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

Rodney Bolt

History Play

Dedication

For my parents

Epigraph

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

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

PROLOGUE A Dead Man in Deptford

PART I

CHAPTER ONE Prefaces to Shakespeare

CHAPTER TWO Une Histoire Inventée

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

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

A Dead Man in Deptford

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

CHAPTER ONE

Prefaces to Shakespeare

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: