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

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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