtyard …

Some 4,000 Huguenots were slaughtered, and the unrest spread to the provinces where it lasted for weeks. Another witness to the massacre was Francis Walsingham, the man who was one day to control a network of spies across the continent, but was then the English ambassador in Paris. It was to sour his attitude to Catholics for life.

By 27 August, crowds of terrified Huguenot fugitives began to arrive at Rye from Dieppe. So many made their way to Canterbury that the cavernous cathedral crypt, which had been allocated to them for worship, could scarcely contain ‘such a swarm’. According to Urry they were not unwelcomed by the people of Canterbury as the refugees looked after their own poor, gave jobs to locals and took over dilapidated property, even though they sometimes packed in four or five families to a house. Many settled in the neighbourhood of St George’s, though it is most likely that Christopher met Oliver Laurens through Stephen Gosson, before Stephen left for Oxford at the end of the year. We know that Stephen’s father was a foreigner: Cornelius Gosson is described as an ‘alien’ in local tax lists, and Stephen referred to himself as a ‘mule’ (i.e. half foreign by birth). French Protestant refugees had been arriving in Canterbury since the 1540s and there was a family of Gossons with the new wave of refugees – quite possibly relations of Stephen’s own family.

Curious young Christopher’s instinctive reaction to being surrounded by the cosmopolitan Gossons and Laurenses was to learn their language. Oliver’s father made a little money by teaching French, and a ‘C. Marle’ appears as a student in his account books as early as Christmas 1572. By adulthood Marlowe’s grasp of French would be very good, as was later evident in the courtship scene in Henry V; and in The Merry Wives of Windsor he would gently mock his friend’s dapper, rather exuberant father – a ‘musical-headed Frenchman’ with an explosive temperament – in the character of Doctor Caius.

Caius: Vat is you sing? I do not like des toys. Pray you, go vetch me in my closet un boitier vert – a box, a green-a box. Do intend vat I speak? A green-a box … You jack’nape; give-a this letter to Sir Hugh; by gar, it is a shallenge; I will cut his troat in de park …

(The Merry Wives of Windsor, I iv 39ff)

Here Christopher cheekily sets his French teacher off against his former ABC school teacher, as Caius ‘shallenges’ Sir Hugh Evans to a duel.

No doubt in his French lessons Christopher used the book of dialogues brought out by the London-based French teacher Claudius Hollyband a few years earlier, which in an admirably taut definition of the process of language teaching, claimed to accustom the learner to ‘the true phrase of the language’ and teach him ‘the perfect annexinge of syllables, wordes and sentences’ and also ‘in what order they ought to be uttered’. The book would also have given Christopher a glimpse of one of the problems of cultural adaptation his new friend was having to face, as in one dialogue a shocked French boy named Francis demands of his nurse: ‘Wilt thou that I wash my mouthe and my face, where I have washed my handes, as they doo in many houses in England?’ (an echo of the horror shown by mainland Europeans that the British enjoy soaking in their own dirty bath water). It is probably at this stage of his life, too, that Christopher, fired by his new discovery of foreign tongues and sustained by his evident ability with them, sought out one of the Flemish refugees who lived in Canterbury and began learning Dutch. Both languages were to prove invaluable to him. English, in the sixteenth century, was unimportant and decidedly insular. That he was keen to learn French and Dutch, an important language of trade, appears to indicate that he had already set his sights and his ambitions on the Continent.

Oliver’s family came from Paris. Together with a small group of fellow Huguenots, they had fled their homes when the killings started, but were set upon once again when they were found huddled and praying in nearby woods. The Laurenses were one of the few families to survive the slaughter. Later, as they grew to have more language in common, Oliver would tell Christopher of his horrors, tales that were to resurface years afterwards:

. . . ‘Kill, kill!’ they cried.

Frightened with this confused noise, I rose,

And looking from a turret, might behold

Young infants swimming in their parents’ blood,

Headless carcasses pil’d up in heaps,

[Women] half-dead, dragg’d by their golden hair …

Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,

Kneeling for mercy to a [lad],

Who with steel pole-axes dash’d out their brains.

(Dido, Queen of Carthage ii 1)

The boys re-enacted the scenes Oliver had witnessed, shouting Tue, tue tue! (Kill, kill, kill!), a phrase which haunted Marlowe and was chillingly echoed in his version of The Massacre at Paris (c. 1590), and later also in the assassination of Coriolanus. Marlowe’s subsequent Puritanism also possibly springs from this time. Certainly, Oliver was to become a lifelong – at times it would seem his only – friend.

One event in 1573 was to brighten the boys’ lives considerably. In September, Elizabeth I arrived in Canterbury to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Christopher had never seen anything like it in his life. Perhaps this was the awakening of the taste for pomp and splendour and a fascination for England’s history that he would display in his early plays. Certainly, the royal visit gave him a tantalising glimpse of the world beyond St George’s. Royal progresses were awesomely extravagant combinations of ritual and spectacle, and this one was magnified not only by birthday celebrations, but by the arrival in Plymouth the month before of the adventurer Sir Francis Drake with tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of shiny plundered treasure. What pageantry, what feats, what shows, what minstrelsy and pretty din the people made in Canterbury to meet the Queen. The city had been preparing for months. The revelry would indeed be unprecedented, if the frantic activity of their neighbours in Sandwich (through which the Queen passed on the way) was anything to go by: here buildings had been repaired, ‘beautified and adorned with black and white’, the town had been gravelled and strewn with rushes and herbs, great bows put on doors and festoons of vines and flowers hung across the streets; the brewers had been enjoined to brew good ale for her coming, the butchers had to cart their offal out of town, and someone was employed especially to keep the hogs out. The Virgin Queen stayed in Canterbury for fourteen days, and would have passed close by the Marlowes’ house for the celebrations on the exact occasion of her birthday, 7 September. That day she was met by Archbishop Parker at the west door of the Cathedral, and before she had even dismounted from her horse heard a nervous Grammarian (a scholar from The King’s School) make his oration. As a member of the cathedral choir, Christopher would have had a fine view, as they ‘stood on either side of the church and brought her Majesty up with a square [solemn] song, she going under a canopy, borne by four of her temporal knights’. City officials were adorned in every bit of silk, velvet and ermine that their livery afforded, even the ordinary burghers were fitted with finery that amounted almost to fancy dress. There were lavish entertainments, masques and musicians, elaborate feasts, and a showering of Gloriana with sumptuous gifts. And there were players.

Christopher had seen players before. William Urry observes that there is a record of travelling troupes coming to Canterbury in almost every year of Marlowe’s boyhood. The Lord Warden’s Players, for example, came in 1569/70, and the city accounts for December 1574 record: ‘Item payd to the Lord of Leycester his players for playing.’ Perhaps, like his Gloucester contemporary R. Willis (the boy who had been the bedfellow of his teacher Master Downhale), Christopher had been taken by his father to see a morality play in the market place, standing ‘between his leggs, as he sate apon one of the benches’. For Willis, ‘[t]his sight tooke such impression in me, that when I came towards man’s estate, it was as fresh in my memory, as if I had seen it newly acted’. The pageantry and supposed idolatry of mediaeval mystery plays was disapproved of by stricter adherents of the Reformation, but an old Catholic pilgrimage town like Canterbury, one that a contemporary traveller noted was a ‘harborowe[r] of the Devill and the Pope’, still abandoned itself to such wickednesses as Maygames, bonfires in the streets and bell ringing on saints’ days, and may well have indulged itself in the odd performance of a miracle play.

But something was happening in the 1560s and 1570s that made the shows Christopher saw very different, more alluring than the old Mystery cycles, and perhaps even a little more wicked. Already in the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the tradition of religious and civic performances had begun to give way to troupes of strolling players who offered spicier fare. There was a move from morality to mirth, from the didactic to the entertaining. Theatre was becoming more fun. In London in 1567, the Red Lion, the first commercial playhouse with a paying audience, had opened. The amphitheatre-like design of the Red Lion playhouse, based itself on the buildings used for bear-baiting and other earthy entertainment, became the model for the Theatre, which opened in Shoreditch on one of the main roads leading out of London, three years after Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Canterbury (and, incidentally, lodged the word in English with its modern meaning). These new public playhouses offered ‘gallimaufreys’ – hotchpotches of romance and drama, narratives with ‘many a terrible monster made of broune paper’, amorous knights, acrobatics and knockabout clowns. These medleys, Philip Sidney’s ‘mungrell Tragycomedie’, catered to a new body of urban playgoers who were looking for something in between community religious drama and the stiffer plays performed in private homes and after banquets. Powerful men such as the Lord Chamberlain and the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, began to sponsor the playhouses, as presenting the new drama at court became a sign of their status and standing with the Queen, with rival companies doing battle over who was chosen to perform the Christmas entertainments. At first, this was a London-based phenomenon and the provinces lagged behind, but go-ahead companies such as ‘the Lord of Leycester his players’ would have brought the drama that so captivated Christopher Marlowe to Canterbury.

What is more, Stephen Gosson was once again showing the way. He had begun to write plays. None has survived, but the author Francis Meres ranked him ‘the best for pastoral’, and Gosson himself mentions a tragedy, Cataline’s Conspiracy, a comedy, Captain Mario, and a moral play, Praise at Parting. According to Gosson, it was Cataline’s Conspiracy that Marlowe was first to see, when he was ten, in 1574 – the year that ‘diverse strange impressions of fire and smoke’ appeared in the night skies over Canterbury, and the heavens seemed to burn ‘marvellously ragingly’, with flames that rose from the horizon and met overhead, ‘and did double and roll in one another, as if it had been in a clear furnace’. It was a magnificent display of the aurora borealis, but to the impressionable Christopher it seemed a portent. If Stephen could do it, so could he.

The King’s School, when Christopher finally made it there in 1578, greatly improved his formal education and unlike his earlier schools it also gave him the freedom and opportunity to strut his hour or two upon a stage. Like the grander English public schools, The King’s School had a lively tradition of performance. The acting of plays there was not only well established, but during Marlowe’s lifetime even threatened to get a little out of hand as ‘playing had become such an accomplished diversion among the schoolboys that it posed a problem of discipline’. The boys were renowned for Christmas entertainments in the cathedral, ‘settynge furthe of Tragedies, Comedyes, and interludes’ in costumes that involved considerable expenditure – the headmaster one year receiving an astonishing £14 6s 8d for Christmas plays. Their efforts at least once so impressed some passing professionals that they ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ to run away and join their troupe, promising them a princely £4 a year in earnings, and later again inveigled the boy players ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’ – far more tempting than the school plays, which were performed in Latin and Greek, but Christopher resisted.

Like Stephen Gosson, Christopher aimed at university, and on writing plays rather than acting in them. But in 1578, university was barely within his reach. At his new school he embarked upon more complex Latin grammar, later voyaging into Greek and the deeper waters of prose and poetry, before casting up on the rocks of rhetoric. Mere learning was not enough, ‘rhetoric’ helped translate language into persuasive action. He had to recognise rhetorical forms and devices used by the ancients, to master the skills of clear expression and to discriminate between good and bad style. He had also to learn how to make links between history and present behaviour. As Richard Grenewey, who translated Tacitus in the 1590s, put it: ‘History [is] the treasure of times past, as well as a guide an image of man’s present estate: a true and lively pattern of things to come, [and], as some term it, the workmistress of experience …’. So Christopher read the poets and the historians – the chaste bits at least – of Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Plautus and Horace; Sallust, Cicero, Caesar, Martial, Juvenal and Livy, and also such moderns as Erasmus and Baptista Mantua. In his final year he would have had to deliver several formal declamations.

Like Stephen before him he was a day boy, starting school at six in the morning with prayers and psalm-singing in the cathedral, before passing back under ‘the Dark Entry’, the low passage between the cloisters and the school, to his lessons (cf. ‘There’s a dark entry where they take it in …’, The Jew of Malta iii 4). Money was deducted from his scholarship allowance to pay for lunch at school: breast of mutton, according to one kitchen account, with peas and prunes; fish every Friday, and salt fish and herring during Lent. The cobbler’s boy from St George’s parish began to make friends above his station – like Samuel Kennet. Sam and Kit were new boys together and left school in the same year. Sam’s father had served in the royal households of both Henry VIII and the present queen, and his great-great-grandfather had been standard-bearer to Henry V at Agincourt. He had Kit enthralled with family stories of knights and the glory of England, and was even more awe-inspiring for his glittering treasure of first-hand tales of court life.

Now that he was rubbing doublets with the gentry, Kit had to brush up on his manners. The instructions to young Francis – the French boy he encountered in the language book he had used with Oliver’s father – would have helped: use a napkin, not your hand to wipe your mouth; don’t touch food that you are not going to eat yourself; don’t lean on the table (‘Did you learne to eat in a hogstie?’); clean your own knife and put it back in its sheath (forks were not yet widely used in England); don’t pick your teeth with your penknife (use a ‘tooth-picke of quill or wood’); and be sure not to get your sleeves in the fat.

And as Christopher had done with Stephen Gosson, so Oliver tagged along with Christopher at every free moment. Records are scanty, but documents in the Bernhardt Institute collection help build up a picture of the two boys at the time. An ‘apprisement of suche goodes as were Mr Oliver Laurens’s’ (dated 1609), made after his death, includes a list of books, some of which must date back to his boyhood.* ‘Nowels Catechismes one in Latin, one in Englishe’ and ‘Luciana dialogi Latini et hist’, which has an annotation in a different, unidentified hand, revealing that Oliver was taught Latin as a child by ‘the atheist Marloe’. If the Lucian indeed included The True History, then the boys at least had some fantasising fun during their after-hours lessons, as the book claims to describe a journey to the moon. Dr Rosine cites an account of Oliver taking Christopher to worship at a Huguenot chapel, and we find Christopher getting into trouble when he ‘solde his poyntes’ to a scrivener in exchange for teaching Oliver to write – ‘poyntes’ were tagged laces for tying doublet to hose. These were apparently special silver-tipped ones given to Christopher by Sir Roger Manwood. This account was in a copy of a deposition by the ever-litigious John Marlowe, though the case is surprisingly absent from Canterbury records.*

Christopher spent just two years at The King’s School. In 1580 – not quite in the footsteps of Stephen Gosson, who had gone to Oxford – he was promised a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His voice as well as his learning had got him there. The scholarship, one in a long line established by Archbishop Parker, himself Master of Corpus Christi from 1544 to 1553, had been set out in the archbishop’s will and provided for a scholar of The King’s School who was Canterbury born and bred. It required that:

. . . schollers shal and must at the time of their election be so entered into the skill of song as that they shall at first sight solf [sing to the sol-fa syllables] and sing plaine song. And they shalbe of the best and aptest schollers well instructed in their grammer and if it may be such as can make a verse.

Young Christopher could do all that, and well. Even at the age of sixteen he could ‘make a verse’ better than the rest. With the scholarship, he had almost reached the peak of the first ‘high Pyramide’ he had set himself to scale, in a climb that had begun the day that Stephen Gosson had walked into John Marlowe’s shop to buy new shoes for school.

Stephen’s life, however, had suddenly and radically changed course. He had failed to take his degree, had hived off to London to write plays, and now, suddenly, in the year before Marlowe went up to Cambridge, had done a complete about-face and published the Schoole of Abuse, one of the most vituperative anti-theatre diatribes of the time, railing on (once he had finished with the evils of plays and players) against the decay of the English spirit. According to Gosson’s Alchemist pamphlet, Marlowe was deeply affected by the book, and had, by the time he went up to university, become a Puritan. His friendship with Sam Kennet, who was about to embark upon his career as ‘the most terrible Puritan’ in the Tower, would seem to bear this out. But even if this is so, it was not a state of grace that was to last very long. The prods and tugs of Kit’s new fortune would propel him in alarming new directions. The boy who had thought: ‘That like I best that flies beyond my reach’ was about to stretch himself further than he had ever done before. In 1580 – the year in which earthquakes shook England, setting church bells pealing unaided, and a blazing star appeared in Pisces – Kit Marlin (as he had started to style himself) sloughed off Canterbury and set out for Cambridge.




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