The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  He doesn’t mix with the likes of us.’

  ‘That arse

  is not the author.’

  Swaying like a tree

  caught in a gentle westerly, I cling

  to my beer-fuelled boldness. ‘This is my play. My play.

  I’ll tell you why Prince Hamlet dithers so.

  He isn’t of a violent temperament.

  Simple as that. Though simpletons like you

  will throw a punch rather than hurt the brain

  to work out something cleverer, the Prince

  (I mark how you restrain him; excellent;

  and you, Fist Man, thus name yourself a clod),

  the Prince of Denmark, if I may continue,

  prefers a quip to murder. As all do

  who value the art of thinking. (Hold him well!

  I’m really not worth the bruising.) There is much

  to think about, surely. Is his father’s ghost

  a figment of Hell? Did not the Christian God

  say, “Vengeance is mine”? Then who is he to slay

  another? Yet the urging drives him mad.

  And at the same time, into a sanity

  more clear than any of you will ever know.’

  ‘Lads! Let me go!’ the held-back brawler shouts,

  and I see a look pass through them like a breeze

  that will furnish the ground with apples.

  ‘No, you don’t!’

  says the wench who served me. ‘No more breakages.

  Broken noses is one thing, broken stools

  I’ve had enough of. Out.’

  ‘Who – me?’

  ‘It’s you,

  or the five of them, and you look easier

  to get to the exit. Help me, darlin’, please,

  come willingly. It’s best.’

  I let myself

  be coaxed from the tavern like an orphaned calf

  is coaxed from its field towards the marketplace.

  To steady me, she pulls my arm around,

  and draped, faux-passionate, around her neck,

  ‘You know I tell the truth,’ I say. ‘I am

  the author of that play.’

  ‘You are, you’re not,

  what does it matter?’

  Her arm around my waist

  as if she’s my lover, steadying my sway

  towards the door. And I, outraged, begin

  my heart’s defence.

  ‘What does it matter? Why—’

  I stop to concentrate upon the words

  that will convince her.

  ‘Not here, love, outside.’

  She tugs at me. ‘Now, darlin’.’

  In the snow.

  We’re in the snow. She is so practical,

  so tiny-nosed.

  ‘If they enjoy the play,

  what does it matter?’

  ‘That I wrote the play?’

  ‘That they know you wrote the play. What does it matter?’

  It’s falling fast. She’s cold. Crosses her arms

  across a goosebumped bosom. ‘Anyways.

  Drink’s done you in. You didn’t write that play.

  You’re soft in the head with boozing. Silly man.’

  She pats my cheek. ‘You’re maybe clever enough.

  But I’ve seen him, Shakespeare. Comes in now and then

  when he visits London. From a country house,

  they say, a big one. Wears a velvet cap.’

  I’m outraged, though I’ve broken sumptuary laws

  more often than I’ve broken wind.

  ‘How can

  a man of so mean standing—’

  ‘Not so mean.

  He is a gentleman. Was granted arms.’

  ‘Bought them more like.’

  She squints me with an eye

  expert at filling just below a pint

  without attracting notice.

  ‘That may be.

  But he comes across more gentleman than you.’

  ‘And does he boast about his plays?’

  ‘No, no.

  ’Umble as mumblin’. Not so in his dress,

  but in his manner. None of yer spoutin’ off.’

  My spouting off. The dart’s not aimed at me,

  but it hits the bull – what landed me right here,

  in a filthy street, tipped out like so much turd

  from an upper window, wrenched free of my plays,

  condemned to stay anonymous Will Hall,

  is my spouting off.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say, ‘I’m not

  called William Shakespeare. That man is a fence.’

  She fast objects, ‘There’s no offence in him!’

  ‘A fence of the sort that keeps intruders out.

  A broker of plays behind whom any man

  who wishes to stay anonymous can write.

  I’ll tell you a secret.’

  She laughs. ‘I’m sure you will.

  Six pints of my husband’s brew would turn a priest

  on to his head and rattle him upside down,

  for a neighbourhood of secrets. Go on, then.’

  ‘I’m Christopher Marlowe.’

  She squawks like a bird.

  She folds in half where her apron strings are tied

  and hoots out disbelief until she can

  stand up half straight.

  ‘You fool,’ she says. ‘He’s dead.

  And you look nothing like him, anyways.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Why, a corpse!’ She grins.

  ‘All bone and worm food. But I saw him once,

  when he was alive. A young bloke. Lots of hair.

  Wild in his manner. Loved to pick a fight,

  I heard.’

  ‘So I’ve lost my hair. And aged ten years.’

  She cackles. ‘Go on with you! Put on some weight

  and shrunk some too.’

  ‘Shrunk some?’

  ‘Why certainly!

  He was five or six inches taller.’

  ‘And how old

  were you, when you saw him?’

  ‘Twelve, thirteen,’ she says.

  ‘And shorter?’

  ‘Listen, sir,’ her finger wags,

  ‘I’m not the one who’s making up this tale.

  Now stop your nonsense and be off with you

  or I’ll call the constables.’

  She’d more than call,

  had she believed me. She’d have shouted, yowled,

  summoned the brawlers out to hold me down

  until the law came. I’d be bundled off

  to prison, and the executioner.

  Though often I’ve wished for that oblivion.

  But, friend, this lie we fashioned from our need

  has taken sustenance, and grown, and bred.

  It nests in the heart of all who gave it ears,

  devouring truth, which cannot be recovered

  even by shoving fingers down its throat.

  The lie has fully digested me, and can’t

  vomit me out.

  And yet, I tasted there

  for the smallest moment, all my pain resolved.

  Before their disbelief, before her squawk

  of extraordinary laughter, for a breath I was

  entirely me, and honest with the world.

  How glittering a resurrection feels,

  when what was gone for ever is regained,

  its value multiplied by loss, reclaimed.

  And I shall know it more, shall write it through

  in every play until I die; a prayer

  that by its repetition may come true.

  Again, and again, the posthumous will rise

  to claim their crowns, their loves, amaze their friends,

  confound their enemies, rewrite their tales.

  And I will live that drama yet. I swear.

  Also by Ros Barber

  POETRY

  Not the Usual Gra
sses Singing

  How Things Are on Thursday

  Material

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Not every word that appears in The Marlowe Papers was in use in the sixteenth century. In order to avoid cod Elizabethan and strike a balance between authenticity and readability, here and there I have chosen ‘barmaid’ over ‘wench’, let Robert Greene refer to Marlowe as ‘bent’, and given ‘Muslim’ when ‘Musselman’ would be more historically accurate. Though in the fifteenth century, ‘lunch’ was the sound made by a soft body falling, and in the sixteenth, a hunk or chunk of something, I have allowed it to mean a meal on the single occasion where no substitute would do. Some decisions of this sort were made in order to keep within the allowable variations of iambic meter. For the syllable counters among you, it is worth noting that iambic pentameter does not always have ten syllables; it can have as many as twelve (and variations in pronunciation can in places make scansion a somewhat subjective art): so long as it has five metrical feet, and the majority of those iambic, the line should qualify.

  Following are notes that are not in any way essential to the understanding or enjoyment of The Marlowe Papers, but I hope some readers will find them interesting or useful.

  NOTES

  DEATH’S A GREAT DISGUISER

  ‘the plague pit where Kit Marlowe now belongs’ Marlowe is supposed to have been buried in an unmarked grave in the grounds of St Nicholas Church, Deptford.

  CAPTAIN SILENCE

  ‘You learnt the tongue from Huguenots?’ After the Paris massacre of 1572, Huguenot refugees flooded into southern England. Many settled in Canterbury, where Marlowe was born and spent his boyhood.

  TOM WATSON

  Tom Watson was a poet and playwright who wrote in Latin. A documented friend of Marlowe, Watson was nine years his senior and a friend of Thomas Walsingham, first cousin once removed of Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State, who set up the first English intelligence network to help Queen Elizabeth gauge and contain the Catholic threat.

  Richard Harvey was rector at St Nicholas, Chislehurst, in Thomas Walsingham’s parish.

  Gabriel Harvey, his brother, was a don at Cambridge while Marlowe was a student. He published numerous references to Marlowe and quarrelled bitterly with his friend Thomas Nashe.

  Lord Burghley, as Lord Treasurer one of the most powerful men in England, signed the 1587 Privy Council letter testifying that Marlowe ‘had done Her Majesty good service … in matters touching the benefit of his country’.

  ‘my only other option was the Church’ The scholarship under which Marlowe attended Cambridge for six years, graduating both BA and MA, had been bequeathed by Matthew Parker, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and under its conditions Marlowe would have been expected to take Holy Orders.

  THE LOW COUNTRIES

  The Low Countries include the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. From 1581 parts were under Spanish occupation, while others, such as the area around Flushing and nearby Middelburg, were held by the English. Protestant England had been under threat from Catholic Spain since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, as the Spanish king, Philip II, had been made King of England and Ireland through his marriage to the previous queen, Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary.

  ‘the daughter stumbles in/with bleeding stumps for hands’ alludes to Titus Andronicus. The first recorded performance of this play, on 24 January 1594, suggests it was written in 1593, and though some consider it an earlier work it includes, like The Rape of Lucrece published in the same year, the rape and brutal silencing of a heroine.

  ‘the silenced woman turned to nightingale’ In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue have been removed by the rapists so she cannot identify them, points to Ovid’s tale of Philomel to explain what has happened to her. Philomel was raped and had her tongue cut out by her brother-in-law Tereus, but wove a tapestry to tell her story, and was transformed into a nightingale.

  ARMADA YEAR

  In May of 1588, the Spanish Armada would set sail.

  ‘Still hiring the horse, though’ Marlowe had hired a grey gelding and tackle when first arriving in London in August 1587, a status item he clearly had problems affording. In April 1588, he borrowed money from fellow Corpus Christi alumnus Edward Elvyn and was sued for non-repayment six months later. In the same law term he was sued by the hackney man for failing to return the horse.

  ‘who now is qualified a gentleman’ Marlowe’s MA gave him gentleman status, meaning, among other things, he was allowed to carry a sword.

  ‘The execution of the Queen of Scots’ Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, had been executed the previous February, after the exposure of the Babington Plot. Several people connected to Marlowe – including his patron Thomas Walsingham and the two official witnesses to his ‘death’ in 1593 (Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres) – were involved in the government’s framing and unmasking of this plot. The messages that led to Mary’s execution for treason were passed through double agent Gilbert Gifford, whose name is an intriguing reversal of that of the man arrested with Marlowe in 1592.

  ‘Tom had been writing plays for Ned for months’ Though no plays are extant, Tom Watson’s employer, William Cornwallis, testified that devising ‘twenty fictions and knaveries in a play’ was his ‘daily practice and his living’, and Francis Meres in 1598 lists him as among ‘our best for Tragedy’.

  MIDDELBURG

  Middelburg is adjacent to Flushing (or Vlissingen), their centres being less than five miles apart. It is here that Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores was apparently printed – a book that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered to be banned (and burnt) in 1599.

  Le Doux and his trunk suggest one way in which Marlowe might have led his ‘posthumous’ existence. Marlovian researcher Peter Farey’s discoveries among the Bacon Papers in Lambeth Palace Library include a list of books in a trunk belonging to a Monsieur Le Doux. The Bacon Papers are the papers of Anthony Bacon (brother of lawyer and philosopher Francis), a spy who lived abroad from 1579 and sent intelligence back to his uncle, Lord Burghley, and Sir Francis Walsingham. Returning to England in 1592 he became spymaster for the Earl of Essex, gathering intelligence through an international network of agents. One of these was Le Doux, who Farey and fellow Marlovian A.D. Wraight speculate was an English agent posing as a Frenchman, as other English agents, such as Anthony Standen, had done. The presence on the book list of French and Italian dictionaries, but no English one, supports this theory, as does the fact that the list, though in French, is written in English secretary hand rather than the italic hand a French writer would have used. According to the International Genealogical Index, the only occurrence of the name Le Doux in England in three hundred years (sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries) was in the Huguenot population of Marlowe’s home town, Canterbury; Louis Le Doux was more or less the same age as Marlowe and therefore a possible boyhood friend (Farey, 2000). The trunk contained numerous books identified by scholars as Shakespeare sources, and a number pertinent to Marlowe’s canon. Le Doux was in Exton, Rutland, in late 1595, in London briefly in early 1596 and then abroad (Wraight, 1996), writing to Bacon for the last time from Middelburg on 22 June 1596.

  ‘the outline of a marigold’ Two different versions of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander were published in 1598. On the title page of the quarto published by Paul Linley a woodcut shows two marigolds, one open to the sun, the other closed at night, with the motto Non Licit Exigius, which means either ‘not permitted to those of mean spirit’ or ‘not permitted to the uninitiated’. The marigold was a flower with strong Catholic connotations; often linked with the Virgin Mary, it was also explicitly linked with Mary Tudor.

  T.T. are the initials under the mysterious ‘Mr W.H.’ dedication of Shake-speare’s Sonnets (1609), usually taken to be Thomas Thorpe. Thorpe, it was recently discovered, worked (like Marlowe) as an intelligencer, and was connected to Catholic figures who were considered a threat to the real
m. In autumn 1596, he was in Madrid as ‘the guest of Father Robert Persons, the outspoken Jesuit opponent of the English government and close adviser to the Spanish’ (Martin and Finnis, p.4).

  TAMBURLAINE THE SECOND

  Robert Greene was a popular writer of romances and plays, described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as ‘England’s first celebrity author’.

  ‘Alphonsus, King of Aragon’ is widely acknowledged as one of Greene’s several attempts to cash in on Marlowe’s success.

  Thomas Walsingham was Marlowe’s senior by three or four years. He was in Paris with Tom Watson in 1581, working from his older cousin Sir Francis Walsingham’s embassy. At one point involved with intelligence operations, he was to become Marlowe’s friend and patron.

  HOTSPUR’S DESCENDANT

  Hotspur’s descendant In 1592 Marlowe claimed to be ‘very well known’ to Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, also known as the Wizard Earl, a direct descendant of Henry Hotspur of Henry IV, Part I fame. Marlowe’s friend Tom Watson dedicated two works to Northumberland. The earl, who amassed a library of over two thousand books at Petworth in Sussex, visited the Low Countries in 1588. His librarian, Walter Warner, was named by Thomas Kyd as an associate of Marlowe’s (Nicholl, p.508).

  ‘a history play’ The fashion for English history plays began with Marlowe’s Edward II and the Henry VI trilogy, plays attributed to Marlowe by scholars for two hundred years until the late 1920s (Riggs, p. 283).

  FIRST RENDEZVOUS

  Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously six weeks before Marlowe’s ‘death’, was on the bookstalls two weeks after it. It is the earliest historical record to associate the name ‘William Shakespeare’ with literature (and there are no theatrical records mentioning that name before this date either). Scholars recognise ‘compelling links’ between this poem and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, which was not to be published for another five years (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, p.21).