13. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 316-349

Chapter Fifteen: In the Theatre of God's Judgements; Epilogue

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Queen Elizabeth herself was said to have pronounced Christopher Marlowe's death sentence ("prosecute it to the full") at court. A few days later, Marlowe died from a puncture wound above the eye in the nearby home of a genteel widow. The Queen's Coroner attributed the killing to a quarrel over "the reckoning," a bill for food and drink, but many have long suspected that the murderer had ulterior motives. Was Marlowe dispatched in an act of sovereign power or in a tavern brawl? Was he guilty -- and if so, of what? -- or innocent? 

So many questions, so few answers. Or rather, so little unambiguous evidence.

In February 1593, a protest by Puritans and Separatists against the Archbishop of Canterbury's crackdown on dissent led the government to take a hard-line approach, invoking a statute against seditious speech that "collapsed the old ecclesiastical crimes of heresy and blasphemy into the secular offence of treason." It "soon turned into the first all-out heresy hunt since the reign of Elizabeth's sister Mary -- and the last in English history."

In April, mob violence directed against Protestant immigrants from Holland and Spain broke out, and in May a propagandist who called himself "Tamberlaine" began stirring up animosity against the immigrants with posted verses that not only invoked Marlowe's Tamburlaine but also alluded to The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris, both of which had been performed by Strange's Men in January. There was no evidence that Marlowe was "Tamberlaine," but he inevitably came under suspicion.

Thomas Kyd, Marlowe's former roommate, was arrested, and among his papers was found what the Royal Commissioners "called 'vile heretical Conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.'" Under torture, Kyd said that Marlowe had given him the document. The Privy Council decided to investigate further and commissioned an informant, a loan shark named Thomas Drury, to get more dirt on Marlowe. Drury had been imprisoned after his partner, Richard Cholmeley, turned on him. Cholmeley and his brother Hugh had been employed by Sir Robert Cecil to spy on well-to-do Catholics. Drury reported that Cholmeley had identified Marlowe as a preacher of atheism, and that one of those who had listened to Marlowe was Sir Walter Raleigh. "Richard Cholmeley was the real-life counterpart of Jack Cade, the plebeian rabble-rouser in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI ... a loose cannon fired by underclass delusions of grandeur." 

Marlowe had been shielded by Lord Burghley from conviction of high treason in the counterfeiting case, which suggests that Marlowe was working as an agent of Burghley's and had possibly been spying on Cholmeley and his gang. But as always, there was also the possibility that Marlowe was "prepared to 'go to the enemy' in earnest." Drury's account of Marlowe's blasphemies, along with Kyd's testimony about his atheism, would be echoed in Richard Baines's testimony. On May 18, Henry Maunder, a messenger of the Queen's Chamber, was ordered to arrest Marlowe and bring him before the court. Marlowe posted bail on May 20. Around the 27th, Drury delivered to the Privy Council Baines's note listing seventeen items of atheistic speech attributed to Marlowe.

The penalty for attempting to persuade others not to attend church was banishment, and Baines asserted that Marlowe talked about going to Spain or Rome. But it's possible that Marlowe was more interested in Scotland and the court of James VI, where his friend Matthew Royden had found a position in the household of the Earl of Haddington. The penalty for sedition was harsher: the lopping off of both ears and a fine of 200 pounds. But a trial of Marlowe, who could testify in his own defense, would have caused a sensation. "With her exquisite sense of occasion, Queen Elizabeth gave the order to 'prosecute it to the full' just when Marlowe was ready to enter history as the overreacher, a wholesome caution for aspiring minds."

On May 30, Marlowe was joined at the Deptford home of Eleanor Bull by Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley. Frizer and Skerres were employed by Thomas Walsingham and Poley by Burghley, who was also acquainted with Eleanor Bull. "Poley was a veteran secret service agent who dealt with threats to Queen Elizabeth's security." According to the coroner's report, Frizer and Marlowe got into an argument over who should pay the bill for this private party. (It's unclear whether Eleanor Bull ran a tavern or a public house, or if the party had been catered in her home.) "At the climax of the quarrel, Frizer plunged his dagger into Marlowe's face, just above the right eye. The blade entered Marlowe's brain, killing him instantly. Frizer pleaded self-defence."

Some details provided at the coroner's inquest lay suspicion on the self-defense plea, though the jury found in Frizer's favor, and he was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth "just two weeks later, a remarkably brief interval for a capital offence." It seems that "Queen Elizabeth paid Marlowe the fatal compliment of taking him seriously, as a political agent to be reckoned with."

In June 1599, the Bishop of London burned Marlowe's translations of Ovid. And about the same time, Shakespeare had Marlowe in mind, when he makes reference to him in As You Like It. One is the couplet "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might / 'Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?'" The other seems to be a reference to Marlowe's death, when Touchstone mentions the exile of Ovid "among the Goths" and observes:

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.

This is both an allusion to the line "Infinite riches in a little room" from The Jew of Malta and a reference to the fatal "reckoning" at Eleanor Bull's. "Of all the contemporary observers who wrote about the killing, Shakespeare alone refers to the coroner's inquest" six years after it took place.

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.

11. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 274-292

Chapter Thirteen: The Counterfeiters

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In the winter of 1591-92, Marlowe went to the town of Flushing, in the Netherlands, where he lodged with Richard Baines and a goldsmith named Gifford Gilbert. They started turning out counterfeit, which constituted treason punishable by death in England. When they put one of their Dutch coins into circulation, Baines went to the English authorities to reveal what was going on. He claimed that they had urged Gilbert to make the bogus money out of curiosity, a desire "to see the goldsmith's cunning."

The Dutch had given the English control of Flushing in exchange for military help against Spain. The town was governed by Sir Robert Sidney, who reported to Lord Burghley, the head of the English secret service, that Marlowe and Baines each accused the other of planning to continue counterfeiting after the first test. They also accused each other of planning to go over to the enemy, the Catholics who were plotting to assassinate Elizabeth and invade England. One of the means of financing this plan was counterfeiting. So both Marlowe and Baines may have been spying on the plotters.

Lord Strange was thought to be involved in the plot, and Marlowe was in a good position to provide information about Strange because of his work with Strange's theater company. After getting cold feet about the counterfeiting, Baines may have decided that Marlowe really was going to go over to the enemy. Or maybe the impecunious Marlowe really did plan to go "to Rome." Sidney placed Marlowe and Gilbert under arrest, but let Baines go. By doing so, "he implied that the scholar and the goldsmith were the guilty parties, while Baines was merely being sent back for questioning. On the other hand, if Marlowe was an English agent, putting him under arrest reduced the likelihood of blowing his cover." All three men were sent back for questioning by Lord Burghley, who had the power to hang them. But there is no record "that Marlowe underwent any punishment or received a pardon." The likelihood is that Marlowe was being kept alive until he could be of some use.


In May 1592, Marlowe was in court again for making "threats against a constable and beadle," facing the same Justice Owen Hopton before whom he had appeared on suspicion of murdering William Bradley. Marlowe was placed under bond to keep the peace and to appear at the next session of the county court, or forfeit twenty pounds.


Strange's Men had revived The Jew of Malta in February, and it and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy were the most popular plays in the repertory until the first part of Shakespeare's Henry VI was staged in March 1592. It was performed fourteen times before the theaters were closed in June. Its success apparently inspired Marlowe to write his own history play, Edward II, that year. It joined the repertory of the Earl of Pembroke's Men in 1593-94, along with Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and adaptations of the second and third parts of Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare probably also acted with the company. "The Earl of Pembroke is the only English aristocrat that Edward II portrays in a favorable light.... The earl's wife, Mary Herbert, née Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was a major literary patroness and a dramatist in her own right."


There is no record of Marlowe's acquaintance of Shakespeare, and as a university man he was a notch on the social ladder higher than the glover's son from Stratford. Shakespeare would allude to his work seven years after Marlowe's death, but the influence of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta is evident in his early work. "Indeed, for two centuries the pervasive debt to Marlowe's style and sensibility persuaded scholars that Marlowe actually did write most of Henry VI." But Marlowe's debt to Shakespeare is seen in Edward II, which like Henry VI is based on Holinshed's English Chronicles, where Marlowe "found yet another story of a strong king (Edward I) whose weak son (Edward II) is destroyed by over-mighty barons (Mortimer) and a masculine queen (Isabella). The 'weak king' formula was well-suited to Pembroke's Men, who lacked a leading actor of Edward Alleyn's stature."


Marlowe departed from Holinshed in making the Gaveston affair the central crisis in Edward's rule. "Edward II is the only Elizabethan play that portrays a homosexual relationship in the terms in which orthodox moralists conceived of it -- as illicit, compulsive and intolerably destructive." In Richard II, another "weak king" play, "Shakespeare suppresses, where Marlowe emphasizes, the homoerotic overtones of his chronicle sources." In Marlowe's play, the crisis is not caused by homosexuality so much as class:  "What enrages the hereditary nobles is that a commoner should enjoy the lucrative offices that would ordinarily fall to them. The base-born Marlowe presses hard on this issue.... Since both of Edward's lovers are lowly interlopers, the king's decision to elevate them above his peers inevitably provokes civil war." The characters most akin to Marlowe are Spencer and Baldock: "Because of their superior education, both men have a special facility with rhetoric and elocution; both are also ready to 'stab, as occasion serves.'"


Marlowe's treatment of Edward's imprisonment and death differs from Holinshed's. Edward is jailed in the sewer of the castle, covered in shit, "the stigmatic regalia of an anal sodomite." But the violation of the king with the red-hot spit depicted in Holinshed is muted in Marlowe's treatment:

Critics and directors usually assume that Lightborn finishes him off with the red-hot poke (Derek Jarman's brilliant film adaptation is a notable exception.) But Marlowe's text, whether by accident or design, stubbornly omits to supply this implement. When the time comes to use it, the spit remains in the other room.... The last act of Edward II, with its brooding, introspective soliloquies and drawn-out scenes of bodily torment, marks a shift in Marlowe's sensibility. His new subject is physical suffering and resistance. He sympathizes with the victim. Despite Edward's follies, Marlowe grants the unrepentant sodomite a measure of redemption in the end. This development coincides with a comparable shift in the course of Marlowe's own fortunes. During the fourteen months of life that remained after his return from Flushing, Marlowe himself would be cast in the role of victim.

7. The World of Christopher Marlowe, pp. 159-189

Chapter Eight: Proceeding in the Arts

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In 1587, turning twenty-three, Marlowe "suddenly vaulted into the tripartite roles of wayward scholar, secret agent and innovative poet-playwright." He completed his work for the M.A., which required attending "lectures in philosophy, astronomy, optics and the Greek language," as well as participating in eleven public disputations. And he somehow did this while taking multiple leaves of absence.

One thing the M.A. course curriculum did was teach students "to conceive of the cosmos as a poetic and theatrical spectacle." The field called "optics" included math, geometry and cosmography, which was a mixture of geography and history; its focus on the rise of the Roman empire inspired Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which is about world conquest. When Tamburlaine besieges Damascus, he speaks of it terms of map-making: His "poetic understanding of mapmaking glosses over the horror of what he is about to do. Were Zenocrate sees the destruction of an existing city, Tamburlaine appeals to the root sense of geo-graphy as 'world-writing.'"

Elizabethan England was on the verge of its own campaign of world conquest: "The impending war with Spain intensified the need for cartographers, navigators and military engineers." These were generally recruited not from the aristocracy, whose "sense of class privilege made them wary of science, which was hard to do, morally dubious and smacked of artisan labour," but from the ranks of the educated lower classes. "The mental labour of actually doing calculations in physics and astronomy could be left to the scholars. For them, the MA course opened up new opportunities for advancement." Marlowe's friends Thomas Hariot and Walter Warner were both employed by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, as mathematician and physician respectively. Thomas Watson also was acquainted with Northumberland, and Marlowe claimed that he was "very well-known" to this "scion of a noble Catholic family with a long record of hostility to the queen," which made him "an excellent target for a would-be spy." Although study of the sciences was still bound up with religion, "Instead of seeking God in the heavens, Marlowe's generation charted the earthly course of imperial conquest."

Study of the classic poets also tended to lead away from religion toward science. In his pastorals Virgil invoked "Silenus, the Orphic bard who 'sang how, through the vast void, the seeds of earth, and air, and sea, and liquid fire withal were gathered together; how from these elements all nascent things, yes all, and even the young globe of the world grew together.'" Virgil also paid homage to Lucretius for study of the laws of nature, and Lucretius honored Epicurus, whose study of nature overcame superstitious beliefs. "Epicurus liberated humanity from the fear of the gods and the spectre of divine punishment after death.... Epicurus and Lucretius were primary sources for what the Romans referred to as 'impiety' and the Renaissance called 'atheism.'"

The celebration of the Orphic bards "reinvigorated the classical myth of the poet-seer." Horace asserted that "Orpheus, the first poet, had conveyed divine wisdom from the gods and elevated the human race from savagery to civility." Marlowe portrays Tamburlaine as a kind of poet-seer who, at the end of the second part of the play "becomes the Epicurean poet-hero who ascends the heavens in order to conquer his fear of death."

When Tamburlaine overthrows the king of Persia, he says, "What better precedent than mighty Jove?" Jupiter had devoured his father, Saturn, who had in turn killed his father, Uranus. But Tamburlaine identifies more with the Titans than the Olympians. Marlowe had begun translating Lucan's Civil War, in which the Titans "personify the destructive and creative forces that bring the degenerate Roman republic to ruin." The Titans were "imprisoned beneath Tartarus -- the word meant both 'hell' and 'central Asia' -- but still had the capacity to break loose in winds, earthquakes and storms." Tamburlaine's enemies refer to him as "Tartarian thief" and his men as "Tartarian rout" and "base born Tartars." And Tamburlaine "likens his sword to a force of nature now unleashed," and at the end imagines Jove as "pale and wan" when beholding him. "Tamburlaine has reduced the Olympian gods to a state of abject fear."

The study of astronomy overlapped that of astrology, which M.A. candidates studied even though it "had no formal place in the university curriculum." The brother astrologers Gabriel and Richard Harvey were on the university faculties. Unfortunately for Richard, he made a prediction of some major event when Jupiter and Saturn conjoined on April 28, 1583, and suffered ridicule when nothing significant took place. Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and Marlowe were among those who mocked Harvey. But Marlowe retained his fascination with astrology, at least as a vehicle for metaphor, using it in Tamburlaine's speech about "A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres / That guides his steps and actions to the throne."

Astrology led to the study of magic. "John Case and Everard Digby, the pre-eminent natural philosophers at Oxford and Cambrdige, introduced students to the occult principles that controlled the natural world. Both men spent their careers synthesizing Aristotle's scientific works with texts about the universe of spirits." Continental books on magic by John Dee and Giordano Bruno sparked an interest in conjuring, which "was not a freak diversion at Oxford and Cambridge" but "a foreseeable outcome of the MA course.... This turn from study to sorcery supplies the rudimentary plot of Dr Faustus."

The last year of Marlowe's M.A. course, 1587, was the one in which the university authorities investigated the rumor that he had gone to the seminary at Rheims and the Privy Council was moved to defend him. The letter vouching for him was signed by Lord Treasurer Burghley, Archbishop Whitgift, Lord Chancellor Hatton, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon and Sir James Crofts. There is some ambiguity in the letter. For one thing, after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Duke of Guise withdrew his patronage of the Rheims seminary, which ceased to be a center of espionage. Antwerp had been conquered by the Duke of Parma in 1585, and Brussels became a staging area for plans to move into northern Holland and from there invade England. Burghley, Whitgift, Hatton and Crofts were involved  in negotiations with Parma to prevent that from happening. So it would have made more sense to send Marlowe to Brussels. And it was there that he might have become acquainted with the Faust legend: The German History of John Faust was published in 1587 and was "an overnight sensation in northern Europe."

Marlowe's Faustus, like his real-life counterpart, is German, [but] he unaccountably places himself in Holland during the opening scene of the play.... Marlowe's Dr Faustus vows to 'chase the Prince of Parma from our land.' Whenever he wrote these lines, Marlowe was thinking about -- and like -- a recent graduate who found himself in the Low Countries soon after Parma's conquest of Antwerp.

Marlowe was not unique among Elizabethan poets in doing this sort of spywork: "Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, ... and Ben Jonson all carried messages for the government." But of these only Marlowe had been accused of going over to the Catholic side. Burghley and Walsingham often recruited people who had been part of the Catholic intelligence network. In his accusations against Marlowe, Baines claimed that Marlowe had spoken approvingly about Catholicism. "Bear in mind, finally, that Marlowe always appears in the government documents as an object of surveillance."

Marlowe's role-playing as a spy dovetails neatly with his career in the theater: "he was the first university graduate to forge a lasting professional bond with the adult players" in "the newly erected London theatres." Jobs in the field for which he was nominally prepared, the church, were growing scarce. "The going rate for a minor parish priest was ten pounds a year. Against this backdrop of exclusionary job placements and low-paying work, Marlowe's decision to become a professional writer looks like a shrewd career move." He "belonged to the group of poets who were born around the time of Elizabeth's accession, attended grammar school and university during the early decades of her reign and flourished during the 1580s and early 1590s." Sir Philip Sidney stood out from this group as an aristocrat. Others in this company include Edmund Spenser, Abraham Fraunce, George Peele, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson and John Lyly. All of them "kept a safe distance from the disreputable adult acting companies."

Marlowe seems like a rebel in this respect, and also because he set himself up in opposition to Spenser, "the English Virgil," by taking Ovid as his model. And his "fascination with ancient models of anti-authoritarian writing soon led him to the kindred of Lucan," whose Civil War he began to translate into English, completing the first book in 1592-93. Lucan is a major influence on Tamburlaine, which Marlowe wrote in 1587. Marlowe's Tamburlaine, like Lucan's Caesar, has the gift of oratory that persuades others to follow him.

Lucan's panoramic view of soldiers flocking to join Caesar's army foreshadows the hordes that rise in response to Tamburlaine's call: "All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine ... All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine." .... Marlowe was about to cross his professional Rubicon.

4. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 63-97

Chapter Four: Scholars and Gentlemen; Chapter Five: Thinking Like a Roman

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In late 1580, almost seventeen, Marlowe left the King's School for Cambridge University, a seventy-mile trip that probably took about three days. Corpus Christi College was also known as Benet College, after the church of St. Benedict which was adjoined to it. The university had 1,862 students -- enrollments tripled while Elizabeth was queen. He was enrolled in the university in March although he wasn't actually admitted to study until the previous Parker Scholar had left in May. He may have supported himself as a manual laborer until the scholarship actually took effect.

The students who were "poor, like Marlowe, had forfeited their place in the artisan class, but stood a good chance of gaining a livelihood in the Church." The wealthy students "were out to have a good time, work on their tennis and acquire enough learning to qualify for the post of Justice of the Peace in their home counties." The poor ones were "required to wear the Scholar's plain black gown and put in eighteen-hour days, from four in the morning until ten at night" and could not go out at night. They were "expressly forbidden to wear silk," a regulation that "publicized their inferior social status."

Marlowe's six years at Cambridge sharpened his awareness of social inequality. At the King's School, everyone was, or wanted to be, a Scholar. The students all wore the same gowns, and, at least in theory, obeyed the same rules.... In Marlowe's plays, to dress above one's station is an infallible sign of social mobility. The base-born Tamburlaine magically enters the aristocracy when he exchanges the rustic attire of a shepherd for the shimmering armour of a gentleman.... Marlowe returned time and again to the mutual enmity between the scholar and the gentleman. The plebeian Dr Faustus torments an insolent knight and warns him to "speak well of scholars" in the future.

In Edward II, Baldock's villainy stems from his resentment of the restrictions he endured as a student. "Baldock's university education confirms his sense of alienation from the hereditary élite. 'My name is Baldock,' he tells the king, 'and my gentry / I fetch from Oxford, not from heraldry.'"

In the real world of Elizabethan society, a poor scholar's prospects of finding preferment at court were virtually nil. Lord Burghley, the Chancellor of Cambridge University, firmly believed that educational institutions should reinforce the existing social hierarchy. He even drew up legislation stipulating that no one could "study the laws, temporal or civil, except he be immediately descended from a nobleman or gentleman, for they are the entries to rule and government." ... [Poor scholars] were expected to remain in the lower echelons of the university and the Church. There were no more Cardinal Wolseys in Tudor England. 

The Parker Scholars were housed together in a small room with "two beds, two chairs, a table and three stools. Like other members of the college, Marlowe and his roommates would have slept with one another." This was not unusual: Until they married, which among men was typically in their late twenties or early thirties, people usually shared a bed with a member of their own sex. But at university, the curriculum also "familiarized students with the seminal ancient works on male friendship and homoerotic love" -- Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and Plato.

In the Symposium and Phaedrus, Plato deals with "the main problem in homoerotic love, which is knowing when to stop." In the Problems, Aristotle "taught undergraduates that homosexuality is both an innate disposition and a cultural practice that can be learned under the right conditions." And "Ovid and his peers -- Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Gallus -- treat homosexual love with absolute moral indifference, as a fact of life." The problem lay in "the paradoxical status of Renaissance homosexuality."

The venerable custom of sleeping with a same-sex bedfellow, the exaltation of male friendship, the fear of being emasculated by heterosexual passion ... and the recovery of Greek and Roman gender systems, all served to legitimate homoerotic affection, especially in the universities. Love between men was intrinsic to the humanist educational programme. Yet the medieval-Christian impulse to demonize homosexual acts persisted regardless. The so-called buggers, pathics, ingles, cinaeduses, catamites, Ganymedes and sodomites who performed such acts were still regarded with horror and disgust. The law too was equivocal on this issue. Tudor parliaments made sodomy a crime punishable by death, but the offence was almost never prosecuted, and then only in cases where a man had raped a boy. 

Riggs comments that "the search for Marlowe's innate sexual identity leads nowhere," but he also shows how the tension between acceptance and condemnation inherent in the Elizabeth attitude toward the homoerotic informs his work. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, "which probably belongs to his Cambridge years," Jupiter's infatuation with Ganymede sets him at odds with his wife, Juno. Edward II hinges on "the king's homosexual love for his favourites," but it is the issue of class -- the king's favoring of his "base-born" male lovers -- that is at the heart of the conflict. Marlowe's other alleged transgressions -- "blasphemy, treason, counterfeiting, sorcery" -- made it easy for his accusers to add sodomy to the list, but we don't know what his sexual orientation was. Marlowe's "endemic poverty" prevented him from marrying before his early death. "In the glimpses of his domestic life after Cambridge, he is always sharing a room with a same-sex partner," perhaps out of economic necessity. "Unless Marlowe was celibate, the readiest outlet for his own sexual desires lay with other men."

"Aside from the odd hour on Sunday, when he could play football or tennis in the college, or go for a walk, the Scholar's life was all work and no play." Much of the work centered on "learning how to defend and attack a thesis." And that depended on a mastery of dialectic, "the skill of arguing credibly on any topic whatever." The study of the art of persuasion is reflected in Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander, in which "Lovestruck Leander wants to persuade Hero, who has taken a vow of chastity, that she ought to have sex with him." In the formal dialectical disputation, Hero plays the role of Answerer, the one who defends a thesis, and Leander that of Questioner, who attacks it. Leander finally wins the debate by having Hero admit that she swore her vow of chastity to Venus, which "puts her in the indefensible position of swearing to the goddess of love that she will never make love.... This is the Questioner's knockout punch; the disputation is over, the endgame of physical seduction can begin."

Dialecticians always kept before them the ancient logical paradox called "the heap," or "the argument of little by little": if one grain of wheat does not constitute a heap, then neither do two, or three, or (by extension) any finite number.... Dialecticians prized the heap precisely because it revealed the void that underlay their own methods -- so that, in Cicero's fine summation, "this same science destroys at the end the steps that came before, like Penelope unweaving her web.... If Shakespeare's King Lear requires a hundred knights to accompany him, how many does he have to lose before he turns into a mere mortal: one? fifty? ninety-nine? When does Tamburlaine cross the line that separates a mere mortal from a king? At what point does Dr Faustus join the ranks of the damned: when he commits the sin against the Holy Ghost? or signs a blood-pace with the devil? or has sexual intercourse with a demon? or makes his final exit with one? The same radical instability haunts modern debates about abortion. When does an embryo become a person? 

The study of dialectic was "a prolonged education in scepticism." And eventually that skepticism had to  extend to religion. "Marlowe's works assess the rival claims of Muhammad, Christ and the classical gods, or of Christian, Muslim and atheist beliefs, without arriving at any definite conclusion."

The study of rhetoric was complementary to the study of dialectic: "the rhetorician clothed the logician's arguments in elegant figurative language." And Marlowe's "poetry and plays -- from his signature lyric "Come live with me and be my love" to Tamburlaine the Great to his erotic narrative Hero and Leander -- emphasize the power of persuasive speech to move the will.

But the key problem with the study of dialectic is that it becomes an end in itself -- "endless dialectical disputation," a duel that ends in a stalemate: "True and false were ... alien concepts in the Elizabethan arts course; for Marlowe and his fellow undergraduates, philosophy was the puzzles on each side of a question." Marlowe's Faustus "scarcely understands what logic is. He can only conceive of it as a way of arguing about philosophical problems because that is what the dialecticians have taught him to do. It never occurs to him that logic could be a way of doing philosophy, of actually solving problems." All the Elizabethans had for philosophy, an approach to a way of living, was poetry. "Dialecticians maintained that poems are repositories of scientific knowledge" because they presented approximations of reality. Ovid's Metamorphoses presented "a universal history of change," unfolding "in encounters between mind and matter, the warring elements, love and strife, lusty gods and reluctant maidens. ... Marlowe faithfully reproduced Ovid's materialistic, ever-changing cosmos in Tamburlaine the Great and Hero and Leander."

But Ovid was in contradiction to "the Bible's privileged status as the master code of revealed natural religion."  Moreover, "The ancient historians Polybius, Plutarch and Livy ... revealed that Roman statesmen had introduced the fear of the gods in order to fashion law-abiding subjects." Pythagoras, Epicurus and Lucretius promoted the idea that "hell is a fable, and belief in hell a craven superstition; the body metamorphoses into the elements after death; poets and rulers invented divine retribution to keep men in awe of authority. Renaissance divines understandably concluded that epicureans were atheists." Tamburlaine subscribes to Ovid's view of creation "and dies alluding to epicurean teachings on death." Faustus says "hell's a fable" and the Prologue to The Jew of Malta says, "I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance." Marlowe was presenting "epicurean ideas" to the theater-going public.

Even though the university "prepared graduates for careers in the Church" it didn't teach them about Christianity. Even Christian doctrine was subjected to dialectical pro and con arguments.

Since dialectical disputation took up "both parts of every question," one of the students had to argue that the style of the sacred Scriptures is barbarous, that there is no place of hell, that the reprobate truly call upon God, that God wants everyone to be saved, that the will does not act freely, and that things are done without God's prior consent and volition. Any doctrine could be made credible; none could be proven.

Moreover, since Calvinist doctrine asserted that there was a predestined elect and Queen Elizabeth, Lord Burghley and Archbishop Whitgift asserted that conformity, "external compliance with the rites and forms prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer," was essential to the social order, religion became "a matter of behaviour rather than belief." But within the university there was a Puritan opposition that promoted Christian education, including the radicals "who advocated total separation from the English Church." Some of them saw "dialectic as a self-referential language game based on bogus dichotomies." But the only student to defy authority sufficiently to be expelled from Cambridge while Marlowe was there was charged with blasphemy, not Puritanism, for an irreverent parody of the catechism.

Marlowe survived the four public debates that he had to participate in for the B.A. and completed the requirements for the degree in 1584. He could remain at Cambridge for three more years on scholarship to work toward his M.A. if he planned to enter Holy Orders. It was a deal he couldn't afford to turn down, even though the prospect of finding a job in the Church had worsened. "He needed to find an alternative career."