2. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 13-29

First Age: Infant; Chapter 2, The Discovery of England

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The break with Rome and the end to the domination of a "universal" church led to a surge in English nationalism, "a perceived need to buttress the English nation by proving the dignity of the English language and the native culture." Elizabeth's decision to remain unmarried, rather than to see an alliance with a prince from another nation was prompted in part by the unpopularity of her half-sister, Mary, whose marriage to Philip II of Spain "effectively placed a foreign king on the English throne."

Her favorite, Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, played an effective role in the development of English culture: "he commissioned an array of publications, including history books and translations of the Latin classics, as a way of flying the flag for English traditions and the English language." He was the patron of a troupe of players that in 1574 received a royal patent. Their leader, John Burbage, leased a site in London in 1576 and built a theater -- "simply called The Theatre." Puritan objections to the drama meant that "public playhouses were always built in the 'liberties' on the margins of London to the northeast or south of the river Thames." Their objections also led Shakespeare to create such characters as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Angelo in Measure for Measure.

In 1581 Edward Tilney, the master of the revels in the lord chamberlain's office, was given jurisdiction over all plays, which he was to screen before allowing their performance. Bate comments, "This sounds like state censorship but was intended as an opportunity for him to familiarize himself with the repertoire in order to get the best shows to court." Two years later, twelve actors formed the Queen's Men, a traveling company whose itinerary included Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1587, a new theater, the Rose, opened in Southwark, managed by Philip Henslowe, and provided competition for the Queen's Men. One of the companies that played at the Rose was Lord Strange's Men, whose patron was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Shakespeare's first plays were performed by the company. The leading actor in Lord Strange's Men was Richard Burbage, who would form a new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594.

When the Puritans took power in 1642, they closed the theaters. But quite intangibly, those same theaters had prepared the way for the moment seven years later when the ax came down on the king's head in Whitehall. Where was it that Londoners had previously confronted the image of monarchs being removed from their thrones? Where was it that they had seen ordinary people -- actors, who were still regarded as little better than rogues and vagabonds -- daring to look into the minds of princes, and in so doing showing that kings and queens are not so much God's vice-regents on earth as ordinary mortals like all the rest of us? In the theater. 

 In 1592 the Dutch artist Marcus Gheeraerts painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in a white dress standing on a map of England and Wales, as if shielding her country from the threatening storm in the painting's background. The map on which she is standing was drawn up by Christopher Saxton in 1579, and "was the first-ever accurate map of the whole country. It was one of the keys to the Elizabethans' discovery of their own land."

Christopher Saxton's Map of England and Wales, 1579

"Thanks to Saxton, the Elizabethans were the first English people to have a clear sense of the physical shape of their own nation. And that gave them a new sense of belonging." But "belonging" was a layered concept: "Elizabethans were as loyal to their county as they were to their country. William Shakespeare was renowned as a Warwickshire man, and Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake were proud of their Devonshire heritage." They relished the individuality of their various regions, and Shakespeare is unique among the Elizabethan playwrights in setting scenes in Warwickshire and neighboring Gloucestershire. "This little-observed fact is something of a problem for those conspiracy theorists who do not believe that the plays were written by a grammar-school boy from Warwickshire."

In Henry VI Part 3, he introduces a character named Somerville, who doesn't appear in the chronicles from which Shakespeare took the historical material of the play. "To an Elizabethan audience, or at least to anyone from the West Midlands, the name would immediately have evoked a Warwickshire man ...:  John Somerville of Edstone, a village four miles north of Stratford." Somerville had been arrested in 1583 for allegedly boasting about a plan to kill the queen. He was the son-in-law of Edward Arden, a Warwickshire Catholic family very probably related to Shakespeare's mother, née Mary Arden. Somerville was killed in prison, but Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered. His wife, another Mary Arden, was reprieved. "The tiny role of Somerville in Henry VI Part 3 may have been Shakespeare's way of saying that it was possible to be both a Warwickshire Catholic and a 'true-hearted friend' of queen and country."

Another Warwickshireman, Michael Drayton, took it on himself to celebrate the whole country, county by county, in his poem Polyolbion, which he began in 1598 and published in 1612. The frontispiece shows Britannia wrapped in a map like Saxton's.  The implication is "that the essence of the nation lay not only in the monarchy but above all in the land itself."

Warwickshire came to be regarded as "the heart of England" in large part because of Shakespeare, with an assist from Drayton.

That identity perhaps becomes tangible at the moment in Henry IV Part 1 when Falstaff breaks his journey from London to Shrewsbury along the old Roman road of Watling Street near Coventry, the capital of the Midlands, the place where the boy Shakespeare would have gained his first smell of city life. And in Part 2, when Falstaff goes recruiting in Justice Shallow's parish in the neighboring shire of Gloucester, Shakespeare begins the invention of deep England.

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.

10. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 250-274

Chapter Twelve: Double Agents

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In September 1589, Marlowe was involved in a fight in which Thomas Watson killed an innkeeper named William Bradley. Earlier, Bradley had defaulted on a debt he owed to John Alleyn, the brother of the player Edward Alleyn, and had then charged that Alleyn, Watson and an attorney named Hugo Swift, Watson's brother-in-law, were plotting to kill him. Marlowe's quarrel with Bradley gave Watson an opportunity to end the feud.

Watson and Marlowe were arrested for murder and sent to Newgate, which was where Marlowe encountered John Poole, a counterfeiter and a member of the Catholic underground. Poole was related by marriage to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who was an object of surveillance by the government. Strange was also patron of a theater company, Strange's Men. "In gathering information about Poole's associates, Marlowe stood to gain in two ways: he could sell his discoveries to Watson's friend Thomas Walsingham, or he could pursue relations with the rebel faction."

Marlowe was exonerated by the coroner's jury and released on bail pending a hearing in criminal court, which took place in December, when he was freed. Watson, a spy employed by Thomas Walsingham, was returned to prison until he received a pardon from the queen in February 1590. His "connection with the Walsinghams offered Marlowe an entrée into up-market Kentish patronage and the secret service." By the winter of 1591-92, Marlowe was roommate and perhaps bedmate of the spy Richard Baines.

Strange's Men included Thomas Kyd, Thomas Heminges, "who later prepared Shakespeare's first folio," Thomas Pope, George Bryan and the comedian Will Kempe. Both Strange's Men and the Admiral's Men performed at the Theatre, owned and managed by Richard Burbage, until Strange's Men moved to the Rose, Philip Henslowe's playhouse. John and Edward Alleyn joined the company after a quarrel with Richard Burbage and his brother John. The Alleyns probably drew Marlowe into the company. He shared quarters with Kyd.

Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta for the company, probably in 1591, though perhaps a year earlier. "Where the dominant trope of Tamburlaine is hyperbole, The Jew abounds in irony." It is "a war between vice and virtue" modeled on the morality play.

Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal were usually required to profess Christianity in their new countries; the converts were called Marranos.... In common parlance the word Marrano signified "one descended of Jews or infidels, and whose parents were never christened, but for to save their goods will say they are Christians"; or more simply, "a Jew, an infidel, a renegado, a nickname for a Spaniard." Doubly displaced by exile and forced conversion, the Marrano became a displaced image of the duplicity inherent in espionage and intelligence work. 

Barabas is the embodiment of this duplicity, bragging about his role as double agent.  The biblical Barabbas, chosen by the Jews over Jesus to be spared from crucifixion, "personified the so-called 'Jewish choice' of materialism over spirituality" for Elizabethan Christians, who would have recognized the reference by Marlowe's Barabas to his hoard of gems and gold, "Infinite riches in a little room," as an echo "of the allegory, which was available from a wide range of devotional works, of the infant Christ enclosed in the Virgin Mary's womb."

But Marlowe's Christians are hypocrites who, like Dr. Faustus, "are deaf to spiritual meanings but alert to literal ones" and adhere to the letter but not the spirit. "Although The Jew of Malta abounds in Scriptural allusions, no one grasps their religious meaning."

Barabas defends the ironist's stance in the course of explaining why a Jew who falsely converts to Christianity is better off than a Christian, like Governor Ferneze, who confuses religion with avarice: "A counterfeit profession is better / Than unseen hypocrisy.

Marlowe even parodies his "live with me and be my love" by putting it into the mouth of Ithamore. 

In Barabas's end, he is hoist with his own petard, plunging into the boiling oil he thinks is being prepared for the Turks. Marlowe here plays on the "lurid fascination" of public executions, which were supposed to represent "the operations of divine justice" and whose gruesome punishments "(burning, mutilation, disembowelling and even, as here, boiling alive) foreshadowed the endless pain that awaited the criminal in Hell." But he "withholds any sense of moral resolution" from the depiction of  Barabas's death.