The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  The court responded with measured steps. The Privy Council agreed to a ban on Sunday performances in the suburbs. In March, they authorized Tilney to form a new company, the Queen’s Men, by drafting twelve leading players from the companies patronized by the Earls of Leicester, Sussex, Oxford, Derby and others. The loss of their star performers made it hard for these companies to compete in the rough-and-tumble urban market-place; they spent most of the mid-1580s touring the provinces.

  The royally commissioned Queen’s Men were a touring company by choice. Master Tilney’s all-star troupe spent the autumn run-up to their holiday appearances at court performing in and around London, where they ostensibly ‘rehearsed’ the plays they would give before the queen. The Queen’s Men never acquired a playhouse of their own; even when they were in London, they toured from one theatre to another. For the rest of the year, they led the exodus to the countryside. The Queen’s Men had a straightforward ideological agenda. Their repertory featured patriotic plays about English history, preferably with an anti-Catholic or pro-Tudor bias. They also specialized in old-fashioned morality plays and fairy-tale romances about long-lost aristocrats. Their shows mingled the ‘truth’ of Protestant history with a lot of extemporaneous clowning. They spoke in rhymed verse and prose. This state-sponsored version of wholesome morality and good clean fun was the high-water mark of English theatre when Marlowe came on the scene.

  Only three of the men who wrote for the common players during this period publicly admitted to doing so: Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson and Stephen Gosson. Tarlton and Wilson were professional actors who wrote for the Queen’s Men. They represented the status quo, and catered to respectable middle-class audiences. Gosson takes us closer to Marlowe’s story. Born in 1554, he grew up in the Canterbury parish of St George, went to the King’s School and won a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but was cut adrift after receiving his BA. Unable to find gainful employment, Gosson contributed occasional poems in English and Latin to volumes published by his friends, and tried his fortunes with the players. He acted, briefly and badly, for Leicester’s Men and prepared several scripts for them; but this too went poorly.

  Gosson saw the error of his ways. Upon retiring from the stage, he presented himself to the public in the guise of a humble penitent: ‘I have sinned and am sorry for my fault: he runs far that never turns, better late than never.’ With the publication of The School of Abuse, A Short Apology of the School of Abuse and Plays Confuted in Five Actions, the failed actor and playwright became the leading spokesman for the anti-theatrical lobby. Gosson’s conversion turned out to be a shrewd career move. He soon became a tutor in a private household, and in April 1584 he spent eight days at the English College in Rome, probably on an intelligence-gathering mission for Secretary Walsingham. On his return to England, he took Holy Orders and acquired several lucrative church livings, enough to make him a wealthy man.

  Gosson dedicated his School of Abuse to Sidney, the arbiter of literary correctness. Although Sidney’s response, An Apology for Poetry (c. 1583), rose to the defence of poets and classical dramatists, he had nothing but scorn for English playwrights. In his digression on the failings of contemporary English literature, Sidney assumes that the popular playwright is a semi-literate player whose script amounts to a naive transcription of his narrative sources. He recommends ‘the ordinary players in Italy’ – skilled performers with a native grasp of dramatic convention – as role models for the English actor-playwrights, who come across merely as clowns. Sidney was virtually the only contemporary critic to tolerate the players at all. Thomas Lodge’s Honest Excuses (1581) mounted an exceedingly cautious defence of playing: ‘I wish as zealously as the best that all abuse of playing were abolished; but for the thing, the antiquity causeth me to allow so it be used as it should be.’ Even so, his treatise was suppressed at once by higher authority.

  The professional writers who prepared scripts for the common players during the early 1580s worked under a cloak of anonymity. Our sole glimpse of these worthy pioneers comes a generation later, from the playwright Thomas Dekker, who depicts them in the Elysian Fields. Entering a grove of laurel, Dekker first encounters Chaucer and Spenser, and then

  In another company sat Learned Watson, industrious Kyd, ingenious Achelley, and (though he had been a player, moulded out of their pens) yet because he had been their lover, and a register to the Muses, inimitable Bentley: these were likewise carousing to one another at the holy well, some of them singing Paeans to Apollo, some of them hymns to the rest of the gods.

  The actor John Bentley belongs with the playwrights Thomas Watson, Thomas Kyd and Thomas Achelley because he loved them and kept their poetry alive, and because they wrote the plays that moulded him. They must have completed these plays before Bentley’s death in August 1585.

  Dekker’s posthumous tribute is the only indication that this body of work ever existed. After Watson’s death, his patron Cornwallis testified that his client ‘could devise twenty fictions and knaveries in a play, which was his daily practice and his living’. A contemporary complimented Shakespeare on being ‘Watson’s heir’ in 1595. The critic Francis Meres numbered Watson ‘among our best for tragedy’ in 1598. But Watson produced these scripts discreetly. The testimony of Dekker, Cornwallis and Meres reveals that he divided the labour of writing into two distinct sectors: his translations, poetry and works of natural philosophy defined his public persona and appealed to prospective patrons; scriptwriting was his day job. Kyd and Achelley pursued the same strategy. A modern reader can still peruse the book of prayers, the Latin poem and the translation of Bandello’s Violenta and Didaco that Achelley prepared for well-placed dedicatees; the plays that won him a place in Dekker’s Elysium have sunk without a trace. Kyd was so careful to cover his tracks as a popular playwright that the only reason we know him to be the author of his masterly Spanish Tragedy, still performed in the twenty-first century, is a glancing tribute in Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612).

  The players were in a dilemma. The repeat visitors in the urban audience required a steady stream of new scripts; but the actors’ long-term survival depended on their acquiring a daily repertory of well-written plays that could be performed on a regular basis. When the Earl of Lincoln’s Men contracted to purchase eighteen plays in two and a half years from a gentleman named Rowland Broughton, they were looking for pot-boilers. Many of the lost plays from the 1570s and 1580s doubtless fell into that category; Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great soars above it. Tamburlaine is a work of high literary achievement. Although it is pitched at the level of the common spectators who flocked to the new theatres, the play also appealed to readers who took a serious interest in history. Marlowe would continue to expend the lion’s share of his prodigious talent on popular plays. He too never publicized this fact. The first explicit ascription of Tamburlaine to Marlowe did not appear until 1609. Nevertheless, he had taken the decisive step in his literary career.

  Why did Marlowe make this choice? His lowly origins and secret service work limited his chances of finding a respectable place in the university or the Church. In taking up the base occupation of a popular playwright, he had relatively little to lose. Poverty gave him an excellent reason to write for money. The going rate for a new play was £6, a sum that compares favourably with the £10 a year Marlowe would have earned as a parson. There was also the prospect of revenue sharing. The players sometimes gave playwrights whose work proved especially popular the receipts for the second day’s performance. A seventeenth-century comedy traces the origin of this practice to

  an old tradition

  That in the times of mighty Tamberlane

  Of conjuring Faustus, and the Beauchamps bold,

  You poets used to have the second day.

  This supplementary pay could be quite lucrative. The receipts for the earliest recorded performance of Dr Faustus, for example, came to £3 12s – and by this time the play was already familiar to playhouse audiences.


  Patron hunting was second nature to Elizabethan writers and surely figured in Marlowe’s plans. Shortly after Marlowe’s death, Thomas Kyd, who played a part in that death, testified that his own patron had never known Marlowe’s ‘service but in writing for his players, for never could my Lord endure his name, or sight, when he had heard of his conditions’. Kyd was referring to a later moment in Marlowe’s career, and wanted to emphasize that Marlowe never made it into his lord’s circle of personal clients. Nevertheless, Marlowe had come to know Kyd’s patron by writing for his players; his Lordship could endure Marlowe’s name and sight until he ‘heard of his conditions’. The opportunity had been there.

  Marlowe tried his luck with the Lord Admiral’s Men. The company’s patron Charles Howard had a long-standing interest in the theatre. Howard had stood in as Lord Chamberlain, the court official who supervised the Master of the Revels, in 1574–75, and procured his own company of players shortly thereafter. Then he arranged for his cousin Tilney to be put in charge of the Revels Office. He himself was appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1583. He intervened on the players’ behalf with the Justices of Surrey and Middlesex and gave preferential treatment to the Queen’s Men, but did not invite his own company to perform at court while he was Lord Chamberlain.

  In 1585, Howard resigned his post, which went to his father-in-law Lord Hunsdon, and became Elizabeth’s Lord Admiral instead. Upon taking office, Howard vastly expanded the scope of English piracy. Under the old system, the Lord Admiral issued a ‘letter of reprisal’ to any merchant who could prove that he had incurred losses at the hands of Spanish privateers. The letter commissioned the injured trader to engage in acts of piracy in order to recoup his losses. Howard streamlined this process: anyone who could pay the fee of 13s and outfit a ship was authorized to prey on Spanish ships. The sky was the limit, so long as the Admiral collected his ten per cent of the booty. The English navy grew strong under this no-holds-barred policy, while the Admiral, who ran the navy as a for-profit franchise, soon became a very rich man.

  The Admiral continued to take an interest in his acting company. During his tenure as Lord Chamberlain, Howard had invited Lord Hunsdon’s Men to perform at court. Lord Hunsdon, the new Lord Chamberlain, now returned the favour by inviting his son-in-law’s company to perform for the queen during the holiday season of 1585–86. It was to be expected that Hunsdon would continue inviting them to court in the future. During the mid-1580s the player John Alleyn and his brother Edward, an emerging star, joined the Admiral’s Men, where they formed an unusually close association with the Admiral himself. The Alleyn brothers had connections at court. Their genteel father served as porter to the queen. The sons belonged to the Howard family’s extensive network of powerful clients. John Alleyn lived at the Admiral’s house for an extended period of time, while Edward Alleyn, soon to become the leading player of his era, was one of Howard’s personal servants. Alleyn continued to wear the Admiral’s livery even after he joined another company. Edward Alleyn performed the part of Tamburlaine for the Admiral’s Men, most likely in its 1587 début, and played it brilliantly. Marlowe’s professional relationships with these two players brought him close to one of the most powerful and sought-after patrons in England.

  9.5 ‘The Engraved image of the great-hearted Charles Howard’, by Thomas Cockson, 1596.

  The office of Lord Admiral made Howard an ideal reader of works about geography, astronomy, colonial exploration and war. A sample of the books dedicated to the Admiral includes The Voyage and Travel of M. C. Fredericks into India, Henry Haslop’s News Out of Spain, Patruccio Ubaldini’s Discourse Concerning the Spanish Fleet, John Blagrave’s Description of the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discourse of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and Guillaume du Bartas’ Colonies. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, with its extended passages on Asian geography, the planets, siege tactics and gunnery, fits right into this list. In addition, Marlowe’s play appealed to Howard’s acquisitive energy in a way that none of these books could hope to rival, for the playwright’s hero, Tamburlaine the Great, was the greatest soldier of fortune in modern times.

  * * *

  Marlowe found the story of Tamburlaine the Great in George Whetstone’s English Mirror: A Regard Wherein All Estates May Behold the Conquests of Envy (1586). Whetstone was a popular novelist, translator and self-appointed moralist. He divided his English Mirror into three parts. The first section gives an historical overview of envy, including Cain’s slaying of Abel, Simon the Magician’s emulation of Christ, Nero’s murder of his mother, the sack of Rome, the Turkish emperor Amurath’s assassination of his five younger brothers and the quarrel between the Florentine Guelphs and Ghibellines. The second part describes Queen Elizabeth’s victories over Envy during the first twenty-five years of her reign. The final chapters are a compilation of edifying precepts, culminating in a long diatribe against ‘atheists, Machiavellians and other Timepleasers’. Whetstone’s peroration sums up the moral lesson that he has been trying to put across for the previous 239 pages. The consequence of impiety is punishment; history proves that crime does not pay. Whetstone’s perception that the world was full of atheists (a fourth part of Christendom by his estimate), who seemed to be doing just fine, gave the moralist in him cause for alarm. So he concluded by harking back to the great atheists of antiquity and demonstrating, on a case-by-case basis, that God had hunted each and every one of them down in the end.

  Tamburlaine was the glaring exception among Whetstone’s chronicles of infamy and ruin. ‘[N]otwithstanding the poverty of his parents’, he rose to become king of Persia, defeated the Turkish emperor Bajazeth at the battle of Ankara, conquered Central Asia and died in splendour at his native Samarkand. For Europeans, Tamburlaine’s claim to fame lay in his defeat of Bajazeth, the event that lifted the Turkish siege of Constantinople. Since Tamburlaine had saved the eastern capital of Christendom, the usual rules did not apply in his case. In the Middle Eastern chronicles, Tamburlaine was the chieftain of a Scythian tribe that counted its wealth by flocks of sheep; in humanist histories, he became the man from nowhere, a base shepherd born ‘under a favourable harmony of distinguished constellations and the lucky conjunction of stars of uncommon magnitude’. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanists transformed Tamburlaine into an avatar of the heroic Prince, favoured by fortune, who imposed order on history through his innate ability. This Machiavellian figure stood out in stark contrast to providential interpretations of history like Whetstone’s Mirror. Since Tamburlaine’s only motive was the will to power, he ‘sought indefatigably, as though it were a wonderful work of virtue, for people he might wage war on … or for people who enjoyed complete freedom, so that he could impose on them a savage yoke’. When a visitor challenged him to justify his egregious cruelty, Tamburlaine proclaimed that he was on a divine mission to punish erring humanity: ‘Remember, he said, I am the wrath of God.’

  For Continental humanists, Tamburlaine’s poverty signified his phenomenological novelty; he was ‘a pure appearance out of nothing’. Marlowe gave the appearance a material basis. From the English playwright’s standpoint, Tamburlaine’s poverty signified an ominous social crisis, and a novel way of resolving it. The ranks of the poor expanded at an alarming rate in Marlowe’s England. The conversion of common lands into private property drove tenant farmers on to the open roads. Prices, stimulated by the influx of precious metals from the New World, rose, while wages remained constant. Since feudal rents too remained constant, aristocrats reduced the size of their households to compensate for the shortfall. Between a quarter and a third of the people in most English towns lived beneath the poverty level of £1–£2 per year. The dissolution of the monasteries, a traditional site of poor relief, aggravated the sufferings of the needy. The Almonry by Canterbury Cathedral no longer dispensed alms to the indigent poor; the building now housed the King’s School, which offered a classical education to the industrious poor. Vagrancy
was on the rise, and the 1572 Vagrancy Act applied to university men: ‘all such scholars of the universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of the said Universities … shall be … declared to be vagabonds.’

  9.6 Sturdy beggar. From The Roxburghe Ballads.

  Warfare was another cause of poverty and vagrancy. Elizabethan armies were recruited from the poor and criminal classes. The war with Spain between 1585 and 1604 produced a steady flow of demobilized soldiers who had been drawn from the underclass, had no communities to return to and were armed and dangerous. In 1589, a group of five hundred demobilized men almost succeeded in looting Bartholomew Fair. Authorities and social commentators voiced concern over the burgeoning ranks of the ‘sturdy’ beggars – able-bodied young men who lived outside the social order by choice rather than necessity.

  Marlowe wove this social conflict into the Tamburlaine myth. A Persian nobleman calls the hero a ‘sturdy Scythian thief’ and accuses him of leading a swarm of ‘vile outrageous men / That live by rapine and by lawless spoil’ (I.i.36, II.ii.22–23). The Empress of Turkey brands him ‘the Great Tartarian thief’ (III.iii.171). The Soldan of Egypt describes him as ‘a sturdy felon and a base-bred thief’, ‘a base usurping vagabond’ (IV.iii.12, 21). His army is ‘a troop of thieves and vagabonds’ (IV.i.6). Tamburlaine’s well-bred antagonists make a valid point. At the outset of the play, he and his outlaw band capture the princess Zenocrate and her dowry in a brazen act of highway robbery. But the hero’s intellectual reach transcends his lowly origins. Tamburlaine justifies his villainy with poetic philosophy, arguing that upward mobility is the universal law of nature. The play yokes the disparate genres of the action-adventure story and the Cambridge MA lecture.