The Marlowe Papers: A Novel
Page 32
Richard Field, printer of Venus and Adonis and originally from Stratford-on-Avon, is usually referred to as a ‘school friend’ of Shakespeare’s. He worked frequently for Lord Burghley, whose ward was the Earl of Southampton, to whom Venus and Adonis was dedicated.
‘Let base conceited wits admire vile things./ Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs’ is Marlowe’s translation (from Amores) of the two-line Latin epigram on the title page of Venus and Adonis. This poem closes, ‘Then though death racks my bones in funeral fire,/I’ll live, and as he pulls me down, mount higher’.
THE FIRST HEIR OF MY INVENTION
‘The first heir of my invention’ is the author’s description of Venus and Adonis in his dedication to the Earl of Southampton.
THE JEW OF MALTA
Thomas Nashe, one of the University Wits, was a writer of satirical and topical pamphlets. He, too, was educated at Cambridge, but by summer 1588 was living in London. Gabriel Harvey referred to Marlowe and Nashe as ‘Aretine and the Devil’s Orator’; Nashe defended Marlowe as one of his ‘friends that used me like a friend’. His name appears with Marlowe’s on the 1594 quarto of Dido, Queen of Carthage.
‘Religion is made by men’ ‘That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’. This and other of Marlowe’s views on religion are listed in the famous Baines Note. (See note on ‘A SLAVE WHOSE GALL COINS SLANDERS LIKE A MINT’. Three versions of the note exist. The transcripts of these, and other documents relating to Marlowe, can be found in Kuriyama (2002)).
William Bradley In March 1588, William Bradley borrowed £14 from John Alle(y)n, innkeeper, manager of the Admiral’s Men at The Theatre, and Edward Alleyn’s brother, promising to pay it back the following August. This defaulted loan caused the subsequent feud between Bradley and those associated with John Allen, including Watson, his brother-in-law Hugh Swift, and Marlowe (Eccles, pp. 57–68).
Hugh Swift is thought to have acted as John Allen’s lawyer after Bradley’s loan defaulted. In autumn 1589 he was threatened by Bradley’s friend George Orrell and took out a surety of the peace. A similar surety was lodged shortly after by Bradley, naming Hugh Swift, John Allen and Tom Watson.
THAT MEN SHOULD PUT AN ENEMY IN THEIR MOUTHS
‘A comedy’ It is a common misrepresentation of Marlowe that he couldn’t be funny. We know there were comic scenes in Tamburlaine which the printer confessed to omitting, thinking them too frivolous for the serious subject matter. Doctor Faustus contains a number of comic scenes and The Jew of Malta can be played as a farce. There is also a great deal of comedy in Hero and Leander. Marlowe was widely referred to as a wit, and one has only to read the accusations in the Baines Note to appreciate Marlowe in full comedic flow.
Padua was the university attended by Danish students named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 1596.
Chronicles Hall’s Chronicles, chief source for the history plays.
THE UNIVERSITY MEN
Poley Robert (Robin) Poley was a key figure in the Elizabethan government’s intelligence service. Described by Ben Jonson’s tutor William Camden as ‘very expert at dissembling’, he had been instrumental in trapping the conspirators associated with the Babington Plot, which in turn led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Cornwallis William Cornwallis (not to be confused with his cousin the essayist) bought Fisher’s Folly in Bishopsgate from the Earl of Oxford in autumn 1588. A suspected Catholic recusant, he was under government surveillance. Watson, appointed as the family tutor not long after his arrival in London, was likely part of this surveillance.
Arbella Stuart was first cousin to James VI of Scotland, and at this time, like him, was considered a strong contender to succeed to the throne. In spring 1589 (when her tutor ‘Morley’ was appointed) she was fourteen years old.
THE TUTOR
Perhaps on account of his ‘bad boy’ reputation, and a belief that Arbella was resident in Derbyshire when Marlowe was in London, scholars have discounted the idea of Marlowe as Arbella Stuart’s tutor without thorough investigation. However, the ‘Morley’ described by Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Shrewsbury, who was the orphaned Arbella’s grandmother and guardian, in her September 1592 letter to Lord Burghley, is a better fit for Marlowe than any other proposed candidate. Writers were frequently employed in this capacity and Marlowe’s experience as an ‘intelligencer’ would make him well suited to such a sensitive position. That he had previously been employed by the State in a matter of extreme trust is confirmed by the 1587 Privy Council letter signed by Lord Burghley and other members of the Privy Council. That the ‘Morley’ in question asked for forty pounds a year, complaining of being ‘so much damnified by leaving of the university’ and that in the very month that Marlowe was called an atheist in print the countess writes of ‘withall of late having some cause to be doubtful’ of the tutor’s ‘forwardness in religion’ fits Marlowe perfectly. Marlowe’s documented presence in London at points during 1589 to 1592 does not clash with Arbella’s known movements. We know that in 1589 Arbella spent much of her time in London with her aunt and uncle (Gristwood, p. 99) and was there with her grandmother from October 1591 to August 1592.
THE HOG LANE AFFRAY
The most authoritative source on this incident remains Eccles’ Christopher Marlowe in London, but details can be discovered in any Marlowe biography.
LIMBO
Marlowe was in Newgate prison from 18 September to 3 December 1589. In November, just before Marlowe’s release, Thomas Walsingham inherited Scadbury on the death of his brother Edmund. Watson was not released until 12 February 1590.
Sir William Stanley fought loyally for the Queen in Ireland and at the taking of Deventer in the Low Countries in 1587, but shortly afterwards handed Deventer back to the Spanish and converted to Catholicism, maintaining an ‘English Regiment’ loyal to the Catholic cause. He favoured his cousin Ferdinando Stanley for the throne, or Arbella Stuart, whom he planned to kidnap (Kendall, p. 170).
John Poole was a Catholic counterfeiter, brother-in-law to Sir William Stanley. The Baines Note tells us that Marlowe was acquainted with Poole, and that he met him while imprisoned in Newgate. For more on Poole, see Nicholl (pp. 286–98).
Ferdinando Stanley The future Earl of Derby was, until his father’s death in 1593, known as Lord Strange. Marlowe claimed to be ‘very well known’ to him in 1592, according to Sir Robert Sidney’s letter to Lord Burghley. Nashe (see note on ‘THE JEW OF MALTA’) was connected to him also, and is thought to have dedicated to him a bawdy poem known as ‘Nashe’s Dildo’. Strange’s Men staged both late Marlowe and early Shakespeare plays.
POOLE THE PRISONER
‘we’re in a place the State denies exists’ Limbo being a Catholic concept. The official State religion had been Protestantism since Queen Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne in 1558.
A TWIN
‘never blots a word’ In the First Folio (1623) Heminges and Condell, Shakespeare’s business partners (as shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men), say, ‘We have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’. Ben Jonson, in a private notebook published posthumously, says, ‘I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech.’
‘shareholder in the players’ company’ The first mention of William Shakespeare in connection to the theatre is a payment in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber in March 1595 for company performances at Court during Christmas 1594. There is good evidence he was a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men but no reliable primary source to support the idea he was an actor.
‘Nashe is in prison’ Thomas Nashe was imprisoned for Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem in 1593.
NECESSITY
Thomas Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy and is considered by some to be the author of an early version of Hamlet, known as the Ur
-Hamlet, on the basis of a reference by Nashe in 1589 to ‘whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches’ just after an apparent allusion to Kyd. Kyd’s first letter to Lord Keeper Puckering after his arrest in 1593 testifies that he and Marlowe were ‘writing in one chamber two years since’. A version of Hamlet was certainly staged in 1594.
Bedlam The original Bethlehem Hospital (for the insane) was situated in Bishopsgate, directly opposite the Cornwallis house, Fisher’s Folly.
‘Ann Watson’s there’ Ann Watson’s brother, musician Thomas Swift, was brought up in the Cornwallis household.
THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT
The School of Night refers loosely to the free-thinkers who gravitated to the Raleigh/ Northumberland circle.
Sir Walter Raleigh In an anonymous agent’s report on Richard Cholmeley, Marlowe is said to have ‘read the Atheist Lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh & others’ (Kuriyama, p. 215). The Baines Note quotes Marlowe as saying that ‘Moses was but a juggler, & that one Heriot being Sir Walter Raleigh’s man can do more than he.’
‘I have a mathematician in my pay’ Thomas Harriot’s connection to Marlowe is mentioned in the Baines Note, and by Kyd in his first letter to Lord Keeper Puckering. Mathematician and astronomer Harriot was employed both by Raleigh and by Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland.
‘Come Live With Me and Be My Love’ Raleigh famously wrote a verse response to Marlowe’s lyric poem, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, entitled ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’.
George Carey Second cousin to the Queen, brother-in-law of Lord Strange, and Lord Chamberlain from 1597, when he followed his father as patron of Shakespeare’s company of players.
Matthew Roydon Poet, intelligencer, an associate of Marlowe, according to Kyd.
THE BANISHMENT OF KENT
King Leir was performed at the Rose Theatre on 6 and 8 April 1594, and registered for publication that May. Widely agreed as a source of Shakespeare’s King Lear, this earlier version of the story was published as The True Chronical History of King Leir and His Three Daughters in 1605. It does not contain the sub-plot of slander revolving round Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, or the banishment of Kent. Some scholars argue the same author wrote both versions.
TOBACCO AND BOOZE
That Marlowe did not originally say ‘tobacco and boys’ but rather ‘tobacco and booze’ was first suggested by Stewart Young (2008). The word in the Baines Note is ‘boies’. ‘Booze’, though it sounds modern, is a variant of ‘bouse’ (c. 1300) and OED examples of its usage include ‘bowsing’ (‘boozing’) in a 1592 pamphlet by Thomas Nashe.
BURYING THE MOOR
‘Moor’ was the Queen’s nickname for Sir Francis Walsingham. He died on 6 April 1590 owing the Queen about £42,000, ‘largely from expenditure on the Crown’s business without obtaining privy seal warrants’. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his burial at night was to avoid his creditors.
‘the tomb of his son-in-law’ Walsingham’s daughter Frances was the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, courtier poet, to whose sister, the Countess of Pembroke, Marlowe was to dedicate Tom Watson’s posthumous Amintae Gaudia.
‘Phaeton’ Ovid tells how Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, obtains his father’s permission to drive the sun chariot, but fails to control it, with fatal results.
SOUTHAMPTON
‘Why should I marry who that man decrees?’ Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, was a ward of Lord Burghley, who wanted him to marry his granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Vere (neglected offspring of the Earl of Oxford). That the first seventeen of ‘Shake-speares Sonnets’ are addressed to the Earl of Southampton, who would turn seventeen on 6 October 1590, was first proposed by Nathan Drake (1817) and has been widely supported.
ARBELLA
The Earl of Essex Arbella Stuart had a fondness for the Earl of Essex which she continued to express for many years (Gristwood, pp. 105–6).
‘your cousin Frances had his child tucked in her belly’ The birth of a son in January 1591 indicates that Essex and Lady Sidney conceived their child around the time of her father’s funeral.
‘the Duke of Parma’s son, Farnese’ Arbella’s possible marriage to Farnese was being brokered in Flushing by Robert Poley’s man Michael Moody only weeks before Marlowe’s presence there.
POISONING THE WELL
Richard Baines was an English intelligence agent who penetrated the Jesuit seminary at Rheims and was ordained as a priest during the time that Tom Watson and Thomas Walsingham were in Paris. He confided to a friend his plan to murder everyone at the seminary by poisoning the well. The friend betrayed him and he was subsequently tortured, his wrists being tied behind his back before he was suspended by them (the strappado). Boas was the first to recognise him as the model for Barabas in The Jew of Malta. Roy Kendall’s book on Baines is invaluable in understanding his relationship with Marlowe and espionage (Kendall).
DANGER IS IN WORDS
‘I go as Morley’ Elizabethan names were flexible. Marlowe was known by many names including Merlin and Marlin (at Cambridge), Morley, and Marley. He is referred to as Morley on a number of official documents: the Privy Council letter of 1587, the Coroner’s Inquest document, and Tom Watson and Ingram Frizer’s pardons. As Sarah Gristwood observes in relation to his dual lives as intelligencer and writer, he ‘managed to split the different sides of his life completely’ (Gristwood, p. 459).
FLUSHING
Richard Cholmeley claimed that Marlowe made him an atheist. Cholmeley was ‘a companion’ of Thomas Drury in 1591, and arrested with him, but it seems he was subsequently released and paid for his role in turning Drury in to the authorities (Nicholl, p. 332).
Drury Thomas Drury describes Richard Baines as one who ‘used to resort unto me’, and appears to claim that it was he who procured the Baines Note, in a letter to Anthony Bacon dated 1 August 1593 (Kendall, p. 336).
A RESURRECTION
Gilbert Gifford, known by his alias Jaques Colerdin and his Cipher ‘4’, was a double agent who, like Baines, became a Catholic priest. He spent time at the Catholic seminaries at both Douai (during Tom Watson’s time there) and at Rheims (missing Baines on several occasions, and by the smallest margin). After gaining the trust of Mary, Queen of Scots, and being given the key to papal ciphers, he was instrumental in unravelling the Babington Plot. His death in a Paris gaol is supported by the scantiest of evidence: in a letter dated November 1591 from Henry Walpole, Jesuit chaplain to Sir William Stanley’s regiment. Two months later ‘Gifford Gilbert’ appears in Flushing in the company of agents Marlowe and Baines (Kendall, pp. 144–51).
THE FATAL LABYRINTH OF MISBELIEF
‘I’ve as much right to coin as the Queen of England’ Marlowe was quoted as saying this in the Baines Note.
Governor Sidney Sir Robert Sidney, brother of the dead courtier, soldier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, and of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was Governor of Flushing in 1592.
BETRAYED
‘To see the goldsmith’s cunning’ The reason for the counterfeiting that Marlowe gave to Sir Robert Sidney, as stated in his letter to Lord Burghley dated 26 January 1592, where other details of this conversation appear.
RETURNED TO THE LORD TREASURER
‘the Strand’ Cecil House, Lord Burghley’s London home, was an imposing house on the Strand.
COLLABORATION
‘My play’ Henry VI Part I is widely considered to be co-authored, and somewhat of a mess. F. G. Fleay (1875) argued the authors were Marlowe, Greene, Peele and an unknown writer of limited skill, whom A. D. Wraight identifies as Edward Alleyn (Wraight, 1993, pp 251–76).
‘the Crow’ Despite a well-established belief that the ‘upstart Crow’ in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit alludes to William Shakespeare, there are good reasons to believe it actually refers to the actor Edward Alleyn (Pinksen). That actors take precedence over writers in the public’s mind is at the heart of Greene’s complaint. Plays were associated wit
h theatre companies, not their authors, and the line Greene quotes from Henry VI Part III would evoke in his readers’ minds not the unknown author but the actor who played the part. In the main text of Groatsworth, Roberto (whom Greene identifies with himself) meets a ‘substantial’ Player, who asks Roberto to write for him, promising he will be well paid. In 1592, readers would have recognised this wealthy Player ‘thundering on the stage’ as Edward Alleyn, chief shareholder and manager of Lord Strange’s Men. Greene wrote for Alleyn. In a letter following the main text, Greene reports he is now dying from poverty, and urges fellow playwrights Marlowe, Nashe and George Peele not to trust actors, ‘those Puppets … that speak from our mouths’, and in particular one ‘upstart Crow’ who believes himself ‘as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’: this last phrase aimed specifically at Marlowe. From April to June 1592, Lord Strange’s Men were performing Tambercam, a probable rip-off of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine : Phillip Henslowe, buying it from Alleyn in 1602, refers to it uniquely as ‘his book’. Thus converging lines of evidence identify Alleyn as Greene’s singular target: the Player and upstart Crow who imagined he could write, left his writers to die in poverty after benefiting from their talents, and was ‘in his own conceit the only Shake-scene [actor] in a country’.