The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Marlowe’s brief appearance in the quarrel that set Nashe and Greene against the Harvey brothers affords a glimpse of his social milieu. The Harvey brothers ranked just a cut above the three professional writers. Their father was a prosperous ropemaker and yeoman in the town of Saffron Walden; Nashe, Greene and Marlowe were the sons of poor men. The Harveys tried to use Cambridge as a social escalator into academia and the professions. Gabriel was Professor of Rhetoric from 1573 to 1575, received his doctorate in Civil Law at Oxford in 1585 and mounted a campaign to become Master of Trinity College. In his dedicatory letter to the Bishop of London, Richard Harvey reminded his grace of ‘that special affection, which you have always borne towards university men, and namely your singular courtesy toward my brother Gabriel’. The three professional writers, by contrast, dropped off the ladder of promotion and attached themselves to the popular press and the playhouses. ‘It is well known’, Nashe remarked, ‘I might have been a Fellow if I had would.’ From the writers’ perspective, the Harveys’ attempt to gatecrash the Establishment was ludicrous. That is why Marlowe said that Richard Harvey was an ass, a humdrum cleric with limited horizons. The Establishment agreed. Richard lived out his days as an obscure parish priest at Chislehurst in Kent, and Gabriel returned to Saffron Walden. The Harvey brothers had returned from the university to their proper station in life. The writers were on another career path, and who could say where it would lead?

  Many scholars proceeded from astrology to magic. John Case and Everard Digby, the pre-eminent natural philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge, introduced students to the occult principles that controlled the natural world. Both men spent their careers synthesizing Aristotle’s scientific works with texts about the universe of spirits. The passage from this so-called ‘natural’ magic to idolatrous or ‘black’ magic occurred when the practitioner employed talismans, symbolic utterances or ritual practices in order to operate a demon (spirit, intelligence or demi-god) that embodied an occult force. The boundary was imprecise, but somewhere along this spectrum the ‘white’ magician became an idolater practising a pagan religion. Two scholars at King’s College crossed the boundary when they withdrew ‘from mathematics and applied themselves to demonic arts’. The Puritan William Perkins, who received his MA from Cambridge in 1584, wrote a year later that he had studied astrology ‘and was never quiet, until I had seen all the secrets of the same: But at the length, it pleased God to lay before me the profaneness of it, nay, I dare boldly say, Idolatry.’

  8.5 Detail from the title page of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, 1616.

  English scholars learned how to operate demons from Continental books on magic, from John Dee’s Preparatory Teachings and Hieroglyphical Monad and from the works of the Italian immigrant Giordano Bruno, especially his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. These books were written for readers who knew Greek, Latin or Italian. Public interest in magic peaked during the mid-1580s, when a London printer brought out seven of Bruno’s books. The printer prudently gave Paris or Venice as the place of publication, for the wizard’s enthusiastic account of idolatry and conjuring disclosed the most shocking aspects of pagan theology. The Expulsion revealed that the Egyptians ‘ascended to the height of the divinity by that same scale of nature by which the divinity descends to the smallest things by the communication of itself’. As Tamburlaine explains to a prospective follower:

  Jove sometimes maskèd in a shepherd’s weed,

  And by those steps that he hath scaled the heavens

  May we become immortal like the gods.

  (I.ii.198–200)

  The magical ascent to ‘the height of the divinity’ – which Bruno borrowed from Hermes Trismegistus, the reputed teacher of Orpheus and Moses – held out the promise of infinite knowledge. As Hermes put it, ‘Man takes on him the attributes of a god, as though he were himself a god; he is familiar with the daemon kind, for he comes to know that he is sprung from the same source as they’.

  Conjuring was not a freak diversion at Oxford and Cambridge; as Henry Barrow recognized, it was a foreseeable outcome of the MA course. ‘When first a Graduate,’ according to an early biographer, William Perkins ‘was much addicted to the study of natural Magic, digging so deep, in nature’s mine, to know the hidden causes and sacred qualities of things, that some conceive that he bordered on Hell itself in his curiosity’. This turn from study to sorcery supplies the rudimentary plot of Dr Faustus. Marlowe’s version of the Faust legend begins when the new arts graduate decides to ‘be a divine in show, / Yet level at the end of every art…’ (I.i.2–4).

  He too wants to dig deep in nature’s mine and know the sacred qualities of things. His curiosity, like that of Perkins, brings him to the borders of hell. Happily for Perkins, ‘it pleased God to lay before me the profaneness of it’. Dr Faustus never has this revelation. ‘Divinity adieu’, he exclaims, ‘These metaphysics of magicians, / And necromantic books are heavenly’ (I.i.50–52). With unwitting irony, Marlowe’s magician decides that he likes hell: ‘O, might I see hell, and return again, how happy were I then!’ (II.iii.175–76). Where Perkins became the great divine of the age, Dr Faustus was its model reprobate.

  The most famous image of magic and idolatry was John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad. The Monad appears on the title pages of Dee’s Preparatory Teachings and Hieroglyphic Monad. Many copies of Dee’s frontispiece found their way into private hands. Indeed, Dee’s Monad enjoyed a much wider circulation than did the abstruse Greek and Latin treatises that it adorned. The Monad depicts the unification of celestial forces, symbolized by the sun and the moon on the two columns, and the four elements that appear at the four corners of the architectural frame. The lines of power meet at the centre. The point of convergence, the Monad itself, is a hieroglyphic rather than a geometrical projection. The upper section comes from the astrological sign of Mercury, Jupiter’s messenger, while the lower part replicates the sign of Aries, the Ram, and the first division of the zodiac. The Ram’s wonderful horns branch out on either side of Aries and Mercury.

  Dee’s well-known frontispiece offers a graphic image of Tamburlaine’s ‘Nature that framed us of four elements’. The Monad represents the creation of man in pagan theology. His central figure is an embryonic human being (‘JD’) in an egg-shaped enclosure. The sun and the moon on the columns signify the morning and the evening of the first day of Genesis. The hieroglyphic inscriptions illustrate the forms of Edenic writing, the language of creation spoken by the unfallen Adam. Instead of God, the magician depicts the mind of God in symbolic images, as nature. Dee was cagey about the atheistical implications of his Monad, but he states them plainly in a marginal note to his copy of Ptolemy’s Astronomical Predictions: ‘Nature made man – body, spirit, soul’.

  Viewed in its architectural setting, the Hieroglyphical Monad metamorphoses into an idol housed in a pagan temple. The horns of the moon turn into the horns of a demon. Aries supplies his cloven feet; his torso mimics the sign of the cross. The astral ‘rays of virtue’ converge in the mind of JD, alias John Dee, the magus whom nature has framed out of the four elements. These are secrets, inscribed for those who have eyes to see. The purpose of the occult discipline that Dee sought to disclose as well as to hide was the elevation of a few select mortals to a state of direct participation in cosmic and supra-celestial influences. The Latin legend over the entrance reads, ‘He who does not understand, let him either remain silent or learn’. Like the title page to Ortellius’s Theatre of the World, the Hieroglyphic Monad displays a vast system of cosmic lore in a compact yet spectacular form. The Monad – to borrow one of Marlowe’s signature lines – offered keen-eyed spectators ‘infinite riches in a little room’.

  8.6 Title page to John Dee’s Propaedeumata Aphoristica, 1568.

  From this longer perspective, Dee’s frontispiece resembles a classical theatre. The fusion of the theatre and the temple bore out the Puritan assertion that theatres were sites of pagan idolatry. Tamburlaine turns this vice into a virtue. His followers take
him for a god and he fulfils their expectations: in performing the role of Tamburlaine, Edward Alleyn became the first matinee idol in English drama.

  * * *

  By June 1587, the last year of Marlowe’s MA course, the university authorities had heard the rumour that he was defecting to Rheims. The usual time to defect was the term before the summer commencement exercises, when degree candidates had to pledge their loyalty to the queen and her Church. The Privy Council vouched for Marlowe’s loyalty instead:

  Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims and there to remain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent, but that in all actions he had behaved himself orderly and discreetly whereby he had done her Majesty good service, and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing.

  The Privy Councillors who signed this letter were Lord Treasurer Burghley, Archbishop Whitgift, Lord Chancellor Hatton, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon and Sir James Crofts. Their wording is opaque. The assertion that Marlowe had not intended to go ‘to Rheims and there to remain’ broadly hints that he did in fact go there; the equivocal ‘and there to remain’ tacitly permits Marlowe to visit the town on government business, but not to join the seminary. Marlowe’s name appears nowhere in the diary where the seminary kept its records. If Marlowe used an alias, he ran a high risk of exposure. The silence of the diary bears out the surmise that the Council employed Marlowe to carry messages, but not to penetrate the seminary.

  After the execution of his cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, on 8 February 1587, the Duke of Guise abruptly withdrew his patronage from the seminary at Rheims, which ceased to be a major centre for anti-Elizabethan conspiracies. Although the master spy Gilbert Gifford continued to operate out of Rheims, the focus of Catholic espionage and English intelligence shifted north to the Low Countries, where the Duke of Parma, who had conquered Antwerp in 1585, was poised to march on northern Holland and from there to invade England. On 29 June 1587, the Councillors’ denial that they sent Marlowe to Rheims made perfectly good sense. The action had moved on to Brussels.

  Did Marlowe ever go to Rheims at all? The Councillors who signed the letter of 29 June had a motive for sending him to the Duke of Parma’s garrison at Brussels. Throughout that spring, Burghley, Whitgift, Hatton and Crofts, all of whom favoured a policy of conciliation with Spain, were anxiously negotiating with Parma in a last-ditch effort to avert war. Many messengers, including Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, shuttled back and forth between the English court and the Low Countries. Secretary Walsingham and his faction were kept in the dark about this venture, disapproved of it and refused to participate in any way. If the ‘good service’ that Marlowe performed for Burghley and his faction grew out of this initiative, it took him to the Low Countries rather than to Rheims. This reading of the letter relies on speculation, but is more consistent with the facts than the curiously persistent rumour that Secretary Walsingham sent Marlowe to Rheims in 1587. When Marlowe appears in government archives he is dealing with Burghley or his agents, not with Walsingham.

  If Marlowe journeyed to Brussels, his visit there would be the earliest point at which he was likely have encountered the legend of Doctor Faustus. The publication of the German History of John Faust in 1587 caused an overnight sensation in northern Europe. This wildly popular fable about a scholar-magician who strikes a bargain with the devil held a manifest appeal for a young scholar in Marlowe’s circumstances. The conjecture that Dr Faustus entered the playwright’s imagination in the Low Countries gains some credence from the fact that even though Marlowe’s Faustus, like his real-life counterpart, is German, he unaccountably places himself in Holland during the opening scene of the play. Alluding to the ‘fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge’ that Parma had used to overwhelm that city, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus vows to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’. Whenever he wrote these lines, Marlowe was thinking about – and like – a recent graduate who found himself in the Low Countries soon after Parma’s conquest of Antwerp.

  The Council’s letter concluded by instructing the university authorities to suppress the rumour that Marlowe had defected to Rheims, and to grant him his MA in July:

  Their Lordships’ request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Country should be defamed by those that are ignorant in the affairs he went about.

  The scholar had done the state some service, and the Council wanted the facts about that service to remain a secret. He now lurked in Burghley’s memory as a man fit for undercover assignments.

  Jove’s courier Mercury was the god of languages, messengers and other go-betweens. The Council frequently employed poets in this capacity. Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson all carried messages for the government. Marlowe’s case stands out because of the rumour about his switching sides. In its effort to quash the rumour, the Privy Council identified the real Marlowe with the loyal subject (‘he had no such intent’), implying that the seditious Marlowe was merely playing a part. Such distinctions often broke down in practice. Burghley and Walsingham recruited many of their best informants from the ranks of the enemy. They routinely ‘turned’ individuals who were already involved with the Catholic intelligence network; here the agent’s loyalty to the state was suspect from the start. Even the most zealous operative is apt to form a bond with his victims; witness Baines’s later account of Marlowe’s approving remarks about Catholicism. Bear in mind, finally, that Marlowe always appears in the government documents as an object of surveillance.

  The vast majority of secret agents toiled in a marginal and mercenary occupation. Their own employers held them in suspicion, believing that ‘There be no trust to a knave that will deceive them that trust him.’ Walsingham and Burghley rewarded secret agents with cash payments; their wages depended on the quality of the intelligence they provided. Field operatives rarely found posts in the civil service or the professions, and there is no reason to believe that Marlowe’s lot was any different. The appropriate contrast is the Puritan Nicholas Faunt, who found work on the clerical side of Walsingham’s establishment. There was nothing secret about it.

  The timing of the Council’s letter to Cambridge University dovetailed with Marlowe’s decision to write Tamburlaine for the newly erected London theatres; he was the first university graduate to forge a lasting professional bond with the adult players. Like the players, the secret agent was an actor, licensed by authority to perform the role of the outlaw, and shrewdly suspected of being the part he enacted. By commissioning Marlowe as a double agent, the authorities inserted him into opposing roles – loyal servant and subversive other. His assignment was to create the enemies that justified the exercise of state power; the crown encouraged him to voice what it regarded as sedition and heresy.

  Marlowe’s own prospects of securing a respectable place at court, in the university or in the Church were more doubtful than ever. Like his friend Nashe, he may have aspired to a college Fellowship, but his poverty and menial status worked against him. It is a ‘hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship’, observed William Harrison, ‘(though he be never so good a scholar and worthy of that room). Such packing also is used at elections that not he which best deserveth, but he that hath most friends, though he be the worst scholar, is always surest to speed.’

  Poor boys did win advancement via the university, but they also fell by the wayside. By way of illustration, consider what happened to the seven peers who accompanied Marlowe from the King’s School to Cambridge. Thomas Taylor and John Marshall left Cambridge without taking their degrees. Henry Brownrigg received his BA but never found a place in the Church. Henry Jacobs, the yeoman’s son from Folkestone, became a Brownist, then a Congregationalist, and eventually migrated to Virginia.
William Potter – the son of the butcher who lived across the street in the parish of St George – John Reynard and Thomas Scales all took degrees, entered Holy Orders and spent their lives as parish priests, but none of them held more than one living or rose to any prominence. The going rate for a minor parish priest was £10 a year. Against this backdrop of exclusionary job placements and low-paid work, Marlowe’s decision to become a professional writer looks like a shrewd career move. His intuition that there would be a future in writing plays for the public turned out to be prophetic – although Marlowe, the prophet, never entered the promised land of patronage and plenty.

  * * *

  Marlowe belonged to the group of poets who were born around the time of Elizabeth’s accession, attended grammar school and university during the early decades of her reign and flourished during the 1580s and early 1590s. At the upper level of this group, Sir Philip Sidney was the aristocratic arbiter who wrote the authoritative Apology for Poetry (1583), prepared court entertainments, circulated his work in manuscript and dispensed patronage through the Leicester–Walsingham faction. Recruits from the ‘middling’ class of merchants, attorneys and well-connected artisans included Edmund Spenser, Abraham Fraunce, George Peele and Samuel Daniel. Thomas Watson’s origins remain obscure. He knew John Lyly and George Peele from Oxford, and had reinvented himself as a classical scholar during his years on the Continent. These poets had a common agenda. They translated works written in classical and modern European languages. They wrote pastoral poetry and prepared court entertainments. They penned love sonnets based on Italian models. They cultivated the amateur genres of the school play, the court entertainment and closet drama. They produced humanist textbooks – Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, Watson’s Hekathompathia, or Passionate Century of Love and Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric – that combined text, commentary and criticism. Finally, they kept a safe distance from the disreputable adult acting companies.