Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  After over 320 pages building up to his conclusion, a sense of doubt creeps into Nicholl: ‘I am not trying to argue that Marlowe’s death has to have a meaning’; ‘Ingram Frizer may well have struck the fatal blow. It is probable, though not certain, that he did’; ‘We will never know for certain exactly what happened in that room in Deptford’, etc. He even wonders at one point whether it might not have been a simple fight after all, albeit not over the reckoning.

  Nicholl’s theory falls down because of the weakness of its motivation on two counts. If Essex wanted to outdo Ralegh as Elizabeth’s favourite, doing it indirectly via Marlowe was a pretty long way round. Ralegh was the target, so Marlow was put in the frame as the author of the Dutch libels. Why, when Ralegh’s poetry was already published and available for black propaganda? Ralegh was the target, so Marlowe’s reputation was dragged through the mud by Baines and Cholmeley, with only one mention of Ralegh – that Thomas Hariot was ‘his man’. There is no attempt to smear those even close to Ralegh, his wife Bess or his brother Carewe. The Cerne Abbas controversy of the following year, while it can be seen in the same anti-Ralegh mould, came about as a result of Ralegh’s own recklessness, upsetting rigid and fairly stupid clerics over a supper table. Marlowe was already dead by then. If the idea was to smear Ralegh by smearing Marlowe, then the whole project was appallingly oblique and ineptly handled.

  Above all, what would be the point? In 1593, Ralegh was already in disgrace. John Aubrey, writing years later, told the story:

  He loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour against a tree in a Wood (twas his first lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearfull of her Honour, and modest, she cryed ‘Sweet Sir Walter, what do you me ask? Will you undo me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!’ At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in extacey ‘Swisser Swatter! Swisser Swatter!’ She proved with child.

  The wench was Bess Throckmorton, a lady in waiting to the Queen, and although we might doubt Aubrey when he claims she was Ralegh’s first conquest, this was the autumn of 1591. By February 1592, court gossips had noticed Bess putting on weight. Her son was born in March and the Queen got to hear of Ralegh’s ‘brutish offence’ in May. Any interference with her ladies was likely to send Elizabeth into one of her famous rages, but that the guilty party was a favourite rankled more than usually. Elizabeth was nearly sixty, with black teeth, think hair and a scrawny chest, but to all her courtiers she must appear as an object of adoration; indeed, the only object of adoration. A courtier wrote:

  S.W.R. will lose, it is thought, all his places and preferments at court, with the Queen’s favour; such will be the end of his speedy rising, and now he must fall as low as he was high at which many may rejoice.

  The fact that Ralegh had secretly married Bess Throckmorton and was skirmishing with Spanish warships off Panama at the time made no difference. He was recalled and he and his wife sent to the Tower in June 1592, lodged in separate apartments. Ralegh seems to have been genuinely distraught and even allowing for the sycophancy of the time, his letter to Cecil has the ring of truth:

  I that was wont to behold [the Queen] riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph...She is gone in whom I trusted and for me has not one thought of mercy. Yours, not worth any name or title, WR.

  He attempted suicide and was only released in August to negotiate with plundering Devon sailors who had helped themselves to loot from the Spanish treasure ship Nombre de Dios anchored at Dartmouth. He rescued the Queen’s cut, but only by giving her all his own. Even so, she never forgave him for Bess Throckmorton. He was not allowed to return to Court for another five years. He fretted ‘like a fish cast on dry land’ at Sherborne Castle and fell foul of the local clergy there the following year.

  If Nicholl had contended that Bess Throckmorton was a pawn in the game, an all alluring femme fatale encouraged by Essex to seduce Ralegh, protesting quietly while he took her virginity and lost his place at Court as a result, there might be something in the Ralegh-Essex squabble. But none of this was necessary. Ralegh ruined himself – he would never gain favour at court again – and Essex had no need in 1593 to discredit him further. With respect to Ralegh’s interests, therefore, the set-up at Deptford served no purpose at all.

  The Survivalist Theory

  A century ago, an American physicist, Dr Thomas Mendenhall, developed a system for determining disputed authorship based on word length, literally counting the number of two-letter, three-letter, four-letter words per thousand written. He had been commissioned to prove that the plays of William Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon, the ‘golden lad’ whose brother Anthony was mixed up in espionage with a homosexual tinge to it.

  Mendenhall discovered that Bacon, who wrote a great deal that we know to be his, matched poorly with Shakespeare, but Marlowe’s match was, in the professor’s words ‘something akin to a sensation’. The conclusion was, simply, that Marlowe was Shakespeare.

  Opponents of this theory, for example those who defend the Stratford man, or support Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, the Early of Derby or a combination of any of the above, pointed out that a mechanical solution like Mendenhall’s cannot be applied to a process as complex as literature. The works of Marlowe and Shakespeare (assuming them to be by different hands from each other) have been so copied and edited over the centuries that the analytical process is invalid.

  While all this is fair comment (and totally ignores Shakespeare’s real genius, the art of picking up unconsidered trifles, styles, characters and even whole stories from other people), it did nonetheless create the obvious corollary. If Marlowe was Shakespeare, he either wrote the whole canon (plays and poetry) before 1593 – which is probably physically impossible – or he did not die in 1593.

  It is interesting that Marlowe’s survival should first appear in the form of a novel, where we believe it should have stayed, when an American lawyer, Wilbur Zeigler, wrote It was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries in 1895. After Hotson’s discovery of the Danby inquest and the unlikeliness of that version, some kind of faked death seemed ever more likely. Another American, Calvin Hoffman, went into print thirty years later with The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. He was even allowed to open the vaults of the Walsinghams in Chislehurst church in order to find some clinching evidence. All he found was sand and was not allowed to open the coffins below.

  ‘Clues’ that Marlowe survived Deptford, with the connivance clearly of Poley, Frizer and Skeres, and perhaps as the brain child of Thomas Walsingham or even Burghley, abound in the plays of Shakespeare, but particularly in the man’s sonnets. This was presented intriguingly by A.D. Wraight in 1994 in The Story the Sonnets Tell. Two examples must suffice. In The Jew of Malta, not published until the 1630s, some experts believe that the prologue spoken by Machiavelli was inserted later and was autobiographical of Marlowe himself – ‘Albeit the world thinks Machevil is dead,/Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps...’.

  And the first letters of the name ‘Machiavelli’, MACH, are an anagram of ‘Ch.Ma’, the nom de plume used in the publication of Dr Faustus in 1604.

  Sonnet 74, written, according to conventional scholarship, at some time in 1594-5, reads:

  But he contented: when that fell arrest

  Without all bail shall carry me away

  My life hath in this line some interest,

  Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

  When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

  The very part was consecrate to thee.

  The earth can have but earth, which is his due,

  My spirit is thine, the better part of me.

  So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

  The prey of worms, my body being dead,

  The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,

  Too base of thee to
be remembered.

  The worth of that, is that which it contains,

  And that is this, and this with thee remains.

  Survivalists see in this references to Marlowe and, since the sonnet was written in the first person, proof that he must have been alive after 30 May 1593. ‘Fell arrest without bail’...’the prey of worms, my body being dead’, ‘the coward conquest of a wretch’s knife’; all this, say survivalists, reflects Marlowe. They are guilty, of course, of taking the Sonnet at once too literally and out of context. References to a rival poet (i.e. Marlowe) do not begin until Sonnet 78. Sonnet 74 is part of a series that deals with death. Sonnet 71 begins:

  No longer mourn for me when I am dead,

  Than thou shall hear the surly, sullen bell

  Give warning to the world that I am fled

  From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

  Sonnet 74 merely continues this notion. ‘Full arrest without all bail’ means death with no reprieve and ‘The prey of worms’ simply reiterates the theme of Sonnet 71. To be as pedantic as the survivalists, Marlowe was granted bail of a sort, by being allowed to report each day to the Privy Council shortly before his death.

  Survivalists have a clear theory as to why and how Marlowe’s death was faked. He was in trouble with the Privy Council and his papers were seized. His friend Kyd was under torture and likely to crack. Whether Marlowe knew it or not, both Baines and Cholmeley were offering devastating evidence against him. If Walsingham was the orchestrator, all he need have done was to get Marlowe away, by ship from Deptford. But if it was a simple dash for the ports, Marlowe could have been intercepted, traced, brought back. Burghley’s agents swarmed over Europe. Several of them knew Marlowe; he would not be difficult to find. But if it was believed that he was dead, a hunt would be pointless.

  For the subterfuge to work, there had to be a body and survivalists have found one. The fanatical Puritan John Penry, probably responsible for the anti-establishment Marprelate Tracts, was hanged at five o’clock on Tuesday 29 May 1593 at St Thomas-a-Watering, along the old pilgrims’ road to Canterbury, some four miles from Deptford. Like Marlowe, Penry was a Cambridge man, from Peterhouse, and he was a year older.

  The Marprelate Tracts appeared first in the year before the Armada, signed by ‘Martin Marprelate’, the surname clearly coined because the pamphlets were attacks on the hierarchy of the Anglican Church, the ‘bad prelates’. John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, came in for particular vehemence – ‘Master Bridges was a very patch and a dunce while at Cambridge’. An incensed Privy Council persuaded the Queen to use torture to discover the author.

  Penry was tried by the Queen’s Bench and found guilty on 25 May. After a delay of a few days, his execution was suddenly carried out with no information given to his wife or family. The reason for this was simple, say survivalists; the corpse was necessary to substitute for Marlowe. Additional wounds were made to Penry’s head above the right eye and Danby and his jurors fell for the subterfuge wholeheartedly.

  After that, Marlowe’s life is a blank page for survivalists. Some have invented the pseudonym Louis le Doux (the meek) and have Marlowe going on writing for years. Peter Zenner, in a book littered with mistakes, has Marlowe becoming heterosexual, and committing suicide in May 1622 having been spurned by the love of his life.

  The whole idea of survival of our heroes is a deep (and old) psychological one. We find it difficult to accept that someone who has brilliance or goodness beyond the everyday can be taken from us so cruelly. The Welsh believed for centuries that Arthur was not dead, but sleeping under a hillside with his nights until Wales had need of him. The French concocted a story that someone other than Jeanne d’Arc died in the fire at Rouen. Thousands of Russians swore they saw Tsar Nicholas II at large in 1918-19 when in fact his bullet-riddled body was rotting in a makeshift grave in the Koptiaki woods near Ekaterinburg. The Americans could not believe that film star James Dean was dead. We have all seen Elvis!

  In other words, Marlowe’s survival of Deptford is mere wishful thinking. Some believers contend that such faked deaths were common in espionage circles, but they give no examples of it actually happening. John Penry could have been substituted for Marlowe, as neither man’s face would be as well known as it would today because of the inevitable media coverage they would have both received. Had Danby’s jurors taken even a passing look at the man’s neck, of course, they would have seen the tell-tale bruising of the rope. The subterfuge is pure speculation, backed up by cryptic acrostic ‘clues’ from poetry and prose, that, literature experts notwithstanding, can be made to mean anything at all.

  Christopher Marlowe died at Deptford. It is time, four hundred years on, that we knew why.

  ELEVEN

  A GREAT RECKONING

  A great reckoning in a little room.

  William Shakespeare, As You Like It

  S

  hortly after his release from the Bridewell and the clutches of Richard Topcliffe, Thomas Kyd wrote two letters to Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and a member of the Privy Council. If the work is in Kyd’s own hand, we can be sure that the thumbscrews were not used on him because the writing is immaculate. It is clear from the text that Kyd was asking Puckering to intercede on his behalf with ‘my Lorde’ who, after Kyd’s arrest, has clearly had to let him go. ‘Though I think he rest doubtfull of myne innocence, hath yet in his discreeter judgement feared to offend in his retaining me.’ Consequently, Kyd wanted a chance to vindicate himself of the charge of atheism – ‘a deadlie thing which I was undeserved charged withal.’ He wrote

  When I was first suspected for that libel [the Dutch] that concern’d the state, amongst those waste and idle papers (which I cared not for) and was unasked I did deliver up, were found some fragments of a disputation touching that opinion, affirmed by Marlowe to be his, and shuffled with some of myne unknown to me by some occasion of our writing in one chamber two yeares since.

  The central portion of the letter went on to vilify Marlowe – ‘That I should love or be familiar friend with one so irreligious were very rare...besides he was intemperate and of a cruel heart, the very contraries to which my greatest enemies will say of me.’ He apologised, almost as a cliché, for speaking ill of the dead. ‘Quia mortui non mordent’ [because the dead do not bite], but must vindicate himself. Kyd suggested that Puckering talk to Marlowe’s friends – ‘Hariot, Warner, Roydon and some stationers in Paule’s churchyard, whom I in no sort can accuse nor will excuse by reason of his company...’.

  It is a sad truth that too many biographers have believed every word from Kyd. Marlowe was an atheist, Marlowe was irreligious, Marlowe was intemperate, Marlowe was cruel. How do we know? ‘Gentle’ Thomas Kyd says so. But ‘gentle’ Thomas Kyd had faced Topcliffe and he had cracked. Good men, however gentle, however honest, however brave, can break when they are alone and in agony. Which of us would behave differently? Only the fanatics like Edmund Campion and the madmen like Francis Kett.

  Kyd was unemployed and friendless by the early June of 1593. He hoped that by ingratiating himself with Puckering, swearing his innocence and distancing himself from Marlowe and his atheism, he would be reinstated by the patron who had fired him. In 1940, Dr Frederick Boas put forward the theory that this lord was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. He believed that Strange sacked Kyd to avoid any link with Marlowe and the School of Night. We believe that Boas is wrong. It was not Strange who was Kyd’s Lord, so that the motive for sacking changes.

  The second letter to Puckering was unsigned, but it is clearly in Kyd’s handwriting. Now, he is more vitriolic, more desperate. No one in the corridors of power was listening to him.

  Pleaseth it your honourable lp [lordship] touching Marlowe’s monstrous opinions as I cannot but with an aggrieved conscience think on him or them so can I but particularize few in respect of them that kept his greater company.

  First it was his custom when I knew him first and as I hear say he continued it in ta
ble talk or otherwise to jest at the divine scriptures, jibe at prayers and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spake or wryt by prophets and such holie men.

  Four specific accusations followed which we have heard before:

  He would report St John to be our saviour Christ’s Alexis. I cover [report] it with reverence and trembling that in that christ did love him with an extraordinary love.

  That for me to wryte a poem of St Paul’s conversion as I was determined he said would be as if I should go wryte a book of fast and loose [conartistry] esteeming Paul a juggler.

  That the prodigall Childe’s portion was but four nobles, he held his purse so near the bottom in all pictures and that it either was a jest or else four nobles then was thought a great patrimony not thinking it a parable.

  That things esteemed to be done by divine power might as well be done by observation of men all which he would so suddenly take slight occasion to slip out as I and many others in regard of his other rashness in attempting sudden privy injuries to men did overslip though often reproached him for it and for which God is my witness as well by my Lord’s commandment as in hatred of his life and thoughts I left and did refrain his company.’

  The last point refers to Marlowe’s going to ‘the King of Scots’ where the poet Matthew Roydon has already gone.

  The second letter smacks of the Baines note – a list of puerile jibes at the Gospels. And as such some biographers have either disbelieved it, because they disbelieve the Baines Note, or they take the view that Kyd provided Baines with information in the first place. We accept neither version.

  Kyd’s second letter is markedly different from the first. There is none of the plaintive wheedling and protestations of innocence. It is all Marlowe. This is not a vengeful man nearing the end of his tether, turning on a former friend with whom he once shared lodgings and who may well have worked with him on The Spanish Tragedy. Between his first and second letters, we believe that the poet received a visit. Somebody got to Thomas Kyd.