by Jim Bernhard
Bacon’s personal chaplain, William Rawley, recounted: “He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then celebrated for our Saviour’s resurrection, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl of Arundel’s house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before; God so ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation.”
Bacon is buried in the parish church of St. Michael’s at St. Albans beneath a tomb topped by his seated statue.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Christopher Marlowe was about two months older than William Shakespeare, and the two were rivals until Marlowe’s violent death at the age of twenty-nine. Born in Canterbury, Kent, probably on February 6, 1564, Marlowe sailed through the King’s School in Canterbury and Corpus Christi College in Cambridge on scholarships, and then sallied forth to London to join the Admiral’s Men theatrical company.
Known to friends as Kit, he achieved early fame as a playwright with seven plays: Dido, Queen of Carthage; Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts), Doctor Faustus; The Jew of Malta; Edward II; and The Massacre at Paris. Through his friendship with Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe is also thought to have worked as a spy, gathering damaging information about people disloyal to Queen Elizabeth.
He also won a reputation for blasphemy and atheism, which were serious crimes in Elizabethan England. One of his critics, Thomas Beard, pulled no punches when he called Marlowe “a poet of scurrility, who by giving too large a swinge to his own wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reins, . . . . denied God and his son Christ and blasphemed the Trinity, affirming our Saviour to be a deceiver and the holy Bible to be but vain and idle stories.”
Despite his lack of religious conviction, Marlowe was able to vividly portray the torments of eternal damnation in Doctor Faustus, when Mephistophilis answers Faustus’s questions about the location of hell by telling him:
Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur’d and remain forever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.
Later Faustus contemplates his own consignment to this realm of doomed souls:
Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
O God,
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransom’d me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain:
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d!
O, no end is limited to damned souls!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
Whether or not Marlowe himself feared ugly hell as Faustus did, he met his end suddenly in a brawl on May 30, 1593, in a tavern in Deptford, about three miles from London. The most commonly accepted story (painstakingly researched by Leslie Hotson for his 1925 book The Death of Christopher Marlowe) is that Marlowe was invited to the tavern for dinner by Ingram Frizer, a businessman with a shady reputation who also worked for Marlowe’s friend Sir Thomas Walsingham. Marlowe and Frizer began to argue over who would pay the bill, and according to an account written in 1600 by William Vaughan, Marlowe “meant to stab with his poniard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickly perceiving it, so avoided the thrust that withal drawing out his dagger for his defense, he stabbed Marlowe in the eye, in such sort that his brains coming out at the dagger’s point, he shortly after died.” The coroner’s report confirms that Frizer killed Marlowe in self-defense.
Other stories circulated that Marlowe and Frizer were arguing over a woman whose favor they both sought, or that Marlowe’s spy work was somehow related to his death. One tale even holds that Marlowe faked his own death in order to escape punishment for a charge of atheism that was pending against him.
His grave, unmarked, is in St. Nicholas Church, Deptford.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The private life of William Shakespeare, whose works are more widely known than those of any other author in the history of world (except for Agatha Christie and Jules Verne), remains cloaked in mystery. He was born sometime around April 23, 1564, to John Shakespeare, a glove-maker, and his wife, Mary Arden Shakespeare, in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon. He attended King Edward VI School in Stratford, and at the age of eighteen, married a young woman named Anne Hathaway. They had two daughters, Susanna and Judith, and a son, Hamnet, who died when he was nine.
Leaving his family in Stratford, Will headed for London sometime after 1585 and became part owner of a theatre company known first as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and later, in a step up, as the King’s Men. While living mostly in London, Shakespeare wrote numerous poems, including the famous Sonnets (1-154), and more than three dozen plays, most of which have become solid warhorses of the theatrical repertoire, among them the tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Romeo and Juliet; the comedies Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; and histories centered on several English kings: King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry VIII.
Speculation about Shakespeare’s religion, as well as his politics, his sexual orientation, his physical appearance, and the cause of his death remain just that: speculation. It has been variously suggested that Shakespeare was an Anglican, a secret Roman Catholic, and a nonbeliever—but no one knows. Similarly, he has been called a pro-Tudor conservative, an advocate of the rising bourgeoisie, and a proto-revolutionary—but no one knows. His sonnets suggest that he was in love with a “dark lady” or possibly a “lovely boy”—but no one knows. And whether Shakespeare really resembled the only known portrait of him, by Martin Droeshout (who probably never saw his subject in real life)—you guessed it: no one knows.
Death is a common occurrence in Shakespeare’s works; the tragic heroes all meet their ends through flaws in their characters or in their perception of reality. Shakespeare’s beliefs about death are ambiguous in his plays. In Measure for Measure, Claudio views death with horror:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and in certain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment,
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
Lines from Julius Caesar, on the other hand, are more comforting—and more famous.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Hamlet is torn between differing emotions in his famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” first welcoming death, but then being gripped by the fear of the unknown:
To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d: to die, to sleep!
To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.
Near the play’s end, Hamlet reaches a philosophical acceptance of death. When his friend Horatio tries to forestall Hamlet’s duel with Laertes, which he fears will end badly for his friend, Hamlet replies:
Not a whit; we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come—if it be not to come, it will be now—if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Was Shakespeare himself ready? Apparently he had had enough of London life by the time he was forty-nine, and he retired to his home in Stratford, where he died three years later on April 23, 1616—his fifty-second birthday. There is no contemporary account of his last days, the earliest written version being fifty years later, when John Ward, vicar of Stratford from 1662 to 1681, noted in his diary what he had heard about Shakespeare’s death: “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”
This story is not beyond the realm of possibility: the poet Michael Drayton and the playwright Ben Jonson were friends of Shakespeare’s and might have come to visit him in Stratford, possibly on the occasion of the marriage of his younger daughter, Judith. But it probably wasn’t the drinking alone that did Shakespeare in; evidence suggests that he had been unwell for some while before his death, for he asked his lawyer, Francis Collins, to draw up a will in January of 1616. The document was not executed until March 25, 1616, less than a month before Shakespeare’s death, and the signature is in a shaky hand. This is the famous will in which he left the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna, a lesser amount to Judith, and the grudging bequest of his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne.
Shakespeare was buried two days after his death in a wooden coffin near the altar in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, where he was a lay rector. Burial space was at a premium in the church, and in order to make room, older remains were sometimes moved to a charnel house underneath the church. To guard against this, some unknown person inscribed upon the gravestone the following bit of doggerel, possibly written by Shakespeare himself in allusion to the fate of poor Yorick’s remains in Hamlet:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.
JOHN DONNE
Anyone who knows anything at all about John Donne knows that he wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Poet, lawyer, member of Parliament, and Anglican clergyman, Donne was born in the area known as Bread Street, London, on January 22, 1572, to a Roman Catholic family. He was the son of a well-to-do ironmonger, who died when Donne was four. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but as a Catholic he was prohibited from receiving a degree. He frittered away a small inheritance on women and frivolous pastimes, then went to the Continent, where he enlisted to fight against Spain.
He returned to England at age twenty-five, began to write poetry, studied law, launched a government career, was elected to Parliament, and was hired as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal. He fell in love with Egerton’s niece, Anne More, and because her Protestant family objected to her marriage to a Catholic, they were wed in a secret ceremony. Both Donne and the priest who married them were briefly imprisoned. Donne and his wife had twelve children before her early death.
After his brother was jailed for Catholic loyalties and died in prison, Donne thought it might be prudent to convert to the Church of England. He did so and became a favorite of King James I, who insisted that Donne take holy orders in 1614. In 1621 he was named dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a prestigious and lucrative post, which he held until his death.
His poetry, which uses fanciful metaphorical images known as “conceits” to convey both erotic and sacred concepts, was given the name “metaphysical” by John Dryden and later by Samuel Johnson. Most of Donne’s love poems were written in the 1590s and published in two major volumes, Satires and Songs and Sonnets. The Divine Poems were published in 1607. In one of them, Donne scoffs at death:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
“Death’s Duel,” a sermon preached in the presence of King Charles I only a month before Donne’s death, took for its text Psalm 68, Verse 20: “And unto God the Lord belong the issues from death.” From this, Donne took comfort in his belief in God’s mercy:
. . . unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death: what kind of issue and transmigration we shall have out of this world, whether prepared or sudden, whether violent or natural, whether in our perfect senses or shaken and disordered by sickness, there is no condemnation to be argued out of that, no Judgement to be made upon that, for howsoever they die, precious in his sight is the death of his saints, and with him are the issues of death, the ways of our departing out of this life are in his hands. And so in this sense of the words, this exitus mortis, the issue of death, is liberatio in morte, a deliverance in death; not that God will deliver us from dying, but that he will have a care of us in the hour of death, of what kind soever our passage be.
Donne was delivered in death on March 31, 1631, at the age of fifty-nine. His fatal illness is thought to have been stomach cancer. According to one account, he had lain “fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change.” The bell tolled for him as he was buried in the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, built between 1087 and 1314, which stood on the site where the present St. Paul’s was erected in 1666. Donne wrote his own Latin epitaph, which translates:
John Donne
Doctor of Divinity
after varied studies, pursued from early years
with perseverance and not without success,
entered into holy Orders
under the influence and pressure of the Holy Spirit
and by the advice and exhortation of King James,
in the year of his Jesus 1614 and of his age 42.
Having been invested with the Deanery of this church
on 27 November 1621,
he was stripped of it by death on the last day of March 1631.
He lies here in the dust but beholds Him
whose name is Rising.
BEN JONSON
Shakespeare’s good friend Ben Jonson was the son of a prominent Protestant landowner who, not surprisingly, ran afoul of Catholic Queen “Bloody” Ma
ry. As a result, she confiscated his land and imprisoned him. When Protestant Queen Elizabeth took the throne, she freed the elder Jonson, who started a new life as a Protestant clergyman. He died a month before Ben entered the world on June 11, 1572, in Westminster, London.
Growing up hearing tales of his father’s tribulations, Ben wavered between the Church of England, in which he was raised, and Roman Catholicism. He went to Westminster School and expected to enroll in Cambridge University, but instead, his stepfather, a bricklayer, put him to work as an apprentice. As quickly as he could leave this trade, Ben joined the army, served on the Continent, and returned to England, where he joined the Admiral’s Men theatrical company as an actor.
“Never a good actor,” said one of his colleagues, “but an excellent instructor.” Jonson began to write plays, most of them satires, and is now known as second only to his good friend, Will Shakespeare, among Elizabethan-Jacobean playwrights. His plays include Every Man in His Humour; Volpone, or The Fox; The Alchemist; Bartholomew Fair; and Epicene, or The Silent Woman.
Burly, blunt-spoken, quick to laugh and to anger, Jonson was described by his friend William Drummond as “a great lover and praiser of himself, jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink . . . passionately kind and angry.” In 1594, he married Ann Lewis, whom Drummond called “a shrew, but honest,” and they had several children, three of whom died in early childhood.
A play Jonson co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, offended Queen Elizabeth, and he was arrested and held in prison, where he converted to Catholicism under the tutelage of a fellow prisoner who was a Jesuit priest. When he was released, he killed a fellow actor in a duel and was imprisoned again. He overcame these setbacks and was eventually named Poet Laureate of England by King James I.