The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  As Christopher Marlowe would discover to his peril, considerations of honour and reputation played a crucial part in the making of early modern selves. A bad name was adequate grounds for suspecting, and even convicting, someone of a crime. In cases of slander the punishment fitted the crime: the Archdeacon’s court sentenced the lecherous tailor to undergo the ritualized defamation of public penance.

  John Marlowe had secured a narrow foothold at the lower end of the ‘middling’ classes – a category that encompassed everyone who ranked a notch below the gentry, the clergy and the members of the professions, and a cut above day labourers and tenant farmers. Within this middle stratum shoemakers came after yeoman farmers, the mercantile élite (mercers, vintners, grocers), expert craftsmen (goldsmiths, clothiers, saddlers) and skilled manufacturers (brewers, tailors, cordwainers), and before only the most menial craftsmen (tilers, thatchers, miners). Among the lowly artisans who were his peers, John stood out in one crucial respect: he knew how to read and write. After the clerk took Marlowe’s deposition in the case of Chapman vs Applegate, the witness signed his name, ‘jhan Marley’, in a firm and legible hand; it is the first of thirteen documents that bear his signature.

  His ability to read is noteworthy but not remarkable. John Marlowe came of age at the historic moment when vast sectors of people who had been excluded from the educational system – small craftsmen, women, servants and apprentices – were learning to read for the first time. In his watershed Injunctions of 1536, King Henry VIII ordered all parents and masters to teach their children and servants the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed and the Ten Commandments. He further instructed them to furnish these texts ‘in writing, or show where printed books containing the same be to be sold, to them that can read or will desire the same’. King Henry believed that this novel practice would bring uniformity of belief to the Church of England. Protestant reformers expected the written word of God to supplant popish images and idolatry. The dissemination of cheap, mass-produced texts, made possible by the spread of printing, enabled the king and his ministers to implement these ideas on a very wide scale. John Marlowe learned to read during the first programme of mass literacy in England, at a time when the outcome of this remarkable experiment was anyone’s guess.

  The ability to write, on the other hand, still depended on one’s social class. By the mid-sixteenth century, the vast majority of the gentry, the clergy and members of the professions had learnt to sign their name, rather than make their mark, on court records. Within the middling classes, the proportion of signers ran high among the commercial élite, and diminished as the deponent’s wealth and status decreased. The proportion of shoemakers who could sign was scarcely one in ten. Among the general run of shoemakers, Marlowe oversaw a very small shop (he was not on the tax rolls), and had no need of written records. Educated beyond his station, he belonged to the anomalous ranks of the literate poor. Once again, local history was on John Marlowe’s side. The high mortality rates during his first two decades in Canterbury created new opportunities for artisans to join the ranks of clerks, scribes and minor officials. Marlowe’s ability to write put him in a position to compete for these openings.

  Katherine Marlowe bore nine children during the first fifteen years of her marriage. She gave birth to her second daughter Margaret in December 1566, and buried her oldest child, the six-year-old Mary, in August 1568. An anonymous second son came at the end of October, only to die in the first week of November. Her third daughter Jane was baptized just ten months later, on 20 August 1569. Her third son Thomas arrived the following July, but survived for just three weeks. She christened her fourth daughter Anne one year later on 14 July 1571, and her fifth daughter Dorothy on 18 October 1573. She bore her fourth son, and last known child, Thomas in the spring of 1576 just eleven months after his healthy sister Jane had beaten the long odds of infant mortality in Elizabethan England. This Thomas survived through adolescence, then disappeared from view.

  This family history is typical of the Marlowes’ era and station in life. Early modern parents saw their children as an asset to be cultivated rather than a cost to be borne. Sons and daughters provided their mothers and fathers with amusement and companionship. Small craftsmen depended on their progeny to assist with household chores from a very early age. Four-year-old girls looked after their younger siblings, gathered food and went on errands for their mothers. Small boys tended flocks of geese. Six-year-olds who did no work were said to be ‘idle’. When children were old enough to marry, their parents arranged alliances that strengthened the family’s position in society. As parents aged, their adult offspring provided a hedge against sickness and infirmity. Like their peers, the Marlowes did their utmost to rear a sizeable family. Since fewer than two out of three children could expect to survive beyond the age of ten, this effort obliged Katherine Marlowe to devote the years when she was fertile to bearing, rearing and burying her sons and daughters.

  Christopher Marlowe spent his first year in a cradle by the fire, securely wrapped in swaddling clothes. Newborn infants needed relatively little maintenance apart from feeding, washing and ensuring against the constant risk that their bedclothes would catch fire. As he grew into a toddler, and developed the motor skills to explore his environment, Christopher required an enormous amount of babysitting. There was the ever-present danger of his playing with fire or his father’s sharp tools. By his second year, he could slip out of the house and muck about in the septic sewage ditch that ran down the centre of the road. Marlowe’s neighbour Laurence Applegate let his privy overflow on to the street. At the age of three, Christopher could wander under tumbrils bearing the entrails of slaughtered animals, or run afoul of the pigs, horses and cattle that frequented public thoroughfares and strayed into houses. Young children were liable to fall into wells and drown. There was no way to childproof the home of an early modern artisan.

  Christopher spent many hours watching his father flay, cut and puncture the skins of cattle with sharp instruments. Outside the house, he learned to use a bow and arrow and wield a staff in hand-to-hand combat with other boys. Upon the death of his sister Mary, the four-year-old Christopher became the eldest child as well as the only son in the family. Mary’s passing reinforced Christopher’s privileged position in the Marlowe household. He had no older sister or younger brother to offset the gender hierarchy in his immediate surroundings; and he had four younger sisters to perform the indispensable woman’s work of cooking, washing and childcare. The oddity of his domestic circumstances was already apparent by the time of his fifth birthday, though the irony did not sink in until he became a full-time student. The fact that Christopher Marlowe grew up in a household full of women, and so was not required for household chores, paved his way to the all-male preserve of the boys’ school.

  John Marlowe’s family grew more rapidly than his leather business. He enrolled his first apprentice, a local blacksmith’s son named Richard Umberfield, in 1567–68, spent two or three years training him, and then lost the benefit of his labour when Umberfield fled after fathering a child on their neighbour Joan Hubbard. Marlowe would not enrol another apprentice until Lactantius Presson entered his employ six years later, only to leave within months, complaining that his master had beaten him. On 10 July 1569, the churchwardens of St George cited John Marlowe ‘for that he cometh not to church as he ought to do’. In 1569–70 he borrowed £2 from a local charity that ministered to the needs of indigent citizens; the loan remained unpaid.

  The Marlowes’ story resembled that of many migrant families. The arrival of hungry mouths to feed prevented them from accumulating enough resources to withstand hard times. John Marlowe the solitary worker had been welcome at a time when labour was in short supply; Citizen Marlowe’s children threatened to be a drain on the local sources of poor relief. Their father’s periodic bouts of indigence and unpaid bills are readily understandable; what makes John Marlowe unusual is his capacity to stay afloat. In 1570, he joined six other shoemakers
in submitting a petition to the Justices of the Peace in quarter sessions; the form of this document indicates that he now filled a minor office in his guild.

  Apart from Laurence Applegate, John Marlowe’s closest associates were fellow immigrants. The baker Thomas Plessington, a native of Chester, gained his citizenship by marrying the daughter of a Canterbury saddler. The grocer George Aunsell came to Canterbury from the south Kent village of Mersham. Although Aunsell was known as a ‘drunken knave and whoremaster knave’, his marriage to the well-connected Ann Potman, from the nearby village of Ulcombe, brought a touch of class to Marlowe’s circle of friends. Marlowe’s brother-in-law Thomas Arthur followed his sister Katherine to Canterbury, where he married Ursula Moore, the daughter of the blacksmith Richard Moore. Moore too came from Ulcombe. John Marlowe later married his twelve-year-old daughter Jane to Richard Moore’s brother John, another recent arrival. All John and Katherine Marlowe’s daughters would marry outsiders like themselves. These alliances enabled their immigrant sons-in-law to become freemen, but brought the Marlowe family no closer to the inner circle of long-time Canterbury residents.

  1.4 Street scene. From The Roxburghe Ballads.

  As John Marlowe entered his mid-thirties, his disputes with fellow citizens began turning up in the plea books of the Borough Court. On 20 October 1573, Marlowe sued Thomas Ovington in a quarrel over a horse and won damages of 9s 4d. Two days later, he exclaimed: ‘Michael Shawe thou art a thief and so I will prove thee to be.’ Shawe, a basket-maker, sought damages for slander. John Marlowe went to court ten times in the course of that year. After a five-year hiatus, which may well be the result of missing records, he resurfaces in the plea books in 1578 and thereafter, usually as a plaintiff seeking to recover unpaid debts. Marlowe had joined the handful of litigants who went to the Borough Court on a regular basis.

  What prompted him to take this course? Immigrant tradesmen had problems with debt collection and property rights, especially in the early days, when they lacked a firm grasp of the local power structure and did not know who could be counted on to pay their bills. Insiders are always apt to take advantage of newcomers. The Borough Court gave Marlowe the opportunity to defend himself and pursue his claims. The sheer quantity of these transactions, however, suggests that he began to take an interest in property law for its own sake. His frequent appearances at court gave him a rudimentary knowledge of pleas, writs and depositions. The Elizabethan litigation boom was well under way by 1570. Literate tradesmen often found work as freelance law clerks. If they were sufficiently aggressive, they could overcharge their customers and take advantage of their gullible fellow citizens. At the very least, they could protect themselves from sharp operators who practised fraud under cover of the law.

  During that same decade, John Marlowe began to do entry-level legal and clerical work. He became assistant churchwarden at St George the Martyr, and then, after the family moved during the mid-1570s, at the centrally located parish church of St Andrew. He became a professional bondsman, especially for couples seeking wedding licences. Apart from the stormy interlude with Lactantius Presson, he remained without an apprentice during the 1570s. The needy shoemaker had become a litigant-entrepreneur.

  John Marlowe set a course that led towards clerical employment in the leather trade, the rapidly growing Kentish legal profession and the lower echelons of the urban bureaucracy. Literate craftsmen had the requisite qualifications for this kind of work. His brother-in-law Thomas Arthur, a surprisingly well-educated man, became a joint bailiff in the Canterbury suburb of Westgate. John Marlowe and his extended family would fill many such positions in the years ahead. Anyone in his position could see that an educated young man stood an excellent chance of finding employment in one of the local churches; about a third of the parishes in Kent still had no rector. John Marlowe had every reason, then, to see to it that his son Christopher received a first-class education in the local schools.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lessons Learned in Childhood

  Christopher Marlowe’s formal education began around the age of six in petty school, where he learned to read and write. Like the day-care centres that spring up in modern suburbs, Tudor elementary schools had no permanent buildings. Schoolmasters held classes wherever space became available; itinerant instructors came and went. The prominent educator Richard Mulcaster deplored the lack of competent teachers: ‘because good scholars will not abase themselves to it, it is left to the meanest, and therefore to the worst’. The schools had limited aims. The men who endowed them believed, in the words of a Canterbury benefactor, that boys ‘whose parents are poor, are for the most part brought up in idleness and stealing and so at riper years unfit to serve the commonwealth’. Petty school prepared them ‘to know God and be trained up in labour and made apt members of the commonwealth’. As is always the case in Tudor educational charters, the word ‘poor’ did not include day labourers, much less the truly destitute.

  Marlowe most likely had his earliest lessons in the parish of St George the Martyr, where his first teacher might have been Father Sweeting. ‘Every parish hath a minister,’ Mulcaster noted, ‘which can help with writing and reading.’ Since petty school consisted of texts to be memorized, rather than ideas to be grasped, Sweeting’s ignorance posed no problem in this area. Marlowe’s schoolfellows included Sweeting’s son Leonard and William Potter, a butcher’s son from Iron Bar Lane.

  Petty school coursework revolved around the curriculum decreed by King Henry and reinstated by Queen Elizabeth. The syllabus consisted of The ABC, The ABC and Catechism and A Primer or Book of Private Prayer. It focused on religious instruction rather than practical skills. The broadsheet ABC contained several alphabets and lists of vowels, together with eight crossrows of syllables. Marlowe’s schoolmaster pasted the ABC on a flat board with a handle, like a table-tennis bat, and covered it with a transparent piece of horn, to prevent wear and tear from dirty fingers. The ‘horn book’ concluded with one model sentence of authorized text: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. So be it.’ Like every Elizabethan reader, Marlowe began with the Trinity.

  2.1 A schoolroom. From the Small Catechism for Boys, London, 1578.

  The Catechism added the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Commandments. Marlowe learned his Catechism through rote memorization and oral recitation. He listened to the schoolmaster read from the book, and regurgitated what he heard. In expounding the Great Commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, Marlowe pledged ‘To honour and obey the king and his ministers. To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.’ The system precluded any exchange of views within the classroom. The archbishop kept track of ‘scoffers’. Diocesan visitors examined pupils to ensure that they had learned their English catechism by heart. Any parent with ‘children of eight years and upwards’ who could not say the Catechism was liable to a fine of 10s unless the problem lay ‘in the want of capacity of the youth’.

  2.2 A horn book.

  King Henry VIII founded petty schools ‘for the better bringing up of youth in the knowledge of their duty towards God, their prince and all other in their degree’. He and Elizabeth viewed the instruction of children in English as a way of fashioning obedient subjects. Before the Reformation, Catholic priests recited the prayers and catechism in Latin, a language that the king’s subjects could not understand; henceforth, children learned to read them in English, the mother tongue of the new national Church. The king confidently proclaimed that it will ‘stir up the ferventness of the mind, if the confused manner of praying be somewhat helped with the fellowship or annexation of understanding’.

  Since this ambitious programme fell short of the mark in practice, and spectacularly so in the case of Christopher Marlowe, it merits closer scrutiny.

  Protestant reformers underestimated the staying power of Catholic imagery and ritual – the so-called ‘laymen’s te
xtbooks’. In areas that retained a strong Roman Catholic presence, such as Lancashire, the catechist’s words fell on deaf ears. Even under Protestant rule, Canterbury preserved the sensory aura of a Catholic centre of worship. Marlowe spent the better part of his life in close proximity to the splendours of Canterbury Cathedral. The interior and exterior of the building arrested the eye with gorgeous iconographic images. The cathedral staff included twelve senior canons, six minor canons and a splendid organist and choir. Students at the King’s School, where Marlowe held a scholarship for twenty months, said their prayers in Latin. King’s Scholars wore surplices to church services, and were required to attend High Mass at the cathedral on Sundays, saints’ days and festivals. The residual appeal of Catholic liturgy helps explain one of the ‘damnable opinions’ that Richard Baines attributed to Marlowe, who allegedly said:

  That if there be any god or any good Religion, then it is the papists because the service of god is performed with more Ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crowns, etc. That all protestants are Hypocritical asses.

  The wayward adult professed a radically materialistic view of religion; yet the atheist (‘if there be any god’) had a continuing attachment to the theatrical world of ritual and ceremony.