by David Riggs
God-fearing contemporaries repeated this story with various embellishments, always emphasizing the providential link between crime and punishment. In the summary verdict of critic Francis Meres, ‘our tragical poet Marlowe for his Epicurism and Atheism had a tragical end.’ The Reverend William Vaughan related how ‘our Christopher Marlowe, by profession a play-maker … about seven years ago wrote a book against the Trinity: but see the effects of God’s justice’. ‘But hark ye brain-sick and profane poets,’ warned The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath, ‘what fell upon this profane wretch.’ Divines rejoiced in Marlowe’s killing for the same reason that William Rankins, John Field and John Stubbes had applauded the collapse of the Bear House at Paris Garden. These events showed that their Lord and Master was, as Robert Greene put it, ‘a God that can punish enemies’.
The mythmakers propped up their tale of divine intervention by giving Marlowe spurious motives. Marlowe ‘purposed to stab one whom he owed a grudge unto’ (Beard); Marlowe was ‘stabbed to death by a bawdy serving man, a rival of his in his lewd love’ (Meres). William Vaughan knew where the murder happened and who did it (‘one Ingram’), but no one told him about ‘the reckoning’. A bar bill was too innocuous to provoke the hand of divine correction. Like Claudius in Hamlet, the blasphemer needed to die ‘about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t’. Where the coroner’s inquest reports that Marlowe died instantaneously, Beard supposes that he ‘cursed and blasphemed to his last gasp, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth’.
Marlowe’s admirers neither dwell on the circumstances of his death, nor suggest that his life needed any apology. Instead, they remembered the poet and humanist. Just three weeks after Marlowe’s death, in an occasional poem addressed to the Earl of Northumberland on his installation as a Knight of the Garter, George Peele wondered what was keeping the current generation of English poets from entering the Elysian Fields:
And after thee
Why hie they not, unhappy in thine end,
Marley, the muses’ darling for thy verse;
Fit to write passions for the souls below,
If any wretched souls in passion speak?
Peele likens Marlowe to Homer, who gave voice to the dead Achilles in the Odyssey. If Marlowe’s end was unhappy, he still possessed the immortal gift of the first poets, Homer, Orpheus and Musaeus.
Marlowe’s earliest critics, the men who knew him best, emphasize this aspect of his genius. In his continuation of Hero and Leander, George Chapman, the translator of Homer and Hesiod, aspires to ‘find th’eternal Clime / Of his free soul, whose living subject stood / Up to the chin in the Pierean flood’. In his dedication of Marlowe’s Lucan, the publisher Thomas Thorpe salutes ‘that pure Elemental wit, Christopher Marlowe’. Nashe cites ‘Hero and Leander, of whom divine Musaeus sung, and a diviner Muse than him, Kit Marlowe’. Marlowe has gone ‘To live with Beauty in Elysium’, laments the poet Henry Petowe, where he ‘must frame to Orpheus’ melody / Hymns all divine to make heaven harmony’. Even his old enemy Henry Chettle now calls him the ‘dead Musaeus’.
Michael Drayton’s fine tribute sums up Marlowe’s reputation among his peers:
Neat Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs
Had in him those brave translunary things,
That the first poets had, his raptures were,
All air, and fire, which made his verses clear,
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a Poet’s brain.
Thespis was the legendary founder of Greek tragedy; Marlowe was the founder of English tragedy. Like the first poets, he travelled in the heavens’ pathways and sang of ‘brave translunary things’. His raptures transported him above the baser elements of earth and water; his verses were ‘All air and fire’. His imagination was possessed by a poetic vision of the cosmos.
The middle ground between the ‘first poet’ and the blasphemer was becoming clearer at the time of Marlowe’s murder. Gabriel Harvey remarked in 1593 that ‘there is no religion but precise Marlowism’. A year later the translator Thomas Bowes warned his readers about a ‘bad fellow whose works are no less accounted among his followers than were Apollo’s oracles among the heathen, nay than the sacred Scriptures among sound Christians’. The gist of the bad fellow’s teaching is
That the religion of the heathen made them stout & courageous, whereas Christian religion maketh the professors thereof base-minded, timorous, & fit to become a prey to everyone: that since men fell from the religion of the Heathen, they became so corrupt that they would believe neither God nor the devil …
Although Bowes loathes everything that the bad fellow stands for, his remarks bring out the inner logic of ‘Marlowism’. Marlowe’s quest for cultural archetypes led him back to the first poets, who invented ‘the religion of the heathen’. From this vantage point, he mounted a prolonged critique of Christianity, and even proposed to ‘write a new religion’. For a while, people listened to him.
Tamburlaine the Great founds an idolatrous cult dedicated to violent appropriation. The Jew of Malta reduces all forms of organized religion to mockery. The Epicurean King Edward II elevates his lover Gaveston above the claims of the Church, the nobility and his wife. The reprobate Dr Faustus proclaims hell a fable and sells his soul for twenty-four years of carnal pleasure. Arguments about the morally correct response to these villain-heroes miss the thrust of Marlowe’s achievement, which was to make such figures conceivable within a public theatrical marketplace.
‘The fear of the Lord’, says the Book of Proverbs, ‘is the beginning of Wisdom.’ Marlowe put extraordinary pressure on this all-pervasive notion. Without flinching from his task, he interrogated the angry God of Judaeo-Christian religion in public spaces and in beautiful language. Like the legendary Orpheus, Marlowe plumbed the depths of hell and survived to tell his tale. In the waning months of his life, he himself became a test case for the validity of divine vengeance. The popular superstition that God punished Marlowe with death and damnation reduced this historic encounter to a cautionary fable. Marlowe possessed the gift of speech, the saving grace that Auden found in Yeats. Time, that ‘Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives’, has released him from the theatre of God’s judgements.
Was the great poet a good man? Firsthand recollections about Marlowe’s character are hard to come by. Nashe counted him ‘among my friends that used me like a friend’. The printer Edward Blount calls him ‘the man, that hath been dear unto us’. The satirist John Marston memorably refers to ‘kind Kit Marlowe’. On the other hand, Kyd’s letters to Puckering assert that Marlowe was ‘intemperate and of a cruel heart’, a person who rashly attempted ‘sudden privy injuries to men’. Bear in mind, though, that Kyd wrote these words after being tortured because of his past association with Marlowe, at a time when his old roommate was dead, and Kyd was desperate to ingratiate himself with Puckering.
Kyd cloaked his repudiation of Marlowe in a famous classical text. ‘That I should love or be familiar friend, with one so irreligious’, he wrote to Puckering, ‘were very rare, When Tully saith Digni sunt amicitia in ipsis inest causa cur diligantur which neither was in him, for person, qualities, or honesty.’ The Latin quotation comes from Cicero’s well-known dialogue ‘On Friendship’: ‘Now they are worthy of friendship who have within their own souls the reason for their being loved.’ On the face of it, Kyd is saying that it would be very ‘rare’ (strange) for him to love a man like Marlowe, who lacked an inner reason for being loved.
Yet the undertow of the classical text pulls Kyd’s meaning in the opposite direction. ‘On Friendship’ recounts the main speaker’s sense of bereavement upon the recent death of his dearest friend. Kyd is quoting from the section on ruptured friendships, where Cicero writes that ‘there is a sort of disaster in connection with the breaking off of friendships’. Immediately after the line that Kyd quotes, Cicero continues: ‘A rare class indeed! And really everything splendid
is rare.’ Kyd echoes this language when he says that for him to love Marlowe ‘were very rare’. Against the backdrop of Cicero’s dialogue, Kyd’s disavowal summons up suppressed memories of a lost friendship. Oh rare Christopher Marlowe!
* * *
While the Bishop of London burnt Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Elegies outside St Paul’s Cathedral in June 1599, Shakespeare was thinking about his mighty rival. One of his two explicit references to Marlowe, the couplet ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might / “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?”’, appears midway through As You Like It (1599–1600). Elsewhere in the play, the fool Touchstone complains that he has been exiled to the Forest of Arden ‘as the most capricious poet honest Ovid was among the Goths’, and goes on to observe that
When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
The fool’s ‘great reckoning in a little room’ echoes another of Marlowe’s magical lines, ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ from The Jew of Malta. His allusion to ‘the great reckoning’ that strikes a man dead glances at ‘le reckynynge’ that reportedly led to the death of Marlowe in the little room at Eleanor Bull’s. Of all the contemporary observers who wrote about the killing, Shakespeare alone refers to the wording of the coroner’s inquest. Six years later, the burning of Marlowe’s Elegies reminded him of the kinship between Ovid and Marlowe, the ‘Dead Shepherd’.
Honest Ovid was banished by Augustus Caesar, who failed to read the poet’s verses ‘with the forward child, understanding’. Marlowe fashioned his own career after the example of Ovid, the ‘teacher of desire’, and suffered a similar fate. The force of the fool’s comparison lies in the parallel cases of art and repression, the poet versus the prince. The issue, in Augustan Rome and Elizabethan London, was the writer’s ‘liberty’ or freedom of speech. The public burning of erotic and satirical poetry thrust this question into public consciousness.
Elsewhere in As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques, Shakespeare’s portrait of the satirist, defies the ban on licentious speech:
I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please, for so fools have.
Jaques soon discovers, however, that only fools have this privilege. In the passage referring to Marlowe, and throughout As You Like It, Shakespeare allows the fool to voice the anti-authoritarian impulses that motivate the satirist, but only on the condition that he cloak his rebellion in innocuous jokes. The clown can flout Shakespeare’s ethic of civility because he is, after all, a clown. Such was the lesson of Marlowe’s meteoric career. Teachers of desire play a dangerous game; when they cross the line that separates art from politics, they are in for a reckoning. Marlowe took the risk and paid the price. In the words of his friend Thomas Nashe, ‘His life he contemned in comparison of the liberty of speech.’
* * *
Anne Marlowe married the itinerant shoemaker John Cranford on 10 June 1593, just twelve days after her brother was murdered at Deptford. Regardless of whether or not she knew about Christopher’s death, Anne was pregnant and could ill afford to put off her wedding. Her sister Dorothy married Thomas Graddell, a migrant glover, vintner, publican and renter-out of horses, early in the following year.
The plague of 1593 claimed the lives of Katherine Marlowe’s brother Thomas Arthur, his wife Ursula and four of their five children within the space of a month. The sole survivor of the Arthur family was ten-year-old Dorothy. On 15 September, two days after the death of Ursula, the Marlowes went to court to secure their kinsman’s property, later assessed at £56, on their niece’s behalf. Dorothy worked as a maid until she too died at the age of fifteen.
John Marlowe kept on quarrelling with his neighbours, landlords, creditors and debtors throughout the 1590s. At the age of sixty, in 1604, he received a licence ‘to keep common victualling in his now dwelling house’. The trade of innkeeper suited his extroverted nature. On 25 January 1605, reckoning that his time had come, he summoned a scribe to record his will and witnesses to authenticate it. Two days later, his friends and fellow shoemakers accompanied John Marlowe’s coffin to his old parish church of St George the Martyr. He bequeathed all his worldly goods – simple furniture, cushions, a carpet, kitchen implements, tableware, a full linen chest, a four-poster bed and a Bible, but no shoemaker’s tools – to his wife.
Seven weeks later, on 17 March, Katherine Marlowe reckoned that her time had come as well. She too sent for a scribe and witnesses, made her will and was buried two days later. Her will distributed her belongings among her daughters, their families and two poor women whom she had befriended. The one exception was her first son-in-law John Moore, who received 20s and a large cupboard ‘that standeth in the great chamber where I lie’. In choosing between her three daughters, the mother leaned towards Margaret Jordan, her favourite of the three, and Anne Cranford, but gave short shrift to Dorothy Graddell.
Katherine’s dying wish ‘to be buried in the churchyard of St George’s in Canterbury as near where as my husband John Marlowe was buried’ was not granted. Her daughters buried her in the nearby parish church of All Saints. After fighting over their mother’s estate, the three sisters went their separate ways. Margaret Jordan led a respectable life until she died in 1642 at the ripe old age of seventy-six. Anne Cranford and Dorothy Graddell, the other two siblings who survived Christopher Marlowe, showed flashes of their brother’s rebellious streak.
Dorothy and Thomas Graddell were twice cited for refusing to take Holy Communion. The Church court convicted Graddell of saying lewd and defamatory things about his wife and a man named Thomas Browne. According to Browne, Graddell told various people that Browne had fornicated with Dorothy ‘seven times in one night’ and infected her with venereal disease. The court excommunicated Graddell twice: first after he refused to do penance, and then when he would not pay a fine. Dorothy too was excommunicated during a lawsuit charging her with slander. Like her father and her husband, Dorothy frequented the Canterbury courts, defending herself against accusations of libel and suing others for the same offence.
In 1603, the churchwardens of St Mary Breadman brought Anne Cranford before the ecclesiastical authorities for being ‘a malicious contentious uncharitable person, seeking the unjust vexation of her neighbours as the fame goeth in our said parish’. They characterized Marlowe’s sister as ‘a scold, a common swearer, a blasphemer of the name of god’. At the age of fifty-five, Anne fought a neighbour with staff and dagger; at fifty-six, she assaulted him with her sword and knife. The Marlowes were a quarrelsome tribe.
Notes
Thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society and the American Council of Learned Societies for their support of the research and writing that went into this book.
I have silently normalized and modernized spelling in early manuscripts and printed works.
Quotations from the works of Christopher Marlowe are taken from:
The Complete Plays. Ed. Mark Burnett. London: Everyman, 1999.
The Complete Poems and Translations. Ed. Stephen Orgel. London: Penguin, 1971.
Abbreviations
BL
British Library (Harleian and Cotton MSS)
DNB
Stephen, L. and S. Lee Dictionary of National Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1885.
OED
Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Ed. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
PRO
Public Record Office, London.
STC
Pollard, A.W. and G. R. Redgrave, et al., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976.
Prologue
the great
est playwright: for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century allusions to Marlowe, see Brooke 1922 351–81 and MacLure 1979 29–50.
Giordano Bruno: Robertson 1976 155, Bruno 1998 7, 55, 86: Bruno 1977 91.
the apparition of Helen: Orgel 2002 228, Hammill 2000 119–20.
Don Quixote: Cervantes 1993 59.
Caravaggio: Friedlaender 1955 3–27, Hammill 2000 78–80.
“damnable Judgement of Religion”: Kuriyama 2002 220, 222, 215.
Marlowe’s reputation: for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century allusions to Marlowe, see MacLure 1979 57–66; Riggs 1997 39–40 and 55n3. Dabbs 1991 discusses Marlowe’s after-image during the Romantic and Victorian eras; see esp. 21, 81, 88–91 and 106.
“sinners of Soduma”: Kuriyama 2002 221.
Seven of Marlowe’s contemporaries: Riggs 1997 56n8.
On a case-by-case basis: Kuriyama 2002 adopts this approach. Kuriyama’s biography is an indispensable resource for anyone seriously interested in Marlowe and a wholesome caution against leaping to unwarranted conclusions. My own view of Marlowe is closer to that of Charles Nicholl 2002 and Roy Kendall 1994 and 1998. Kendall 1998 has recently been published as a book, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underworld, by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and the Associated University Presses.