The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Although the demands of metre impelled poets to draw on the figures for variant forms of speech, the tropes and schemes brought a ‘power of utterance’ in their own right, and they imparted this force to poetry. The figures conveyed a delightful effect of shapeliness and brilliance. Rhetoricians characterized them as the jewels or flowers of eloquence. They won the audience over by engaging its attention and awakening an emotional response. The schoolmaster Brinsley concluded that making poetry was ‘nothing but the turning of words forth of the Grammatical order, into the Rhetorical, in some kind of metre’.

  When Marlowe reached the figures of thought, in the final section of the Epitome, the poets abruptly disappeared. In their place, he encountered the orators: Cicero, St Paul and the Church Fathers. Poetry secured its lone foothold among the forms of argument through the device of vivid description. Poets achieved this effect ‘when a person, action, place, time, or any other thing, either written or spoken, is so expressed in words that it seems to be perceived and born into the eye, rather than read or heard’. Lifelike representations effaced the medium of language and ‘called the spectator or reader outside of himself, as if in a theatre’. The truth effect of this illusory presence was so powerful that rhetoricians gave it the status of a logical argument, like cause and effect. Do you need to persuade your audience that the Greeks are a cruel race? Look at what they did to the Trojans!

  Young infants swimming in their parents’ blood,

  Headless carcasses piled up in heaps,

  Virgins half-dead, dragged by their golden hair

  And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,

  Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,

  Kneeling for mercy to a Greekish lad,

  Who with steel pole-axes dashed out their brains.

  (Dido, II.i.193–99)

  Vivid description epitomized the poet’s ability to create a new reality out of words. The rhetoricians hedged their investment in this slippery device by identifying lifelike representations with poetry. Despite the fact that Roman oratory abounds in vivid descriptions, Susenbrotus draws his examples from poetry and fiction. In Marlowe’s sixth-form textbook On the Abundance of Word and Things, Erasmus recommends that lifelike representations be used sparingly if one is speaking on a serious issue, ‘but when the whole business has no purpose but pleasure, as is usually the case with poetry … one may indulge rather more freely’.

  * * *

  The ancient division of labour between poetry and rhetoric took on a curious rigidity during Marlowe’s lifetime. In the schools of ancient Rome, verse composition and prose oratory marked successive phases in the education of a well-rounded public speaker. In Elizabethan England ‘the rules for making verses’ and ‘the figures of oratory’ became opposed, even antagonistic, forms of training with predictably different outcomes. Orators were persuasive advocates who brought the figures of thought to bear on questions of religion and statecraft. They used figures of speech sparingly, and only ‘when the subject matter calls for it, as it were with a scattering of salt’. Verses consisted of figures and metre. If orators were advocates, poets were ‘makers’, articulate craftsmen who fashioned pleasing verbal artefacts out of airy nothing.

  These stereotypes laid the groundwork for Elizabethan ideas about what poets are and do. The poet was the orator’s disreputable younger brother. Sir Roger Ascham declared that ‘the quickest wits commonly may prove the best Poets, but not the wisest Orators – ready of tongue to speak boldly, not deep of judgement, either for good counsel or wise writing.’ Mulcaster counselled that ‘there must be heed taken that we plant not any poetical fury in the child’s habit, for that rapt inclination is to ranging of itself.’

  The poet’s powers of persuasion had no ethical agenda; his licence to recombine syllables and words into seductively beautiful works of art knew no limits. His object was delight, and his notorious mentor was Ovid, the celebrant of wanton love and continuous change. Critics viewed the maker with mixed feelings of fascination and disapproval. The poetic fancy not only ‘taketh what pleaseth it,’ warned a prominent French humanist, ‘but addeth thereto or diminisheth, changeth and rechangeth, mingleth and commingleth, so that it cutteth asunder and seweth up again as it listeth’. Bacon found that poetry ‘commonly exceeds the measure of nature, joining at pleasure things which in nature would never have come to pass’.

  Marlowe still had a great deal to learn about poetry. His grammar-school course focused on the linguistic side of making verses; the interpretation of poetry came later, being a university-level subject in Elizabethan England. Even at this stage, though, he could easily see that the cultural preference for deep orators over shallow poets was based on class prejudice rather than intellectual merit. Oratory looked ‘deep of judgement’ because the course was about argumentation rather than language. The figures of thought appeared to be profound because they showed students how to form arguments, whereas the rules of prosody and the figures of speech pertained to words. In fact, making verses was an infinitely more complex mental task than making speeches. It is the difference between composing a double sestina in the language of Provençal and writing a business letter in French.

  What is more, the poor Scholars had to be adept at poetry and oratory. The élitist disdain for the poetic imagination obscured the fact that poets were the only ones who fulfilled the humanist ideal of seamless eloquence in classical Latin. Since the poets’ reserves of Latinity exceeded the station they were born to fill, their position in society was most anomalous. In achieving the highest standard of linguistic fluency, they exposed the fault line that separated classical learning from class privilege.

  Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (c. 1583) applauds the poet’s capacity to ‘grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew’; but Sidney qualifies his praise by emphasizing that poetry should only be written by gentlemen. The problem with Elizabethan poetry, from Sir Philip’s standpoint, is that ‘base men with servile wits undertake it … so these [men], no more but setting their names to it, by their own disgracefulness disgrace the most graceful Poesy.’ Sidney wrote his Apology to persuade English gentlemen that poetry was too important to be left to the lowlife types who were writing it. Since base men (Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson) had been trained to write the kind of poetry that Sidney most admired, his concern is understandable. The custom of requiring poor Scholars to make verses in order to qualify for university scholarships had created a motley crew of professional poets. Like Sir Philip, Ben Jonson’s fatuous rhymester Sir John Daw distinguishes between genteel wits like the Earl of Oxford and the ink-stained wretches who wrote poetry for money: ‘every man that writes in verse, is not a Poet; you have of the Wits, that write verses, and yet are no Poets: they are Poets that live by it, the poor fellows that live by it.’

  Marlowe lived by it. He formed strong personal attachments to stories about poverty, poetry and social mobility. The thundering eloquence of Tamburlaine’s blank verse lines turns the Scythian shepherd into a mighty monarch and establishes Marlowe’s supremacy in the London theatre of the 1580s at a stroke. When Ithamore, the ‘poor Turk of tenpence’ in The Jew of Malta, discovers how to write for money (‘I scorn to write a line under a hundred crowns’), the slave celebrates with a plutocratic send-up of Marlowe’s sole surviving lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love’ (IV.ii.137). Although the devil agrees to grant Dr Faustus’s every wish for twenty-four years, the lowly scholar cannot see beyond the horizons of his meager station in life; he does not know what to ask for. At the climax of the play, his crowning desire is a tryst with Helen of Troy, the most beautiful character in the best book ever written. Marlowe interrupts the love story of Hero and Leander to explain why the followers of Mercury, patron of letters, labour under a curse of poverty. Although learning can ‘mount aloft, and enter heaven gate’, men of letters are condemned to live in a world where ‘Midas’ brood shall sit
in honour’s chair / To which the Muses’ sons are only heir’ (I.i.464, 475–76). The story of Marlowe’s life follows the same trajectory. Poetry raises him up out of obscurity, but it cannot deliver him into prosperity.

  If the adolescent Marlowe harboured any resentment, he was well advised to keep it to himself. ‘In behaviour toward his companions,’ Mulcaster wrote, the upwardly mobile scholar was ‘gentle and courteous, not wrangling, not quarrelling, not complaining, but will put to his helping hand, and use all his persuasions, rather than to have either his master disquieted, or his fellows punished.’ Mulcaster recognized that it took time to achieve this degree of self-abnegation: ‘oft-times that wit maketh the least show at the first, to be so pliable, which at the last doth best agree with the policy.’ The policy was conformity. The scholar who submitted to the discipline of grammar school, and took part in the rites prescribed by the Church of England, could expect to land a place in the universities or the Church.

  The policy made scant provision for the scholar’s inner assent or lasting allegiance. Even the ones who did well sometimes had second thoughts about their end of the bargain. Henry Jacob, the farmer’s son from Folkestone, took two degrees and became choirmaster at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before he joined the Separatist movement and went into exile in Holland. Jacob later established a Congregationalist Church and founded a settlement in Virginia. The well-connected Samuel Kennet proceeded from the King’s School to the Tower of London, where he was made a warden of Roman Catholic inmates. Young Kennet quickly became known as a ‘most terrible Puritan’ until one of his prisoners converted him to Catholicism. During Marlowe’s second year at Cambridge, Kennet fled to the English seminary at Rheims, and proceeded from there to Rome, where he was ordained a priest. In 1591, he joined the Jesuit mission to reconvert the English people. Benjamin Carrier became a Doctor of Divinity, cathedral canon and chaplain to King James I before he defected to Rome. According to Richard Baines, Marlowe too planned on going ‘to Rome’ during the winter of his twenty-eighth year.

  The most conspicuous failures were the young men who dropped out of school and could not find regular work. It was a major cause ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, according to Bacon’s classic essay on that topic, ‘when more are bred up scholars than preferment can take off’. Mulcaster maintained that the dropouts had a bad attitude: ‘having such benefits of school, they will not be content with the state which is for them, but because they have some petty smack of their book, they will think any state be it never so high to be low enough for them.’ Like many contemporaries, he concluded that displaced scholars posed a serious threat to the social order: ‘[H]ow can it be but that such shifters must needs shake the very strongest pillar in the state where they live, and loiter without living?’ Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor believed that ‘learning without living doth but breed traitors.’ Bacon urged King James I not to fund any more grammar schools because they produced too many young men who ‘will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people’. Best to flunk them out early, Mulcaster counselled, before they ‘come to the sense and judgement to discern what a heavy thing a flat repulse is’. The worst cases of all were young men like Christopher Marlowe, who received their BA and MA degrees, but still proved unable, or unwilling, to fill a respectable place in society.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Scholars and Gentlemen

  Marlowe left the King’s School late in the autumn of 1580, after winning the Parker Scholarship that sent him to Cambridge. Although he had been at the school for less than two years, he was nearly seventeen, a couple of years older than most incoming undergraduates; it was time to move on. His college stipend amounted to £3 6s 6d a year, or twelve pence a week – a sixth less than his scholarship at the King’s School. His scholarship supported only three years of work towards the BA degree, although the course took approximately four years to complete. Marlowe made up a lot of this deficit by getting off to an early start. He arrived at Corpus Christi five months in advance of the date when payments on his scholarship were due to begin. Upon his arrival, he would need to support himself during the winter and spring terms. Christopher set out for university early in December, leaving his mother, father and four unmarried sisters behind him.

  If he followed the usual route from Canterbury to Cambridge, Marlowe went up Watling Street past Faversham to the cathedral city of Rochester. He would have found rides with agricultural or trade vehicles. He crossed the Thames at Gravesend, to the east of London, and then headed north across the county of Essex, passing through Chelmsford, Dunmow and Thaxted on the medieval thoroughfares that lay to the east of the Old North Road. The seventy-mile trip probably took Marlowe about three days, unless the cold December weather slowed him down. At journey’s end, he reached the handsome university town that was to be his home for the next six and a half years. ‘All is splendid,’ wrote a German traveller, ‘the streets fine, the churches numerous and those seats of the Muses, the Colleges, most beautiful.’

  4.1 Map of Cambridge. From Franz Hogenberg and Georgius Braun, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1575. Corpus Christi (Benet College) appears at the centre to the right.

  Heading north on Trumpington Street, Marlowe passed by Peterhouse and Pembroke College. He entered Cambridge through the Trumpington Gate, crossed Penny-farthing Lane, so named for the poverty of its inhabitants, and continued past the parish church of St Botolph’s, on the south side of Corpus Christi College. To the right, he had his first glimpse of the private dwellings that stood between the street and the College. Corpus Christi went by the name of Benet College, after the adjoining church of St Benedict. A right turn on to Benet Street, and then another one into the churchyard, took him through the gateway to the fourteenth-century quadrangle that contained his new lodgings. The kitchen and the buttery, the hall and the Master’s Lodge, stood directly across from the gateway, on the south side of the quadrangle. The other three sides held living quarters for the Fellows and students. The new college chapel, still under construction, lay just north of the quadrangle, as did the Fellows’ Garden and the roofed college tennis court.

  Further to the north, past King’s College and its soaring Gothic chapel, the town centre was just a few minutes’ walk away. The built-up part of Cambridge stretched from the medieval castle on the north bank of the River Cam to the south side of Trumpington Gate; this area was a little over a mile long and half a mile wide. Elizabethan Cambridge numbered about five thousand townspeople, while the university had 1,862 students and faculty on its rolls, including ‘an hundred preachers at the least’. Since Cambridge stood by the only bridge across the much-travelled Cam (‘the one bridge in England that gives its name to a county’), at the intersection of major roads leading in all four directions, it had been an important market town for centuries. The academic authorities increasingly viewed the city as a dangerous distraction for their undergraduates. Beyond their college walls, students could choose from among eighty local alehouses, many of which lay adjacent to the colleges, or attend performances by travelling players, or savour the yearly delights of Sturbridge Fair, ‘by far the largest and most famous fair in all England’. They were, however, forbidden to wander around the city, or to play football outside their colleges. There was too much risk of violent confrontations with the lads from town.

  When scholars did leave their colleges, their main destination was the ‘public schools’ – that is, lecture halls – housed in a large quadrangle just west of the town centre. During his undergraduate years, Marlowe went to the public schools six days a week. It was here that he attended lectures by the university faculty, practised the art of academic disputation and used the university library on the first floor.

  Canterbury was ‘an old city somewhat decayed yet beautiful to behold’; Cambridge too was a beautiful old city, but also a dynamic one. The Elizabethan university drew students from all secto
rs of society, and in steadily increasing numbers. The student body included both the scions of noble houses, such as the university Chancellor’s son Robert Cecil, and young men so poor that they were ‘unable to continue for lack of exhibition and relief’. Enrolments tripled during Queen Elizabeth’s reign: two new colleges, Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex, were founded; old colleges added rooms; benefactors established new scholarships. Parker alone endowed fourteen of them, all tied to Corpus Christi. Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal presented the college with six more scholarships just three years prior to Marlowe’s arrival.

  Marlowe ate his first meal in the college’s panelled dining hall during the second week of December. It cost one penny. Upon reaching his table, he encountered Christopher Pashley, the incumbent Parker Scholar whom he was to replace. Pashley held on to his stipend until the following May. Nevertheless, Marlowe received his regular allotment of twelve pence a week throughout the winter and spring terms. On 17 March he was enrolled in the university matriculation book as a member of Corpus Christi, despite the fact that he had neither been admitted to the college, nor paid the entrance fee of 3s 4d. This did not happen until 7 May, when Marlowe was finally ‘elected and admitted in place of Mr Pashley’.

  Who covered Marlowe’s expenses between mid-December and early May? Parker Scholars were supposed to be chosen within three months after a vacancy. The Corpus Christi bookkeeping system was designed to prevent the college from supporting two students on one scholarship. What is more, Marlowe’s expenses frequently exceeded the shilling a week he was entitled to as a Parker Scholar. The college Buttery Book records that he spent more than 3s during the third week in December, for example. He could have supported himself as a manual labourer during this interval. Scholars at Corpus Christi ‘were oft employed in assisting the workmen’ who built the new chapel. The college paid these student-labourers with ‘exceedings’ (extra rations in the dining hall?) – a fact that would explain how Marlowe managed to run up excessive charges in the college Buttery Book.