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.

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

Rodney Bolt