by David Riggs
The Babington plot lent new meaning to the familiar analogy between the world and the stage. The priest who gave Babington Holy Communion for the last time wrote: ‘Of that tragedy Sir Francis Walsingham was the chief actor and contriver, as I gathered by Mr Babington himself, who was with me the night before he was captured.’ The Jesuit poet and missionary Robert Southwell called Walsingham, Leicester and Burghley ‘the chief plotters’ in the Babington conspiracy, and Robert Poley ‘the chief actor in it here in England’. Southwell concluded that ‘the plot was rather a train to entrap the actors in it, than a mean to effect that which was intended by it.’ A Tudor chronicle of the plot characterized Poley as ‘a most cunning counterfeiter and dissembler’. The same theatrical metaphor underlay Phelippes’s question about whether Babington was to be apprehended or ‘played with’. Burghley argued that the worst dissemblers of all were missionary priests like John Ballard, alias Captain Fortescue: ‘all, or the best part, as soon as they are crept in are clothed like gentlemen in apparel, and many as gallants, yea, in all colours and rich feathers and such like disguising themselves.’
The question of what was inside a person and how to discover it bridged the novel professions of secret agent and playwright. Elizabethan plays taught their audiences to look for the inward truth beneath the outward show of theatrical presentation. Among the handful of dramatists that emerged in the 1570s and 1580s, George Gascoigne, Thomas Watson, Anthony Munday and Christopher Marlowe all combined the trades of intelligence gatherer and playwright. The plots and counterplots of this era taught Marlowe that spies and scriptwriters had a lot in common.
Elizabeth’s performance during the Babington plot foreshadows the final act of Marlowe’s Edward II, where King Edward’s estranged queen and her consort, Lord Mortimer, take extraordinary steps to avoid the blame for murdering the king. Mortimer and Isabella’s agents move Edward from place to place, never telling him where he is; they incarcerate him in a sewage pit, hoping that the king will die from exposure and exhaustion. When it becomes clear that Edward will have to be executed, their main concern is deniability. ‘Speak,’ Mortimer asks, ‘shall he not be dispatched and die?’ ‘I would he were,’ the queen replies, ‘so it were not by my means’ (V.ii.44–45). Mortimer gives the king’s executioner an ambiguous warrant, cleverly worded to conceal ‘the cause of Edward’s death’. The earl’s unpunctuated Latin order can mean either ‘Fear not to kill the king, ’tis good he die’ or ‘Kill not the king, ’tis good to fear the worst’ (V.iv.8–12). Mortimer also commands Edward’s attendants to murder the executioner once the killing is done, but this performance fails to persuade the wider audience of decent public opinion. In the end, Mortimer goes to the block and the queen goes to prison.
The protagonist in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta usefully distinguishes between two approaches to the politics of deception:
As good dissemble that thou never mean’st
As first mean truth, and then dissemble it;
A counterfeit profession is better
Than unseen hypocrisy.
(I.ii.292–5)
Barabas sums up the contrasting assumptions that guided Catholic and Protestant operatives in the 1580s. Hypocritical dissemblers like Robert Persons and William Allen refused to acknowledge (‘dissembled’) the unseen discrepancy between their religious vocation and their violent takeover plots. Counterfeit professors like Richard Baines, Bernard Maude, Robert Poley, Gilbert Gifford and Michael Murphy used pretence (‘dissembled’) to infiltrate a religion that meant nothing to them. Barabas sides with the counterfeit professors. An agent who sees another person’s religion as a fiction has the advantage over a believer deluded by his own cant.
Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: With the Death of the Duke of Guise explores the role of intelligence in the history of his own times. Written in 1592, the play stages a retrospective history of the period when Marlowe became involved with the secret service. Marlowe’s twenty-four scenes juxtapose the massacre of 1572 with the bloodbath that erupted in France between 1586 and 1588. The first half depicts the rise of the Guise as he slaughters the innocent Huguenots; the second portrays the Duke’s fall at the hands of three hired assassins. Marlowe’s plot works on the principle of discrepant awareness. First we see the forward-looking conspirators, then their unwitting victims. The only way to survive in this world is to know your enemies’ plans ahead of time; the losers in this play are always those without reliable intelligence.
Marlowe accepts the Protestant theory that the Catholic League (Pope Gregory XIII, King Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Guise) planned the massacre in advance. The wedding feast that brings the two factions together in 1572 is a fraud, a mere pretext for the carnage that follows; the conspiracy succeeds because the victims have no advance intelligence of what lies in store for them. Without the benefit of spies and informants, the Protestants are doomed to extinction. The only character who grasps this lesson is the Protestant King of Navarre, who warns his entire army about the Catholic League and its secret plan to exterminate the Protestants. Since compromise is out of the question, he tells them, ‘We must with resolute minds resolve to fight’ (xvi.10). Navarre’s superior intelligence pays off when he wins the battle of Coutras and eventually inherits the French crown.
Like the victims of 1572, the Catholic nationalist King Henri III has no inkling that he is a pawn in the Catholic League’s clandestine plot to seize control of France. Henri only learns that the Guise, far from being a patriot, is a foreign agent after the Duke has raised an army. King Henri’s blindness mirrors Queen Elizabeth’s ignorance of the Catholic League’s existence prior to Walsingham’s discovery of the Throckmorton plot. The Massacre at Paris warned English spectators about the continuing menace of paramilitary Catholics loyal to the League. In addition to the ‘sort of English priests’ at Rheims, the League can call on ‘thirty thousand able men’ housed in Parisian religious orders, together with ‘a thousand sturdy student Catholics, and more’. The Jacobin friar who assassinates King Henri III with the church’s blessing personifies the lethal allure of religiously sanctioned violence: ‘I have been a great sinner all my days,’ he reckons, ‘and the deed is meritorious’ (xxiii.28–29).
Marlowe’s murderous friar personified the threat that confronted the queen in the mid-1580s and thereafter. Like modern terrorists, Elizabeth’s enemies were fanatical and invisible, ready to sacrifice their own lives in the hope of bringing hers to an end. The reward for mayhem was martyrdom. The queen’s best line of defence was to employ agents who could penetrate the ranks of her enemies, regardless of how dangerous such men could prove to be.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Proceeding in the Arts
1587 is the turning point in Marlowe’s career. He surfaced as a suspected turncoat and government agent. He received his Master of Arts degree, at the Privy Council’s request. He completed Tamburlaine the Great, his first play for the adult acting companies. After years of quiet, dutiful study the twenty-three-year-old shoemaker’s son suddenly vaulted into the tripartite roles of wayward scholar, secret agent and innovative poet-playwright. He would spend the rest of his life juggling these identities.
The terms of Marlowe’s scholarship stipulated that he should ‘proceed in the arts’, concentrate on divinity and take Holy Orders. Marlowe proceeded in the arts, but embarked on a path that led him away from the ministry towards undercover work and the public stage. The best guide to this phase of his life is the MA course itself. The puzzle of Marlowe’s absences from Cambridge makes it easy to forget that he spent at least a year and a half in residence preparing to dispute for his advanced degree. During the three years of work required for the MA, students were expected to ‘be constant attendants of lectures in philosophy, astronomy, optics and the Greek language’. When the time came for Marlowe to graduate, Master Norgate certified that the candidate had attended these lectures and participated in the eleven public disputations that were required of all MA candidates.
Study, government service and playwriting became mutually reinforcing activities for Christopher Marlowe. In theory, MA-level work on astronomy, geography and cosmography taught aspiring divines to know the Creator through the study of His works. In practice, these subjects familiarized many students, including Marlowe, with the academic cornerstones of expansionist state systems; they introduced scholars to the special skills that equipped them to work in the military and diplomatic sectors. The MA course provided an opportunity to ‘be a divine in show,’ as Dr Faustus puts it, ‘Yet level at the end of every art’ (I.i.3–4). Marlowe’s employment by the Privy Council gave him a personal motive to think of his advanced studies as preparation for state service. Yet his base origins, poverty and lack of any discernible gift for science and mathematics restricted his opportunities in the real world of political patronage.
The stage supplied Marlowe with an imaginative space commensurate with his intellectual reach. It offered a public arena in which to display his grasp of astronomy, geography and cosmography. The MA course taught graduates to conceive of the cosmos as a poetic and theatrical spectacle; Tamburlaine reproduced this spectacle ‘upon Stages in the city of London’. Marlowe’s graduate work is the best introduction to his early masterpiece; like his final disputations, the play crystallizes what he took away from the course.
* * *
The Elizabethan MA programme descended from the medieval quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) as it had been adapted to accommodate early modern state systems. The Egyptian mathematician Ptolemy remained the great master in the field of astronomy, despite the onset of the new Copernican model. The multidisciplinary field of optics covered maths and geometry. Cosmography, a branch of optics that encompassed both geography and history, had by now supplanted music. Among the set texts for this emerging discipline, Strabo’s Geography provided detailed descriptions of specific localities, while Ptolemy’s Geography located regions within an abstract system of geometrical projections. The two schools of thought suited the needs of emergent imperial regimes in complementary ways. Where Strabo supplied detailed intelligence about the regional traits of other nations, the deracinated, alphanumerical space of Ptolemy’s mathematical geography situated them in a global setting. MA candidates also studied Sebastian Munster’s modern cosmography and Abraham Ortellius’s pioneering atlas The Theatre of the World. Ortellius’s Theatre and André Thevet’s Universal Cosmography were both important sources for The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great. François Belleforest’s Universal Cosmography of the Whole World, an expanded version of Munster, supplied Marlowe with material for 2 Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta.
To a far greater extent than astronomy, maths or geometry, cosmography was an interdisciplinary field. Enlarging on his metaphor of the ‘theatre of the world’, Ortellius explains that geography is ‘the eye of History’. While both disciplines relate ‘the expeditions and voyages of great Kings, Captains and Emperors … the travels and peregrinations of famous men, made into sundry countries’, the ‘reading of Histories doth seem to be much more pleasant, and indeed so it is, when the Map being laid before our eyes, we may behold things done, or places where they were done, as if they were at this time present and in doing’. The mapmaker refers to the theatrical pleasure of comprehending gigantic expanses of time and space in a little room. The prologue to Tamburlaine evokes the same sensation of being physically present at a vast historic spectacle, ‘Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine: / Threat’ning the world in high astounding terms’ (4–5). Theatrical performance, like a map, an optical refraction or a mirror, reduces cosmic events to the scale of human perception: ‘View but his picture in this tragic glass’ (7). Marlowe’s printer later dedicated Tamburlaine to ‘Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading histories’.
The past masters of Marlowe’s cosmography syllabus focused on the rise of the Roman empire: when else had so few conquered so many in such a brief interval? Polybius’s account of how ‘almost the whole inhabited world was conquered, and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years’ proceeds along a geographical axis that runs from west to east, from conflicts in Italy to North Africa to Egypt. 1 Tamburlaine proceeds from east to west, from Persia to Egypt. Strabo addresses his Geography to generals ‘who are able to hold sway over land and sea and to unite nations and cities under one government and political administration’. The writing of Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World coincided with the Roman invasion of Britain. The author welcomed the opportunity to learn more about ‘the long closed island’. At the outset of his ‘circuit of Italy’, Pliny’s Natural History, another set text in cosmography, explains ‘that we intend to follow as “author” the deified Augustus and the division that he made of the whole of Italy into eleven regions’. These ancient authorities conflated cartography with conquest, and geographical writing with imperial domination.
8.1 Abraham Ortellius’s World Map. From Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570.
Tamburlaine reaped the benefits of Marlowe’s MA work in cosmography. When the hero’s betrothed begs him to spare her native city of Damascus, he replies with an elaborate geographical conceit:
I will confute those blind geographers
That make a triple region in the world,
Excluding regions which I mean to trace,
And with this pen reduce them to a map,
Calling the provinces, cities and towns
After my name and thine, Zenocrate.
Here at Damascus will I make the point
That shall begin the perpendicular.
(1 Tamb, IV.iv.81–88)
The ‘blind geographers’ – so called because they have never seen the world – are the medieval mapmakers who trisected the earth into Asia, Europe and Africa, with the Holy City of Jerusalem at the centre. Following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, Tamburlaine distinguishes between the world that is represented on existing maps and the new one that he will re-present in the act of conquest. His ‘pen’ is a sword, his ‘point’ is both a puncture wound and a mark; ‘trace’ meant both ‘draw’ and ‘harness’; ‘reduce’ carries the double sense of ‘scale down to size’ and ‘subjugate’. Damascus, where he will ‘make the point’, will be the new Jerusalem. Tamburlaine will rename it, like all his new provinces, cities and towns, after himself and Zenocrate. The hero’s poetic understanding of mapmaking glosses over the horror of what he is about to do. Where Zenocrate sees the destruction of an existing city, Tamburlaine appeals to the root sense of geo-graphy as ‘world- writing’.
With the accession of Queen Elizabeth, aspirants to royal and aristocratic patronage began to think of England as an imperial power with global ambitions of its own. Proposals for discovering Northeast or Northwest Passages to the east, or for colonizing North America, became a standard ingredient of political discourse. The impending war with Spain intensified the need for cartographers, navigators and military engineers. Who would fill this need? The great aristocrats at the court of Elizabeth I led military expeditions, colonial adventures and voyages of discovery. They required a working knowledge of cosmography in order to carry out these tasks, but their sense of class privilege made them wary of science, which was hard to do, morally dubious and smacked of artisan labour. Sir Philip Sidney told his mentor Hubert Languet that he planned ‘to be acquainted’ with geometry ‘because I have always felt sure it is of the greatest service in the art of war; nevertheless I shall pay but sparing attention to it, and only peep through the bars, so to speak, into the rudiments of the science’. King James VI of Scotland wanted his son to have ‘some entrance … in the Mathematics; for the knowledge of the art militaire in situation of Camps, ordering the battles, making Fortifications, placing of batteries or such like’; but he did not want him ‘pressing to be a passe-master’ in any of the sciences.
8.2 Miniature portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl
of Northumberland, by Nicholas Hilliard.
The mental labour of actually doing calculations in physics and astronomy could be left to the scholars. For them, the MA course opened up new opportunities for advancement. The mathematical sciences were a social escalator for base-born scholars such as Thomas Hariot. Henry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland, paid Hariot £100 a year to subsidize his research in mathematics, and retained the physician Walter Warner among his entourage as well. Hariot and Warner both became friends of Marlowe, as did the poet, translator and dabbler in science Thomas Watson, who dedicated his manuscript translation of a French treatise Concerning Waters and Fountains to Northumberland. As the scion of a noble Catholic family with a long record of hostility to the queen, the earl was also an excellent target for a would-be spy. During his postgraduate years, Marlowe claimed that he was ‘very well known’ to Northumberland. Although there is no evidence that Marlowe himself had any special skills in mathematics and astronomy, he was better at expressing scientific ideas in poetic language than any English poet since Chaucer.
Advanced training in cosmography and astronomy involved more than technical competence. It produced subjects who were mentally positioned to grasp the entire field of spatial phenomena. Ptolemy’s Geography taught MA candidates to convert the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane stratified by latitude and longitude. The celebrated clash between Ptolemy’s geocentric universe and Copernicus’s heliocentric alternative obscures the fact that Copernicus vindicated Ptolemy’s way of doing mathematical astronomy. When Leonard Digges publicized Copernicus’s findings in 1576 – the year of the first recorded university disputation about ‘whether the earth reposes in the middle of the cosmos’ – the reading public responded with intense interest. Digges’s book went through seven new editions by 1605. Ptolemy remained on the MA syllabus, not because university lecturers in science and mathematics were conservative, but because Copernican astronomy had raised the Ptolemaic system to new heights. Although the heliocentric model displaced humanity from the centre of the physical universe, Copernicus recuperated man’s relationship to the cosmos on another level: the new astronomy re-centred the human subject as a reasonable being capable of grasping the structure of the universe through mathematical formulation.