Marlowe's Lives

1

Christopher Marlowe's murder, as Anne Sexton said of Plath's suicide, was a good career move. Many writers have died young: Sir Philip Sidney of battle wounds and Wilfred Owen in battle, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in duels, the Earl of Surrey on the scaffold and Shelley from drowning, Lord Byron and Rupert Brooke from a fever, Emily Bronte and Katherine Mansfield from tuberculosis, Edgar Allan Poe and Dylan Thomas from alcoholism, Thomas Chatterton and Hart Crane from suicide. But apart from the equally eccentric and defiant homosexual playwright Joe Orton, battered to death by his lover in 1967, Marlowe was the only major writer who was ever murdered.

Another "marvellous boy," Marlowe has the irresistible appeal of a genius killed in his prime, his promise unfulfilled. His premature death is one of the greatest losses to English literature. When he died at the age of twenty-nine he'd found his distinctive voice—energetic, highly-charged and self-assured—and written greater plays than Shakespeare had by 1594. If he'd lived, he might have rivaled Shakespeare. As Swinburne wrote in 1908, Marlowe was Shakespeare's John the Baptist: "He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare."[1]

The evolution of Marlowe's character in twentieth-century biographies reveals the persistent urge, despite the scanty facts, to bring him to life. It also shows how scholarly discoveries and cultural changes have altered our perception of his character. The nineteen modern lives of Marlowe are documentary and scholarly, popular and pictorial, conjectural and fantastic, fictionalized and ingenious. The gradual accretions to knowledge by what Thomas Nashe called "mice-eyed decipherers" begin with John Ingram in 1904, reach their peak with Leslie Hotson in 1924, and end with John Bakeless in 1942. The scholars discover the basic facts of the poet's life and death, but the major mysteries remain. During the next phase, the popular biographers and fictionalizers, making much of the mysteries, invent bizarre solutions. Desmond MacCarthy defined the biographer as an artist on oath, but the scholars are not artists, the popularizers not on oath. Not until 1992 does Marlowe biography come of age with Charles Nicholl's summation of all the scholarly material in a sound but dramatic narrative. He makes sense of the murky evidence and convincingly explains the political motive—the why—for his murder.

Marlowe's biographers are pedestrian critics and fail to integrate the discussion of his life and works. The plays are often treated in separate chapters or in separate volumes, and even completely ignored. Yet his work has been combed for biographical meaning, and critics assume that Marlowe's personality is reflected in his characters. T. S. Eliot called him "this bard of torrential imagination."[2] Harry Levin, one of Marlowe's best critics, wrote that he "threw a good deal of himself into these monomaniac exponents of the first person: egoists, exhibitionists, infidels, outsiders."[3] Bernard Shaw described these characters as "wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion."[4]

Paul Kocher observed that "Marlowe was a swordsman who used rapier and dagger. . . . [Thomas] Kyd, and others, feared him for his rashness in 'attempting soden pryvie iniuries to men.' Marlowe died with a dagger in his hand. In short, his nature had a tempestuously active side."[5] Una Ellis-Fermor added that, like Doctor Faustus, he was "absorbed in the realisation of [his] own destruction."[6] The poet John Berryman noted the challenge of interpreting his seductive and endlessly intriguing character:

But what is in fact known about Marlowe? What constitutes valid evidence? How should such evidence be interpreted? How much speculation is justified?

It's useful to begin with what is not known. We don't know the correct spelling of his name and the sportive variants—Marlo, Marloe, Marlow, Marlen, Marlin, Marline, Marley, Marlye, Marlyne, Marlinge, Marlynge, Merlin, Morle, and Morley—-have for centuries maddened and misled archival researchers. We don't know the date of his birth—only of his baptism on February 6, 1564 (two months before Shakespeare was born). We know nothing about his family life. There are no surviving letters, and only one example of his signature, as witness to a will. There are no secret service reports, and his career as a secret service agent remains a mystery. We don't know if he ever spied in Rheims or, if he did, whether he was a crypto-Catholic and double agent. We know more about his last day than about any other day in his life, but the discovery of the circumstances of his death, far from settling the matter, has inspired many dubious theories. We know he was buried in the church of St. Nicholas in Deptford, but don't know the exact site of his grave. His family was not allowed to attend the funeral or find out where he was buried.

The important known facts about Marlowe, during a four-year period, reveal a recurrent pattern of violence and conflicts with the law:

It's clear from these conflicts and arrests that Marlowe was manically violent and prone to wildly reckless speech; that though he was often in serious trouble, he was protected by powerful patrons in the secret service. He always, until the very end, escaped punishment.

There are four mysterious areas of Marlowe's life: his homosexuality, his atheism, his involvement in espionage, and the circumstances of his death. The evidence about them is suggestive but inconclusive, which helps explain the endless fascination of his life, character, and connections.

After his death Marlowe was damned as a homosexual who supposedly said "all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools" and as a "lewd lover" of women who'd been stabbed to death by a bawdy rival. Evidence for both (he may have been bisexual) can be found in his works. The dalliance of Jupiter and Ganymede in Dido, Queen of Carthage, of Henry III and his minions in The Massacre at Paris, of Neptune and Leander in Hero and Leander, and of Edward and Gaveston in Edward II, which exalts notable homosexuals ("The mightiest kings have had their minions," 1.4.390-396) suggest the former. His sexy translation of Ovid's Fifth Elegy ("all liked me passing well; / I clinged her naked body, down she fell. / Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss; / Jove send me more such afternoons as this"), publicly burned in 1599, and intensely erotic passages in Hero and Leander suggest the latter. A sexually ambiguous couplet in this poem—"She swore he was a maid in man's attire, / For in his looks were all that men desire"—complicates the confusing question.[9]

In the Elizabethan age the profession of atheism, a capital offense, could be interpreted to mean belief in Catholicism or any other religious doctrine that challenged ecclesiastical or secular authority. Apart from the apparent lack of religious belief in Marlowe's poems and plays, the main evidence for his atheism came from Thomas Kyd and Richard Baines. In May 1593, just before Marlowe was killed, Kyd's chambers were searched and heretical writings were found among his papers. Kyd claimed the writings were by Marlowe, and that when they'd lived together Marlowe's papers had mistakenly been shuffled with his own. Attempting to dissociate himself from Marlowe, he called his old friend "intemperate and of a cruel heart." But Kyd's accusations were extracted by the rack and thumbscrew, and he would have said anything to save his neck. After Marlowe's death, Kyd wrote two letters to Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who was in charge of the investigation of Marlowe's alleged atheism, setting forth Marlowe's provocative and dangerous assertions.

Kyd's statement about Marlowe's "monstrous views" was substantiated after his death by Baines's "Note." Marlowe's supposed blasphemies "fall under four main topics: (1) Attacks upon the Old Testament, especially in connection with chronology; (2) Jeering at Christ in regard to the Virgin Birth, his divinity and alleg[ed] homosexuality; (3) Criticism of the méthode of the Christian religion; (4) Statements of Marlowe's efforts to secure converts to atheism."[10] One of Marlowe's supposed statements, presumably picked up second-hand from Raleigh's expedition to Virginia and reported by Baines, is puzzling: "The Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written of above 16 thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years." The Indians had no knowledge of prehistory and no written records that went back more than 6,000 years, but since almost nothing was known about them, almost anything could be attributed to them. Baines's accusations duplicated Kyd's, and it seems likely that they were in collusion. Marlowe was dead, and could no longer answer the charges.

The evidence for Marlowe's career as a spy, apart from his intimate connections with many dubious secret agents, were his unexcused absence from college from February to July 1587; his notably increased expenditure upon his return; the expensive dress he wore in his portrait; the Privy Council's extraordinary intervention on his behalf, because of his good service to the Queen, when Corpus Christi College refused to grant his M.A. degree; and his 1592 arrest for counterfeiting in the Netherlands, which proved he was on the Continent. The M.A. was duly granted, and Marlowe was not punished for coining.

According to the eyewitness report of his death by his three companions, Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, they all spent the day at the house of a Mistress Bull, ate two meals, played games, and walked quietly in the garden. After dinner the three men sat wedged together on a narrow bench, Frizer in the middle, while Marlowe lounged on a bed behind them. A quarrel erupted about the tavern bill, and Marlowe, taking Frizer's dagger from his belt, attacked him. Frizer turned, wrested the dagger from him and stabbed him just above his eye. This account, from men almost certainly paid to murder him, raises many questions and has many logical inconsistencies:

Modern scholarship established the when and how of the murder, but not the why.

The scholarly search for written evidence about Marlowe was matched by another discovery. An Elizabethan portrait of a young man, on two broken wooden panels, was found in 1953 by a passing undergraduate among the rubble thrown out of the Master's Lodge at Corpus Christi. The subject, like Marlowe himself, was twenty-one years old in 1585, and the Latin motto—"Quod me nutrit me destruit" (what nourishes me also destroys me—close to Shakespeare's Sonnet 73: "Consumed with that which it was nourished by") fits him as perfectly as Faustus' "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight." (1604, Epilogue, line 1)

Marlowe could have paid for the unusually rich and elaborate costume with his espionage money, and his poetry suggests that he had a taste for elaborate clothes. Faustus, challenging the rule of black clothing for scholars, boasts: "I'll have them fill the public schools with silk; / Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad." (1604, 1.1.92-93) And no one has noticed that Hero's dress resembles the rich apparel in the portrait: "The outside of her garments were of lawn, / The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn."[12]

In the restored portrait the subject has flaming red hair (suggesting a choleric disposition); pale, yellowish skin; high forehead; thick eyebrows and wide-apart, penetrating eyes; blunt nose; drooping mustache with a groove between the two halves; thin beard on his jaw and chin; and sly, self-assured, somewhat superior smile on his full lips. He wears a fine linen shirt with a wide, cobweb-lawn collar; and a black, velvety, puff-sleeved doublet with diagonal cuts—as if slashed by a sword—that reveals an orange lining underneath. There are fourteen large, embossed gilt buttons on his crossed right arm, which shows his hand beneath a yellow cuff; and eleven buttons visible on the crossed left arm, which hides the hand. Five more buttons run down the center of his chest (almost every one highlighted by a diagonal slash), and a sixth button at the bottom that suggests part of the vertical row is covered by his arms. Another bit of hitherto unnoticed evidence also links the portrait to Marlowe. The symbolism of dress identifies the sitter as a poet, since the buttons form a stylized Greek Y, which stands for his psyche: his mind, spirit, or soul.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (?)the Corpus Christi Portrait

Marlowe's posthumous reputation, like everything else about him, is contradictory and ambiguous. The vicious condemnations by the poet Robert Greene, Marlowe's constant and jealous enemy, by Kyd, who would say anything to save his own life, and by Puritan moralists who wished to see God's judgment in his terrible end, are balanced by the praise of other writers who loved him. George Peele called him "the Muses' darling" and John Marston, remembered him as "Kind Kit Marlowe." Thomas Nashe lamented "Poor deceased Kit Marlowe!" Ben Jonson paid tribute to "Marlowe's mighty line" and Michael Drayton described the inspired poet's "fine madness." George Chapman, who completed Hero and Leander, composed affectionate lines on the "free soul, whose living subject stood / Up to the chin in the Pierian flood," and Edward Blount tenderly wrote in the dedication of Hero and Leander: "for albeit the eye there taketh his ever farewell of that beloved object, yet the impression of the man hath been dear unto us, living an after life in our memory." [13]

2

John Ingram's Christopher Marlowe and His Associates (London: Grant Richards, 1904), the first twentieth-century biography of the poet, appeared in the Dark Ages before the advancement of learning had shed real light on his life. The Preface announces his intention to whitewash: "to cleanse a noble character from the slime with which libelers and forgers have besmirched it." (ix) He never suggests that Marlowe was a homosexual, atheist, or spy, and when he reprints "The Baines Libel," he deletes the most damaging statements about Marlowe's love of boys and blasphemies of Christ.

Ingram believes that "Biography, like history, must owe something to conjecture." (x) But before reaching page 1, he's on thin ice for claiming that Marlowe worked with and was "certainly deeply admired by Shakespeare." (vii) Shakespeare quoted a line from Hero and Leander ("who ever loved that loved not at first sight?") and alluded to the ostensible cause of Marlowe's fatal fight, the "great reckoning in a little room," in As You Like It (3.5.82 and 3.3.15), and referred to Sir Walter Raleigh's "School of Night" in Love's Labour's Lost. (4.3.255) Ingram claims that "references of every one who knew Marlowe personally are favourable to his character" (vii), then contradicts himself by stating that "Greene gives us to understand that he and Marlowe were great friends; yet in addressing Marlowe he makes against him the vilest insinuations" (117), and that "Kyd, of whom nothing kind has ever been recorded . . . stigmatized the man." (233)

Ingram's chapters—on Canterbury, Cambridge, London, Poet, and Last Years—cuts the path duly trodden by his successors. The background swamps the foreground and Marlowe, the elusive subject, disappears in a mass of extraneous facts and long digressions. The book is weakened by many otiose generalizations: "Marlowe entered the world at a stirring period, when the old times were rapidly passing away and a new era of mingled hope and doubt was dawning upon his country" (18) as well as by presumptuous creeping into the mind of the characters: "How proud Catherine Marlowe must have been when her son returned home daily from his studies." (36)

Worse still, to our more sophisticated eyes, are the crude errors based on unreliable information. Though Marlowe died instantly, Ingram maintains that Chapman completed Hero and Leander "in compliance with some suggested dying wish." (219) After misreading an Elizabethan signature, he declares that "the poet, either accidentally or intentionally, was fatally wounded by some person named Francis Archer" (245)—not, by an unhappy coincidence, named Ingram Frizer—"in the duel, riot, fight, accident, assassination, or whatever it may have been." (246)

John Leslie Hotson is the hero of Marlovian scholarship. In 1924 (on a different quest), he was searching among Elizabethan archives in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. There he discovered "A Certificate from the Privy Council in Favour of Marlowe" (June 29, 1587) and "the complete record of the legal proceedings which followed the slaying." (25) Hotson's 76-page monograph, The Death of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), established that when Marlowe's M.A. degree was withheld because of his prolonged absence abroad, the Privy Council ordered the college to grant the degree: "Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine Their Lordships thought good to certefie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetlie wherebie he had done her Majestie good service, and deserved to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge." (58)

This discovery suggests that Marlowe had been recruited as a spy at Cambridge and that he may well have gone to Rheims in northeast France for the purpose of espionage. From 1580 to 1587 the Catholic seminary in Rheims was the nursery of almost every political intrigue by exiles against Elizabethan England, including the Babington Plot of 1586 that led directly to Queen Mary's execution. As King Henry says of the slain Duke of Guise in The Massacre at Paris: "Did he not draw a sort of English priests / From Douai to the seminary at Rheims, / To hatch forth treason 'gainst their natural Queen?" (scene 21.105-108)

Hotson also discovered that the Coroner's jury, on the testimony of two eyewitnesses (or accomplices), Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres, found that Marlowe had "attacked Frizer from behind, and this account was borne out . . . by the evidence of the two wounds on Frizer's head. Frizer was pardoned, as having killed Marlowe in self-defence." (65) Hotson claims that his study "offers for the first time the only authoritative report which tells how, when, and at whose hands Christopher Marlowe met his death." (10) In the Introduction his former teacher, G. L. Kittredge, confidently agreed: "The mystery of Marlowe's death, heretofore involved in a cloud of contradictory gossip and irresponsible guess-work, is now cleared up for good and all. . . . Every detail of the strange affair is vividly set forth on the testimony of eyewitnesses." (7)

Hotson, a researcher rather than interpreter, found the documents but doesn't analyze them. He doesn't question the doubtful evidence presented to the jury, nor seem to realize the logical flaws in the story, nor consider the motivation of the assassins. "In all probability," Hotson concludes, placing the blame entirely on alcohol, "the men had been drinking deep (the party lasted from ten in the morning until night!); and the bitter debate over the score had roused Marlowe's intoxicated feelings to such a pitch that, leaping from the bed, he took the nearest way to stop Frizer's mouth." (40) Hotson's discoveries were based on his knowledge of Latin and of the labyrinthine achives, on recognizing that Morley was Marlowe and that Ingram Frizer (not "Francis Archer,") had killed him. Instead of concluding this vexed issue, Hotson raised many more questions than he answered.

Samuel Tannenbaum was a medical doctor and psychoanalyst, a learned but amateur Elizabethan scholar and compiler (in 1937) of the standard bibliography of Marlowe. In the 75-page The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe (New York: privately printed by the Tenney Press, 1928; reprinted by the Shoe String Press, 1962), he argues, with medical evidence gathered from neurosurgeons, that a two-inch knife wound in the brain would not cause instant death (as stated in the Coroner's report), and that a wound "over the right eye" would be impossible because a knife could not penetrate the thick bone structure of the forehead: "One who knows the anatomy and pathology of the human brain knows that it is almost impossible for death to follow immediately upon the infliction of such a wound. . . . To have caused instant death, the assassin would have had to thrust his dagger horizontally into Marlowe's brain to a depth of six or seven inches—and that could not have happened if Frizer and Marlowe had been wrestling as the witnesses reported." (41-42) In 1964 Gavin Thurston, a barrister and secretary of the Coroner's Society of England and Wales, demonstrated, using common sense available to everyone as well as forensic expertise, that "if the blade entered the eye socket between the eyeball and eyebrow instantaneous death could result."14

Tannenbaum also argues that the play Sir Thomas More (c.1593)—written by several collaborators, heavily censored and never staged—was meant as political propaganda for Sir Walter Raleigh and that Marlowe's murder was instigated by Raleigh to protect himself and his School of Night against charges of atheism. Tannenbaum (in contrast to Hotson) sought the political motivation for the murder, but his unconvincing theory has been firmly rejected by most scholars.

Marlowe and His Circle: A Biographical Survey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929) by Frederick S. Boas, sometime professor at Belfast and London school inspector, is a short, specialized book with a limited scope. He intends to survey "the documentary materials for the biography of Christopher Marlowe and his associates." (5) Boas reprints letters from Kyd to Sir John Puckering, which he first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1899. Boas's second purpose is "to reconsider the case for and against accepting the verdict of the Coroner's jury that Ingram Frizer killed 'Christopher Morley' on 30 May 1593 in self-defence." (6)

Though Kyd and Baines both accused Marlowe of atheism, Boas defends him from this charge: "Marlowe does not appear as an 'atheist' in the modern sense. . . . We see instead a rationalist intelligence blasting its destructive way through all that was held in reverential awe by its contemporaries and ruthlessly desecrating the Holy of Holies. The supernatural is laughed out of court." (76-77) Nevertheless, Baines spoke for more powerful figures when he stated that "the mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped." (78) Boas is aware that Marlowe may have known "political secrets which his companions were afraid might be disclosed, and that they [may have] acted on the maxim, 'Dead men tell no tales.'" (103) But he's unwilling to reverse the jury's verdict and cautiously concludes: "At the most we may suspend judgement." (108)

The 80-page Life of Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1930) by C. F. Tucker Brooke, a professor of English at Yale, is divided into familiar chapters: Canterbury, Cambridge, London, Scadbury, and Deptford. (Marlowe took refuge during the London plague in Scadbury Manor, near Chislehurst, Kent, a dozen miles southeast of London. It was the home of his patron Sir Thomas Walsingham, a young cousin of the potent and terrifying Sir Francis Walsingham, who was Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State and head of the secret service.) The biography is prefaced to Brooke's edition of Marlowe's earliest and least important dramatic work, The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, closely based on Virgil's Aeneid.

Brooke, an editor, not a biographer, recognizes the formidable lacunae in Marlowe's life and is extremely hesitant and restrained. Like a gambler holding five jokers, he throws in his cards by frequently confessing:

What's left, then, for Brooke to say? He offers vague yet obvious statements about Marlowe's character: "of a boldness approaching brutality" (40); banalities about his work: "In this play [Edward II] and in Hero and Leander, a sane and rounded tolerance appears which bears evidence to the personality of the author" (49); and the standard line on Kyd: "We need hardly doubt that the warrant for Marlowe's appearance [before the Privy Council] was the result of Kyd's information against him." (58) Of Marlowe's death, the ever-

cautious Brooke concludes (unlike Kittredge and Hotson) that we still know "too little for a perfectly clear understanding of what happened." (72) He refuses to draw conclusions from or even question Hotson's new facts.

In his generous Introduction to Mark Eccles's Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), Hotson describes the high calling of literary scholarship and the pioneering method taken up by his successors: "to root up, grub through, pry into, seek in every corner and hole, search diligently, grope or feel, spy out, scout about, assay and prove, trace, trail, or follow by the track—these alone will not produce the result Dr. Eccles has achieved. There must be a directing imagination to guide the process, and a memory stored with rare Elizabethan things, some of which, rightly understood, can be made to dovetail in uncanny fashion with the new-found materials" (v). He also defines, in somewhat heated and slightly archaic language, Eccles's notable discoveries about Marlowe's friendship with the once well-known poet and playwright Thomas Watson and his role in the murder of William Bradley: "To our terror, he shows us the dramatists seconding each other [though Marlowe withdrew and did not second Watson] in the fatal fight; in the sequel, he attends them to the prison in Newgate; on Marlowe's release, he traces him to discover his lodging in London, and subsequently finds the poet and sworder there writing a Latin dedication to one of Watson's works, and threatening the parish constables with grievous bodily harm." (vi) Eccles also introduces the underworld thug George Orwell (or Orrell), who threatened one of Bradley's creditors.

Eccles made his discoveries among the Sessions Rolls at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster. In the opening chapter, "New Light on Marlowe," he emphasizes the irresistible attraction of his chiaroscuro life, which "has the fascination of the unknown. Such fragments of it as we do succeed in discovering only intensify the silence and blackness of the rest" (4). He then describes Watson's fatal intervention in Marlowe's fight with Bradley—"Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee" (10)—as if Bradley were expecting him, as well as Marlowe's thirteen-day imprisonment in Newgate and appearance at the Old Bailey. Frizer was later pardoned for killing Marlowe just as Watson was for killing Bradley. But, Eccles notes, Frizer was speedily pardoned in only thirteen days while Watson's process took five months. In Elizabeth's time there were only three ways to kill a man and escape hanging: by fleeing the country, by benefit of clergy (like Ben Jonson), or by pleading self-defense (like Watson and Frizer). The industrious Eccles also found evidence of yet another conflict with the law when the hot-tempered Marlowe threatened a constable in 1592. But after the crucial first chapter, Eccles follows a trail of rather scrappy evidence about the two men who secured Marlowe's release from Newgate. By doing so, he wanders quite far from Marlowe, who disappears as the book fizzles out.

Frederick S. Boas's second book on this subject, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), discusses both the life and works, surveys the scholarly accretions since Hotson's book, and offers a more positive view of Marlowe's character. It incorporates parts of Boas's first book of 1929 and, in a 1952 reprint, rather awkwardly squeezes in supplementary notes to several chapters. Boas also gives a detailed but pedestrian account of the plots of Marlowe's plays in relation to their sources and emphasizes the classical influences throughout his work.

The main faults of this learned and valuable book are that Boas's discussion of the works (including the translations of Ovid and Lucan) in separate chapters interrupts the narrative (sometimes for more than a hundred pages). Covering Marlowe's childhood and schooldays in only nine pages, he also fails to vivify the dry facts and flesh out the bare bones. Boas goes in for absurdly illogical statements that are always fatal to biography. "As he stood in court Marlowe could

not foresee [how could he?] that by the end of December 1592 he would be writing an epitaph on [Sir Roger] Manwood." (105)

Boas emphasizes that the main purpose of education at King's School "was to train the scholars to speak and write Latin fluently" (8), and that Marlowe planned to study for the priesthood at Cambridge (a most unsuitable vocation for a non-believer). Unlike most early biographers, Boas usefully questions the factual evidence. Did Marlowe really express the repulsive blasphemies reported by Kyd and Baines? He notes that Marlowe, Poley, and Frizer were all closely connected to Sir Thomas Walsingham, that both combatants (most unusually) used the same dagger and that Skeres's and Poley's evidence exonerated Frizer. And he wonders if Marlowe's rash violence caused his death or if evidence was fabricated to conceal a deliberately planned political murder. If the latter, "why should the Privy Council have taken such a roundabout way of getting rid of the atheist playwright?" (276) Boas rejects Tannenbaum's theory that the Deptford trio were agents of Raleigh, who feared that Marlowe might incriminate him. But, refusing to interpret the evidence, he timidly draws back from the water instead of boldly taking the plunge and concludes that "the more we learn about [Marlowe's] life the more puzzling are many of the aspects that it presents." (306)

The books of Boas and John Bakeless (Harvard Ph.D., journalist, and wartime officer) played leapfrog with each other while competing for the title of "definitive biography." Boas's first book on Marlowe had appeared in 1929; Bakeless's first book, Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time (New York: William Morrow) in 1937. Boas's second book, incorporating the first, appeared in 1940; Bakeless's second book, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) in 1942. Bakeless, oddly enough, doesn't mention his earlier trade book, which was silently swallowed up in his greatly expanded university press book. He merely says that the present, two-volume, 807-page monument was the culmination of twenty-two years' labor. It was essentially completed in 1936, when a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to do more research in England. Not to be outdone, Boas reprinted his book with corrections in 1945, with supplementary notes in 1952 and again in 1960. Bakeless had the last word by bringing out the paperback edition of his first book with Washington Square Press in 1964. But Boas was the superior biographer. His more selective and condensed life is far more readable and required more intellectual rigor to produce than Bakeless's encyclopedia of scholarly scraps.

In his Foreword to the 1937 biography, based on new documents and published before Boas came out with his comprehensive study, Bakeless (no doubt aware of his competitor) staked out the territory:

Bakeless believes that "Marlowe possessed information dangerous to [Thomas's wife] Lady Audrey Walsingham, and that her agent Frizer was encouraged to silence him at any cost." (184)

As late as 1942 Bakeless assumes that his learned audience can read Latin documents without translations. Though he warns that speculation is rarely safe, his heavyweight tomes often resort to "probably" and "must have." His style, derived from both the popular 1937 and the scholarly 1942 versions, is a mixture of stupendously boring passages (which make Boas seem almost lively) and embarrassing attempts to liven things up. Bakeless's attempt to present one of his major discoveries falls rather flat: "He was hungry—or more probably thirsty—and he spent one penny at the buttery. It was his only purchase for the week. Such is Corpus Christi's first record of its famous son!" (66) Wow! At the other end of the stylistic scale he exclaims that the stories in Tamburlaine and in The Massacre at Paris (about the St. Bartholomew's Day slaughter of Huguenots in 1572) echo "old travelers' tales which once rang in the eager ears of a wide-eyed and wondering little boy, the son of a Canterbury cobbler" (34), as well as meaningless statements meant to explain the social background: "It was a dramatic moment in history. It was also a pregnant moment in English literature." (88)

3

The Muses' Darling: Christopher Marlowe (New York: Macmillan, 1946), by Charles Norman, a Russian-born poet and biographer, was the first attempt to write a popular life. But it is superficial and trivial: Marlowe for boobies. Admittedly based on the research of Boas and Bakeless (or was it Bakeless and Boas?), Norman tips his hand by writing that "while I have scrupulously adhered to the story found in the records and documents, occasionally, in the accompanying dramatic recreations, it has been necessary to go beyond them." (xiii-xiv) This method leads inexorably to tedious generic scenes, both studious and combative: "He unpacks his belongings, his dog-eared books emerge from the trunk's depth, and he spreads fair paper on a table, places inkhorn and goose quill at hand, and bends over in his chair to chart his course, the mariner of his fate" (57-58) and: "As they lunged and thrust at each other, their mutterings and imprecations, and the clang of sword on sword, drew a crowd." (91)

Norman has nothing significant to say about the life or works, and reduces both to obvious banalities. He quotes the entire poem "The Passionate Shepherd" ("Come live with me and be my love") without comment; and, with a nod to Aristotle, says of Edward II: "Thus, in pity and terror, the climax of the play comes, and the great characters that people it turn shadowward." (177) A bit of a whitewasher (like Ingram), he sidesteps a vital issue and claims that Marlowe believed in a Supreme Being. As late as 1946, Norman offers no comment on Marlowe's death and, as Mistress Bull with a cry of horror rushes out of the bloody room, merely affirms: "there was a dispute over the bill." (207)

The controversial The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare" (New York: Julian Messner, 1955), by the Canadian scholar and New York drama critic Calvin Hoffman, moves (sad to say) from the unadorned facts of timid pedants like Brooke to the unconstrained fantasies of an obsessed crank and crackpot: an amateur gone mad. Hoffman describes his "discovery" as "a real-life literary 'thriller,' complete with murder, brawls, duels, and normal and abnormal sexuality" (viii). His pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp, he admits, occupied him for two decades, gave him no rest and "gradually consumed most of my thinking hours." (viii)

Hoffman's thesis is that "every single play and poem we have been led to believe was written by William Shakespeare had been written by Christopher Marlowe—a poet-dramatist who had outlived his own death . . . [and] that no one but Christopher Marlowe could have written the works of Shakespeare." (xvii) The paradox, of course, is that Marlowe was killed "at an age when he could not possibly have written the bulk of the Shakespeare Canon." (xix) Hoffman wriggles out of this knotty dilemma by explaining that "Marlowe was not the man assassinated that fateful day in May 1593" (49) and lived on past his staged death, which was arranged to save him from execution. According to Hoffman, Marlowe fled, after his escape from death, from England to France and then Italy. While living on the Continent he sent all of "Shakespeare's" plays to his patron and lover, Sir Thomas Walsing Ham—the "Mr. W. H." of the Sonnets. After a few years abroad, Marlowe secretly returned to the Scadbury estate, where he continued to reside and to write in disguise. Elvis lives!

Since there's not a scrap of evidence to support Hoffman's thesis, he bases his argument on parallel passages in the works of the two playwrights. But the passages that Hoffman adduces—like "pampered jades of Asia" in Tamburlaine II (4.3.1) and in 2 Henry IV (2.4.178), "the face that launched a thousand ships" in Doctor Faustus (1604, 5.1.89) and Troilus and Cressida (2.2.82)—are not parallels at all, but clear examples of Shakespeare lifting Marlowe's mighty lines. Hoffman fails to persuade with vague generalities and tends to repeat his assertions rather than develop his argument. Grasping at straws, he co-opts as evidence the long-discredited ballad forged by John Payne Collier in 1836. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson on Pope's Homer: It's a pretty theory, Mr. Hoffman, but you must not call it true.

A. L. Rowse's Christopher Marlowe: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1964) was published on the 400th anniversary of Marlowe's birth and dedicated to his friend Canon John Shirley, the Headmaster of King's School. Rowse—productive Renaissance historian, Fellow of All Souls, and homosexual (who plays down this aspect of Marlowe's life)—is brisk and hearty, commonsensical and sound. He justifies this biography, a sequel to his life of Shakespeare (1963), by his new dating of the sonnets to show that Marlowe was, for a brief time, Shakespeare's rival for the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. Rowse occasionally hints at Marlowe's sexuality, but fails to make his point: "Marlowe grew up in a family dominated by females, with a rather feckless father: no doubt that was important in his psychological make-up." (10) After Marlowe's death, he disappointingly concludes: "That is all there is to it. Thus, and thus casually, perished so much genius." (199) But with superior style and a masterly evocation of the social and political history, Rowse succeeds, where Norman failed, in writing a popular middlebrow biography.

Rowse interprets the Privy Council "Certificate" to mean that "Marlowe had been sent over to Rheims to report on what was going on in the seminary." (30) He states (in contrast to Boas and Norman) that Marlowe "saw the absurdity of all religions, each claiming a unique monopoly of truth" (204), that he was savaged by the "nonsensical beliefs and prejudices which he had the courage to challenge, but not the wisdom to ignore." (122) He states that The Massacre at Paris contains "very little else but cruelty, violence and death" (62); and calls "The Passionate Shepherd," inspired by Virgil's Second Eclogue, a "haunting poem, full of nostalgia and longing for what can never be." (124) He praises the bold conception, daring originality, and surpassing poetry of Tamburlaine and maintains that the young Marlowe has still not "received full imaginative recognition for what he had achieved by Armada Year, 1588." (75) Like Berryman, he characterizes Marlowe as superior and contemptuous, daring and challenging, but with a great deal of charm. And he forcefully declares that he "reminds us of no-one so much as Rimbaud with his arrogance and pride, his mingled intellectuality and devotion to the senses, his determination upon knowledge as power, to storm and cross all barriers of experience." (206)

A. D. Wraight's In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), with photographs by Virginia Stern, is long-winded, loosely structured, and familiar. It contains an account of Marlowe's life; essays on related subjects—Giordano Bruno, Thomas Kyd, the ill-fated play Sir Thomas More, the contents of Scadbury manor—that sometimes wander far from Marlowe; and long notes on the lavish illustrations (some of them jarringly modern) of Canterbury, King's School, Cambridge, and London; contemporary maps, manuscripts, and first editions; friends, actors, and theaters as well as of modern theatrical productions. It adds nothing new, and the style sometimes strains for exaltation: "he listened to the music of his poetic Muse, and spreading the wings of his intellect found that he might soar on these to loftier heights." (83) But it is a useful compendium and the pictures are fascinating.

In Kind Kit: An Informal Biography of Christopher Marlowe (New York: St. Martin's, 1972), Hugh Ross Williamson, a prolific writer of historical fiction, including The Day Shakespeare Died (1962), states: "all we know of Christopher Marlowe's life could be comfortably written on one sheet of writing paper" (254). Following Brooke's admonition: "Formal biography in this instance is more than usually futile," he seeks to remedy the matter by using "the historical imagination to try to bring the subject to life. All I claim for Kind Kit is that what I have narrated could have happened as I have reported it." (253) Following the path of Charles Norman, Williamson crosses the frontier from biography into fiction.

Williamson (like Boas) declares that Marlowe "could not know that he had less than six years of life left to him." (129) He offers (like Norman) a generic version of the fatal duel: "Cold with fear, Marlowe drew his sword and lunged at Bradley, only to be parried with contemptuous ease." (176) And he describes an absurdly stilted version of how Raleigh wrote his own poetic response to "The Passionate Shepherd": "Having glanced through [the verses], Raleigh said: 'These, my kind Kit, merit an unkind answer. Allow me to supply it. Let me have the first stanza.' " (138) But, in an interesting reversal of positions, he has Poley and Skeres pin down Marlowe while Frizer stabs him to death. Williamson's decent attempt produces a kind of Marlowe without tears.

William Urry, City Archivist in Canterbury, spent a lifetime burrowing through the records like a mole, but died in 1981 before publishing his book. Seven years later Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) appeared, edited with an Introduction by Andrew Butcher. In his excruciatingly boring documentary throwback to Eccles and Bakeless, Urry records everything he's found instead of what might interest his readers. As usual, the book claims more than it delivers. "Here, for the first [sic] time," the dust wrapper boldly announces, "we have a completely reliable account of Marlowe's ancestry, his Canterbury youth, his Cambridge education and his dazzling appearance in literary London."

Urry (like Bakeless) frequently resorts to speculation in this all-too-sober account and in only one paragraph eagerly clutches on to "probably," "may have," "Possibly," "perhaps" and "It seems likely." (42) He conveniently asserts, without providing any evidence, that Marlowe's "surviving writings, whatever their themes, were repeatedly enriched by the experiences of youth in his native city." (81) The liveliest, non-Canterbury parts of the book—the duel with Bradley, the accusations of Kyd—are taken from Boas and Bakeless; and he naively accepts Boas's conclusion about Marlowe's death: "there is no need to invent a plot to put Marlowe out of the way. He was a victim of his own temperament. Four times at least he was involved in violent struggles with other men." (98)

Urry's main discovery is that in Canterbury in 1592 Marlowe attacked William Corkine, a musical tailor, with stick and dagger. More interesting is his revelation that Christopher inherited his belligerent temper from his father, John, who got into trouble for two serious brawls with his apprentices. Urry characterizes John, who for the first time moves out of the shadows, as "rowdy, quarrelsome, awkward, improvident, busy, self-assertive and too clever by half." (28)

George Garrett's Entered from the Sun (New York: Doubleday, 1990), a loosely structured and long-winded historical novel, rehearses the well-known facts of Marlowe's life. In 1597, four years after his murder, the three main characters—Hunnyman, an actor; Barfoot, a soldier and spy; and Alysoun, a sexy widow—attempt "To find out how Marlowe was really killed. And why." (36) Though the uncertainty of Marlowe's fate should have freed the novelist's imagination, Garrett says very little about his homosexuality, atheism, or espionage, and doesn't exploit the fascinating intrigues and repression of the Elizabethan police state.

Garrett examines the murder from many different angles and suggests some interesting possibilities. He notes that Kyd was racked on Marlowe's account and that Marlowe, though arrested and questioned by the Privy Council, was not imprisoned or tortured. He describes the bloody mess in Eleanor Bull's tavern, and remarks that neither she nor her servants testified at the Coroner's jury. He finds it strange that Marlowe attacked with Frizer's knife rather than with his own. Emphasizing that the three assassins all knew that the violent and short-fused Marlowe would be dangerous if provoked, Garrett suggests that they might have killed him while he was sleeping on the bed.

But Garrett, failing to invent an ingenious solution, rather disappointingly concludes that Walsingham ordered Frizer to kill Marlowe: "Marlowe was planning to flee the country [to Scotland or France] and they wanted to stop him. Or they wanted him to flee the country and he would not do so." (321) Marlowe's death, he platitudinously observes, "may have been sudden and brutal and sordid and, finally, mysterious," but his "living words" still "thrive and flourish." (348)

Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford (London: Random House, 1993) is, like Williamson's and Garrett's books, historical fiction. Its virtue, he frankly admits, is also "its vice—the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact." (272) His novel raises the question of whether an artist's intuition and imagination can solve the mysteries of Marlowe's tortured, contradictory life. Though Burgess had brilliantly portrayed another King's Old Boy, Somerset Maugham, as Kenneth Toomey in Earthly Powers (1980), this novel is not much better than his predecessors'.

Burgess has a field day with an awkward pastiche of Elizabethan English and Frenglish: "Untruss, sweetheart, that I may embrown my piggot" (20) and "A good torchecul or arsewipe, Kit said." (99) Lusty knaves and saucy wenches, rapscallion drinking and boorish roistering weave through the story as Burgess concentrates on boys, theater, coining, and spies: " -Then what must I do in Rheims? -Watch, watch and learn (29) . . . . -Kit, Kit, Kit, you will never be free. Or rather in that service to the Service lies your only freedom." (189)

Burgess is good on the aftermath of torture: "So Kyd left in great agony to abide the subsidence of the gross swelling and the mending of his fingers to strange useless shapes" (237); and on the profane and drunken, cantankerous and disgusting Robert Greene: "His teeth showed their rotting waists, his nails, much chewed by them, harboured the grease he scratched from his lousiness. His stockings were silk but foully twisted and the cloak tied at his breast but thrust over his shoulders was of the pitiful green, much spotted, of a duck's turd." (121)

Burgess once told me, as we strolled through the Precincts, that Canterbury Cathedral had been built and consecrated as a Catholic church and, he firmly believed, still was one. Unlike most biographers, he's sympathetic to the cause of Queen Mary and the Catholic exiles rather than to the Protestant monarch and government. He theorizes that Marlowe was killed as part of a plot to destroy Raleigh and his band of atheists.

Who Killed Kit Marlowe?: A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001) by M. J. Trow—a Welsh high school teacher and mystery writer—and his son, Taliesin Trow, is an amateurish exercise with scholarly trappings. In chapters called "A Death in Deptford," "The Muse's [sic] Darling," "Tobacco and Boys," "Plot and Counterplot" and "A Great Reckoning," it covers familiar territory. After surveying the main theories about Marlowe's death, the Trows unsurprisingly conclude that he was killed because he knew too much:

4

Between Urry's book and Burgess's novel, Charles Nicholl—a Cambridge graduate and journalist—published The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1992; paperback edition: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Nicholl, the author of two travel books and a life of Nashe, would later write a work about Raleigh's voyage to South America in 1595. The title suggests Nicholl's reckoning as well as Marlowe's. He fleshes out all the major figures in Marlowe's life, shows their intricate connections and reveals how "the intelligence game of the 1580s furnishes these key players in the events of 1593. . . . There is a sense of closeness, a claustrophobia, in these repetitions and reappearances." (220) Richard Baines, for example, accused Marlowe of coining in the Netherlands just as he would later accuse him of atheism in London.

The first to make a grand synthesis of all that is known about Marlowe, Nicholl subjects the available evidence to rigorous and consistent analysis, develops contexts that allow scattered facts and cryptic references to be interpreted, and deftly walks the razor's edge between reasoned argument and plausible assertion. Using his profound knowledge of the period, he asks the right questions, makes the right connections, and constructs a provocative yet persuasive motive for Marlowe's murder. His book is much clearer though more complex than earlier accounts. By far the best writer, he unveils the evidence, arouses the reader's interest, and cunningly withholds the solution of the mystery till the very end.

Setting forth his methods and aims in the opening pages, Nicholl declares that his book is fact rather than fiction: "The people in it are real people, the events I describe really happened, the quotations are taken verbatim from documents or books of the period. Where there is dialogue I have reconstructed it from reported speech. I have not invented anything" (3). Pursuing the records that allow diametrically opposed interpretations, he's "interested in what they say about Marlowe, and in why they say it, and in what kind of truth they tell. Above all, I am interested in the strange political underworld out of which these allegations emerge." (4)

Nicholl believes that Marlowe became a spy to jump-start his career: "It puts money in his purse, gets him noticed, gives him entrée to influential circles." (169) Though sometimes accused of being a double agent, he was, like his master Sir Francis Walsingham, "dedicated to the penetration and exposure of Catholic groupings at home and abroad." (104) His supposed atheism "has an element of provocation, of projection. Like his Catholicism, it is sanctioned by his role as an informer." (220) But Nicholl brilliantly exposes Marlowe's pretenses and masks: "He is a militant Catholic 'determined to go to Rheims,' he is a seditious coiner with 'intent to go to the enemy,' he is a propagandist stirrer going 'unto the K[ing] of Scots,' and yet we find he is really none of these things, that these appearances of commitment are only to cover . . . his role as a spy, a deceiver, a politic meddler." (265)

Nicholl takes a fresh look at the menacing events of April and May 1593 that led directly to Marlowe's death: the libels against the Dutch tradesmen in London, Kyd's arrest, the apprehension of the heretical papers in Kyd's room, the accusations of atheism and Marlowe's summons before the Privy Council. Nicholl believes that Marlowe's papers, copied from an old heretical book, were planted in Kyd's room and then found during the search. He accepts the essential truth of Baines's "Note," not as a garbled text of Marlowe's lost "atheist" lecture to Raleigh's circle, but as a debased form of his genuine attitudes. The motive was to incriminate Marlowe.

Nicholl asks what transpired from ten to six on the fatal day, and why the assassins waited eight hours to kill him. What did they talk about in all that time? Nicholl believes that they tried "once more to persuade Marlowe to turn evidence against Raleigh, and failing that, to silence him for good." (327-28) When he refused, they murdered him. Contrary to what the killers told the jury, Marlowe's and Frizer's positions (as Williamson had suggested) were actually reversed. Marlowe, sitting on the bench and trapped between Poley and Skeres, inflicted minor wounds on Frizer before being stabbed to death from above. One question still remains: why, if his life was at stake, didn't Marlowe do as they asked?

Nicholl adopts Burgess's theory and argues that Marlowe, murdered on the orders of the Earl of Essex, was part of a larger struggle for power between Essex and Raleigh: "if Marlowe could be removed from the game, silenced in some way, then [Baines's] 'Note,' and all the other accumulated accusations, might be enough to keep the campaign moving towards its desired end, which is the political destruction of Sir Walter Raleigh." (323) The great irony is that both Essex, in 1601, and Raleigh, in 1618, died by the axe.

In The Unfortunate Traveler (1594), Nashe defined the negative qualities required by a spy: "he must be familiar with all and trust none, drink, carouse, and lecher with him out of whom he hopes to wring any matter, swear and forswear, rather than be suspected, and, in a word, have the art of dissembling at his fingers' ends as perfect as any courtier."15 Marlowe's need to hide his homosexuality and atheism taught him the arts of deception: to be secretive, devious, and manipulative. Somerset Maugham, like Marlowe, went to King's School and was also a homosexual, atheist, playwright, and spy. He defined the modern secret agent's perverse intellectual challenge and enjoyment of power in his novel, The Hour Before the Dawn (1942): "there was something in his nature, pitiless and rather dreadful, that made him take a peculiar pleasure in his secret work. Because his motives were pure, he allowed himself to revel in the crooked ways in which, setting his wits against theirs, he strove to combat the wiles of his adversaries." 16

The spy has become a crucial figure in twentieth-century fiction and drama. The modern ideological struggle between the West and the Soviet Union paralleled the conflict between the ruling powers in England and the Continent in the Elizabethan age. In Cambridge in the 1580s Sir Francis Walsingham's men recruited Marlowe as a spy; in the 1930s Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt picked up promising undergraduates in the same way. Like Shakespeare, the protean Marlowe has baffled most biographers. But the combined efforts of modern scholarship and historical imagination finally enabled Nicholls to illuminate the mysterious aspects of his life.

NOTES

1. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 1908), 14.

2. T. S. Eliot, "Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe," The Sacred Wood (1928; London: Methuen, 1960), 88.

3. Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (1952; Boston: Beacon, 1964), 157.

4. George Bernard Shaw, "The Spacious Times," Saturday Review, 82 (July 11, 1896), 36.

5. Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of His Thought, Learning, and Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 241.

6. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1927), 87.

7. John Berryman, "Marlowe's Damnations," The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), 3.

8. See J. A. Downie, "Marlowe: Facts and Fictions," Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.

9. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (London: Penguin, 1971), 119; 19. [Quotations from the dramatic works are from Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999).]

10. William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 75.

11. William Archer, "Christopher Marlowe and the Observation of Men," Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 70.

12. Marlowe, Complete Poems, 17.

13. Ibid., 48; 15.

14. Gavin Thurston, "Christopher Marlowe's Death," Contemporary Review, 205 (April 1964), 199.

15. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveler, edited with an Introduction by John Berryman (New York: Capricorn, 1960), 44.

16. W. Somerset Maugham, The Hour Before the Dawn (1942; New York: Popular, 1960), 24-25.