The Marlowe Papers: A Novel

by Ros Barber

  THE SCHOOL OF ATHEISM

  ‘An anonymous agent’ Richard Verstegen is believed to be the author of An advertisement written to a secretarie of my L. Treasurers of Ingland, by an Inglishe intelligencer as he passed throughe Germanie towardes Italie (1592), a condensed version of Jesuit Robert Person’s Responsio. The attack, focused on Lord Burghley, accused Sir Walter Raleigh of running a ‘school of atheism’.

  ‘teach scholars “to spell God backward”’ This claim, directed at the ‘school of atheism’ in An advertisement, can be read as a reference to Doctor Faustus: ‘Within this circle is Jehovah’s name,/Forward and backward anagrammatiz’d’ (Act 1, scene iii). Marlowe was thus implicated in this dangerous public accusation of atheism.

  HOLYWELL STREET

  Holywell Street Robert Greene died in the house of one Mistress Isham in Dowgate, but he had previously fathered a son with the prostitute Em Ball. He seems to have fallen out with her by the time he was approaching death, but Marlowe’s biographer Mark Eccles notes the possibility that ‘Greene was staying in Holywell, where his mistress lived, at the same time that Marlowe was bound over to keep the peace toward the constables of Holywell Street in May 1592’ (p. 126). Less than five months later, and following Verstegen’s tentative allusion to Marlowe’s atheism in An advertisement, Greene was the first to finger Marlowe as an atheist in a direct and identifiable manner (in Groatsworth of Wit).

  A GROATSWORTH OF WIT

  Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit – and despite the current scholarly consensus it is almost certainly Greene’s rather than Chettle’s (Westley) – was registered on 20 September 1592, seventeen days after Greene’s death. Gabriel Harvey shows familiarity with the contents as early as 8 September, so it may have been published before this.

  ‘St Paul’s’ The area around St Paul’s churchyard was the centre of the publishing trade, full of stationers and booksellers. Thomas Kyd, Thomas Thorpe, Gabriel Harvey and Sir John Davies all speak of it as one of Marlowe’s haunts.

  ‘Thom Nashe was gone to spy on the Church’ Nashe, in a secretarial capacity, was staying with Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift at his palace in Croydon.

  THE COBBLER’S SON

  Corkine On Friday, 15 September, just below the Chequers Inn, Canterbury, Marlowe attacked the tailor William Corkine with a stick and dagger. He was bailed by his father, John. In October the case was dropped by mutual consent (Urry, pp. 65–8).

  A SLAVE WHOSE GALL COINS SLANDERS LIKE A MINT

  ‘There is a note’ The dating of ‘A note Containing the opinion of one Christopher Marley Concerning his Damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of gods word’ is uncertain. The carefully edited final version endorsed ‘as sent to her H’ says it was ‘delivered on Whitsun eve last’, but this date (2 June 1593), falling after Marlowe’s apparent death, would make the Note (and its two carefully altered versions) pointless. Drury was sent to ‘stay one Mr Baines’ as a condition of his release from prison the previous November. He writes of delivering to Lord Keeper Puckering and Lord Buckhurst (Whitgift allies) ‘the notablist and vilest articles of atheism that I suppose the like were never known or read of in any age’, saying the Note was ‘delivered to her Highness and command given by herself to prosecute it to the full’ (Kendall, p. 336). Most scholars, assuming error rather than deliberate obfuscation, assign the Note a delivery date of 26 May, a week before the ‘Whitsun eve’ declared, but it may have been in existence much earlier. Historians of Chislehurst in the nineteenth century stated that the Baines Note was the reason for Marlowe’s retreat to Scadbury, and Tucker Brooke arrived independently at the possibility that the Baines Note preceded the arrest warrant of 18 May (Kendall, pp. 308, 281). Gabriel Harvey (a contemporary of Baines who was with him at Christ’s College, Cambridge for five years) thanks an unnamed person for ‘his invaluable Note, that could teach you to achieve more with the little finger of Policy, than you can possibly compass with the mighty arm of Prowess’ and paraphrases the Baines Note’s first line, in a letter dated 27 April (Barber).

  ‘To Scotland, where your friend went’ Thomas Kyd said of Marlowe ‘He would persuade with men of quality to go unto the King of Scots whither I hear Royden is gone and where if he had lived he told me when I saw him last he meant to be.’ Roydon had left for Scotland some time after 26 April 1593 (Nicholl, p. 312).

  THE PLOT

  ‘the Verge’ was defined as an area within twelve miles of the Queen’s person. Any killing occurring within the Verge would be handled by the Queen’s Coroner.

  Ingram Frizer, a loyal servant of the Walsingham family, often acted as their business agent. After apparently killing Christopher Marlowe he received the Queen’s pardon with unusual swiftness (in one month). He was doing business for Thomas Walsingham the next day and remained in the family’s service until his death. On the accession of King James I in 1603 he was granted numerous leases in reversion on Crown lands (Bakeless, vol.1, p. 165).

  Nicholas Skeres was a minor player in the Babington Plot, a business partner of Ingram Frizer (in conning gullible young gentlemen out of their money) and had loaned money to Matthew Roydon.

  WHITGIFT

  John Whitgift In 1593 the Archbishop of Canterbury and his supporters on the Privy Council had growing influence on the Queen, and were in conflict with Lord Burghley (now ageing and in ill-health) over the prosecution of religious dissenters. Peter Farey has recently argued that Marlowe’s disappearance – which would be unlikely to succeed without official sanction – was essentially a compromise between those members of the Privy Council who wished to keep him in the service of the nation (Burghley, Essex) and those who wished him prosecuted for atheism (Whitgift, Puckering). A faked death not only allowed him to be silenced and controlled, but to be paraded by the Church as an example of the punishment God would inflict upon sinners. Puckering’s involvement in the cover-up may be read from the fact that amendments to the Baines Note, including the alteration of ‘sudden and violent death’ to the more equivocal ‘sudden and fearful end of his life’, are in his hand (Nicholl, p. 323). Whitgift’s knowledge of it may be indicated by the fact that he personally signed the licence for Venus and Adonis when it was ‘relatively unusual’ for him to do so (Duncan-Jones, p. 743), and from his subsequent suppression (through the Bishop’s Ban of 1599) of works where doubts about the identity of Shakespeare were aired.

  ‘FLY, FLYE AND NEVER RETURNE’

  The title is from a line in the Dutch Church Libel. This poem in iambic pentameter, posted on the wall of a Dutch churchyard on 5 May 1593, looks like a deliberate attempt to implicate Marlowe in the recent unrest against foreigners, referencing his plays The Massacre at Paris and The Jew of Malta, and being signed ‘Tamberlaine’.

  ‘Walter Raleigh spoke against the Dutchmen’ In late March 1593, Raleigh was ‘the lone voice of dissent’ in opposing a House of Commons bill to extend trade privileges to immigrant (largely Dutch) merchants (Nicholl, pp. 358–9). Government policy was to welcome the immigrants on the grounds they were Protestants. Raleigh and Marlowe were connected to each other, and to atheism, in government documents.

  KYD’S TRAGEDY

  ‘They arrest my former room-mate’ With Marlowe being absent from London, the direct result of the Dutch Church Libel was the arrest (and, probably, torture) of his former room-mate, Thomas Kyd (Freeman).

  ‘some lines against the Trinity’ The papers contained anti-Trinitarian arguments similar to the tenets of Arianism that had been published openly four decades earlier in John Proctor’s The Fall of the Late Arian (1549).

  ‘from the fact he set inquisitors on me’ Kyd’s letter and note to Puckering were written when he believed Marlowe was already dead. (He says, in Latin, ‘the dead do not bite’). That ‘the ignorant suspect me guilty of the former shipwreck’ suggests he was being blamed for what had happened to Marlowe.

  BY ANY OTHER NAME

  ‘Machevil’ The spelling favoured in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta: ‘
Make evil’.

  ‘It’s Marlowe on the warrant’ The Domestic State Papers record it as ‘Marlow’. On his appearance before the Privy Council two days later, he is ‘Marley’.

  DEPTFORD STRAND

  ‘Come from The Hague’ Robert Poley was carrying urgent letters from The Hague, yet inexplicably delayed their delivery by ten days. For two of those days, the so-called ‘feast’ on 30 May, and the inquest on 1 June, he was in Deptford. A payment to Poley covering 8 May to 8 June states explicitly that he was in the Queen’s service ‘all the aforesaid time’.

  John Penry was ‘one of the most important martyrs of Congregationalism’. The possibility that John Penry’s corpse was substituted for Marlowe’s was first suggested by David A. More (More). Sentenced to death on 25 May, Penry was executed at St Thomas-a-Watering, two miles from Deptford, on 29 May. His body is unaccounted for, but would have been within the control of Queen’s Coroner William Danby, who conducted Marlowe’s inquest (Farey, 2007).

  THE GOBLET

  If Marlowe’s detractor is the same Richard Baines who was hanged at Tyburn in 1594, as Kendall argues persuasively, the parallels between his case and the cup-stealing scene in Doctor Faustus between Robin and Dick, smack of something more than coincidence, strongly suggesting the scene is a post-1594 addition. Richard can be shortened to ‘Dick’ and Robert Poley was often called ‘Robin’. In Doctor Faustus, Robin gets Dick to hold the cup while he is searched (Kendall, pp. 322–8).

  ‘No benefit of clergy. He was hanged’ Ben Jonson, on killing a man, escaped execution through ‘benefit of clergy’, the abilty to recite from memory Psalm 51 (referred to as ‘neck verse’). The Richard Baines hanged at Tyburn was found guilty of robbery (a crime for which one couldn’t plead benefit of clergy) rather than burglary (for which one could); the distinction being that the victims were present in the property when the theft took place.

  THE HOPE

  ‘the Phoenix’ An emblem commonly associated with Queen Elizabeth I, possibly after the Phoenix portrait by Nicholas Hilliard (c. 1575).

  SICKENING

  ‘Even to be accused of heresy’ Leading legal adviser to Archbishop Whitgift, Richard Cosin, had published Apology of sundry proceedings by Jurisdiction Ecclesiastical, a 700-page defence of ex-officio oaths, by April 1593. In it, Cosin explains that against ‘a grievous crime’ such as heresy or atheism, a judge has the power to proceed even without evidence (Shagan, p. 559).

  MONTANUS

  Pietro Montanus Peter Farey has explored a number of possible Marlowe aliases in addition to Louis Le Doux. One of these is Montanus. On 9 May 1595, someone calling himself Pietro Montanus arrived in London, ill and without funds. He had entered the country using a forged passport, which alleged he was a French servant of Anthony Bacon. Bacon looked after him while he was ill. On 15 and 23 March, he wrote two letters (in Latin) to an espionage agent of Lord Burghley, Peter Edgcombe, in which he complains he has not been supplied with the provisions, money and safe conduct he was promised. He speaks not only of his illness, but of his ‘great calamity’. Farey notes that in Hamlet, the original name of the man sent by Polonius to spy on Laertes was not Reynaldo, but Montano (Farey, 2000). Anthony Bacon’s documented connection to Marlowe begins with Thomas Drury’s letter to Bacon two months after the Deptford incident. Le Doux is associated with Bacon throughout 1595 and 1596, and the Bacon Papers contain several letters from and about Le Doux in this period.

  BISHOPSGATE STREET

  Bishopsgate Street Anthony Bacon rented a house in Bishopsgate Street, almost next door to the Bull Inn, and within easy reach of the theatres of Shoreditch, from April or May 1594 until September 1595 when he moved to a suite of rooms in Essex House (Du Maurier, pp. 131, 154).

  MADAME LE DOUX

  ‘The Earl of Derby’s death’ Ferdinando Stanley died 16 April 1594 after a mysterious illness. It was widely suspected he had been poisoned after informing the government of a Catholic plot intended to place him on the English throne. After his death, key figures from his acting company formed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

  ‘He comes to London only twice a year’ Despite the sustained myth of his deep involvement in the day-to-day business of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, there is little evidence to support William Shakespeare’s continuous presence in London (where his lodgings were of a temporary nature) and much that argues against it.

  INTERVAL

  the Earl of Rutland Friend of the Earl of Southampton and, with him, an avid theatregoer, Rutland was at Padua University at the same time as two students named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  A CHANGE OF ADDRESS

  Sir John Harington of Exton, Rutland, was first cousin to Sir Philip Sidney (the soldier poet, first husband of Sir Francis Walsingham’s daughter), Sir Robert (governor of Flushing) and their sister Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, to whose sons Shakespeare’s First Folio Shakespeare was dedicated in 1623. His daughter Lucy married at fourteen to become Countess of Bedford.

  Burley on the Hill Le Doux arrived at Burley in October 1595 and remained there until 25 January 1596 when he left with Sir John Harington.

  HOW RICHARD II FOLLOWED RICHARD III

  Posthumous is the unusual given name of the hero of Cymbeline, a man of low birth but high personal merit, who is banished from the kingdom for exceeding his station. It was also the name of the first cousin who connected Anthony Bacon to the Haringtons.

  NOTHING LIKE THE SUN

  Jaques Petit Anthony Bacon’s Gascon servant Petit was to arrive at Burley on 10 December 1595. The woman known as Ide du Vault, appointed as governess to Harington’s small daughter, had preceded him.

  Ide du Vault/Madame Vallereine The woman depicted here as the Sonnets’ Dark Lady was indeed known by both names. She signs her name ‘du Vault’ on her letters, but they are endorsed as being from ‘Madame Vallereine’. In one of his letters, Jaques Petit refers to her as Ide du Vault, and in another plays on both names by calling her Miss-worth-nothing (Mzel Vaultrein). (Wraight, 1996).

  ‘ruined nun’ Petit says du Vault is a defrocked nun. He refers to her as ‘la nonain’ but also calls her a whore.

  WILL HALL

  Unconfirmed evidence of an agent named ‘Will Hall’ is reported but not referenced in The Shakespeare Conspiracy (Phillips and Keatman). Hall’s first appearance in the records is allegedly recorded in Canterbury in 1592 in connection with writer and intelligencer Anthony Munday. A payment to ‘Hall and Wayte’ for carrying messages to the Low Countries was supposedly made on 19 March 1596. (It is a William Wayte who takes out a surety of the peace against one William Shakespeare in November of the same year.) In October 1601 ‘Willm Halle’ returns with intelligence from Denmark. The Sonnets’ dedication famously begins, ‘TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE ENSUING SONNETS MR W.H. ALL HAPPINESSE’ and Donald Foster has demonstrated that ‘begetter’ at this time was, with one deliberate exception that plays on the convention, always a reference to the author. Foster’s solution is that ‘W.H.’ is a typo for ‘W.SH.’ (Foster). A solution suggested by Peter Farey is that the author is at this point going by the name of Will Hall (Farey, 2000).

  MY TRUE LOVE SENT TO ME

  ‘Pembroke’s Men to come from London with a play’ The Earl of Pembroke’s Men played Titus Andronicus at Burley on the Hill during the Christmas Le Doux was there. Reporting on the Christmas festivities in January 1596, Petit notes that ‘the tragedy of Titus Andronicus’ was played, adding ‘but the performance was better than the subject matter.’

  HAL

  Ganymede in Greek myth was abducted by Zeus to be cup-bearer to the gods, and his sexual plaything.

  THE AUTHORS OF SHAKESPEARE

  ‘A lawyer playwright’ A reference to John Marston who, with Joseph Hall in various publications from 1597 to 1598, discussed an author they nicknamed Labeo, whom Marston implies is the author of Venus and Adonis. He identifies Labeo with a heraldic motto used exclusively by Francis and Anthony Bacon, ‘Mediocra
Firma’. H. N. Gibson, who argued against a range of authorship candidates in his book The Shakespeare Claimants, calls this ‘the one piece of evidence in the whole Baconian case that demands serious consideration’ (Gibson, p. 63). All copies of the books in which Marston and Hall discussed ‘Labeo’ were subsequently ordered to be burnt by Archbishop Whitgift and the Bishop of London (1599).

  ‘Picks up a play from Bacon’ On 25 January 1595 – incidentally the day that Le Doux left Burley – Francis Bacon wrote to his brother Anthony from Twickenham Lodge: ‘I have here an idle pen or two, specially one that was cozened, thinking to have gotten some money this term; I pray send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish collection which is almost done’ (Cockburn, p. 147). Cockburn says, ‘Bacon evidently had several young men at the Lodge doing copying work for him’ (p. 148). That Francis Bacon (or his scribes) had possession of several Shakespeare works, including Richard II and Richard III, is supported by The Northumberland Manuscript (pp. 164–83). On this mixed inventory of works from 1595 to 1597, the name ‘William Shakespeare’ is scribbled repeatedly as if for practice. No play was published under the name ‘William Shakespeare’ until Richard II and Richard III in 1598. The First Folio comments of Heminges and Condell regarding blotless manuscripts make it clear that they only received fair copies of the plays, and that this was unusual.

  ‘verse fit only for lighting fires’ Oxford’s talent in the poetic arts can be determined from examples of his work at www.elizabethanauthors.com/oxfordpoems