The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  8.7 Sir Philip Sidney

  Sidney’s client Edmund Spenser was the respectable role model who used the medium of print to put himself before the reading public. Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) had staked his claim to be the English Virgil. By 1587 he was well on his way to completing the opening books of The Faerie Queene, his answer to Virgil’s Aeneid. Poetry brought Spenser affluence and prestige. Under the patronage of Leicester and Sidney, he became Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland and received large grants of money (£162 in 1582, for example), other offices and over three thousand acres of Irish land. Queen Elizabeth gave him a royal pension of £50 a year in recognition of his newly published Faerie Queene (1590). She honoured no other poet in this way.

  Abraham Fraunce, another Sidney client, had the unenviable task of showing that English verse was meant to be written in quantitative, rather than accentual, metres. Although this experiment was doomed to failure, contemporary critics believed that classical measures were the way forward and hailed Fraunce as a major poet. His Lamentations of Amintas … translated out of Latin into English Hexameters (1587) was the high-water mark of the campaign to write English poetry in Latin metres. After the death of his patron Sidney, Fraunce joined the retinue of Sir Philip’s sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton House. Samuel Daniel found employment with the English ambassador to Paris, wrote and carried diplomatic dispatches for Secretary Walsingham and travelled with the queen’s champion Sir Edward Dymock to Italy before joining Lady Pembroke’s entourage at Wilton House around 1592. George Peele never secured long-term patronage, but he did receive lucrative commissions for preparing productions of academic drama at Oxford, civic pageants in London and verses for state occasions.

  Further down the social ladder, the Catholic Thomas Watson stood out by virtue of his learning and versatility. His translation of Sophocles’ Antigone into Latin established his reputation as one of the few Elizabethan poets who took a serious interest in Greek. Marlowe, on the strength of Hero and Leander, was another. Watson’s Passionate Century of love sonnets included imitations of Greek, Latin, Italian and French models. His Latin Compendium of Local Memory simplified the occult memory system of Giordano Bruno. His paraphrase of Tasso’s Italian pastoral Aminta in Latin hexameters became famous through Fraunce’s English translation; Spenser in particular admired it. Although he never won a munificent patron, Watson made inroads into the Sidney–Walsingham circle and found a place in the household of Sir William Cornwallis. The only thing that prevented Watson from becoming a major poet was his lack of talent. Last but not least, he wrote plays for the adult acting companies, though he kept this fact out of the public eye.

  Marlowe practised his craft on the margins of this cadre. He had no apparent ties with the Sidney–Leicester circle and had begun to brew a rivalry with Spenser. If Spenser was ‘the English Virgil’, Marlowe’s translation of the Amores signalled his intention to be the English Ovid. Since Spenser was in Ireland from 1580 to 1589, when he may have returned to England to see his Faerie Queene through the press, the two poets would not have known one another before 1589. Among contemporary poets, Marlowe’s closest counterpart was Watson, the Catholic, who shared his interest in libertine and oppositional writing. Watson had translated Sophocles’ Antigone, the classic Greek text on civil disobedience; yet he did so only from Greek into Latin, not risking the exposure that an English version would bring. Marlowe took the more dangerous path of vernacular translation. Having begun with Ovid, Marlowe’s fascination with ancient models of anti-authoritarian writing soon led him to the kindred figure of Lucan.

  Marlowe’s resolve to put the first book of Lucan’s Civil War into English complemented his decision to translate Ovid’s Amores. Lucan was Ovid’s successor in the ancient line of anti-imperial poets. Where Ovid stood for the cause of personal and erotic liberty, Lucan made the case for armed resistance to Caesar’s monarchical yoke. Within the Roman tradition, Ovid’s Amores and Lucan’s Civil War were definitive testaments to erotic and political freedom. Literary history had marginalized both works; Marlowe turned them back into lively vernacular texts, with the potential to reach a wide range of contemporary readers. Marlowe probably completed his translation of Lucan His First Book in 1592–93; but Lucan’s influence is already apparent in Tamburlaine the Great, the script that Marlowe prepared for a company of adult players in 1587. Ovid and Lucan remained important presences throughout his career. Marlowe’s own work would move back and forth between these strains, amorous song and epic strife, the opposed registers of Venus and Mars. His ancient mentors, Ovid and Lucan, together form a single side of the perpetual struggle between liberty and monarchy, the poet and prince. Like Lucan, Marlowe paid a violent price for giving the struggle full play in words.

  Lucan’s Renaissance editor emphasized the performative quality of his writing: his ‘style is so masterly that you seem rather to see, than read of those transactions. But for the enterprises and battles, you imagine them not related but acted: towns alarmed, armies engaged, the eagerness and terror of the several soldiers, seem present to your view.’ Lucan’s set pieces of vivid description showed Marlowe how to convert narrative poetry into poetic drama. When Marlowe translated the famous opening lines of Lucan’s Civil Wars, he was thinking about Tamburlaine:

  Wars worse than civil on Thessalian plains,

  And outrage strangling law, and people strong

  We sing, whose conquering swords their own breasts launch’d,

  Armies allied, the kingdom’s league uprooted,

  Th’affrighted world’s force bent on public spoil,

  Trumpets and drums like deadly threat’ning other,

  Eagles alike display’d, darts answering darts.

  (1–7)

  Marlowe’s first intervention occurs in line 3, where he substitutes ‘conquering swords’ for Lucan’s ‘victorious right hand’. This new weaponry comes from the Prologue to 1 Tamburlaine, where we see the hero ‘scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword’. The penultimate line in this passage likewise has no counterpart in Lucan; but the phrase ‘Trumpets and drums’ turns up everywhere in the Second Part of Tamburlaine, written in response to the great success of the First Part: ‘Trumpets and drums, alarums presently; /And, soldiers, play the men’ (III.iii.63–64). These meta-dramatic lines sum up the performance values of earlier Elizabethan history plays, where trumpets and drums rally play soldiers armed with conquering swords, who appear as deadly threatening others. Marlowe was preparing to write for the public stage.

  Despite his opposition to Caesarism, Lucan found much to admire in Caesar. Although the conqueror turned into a moral monster after his victory at Pharsalia, Caesar’s energy, competence, leadership and luck at first held enormous appeal for nostalgic republicans. Lucan’s First Book shows Caesar at his best. Angry and defiant, he crosses the Rubicon into Italy, delivers a magnificent oration in defence of his cause and the countryside rises to support him. That is the gist of Tamburlaine the Great. Lucan’s panoramic view of soldiers flocking to join Caesar’s army foreshadows the hordes that rise in response to Tamburlaine’s call: ‘All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine … All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine’ (2 Tamburlaine, I.i.72, 76). Marlowe was about to cross his professional Rubicon.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the Theatre of the Idols

  The north London suburb of Norton Folgate occupied a small stretch of the old Roman road that ran from Bishopsgate past the insane asylum at Bedlam, summer houses on Moorfields to the west and on up to Shore-ditch. Marlowe found lodgings there after leaving Cambridge. Norton Folgate was one of several ‘liberties’ that ringed the City of London. These neighbourhoods were ‘at liberty’ from the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities housed within the City walls. Lax enforcement of the law created a friendly environment for illicit pleasures; citizens went there in search of pastimes and recreations. The streets diverted visitors with taverns, gaming houses, prostitutes, bowling all
eys and practice fields for archery. Duellists settled their quarrels on Finsbury Fields. Spectators paid admission fees to Bedlam Hospital, where the keepers exhibited various types of madmen.

  In 1576, the carpenter and actor James Burbage erected the Theatre in the liberty of Shoreditch, by Finsbury Fields. It was the second custom-built public playhouse in England, and the first to enjoy commercial success. Another playhouse, the Curtain, soon appeared a few hundred yards south of the Theatre. Around the same time, Jerome Savage and the Earl of Warwick’s Men opened another theatre across the Thames at Newington Butts, a mile south of London Bridge. Savage’s theatre stood alongside the sewage canal that ran east from Lambeth Marsh to Lock Hospital, the old leper house on Kentish Street, where it joined the Duffield sluice system. In 1587, the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe erected the Rose Theatre in the Liberty of the Clink on the south bank of the Thames. The Rose was conveniently located between Southwark and the bull- and bear-baiting rings at Paris Garden, an old manor just to the north of London Bridge. Like Shoreditch, Bankside contained many dicing houses, brothels and inns that let rooms to prostitutes.

  9.1 Detail from a map showing Bishopsgate Street and Norton Folgate, 1577. Norton Folgate is between Bishopsgate Street and Shoreditch, in the upper right.

  9.2 Exterior of the Curtain Playhouse, London. From a drawing in the manuscript journal of Abram Booth 1597–98.

  The theatres were unsavoury places. This was literally true at Newington Butts, where the Commissioners frequently dunned Jerome Savage for failing to clean and maintain the sewer that abutted on to his playhouse. The authorities repeatedly ordered Henslowe as well to clean and repair ‘the common sewer before his playhouse’. Elizabethans referred to making water as ‘plucking a rose’; Rose Alley did double duty as an entrance to the Rose Theatre and as a public toilet. The slime still clings to Edmund Rudyerd’s sneering epitaph on Christopher Marlowe: ‘a Cambridge Scholar, who was a Poet and a filthy Play-maker’.

  As the playhouses became a part of the urban landscape, outsiders were hard put to say what went on inside them. A German trader visiting London in the early 1580s remarked that:

  there are some peculiar houses, which are so made as to have about three galleries over one another, inasmuch as a great number of people always enters to see such an entertainment. It may well be that they take as much as from 50 to 60 dollars [£10–£12] at once, especially when they act anything new, which has not been given before, and double prices are charged. This goes on nearly every day in the week; even though performances are forbidden on Friday and Saturday, it is not observed.

  Sober citizens noted that men and women flocked to the playhouses in search of sexual partners. The theatres were flanked by garden alleys lined with pleasure houses, or ‘stews’, where prostitutes serviced their customers, and casual visitors found beds to share with one another. Rose Alley led spectators from the Rose Theatre to the Little Rose, one of several whorehouses owned by Philip Henslowe. ‘London, what are thy suburbs but licensed stews,’ asked Thomas Nashe. The citizen ‘Who coming from the Curtain, sneaketh in / To some odd garden, noted house of sin’ became a familiar figure in the theatre district, as did his bored wife, who was accused of stealing business from the local sex workers, so that ‘The poor common whores can ha’ no traffic for the privy rich ones!’ Playhouses also attracted troublemakers looking for a fight. In 1580 the magistrates charged Burbage with attracting ‘unlawful assemblies’ that provoked ‘affrays and tumults leading to a breach of the peace’.

  When Jerome Savage’s landlords evicted him in 1580, they testified that he was ‘a very lewd fellow and liveth by no other trade than playing of stage plays and Interludes’ – as if Savage’s profession sufficed to explain the nature of his ‘lewd behaviour’. When his case came before the parish priest at St Mary’s Church, just across the road, Savage was ordered to ‘avoid the parish with his lewd behaviour … and so much the more so because the honest neighbours in that place do so mislike his behaviour as they will not suffer him to dwell there any longer’. William Harrison wished that ‘these common plays were exiled for altogether as seminaries of impiety, and their theatres pulled down as no better than houses of bawdry’. It was ‘an evident token of a wicked time when players wax so rich that they can build such houses’. William Gager, the leading advocate of university drama, had this to say about the profession of player: ‘they came upon the stage … of a lewd, vast, dissolute, wicked, impudent, prodigal, monstrous humour, whereof no doubt ensued great corruption of manners in themselves, to say nothing here of the beholders.’ Looking back at the turn of the seventeenth century, the urban historian John Stow, an oracle of decent public opinion, recalled that the London stage ‘became an Occupation … And which was worse it became the Occasion of much Sin and Evil. Playhouses thronged. And great Disorders and Inconvenience were found to ensue to the City thereby.’

  9.3 The Bear-garden (centre), the Rose Theatre (lower right) and the Globe (lower right foreground, mostly hidden by trees), 1600. From Civitas Londini, an engraved panorama of London by John Norden, 1600.

  9.4 Interior of a brothel. Engraving by Virgil Solis (1514–62).

  Like most artisans and professional men, theatre people lived in a tightly knit community within walking distance of their workplace. Marlowe’s neighbours in the vicinity of Norton Folgate included, at one time or another, James Burbage, the actor John Alleyn, the playwright Thomas Watson and Richard Tarlton – the greatest of the early Elizabethan comedians. Another actor, William Shakespeare, probably moved to Shoreditch in the late 1580s. The playwright Robert Greene resided there together with his mistress Em Ball and his bastard son Fortunatus. The Earl of Oxford had a townhouse at Fisher’s Folly off Bishopsgate Street just north of the City walls. Robert Poley and his mistress Joan Yeomans found lodgings in Shoreditch as well.

  The companies that performed in the new playhouses typically consisted of half a dozen lead actors who shared in the profits (‘sharers’), three hired men to play the minor roles and walk-ons and three or four boys to perform the parts of women and children. Although the construction of the theatres represented a major economic breakthrough for the companies, they still led a precarious existence on the margins of Elizabethan society. The 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds decreed that all ‘fencers, bear-wardens, common players in interludes, and minstrels’ were subject to whipping unless they belonged to a ‘baron of the realm or to any other honourable personage of greater degree’. This double-edged proviso summed up the queen’s attitude towards the common players (Elizabethans seldom called them actors; the word was too Latinate). She was willing to protect the players from unfriendly local authorities, but only on condition that they were incorporated under the control of an aristocratic patron.

  Two years after the Act was passed, Elizabeth gave a royal patent to the company patronized by her favourite, the Earl of Leicester. The queen later strengthened her control over the players with the appointment of Edmund Tilney as her Master of the Revels. A Special Commission granted to Tilney in 1581 required everyone involved with the theatre to appear before the Master ‘with all such plays, comedies, tragedies, or shows as they shall be in readiness or mean to set forth’. The players, in turn, paid a fee for having their plays licensed.

  When the actors took up metropolitan residences they provoked a hostile reaction from the municipal authorities and the Puritan wing of the Church. While the ministers John Northbrooke, John Field and John Stubbes vilified the players from the pulpit, the City hired two ex-playwrights, Stephen Gosson and Anthony Munday, to write a series of tell-all pamphlets lambasting the stage. Although these attacks ranged over many targets, the anti-theatrical faction stayed on-message: the players were recreating the libertine culture of pagan antiquity on the outskirts of Protestant London. They had to be suppressed.

  Reminding his readers that plays were ‘invented by the devil, practised by the heathen gentiles and dedicated to their
false idols, Gods and Goddesses’, Stubbes argued that modern theatres ‘renew the remembrance of heathen idolatry’: ‘if you will learn to condemn God and all his laws, to care neither for heaven nor hell … you need go to no other school.’ The fact that the actors often performed plays based on the Scriptures only made matters worse, according to Munday, since ‘the reverend word of God and histories of the Bible, set forth on the stage by these blasphemous players, are so corrupted with their gestures of scurrility, and so interlaced with unclean, and whorish speeches, that it is not possible to draw any profit out of the doctrine of their spiritual moralities’. When Northbrooke’s Youth reminds Age that ‘many times they play histories out of the Scriptures’, Age replies: ‘Assuredly that is very evil so to do, to mingle scurrility with Divinity, that is, to eat meat with unwashed hands.’

  The anti-theatrical movement put the compromise position of ‘close’ atheism under a new kind of strain: for the thrust of the Puritan case against the players was that they performed on the Sabbath, in public, and so gave scandal to God. Since God is not mocked, these performances were bound to bring divine retribution, not only on players and playgoers, but on the City and nation as well. The accidental collapse of the galleries at Paris Garden on Sunday 13 January 1583, a misfortune that claimed the lives of at least seven spectators, confirmed this theory in spectacular fashion. Field and Stubbes demanded that performances come to a halt before God struck again.