Roaring Boys

by Judith Cook

  As to the ‘tavern’ of legend, there is no record in Deptford of any tavern kept by a woman of the name of Eleanor Bull, although such records exist with regard to other inns and taverns in the area, and their landlords or landladies, during the same period. But it was never claimed during the inquest that the event took place in a tavern, only that Marlowe was killed in ‘a room in the house of a certain, Eleanor Bull, widow’. More recent research, in the run-up to the four hundredth anniversary of Marlowe’s death in 1993, revealed that there was indeed an Eleanor Bull living in Deptford and that she had friends in very high places, being related both to Blanche Parry, the Queen’s Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and Robert Cecil himself. The most logical explanation, given the work undertaken by Poley and Skeres, is that she ran what we would now describe as a ‘safe house’.7

  So, if the story of the tavern quarrel does not ring true and as we know that although Marlow, had been arrested he was out on bail, free to come and go as he pleased, why was he killed? His death still provokes far more questions than answers. Was he still working for the secret service? If not, and no one who has ever undertaken that kind of dark work ever escapes from it entirely, did he know too much and had somehow become a danger to those who were? Was it thought he might blurt out in drink details of that secret world of which he had once been part? Did he hold information that might have fingered others had he been brought to trial? There are a number of twentieth-century examples of notorious, heavy-drinking, homosexual, Cambridge-educated spies who even at that later date would have been open to blackmail. How much more vulnerable would a gay man in 1590s London be to such a threat when officially homosexuality was a capital offence, although a blind eye appears to have been taken so long as it was not too overt – at least where the nobility was concerned.

  One idea put forward by Charles Nicholls in The Reckoning is that Marlowe, whose own hands were far from clean, was used as an unwitting agent by Essex in an attempt to destroy his rival, Ralegh. Another reason might be Marlowe’s involvement with Ralegh and the School of the Night and that Cecil, still insecure in his position as Acting Secretary to the Privy Council, saw Marlowe not only as a dangerous ex-spy but as a persuasive dramatist, exposing ignorant audiences to a whole range of new and deeply subversive ideas. Lastly, what part, if any, did Marlowe’s long-term patron and possible lover, Thomas Walsingham, play in the affair, since he was finally about to be married and regularly employed Frizer? One supposition is that while he might have had no direct hand in it, he felt it convenient to turn a blind eye to what had happened, taking Frizer back into his service after he had been pardoned.

  We will never know what prompted Marlowe to go all the way out to Deptford. Was he persuaded that he could be smuggled out of the country to the continent and so avoid standing trial and that he might well be able to return once things had cooled down? If so, what better person to suggest it than his old secret service colleague, Robert Poley, who regularly travelled as a courier between Deptford and Holland. If this was the case then Marlowe, shrewd as he was, might well have considered the possibility that he was walking into a trap but took the risk anyway since he had nothing to lose when a trial on either one of such serious charges could only lead to his death. Whatever the truth, Marlowe’s murder remains one of history’s most fascinating mysteries.

  Meanwhile Kyd, unaware that Marlowe was dead, still languished in Bridewell. He made a second statement which adds little to the first except that in it he alleges Marlowe had once told him it was all one to him whether he served Elizabeth of England or James of Scotland, which leaves one wondering if he had undertaken a mission or missions to Edinburgh on behalf of the Crown. Certainly Robert Poley did. Again Kyd swears that he neither condoned blasphemy nor spoke treason. The authorities did not, however, have to rely entirely on Kyd for there is also the infamous ‘Note’ of the informer Richard Baines, who had been employed specifically to monitor Marlowe’s activities. It is a lengthy document which repeats information already given by Kyd along with additional material including ‘that one Ric Cholmley has confessed he was persuaded by Marlowe to become an Atheist’ (Cholmley was a spy who had been placed in Ralegh’s circle); that ‘the Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written about 16,000 years ago’, whereas Adam ‘is proved to have lived within 6,000 years’; and, notoriously, ‘all that love not tobacco and boys are fools’.8

  On 28 June 1593 Frizer received his official pardon from the Queen, was released from prison and returned to Scadbury. Within a comparatively short time he was given a gift of lands and rents belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster and, in 1611, was made one of two certified assessors for Eltham and, something of a joke given his past history, an officer of various charities, being described as ‘one of sixteen good and lawful men of the county’.

  A warrant for payment, made out to Poley and signed by the Vice Chamberlain at the Court on 9 June 1593 is for ‘carrying of letters on her Majesty’s special and secret affairs of great importance from the Court at Croydon on 8 May 1593 to the Low Countries to the town of The Hague in Holland and for returning back with letters of answer to the Court at Nonsuch on 8 June 1593 being in her Majesty’s service all throughout the aforesaid time (my italics). But, as we know, Poley was already back in England on 30 May and at Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford. Poley continued in the secret service until into the next century.

  In March 1595 Nicholas Skeres was arrested at the house of a man called Williamson, who had testified against Robert Poley. He was imprisoned first in the Counter Prison to await further examination, then transferred to Newgate, and finally to Bridewell after which ‘he was never seen again. . .’. A man called Richard Baines, who may have been the informer, was hanged at Tyburn on 6 December 1594.

  The last words on the previous twelve months and their aftermath must go to Thomas Nashe, so closely associated with Greene, Watson and Marlowe. He wrote his cycle of verses, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, at the end of 1593, although it was not published until eight years later. It is officially dedicated to the victims of ‘King Pest’ who had ruled so savagely for so long, but he must also have had in mind the friends who had died so recently:

  Haste therefore each degree

  To welcome destiny,

  Heaven is our heritage

  Earth but a player’s stage.

  Mount we unto the sky.

  I am sick, I must die.

  Lord have mercy upon us

  The deaths drew a line under the first creative surge of theatrical endeavour. With Greene, Marlowe and then Kyd now gone, alone in the spotlight, centre-stage, stands the single towering talent which was to dominate the English theatre then and for centuries to come: William Shakespeare.

  SEVEN

  Deaths and Entrances

  . . . what things we have seen

  Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been

  So nimble and so full of subtle flame,

  As if that every one from whence they came

  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

  And had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life.

  Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson

  In the December of 1593 Thomas Kyd, broken in mind and body, finally limped out of Bridewell having unknowingly been forced to betray his colleague even after that colleague’s death. When finally told that Marlowe was dead he wrote that he did not like slandering the dead, ‘thus much have I dared in the greatest cause which is to clear myself of being thought an Atheist which some swear he was’. Never charged with any offence and having suffered mightily, he now found himself alone in a cold world, spurned and ignored by his fellow dramatists. Within months he was dead.

  We do not know what impact the arrests of Marlowe and Kyd and the subsequent deaths of both had on the rest of the theatrical world, but there are hints. Ben Jonson, in a poem entitled ‘On Inviting a Friend to Supper’, warns against ever including ‘Poley’ among the guests, while
Shakespeare’s reference to the ‘dead shepherd’ in As You Like It, not to mention the line he gives to Touchstone in the same play, ‘it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room’, suggests that it is likely to have been considerable.

  But life goes on and was gradually returning to normal. In 1594 the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon (who was either the Queen’s nephew or her half-brother depending on which theory you believe), formally became patron to Burbage’s company. The first theatre to open full-time after the plague was finally over was one at Newington Butts on the outskirts of Southwark, about which we know almost nothing except that for a period it was shared by both the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. By the summer of 1594 the theatre companies were clamouring for the reopening of all the theatres, especially the Rose, the prolonged closure of which had severely affected not only the finances of Henslowe and the Companies of the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Strange’s Men, but also the takings of the hundreds of watermen who had become reliant on ferrying theatregoers over the Thames to the Bankside.

  In June the Privy Council received a number of petitions on the subject. The first was on behalf of Lord Strange’s Men who complained that they were finding it increasingly intolerable and a great charge to be forever travelling around the country trying to scrape a living and that if they did not soon have a London base in which to play they would be unable to entertain the Queen when next she commanded them to do so. The Rose, they wrote, was essential not only to them ‘but by reason of the passage to and from the same by water, is a great relief to the poor watermen there. And our dismission [sic] thence in this long vacation, is to those poor men a great hindrance’.

  Another petition (which is in poor condition) was delivered by the watermen themselves who ‘in the most humble manner complain and sue unto your good lordships, your poor supplicants and, daily, the orators [of] Phillipp Henslo [sic] . . . had much help and relief for us, our poor wives and children, by means of the resort of such people to the said Playhouse’. Therefore would they please, please allow the reopening of the Rose for the sake of all concerned. The various petitions finally bore fruit and the Privy Council conceding that the theatre at Newington Butts was not altogether a suitable venue, admitted that the public was finding life tedious without access to plays, and accepted that the poor watermen needed to be relieved. This therefore being the case, ‘the Rose may be at liberty, without any restraint, so long as it shall be free from infection or sickness’.1

  So the theatres reopened. It was not, however, entirely the end of the Marlowe affair for Robert Cecil finally decided to move against the School of the Night, setting up an official inquiry at Cerne Abbas in Dorset (close to Ralegh’s country home, Sherborne Castle), under the auspices of the High Commission in Causes Ecclesiasticus: its brief to investigate various ‘blasphemous and atheistic matters’. The charges against those taking part in Ralegh’s discussions have a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with either the allegations in Kyd’s confession or the Baines’s Note, but all the investigators could come up with after deliberating for weeks was that one of those attending was said to have dried tobacco on leaves torn from his Bible, that Ralegh had doubts as to the immortality of the soul, plus a few other pieces of hearsay in a similar vein. Among those questioned were Ralegh himself, his half-brother Sir George Carew, Thomas Allen, Thomas Walsingham, Hariot and, somewhat surprisingly, Ferdinand, Lord Strange, Earl of Derby, as, unlike the Earl of Northumberland, ‘Wizard Earl’, he had not figured earlier.2

  But during the investigation Lord Strange died. There were contemporary rumours to the effect that he had been poisoned because he was a Catholic, though this seems unlikely given that his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth had never been in doubt.

  Modern medicine suggests a more likely cause: dysentery followed by kidney failure. Sixteenth-century poisoners are given far more credit than is their due. Sheer lack of hygiene in food preparation, not to mention the absence of refrigeration, were sufficient to do the job for them. The inquiry dragged on for a while and a number of depositions were taken on oath, but no one was ever brought before either the Star Chamber or the Privy Council, nor was any action taken against Ralegh or any other member of his circle. In the end nothing came of the enquiry and the Commission simply gave up.

  During the three years following Marlowe’s death Shakespeare was writing prolifically. He had now become one of the sharers in the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the others being Richard Burbage, Will Kempe (before he left for Norwich), Thomas Pope, John Hemings, William Sly, Henry Condell, George Bryan and Augustine Phillips. For those who still seek to prove that Sir Francis Bacon, Marlowe (who had somehow survived Deptford) and even Queen Elizabeth (in between running the country) wrote Shakespeare’s plays, one has to ask how on earth the actors and sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, let alone the Burbages, could have been so fooled. He was indeed the house dramatist, but any playwright of the day would have been expected to be on hand to make any alterations and rewrites that might be needed, just as they are today. That Shakespeare’s was, and is, a towering talent is without dispute but there is little doubt that so prestigious a patron helped to establish his place at the top of the hierarchy of dramatists who, over the next ten years, started writing for the theatre.

  The new talent differed in a number of ways from the old University Wits or their colleagues, even though their backgrounds were not dissimilar and it appears that they felt no necessity to give themselves a title which identified them. By the mid-1590s playgoing in purpose-built buildings was no longer a novelty but an accepted part of London entertainment; audiences were becoming increasingly sophisticated and expected a whole range of different kinds of drama sumptuously costumed and preferably with exciting stage effects. Nor, with the possible exception of Ben Jonson, did the new breed of dramatists consider themselves to be rarefied beings but, rather, hardworking professionals, hired to provide scripts to order. In this climate Henslowe’s system proved particularly effective, offering, as has already been pointed out, an advance upfront for one or more writers who would then, if the play was delivered on time and accepted by the actors, be ensured a production at the end of it. Whatever we may feel now about the quality of the writing, whether that of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton or Webster with his extraordinary imagery, there was no long gestation or writing period, no time for agonising over every act or scene, let alone every line. The texts were certainly not written with the idea that centuries later they would be pored over by scholars looking for nuances in every phrase. Anyone who has ever worked on a new play today is well aware of how a script has to be altered, often due to practicalities such as costume changes, how many actors are available, and other such mundane essentials. Whole theses have been written around why a character in classical drama leaves the scene when he does when the real reason might well be that the actor in question had to play at least two parts and exited at that point so that he could change his costume, add a beard, and appear a scene later as somebody else.

  The demand for new material was now insatiable. As Sir Trevor Nunn once put it, it must have been rather like Hollywood in the 1930s, sucking in talent from all over the place, throwing writers together to work on a script whether they were compatible or not. One reason was because it was almost unknown for a play to be given two consecutive performances; the programme would change daily and the actors and sharers would see to it that one play was up and running while another was in rehearsal and yet another half finished, the hard-pressed hack scribbling away late into the night. Meanwhile, laboriously and possibly with the help of a hired scrivener, the bookman had to ensure that each part was written out on a separate sheet or roll, from which the word ‘role’ comes, to hand to actors each time a new play went into production. There would be only a handful of copies of the entire script (one to be lodged at Stationer’s Hall), possibly only two, and the actors had to keep their wits about them as only their
cue lines appeared on their rolls. This must often have led to some confusion and explains Quince’s testy note to the actor playing Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘you must not speak that yet; that is your answer to Pyramus: you speak all your part at once, cues and all’. One reason for registering the play at Stationer’s Hall was to try and ensure the script was not pirated by a rival company and the bookman was held responsible for keeping the scripts safe.

  Possibly because of their workload, the lifestyles of many of the new writers were not as consciously flamboyant or outrageous as those of Greene or Marlowe, although that is not to say that they did not get drunk, fight, or end up before the local Justice of the Peace to be fined or put in prison for disorderly conduct, debt, manslaughter or, if more rarely, because the content of a play had caused offence to someone important or in authority or both. Ben Jonson was to end up imprisoned for both this last and manslaughter.