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.

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.

6. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 127-158

Chapter Seven: Plots and Counter Plots

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One reason for Marlowe's absences from the university during the last years of his scholarship after receiving the B.A. degree may be that he was involved in espionage. In June 1587, the university authorities were told by the Queen's Privy Council that Marlowe "had done her Majesty good service ... in matters touching the benefit of the country." He may have gone to France, to the English seminary at Rheims, which was where exiled Catholics studied for the priesthood. It also "housed many of Queen Elizabeth's mortal enemies." The letter from the council doesn't specify what Marlowe's "good service" was, but it has been inferred that he was a spy. When he returned to Cambridge, he seems to have been in possession of more money than his scholarship, which wasn't paid during absences, afforded. "The theory that he was being paid for doing Her Majesty good service looks more compelling with the benefit of hindsight." Many of the people who figure in his postgraduate life were known to have spied on the seminary at Rheims, including Richard Baines, Thomas Watson, Thomas Walsingham and Robert Poley. 

The plots emanating from Rheims centered on Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Catholics considered the rightful heir to the English throne, particularly after Queen Elizabeth had been excommunicated in 1570. Mary was suspected of having conspired with the Earl of Bothwell in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. After her marriage to Bothwell provoked an uprising in 1567, she abdicated in favor of her son, James VI, and fled to England, only to be put under house arrest by her cousin Elizabeth. The prospect of overthrowing Elizabeth and installing Mary in her place was very appealing to Catholics.

The Catholic cause gained a martyr in 1577 when the Jesuit priest Cuthbert Mayne, who had studied at the English seminary at Douai, was hanged, drawn and quartered after a trial for high treason. The senior judge at the trial was Sir Roger Manwood, who overruled another judge's observation that the worst offense with which Mayne was charged -- "possession of an innocuous papal bull that had already expired" -- was trivial. Another assembly of judges reversed Manwood's sentence, but the Privy Council upheld it and ordered that Mayne's head and the quarters of his body be displayed in five towns as a warning to papists. Riggs notes that "Justice Manwood would prove more lenient when Marlowe and Thomas Watson came before him 'on suspicion of murder' twelve years later," and that Marlowe wrote a Latin epitaph for Manwood singling out the judge's "remarkable capacity to instil terror."

At the time of Mayne's mission to England, Watson was at the seminary at Douai, but he fled after Protestant forces seized the city in 1577. The seminary itself, under the leadership of Father William Allen, was evicted from Douai in 1578 and relocated in Amiens. Watson's knowledge of who had been at the seminary was valuable when he returned to England and went to work for the Privy Council. He posed as a recusant Catholic, gathering information on foreign Catholics in England, and working as a messenger to the Paris household of Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen's principal secretary. "His new job brought him to within seventy miles of his friends and former colleagues who had moved from Douai to Rheims; now, however, Watson was employed by the other side."

The seminary at Rheims was under the protection of the Duke of Guise, who is the villain of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris. Guise was also a cousin of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the seminary "now became the major launch point for plots against the monarchy and life of Elizabeth I." Richard Baines entered the seminary in 1579, but the record is contradictory about whether he was sent to spy or did so out of religious conviction. Riggs comments that "Baines is a hard man to pin down." He claimed that his initial impulse was religious and that he changed sides later, although this admission was elicited under torture: "A lapsed Catholic who confessed and repented stood a better chance of leaving Rheims alive than a confirmed heretic and professional spy did." The transcript of his oral confession to Father Allen also contains testimony by witnesses. In the confession Baines denies the existence of Purgatory, but a witness says he also denied the existence of hell. He also denounced other Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation, "clerical celibacy, the Papacy and prayers for the dead." The interesting thing is that many of the things he confessed to are precisely the things he accused Marlowe of to the Privy Council in 1593. "Was Baines an informant, a mentor or a ventriloquist?"

One of the most complex plots uncovered by Walsingham's spies involved Esme Stuart, who was male and French and in 1579 became the lover of his cousin James VI. Stuart converted to Protestantism and James made him Duke of Lennox in 1581. He had been sent to Edinburgh by the Duke of Guise to convert James to Catholicism and set in motion an invasion of England, the liberation of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the return of England to Catholicism. In the summer of 1581, Walsingham went to France to negotiate a marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. He was joined in Paris by his cousin Thomas Walsingham and by a messenger who was very probably Thomas Watson, who knew Father Allen and other seminarians at Rheims from his stay at the seminary in Douai. "He was ideally placed to brief Thomas Walsingham and to debrief Richard Baines," who was ordained a priest in September.

The Lennox plot, which was coordinated by Father Allen, began to come together in early 1582: The Duke of Guise was ready to send soldiers to land as a diversion on the coast of Sussex, and Mary sent word from prison to Philip II of Spain urging him to get involved. The pope was asked to name Allen Bishop of Durham, to rally Catholics in the north of England, and the papal nuncio in France assured the pope's secretary of state that Catholic priests in England would rally the faithful to support an invasion. But then a friend of Baines's revealed to Allen that Baines was spying for the Privy Council. Baines was tortured but held out until the summer when he finally confessed. But Walsingham now had enough evidence to persuade the Protestant lords in Scotland to act, and when they kidnapped King James in the Raid of Ruthven in August, "Lennox had lost his only substantial asset," and he was banished from Scotland in January 1585.

Baines, who had been imprisoned since his confession, recanted that confession in May in "what looks suspiciously like a plea bargain": Baines gained his freedom and Father Allen got a document in which Baines "cast himself in the role of a penitent papist. He substituted an anti-Protestant diatribe for his earlier attacks on the Catholic religion" -- he blamed it on the devil. This made it possible for Allen to "whitewash" the role of the Rheims seminary in the plot. Baines's confession was included in a collection of recantations by Catholics who had strayed over to the Protestant side. The Lennox plot is reflected in Edward II, written about nine years later, in which the king's relationship with Gaveston echoes that of James and Esme Stuart.

 In the "Rainbow Portrait," Queen Elizabeth's gown 

is embroidered with ears and eyes, symbols of surveillance.

"Intelligence gathering was a major growth industry during Marlowe's student years." Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham each had his own corps of spies, and in 1581-82, Elizabeth "authorized Walsingham to organize the first state-sponsored secret service in English history." The Jesuits targeted university students, so Walsingham began recruiting students for counterintelligence. "The industrious Parker Scholars -- quick-witted, needy and beholden to the Church of England -- were just the kind of men the Secretary was looking for." In the followup to the Lennox plot, most of the elements had been discovered: the involvement of the Duke of Guise and Mary, Queen of Scots, and the support of the pope. "Secretary Walsingham now realized that the conspiracy to depose Elizabeth had become vast, international and self-perpetuating.

Assassination plots against the queen now began to be uncovered. Pope Gregory XIII had opined that England should "be freed by any means from oppression," which gave license to plotters such as George Gifford, a member of the queen's household, who told the Duke of Guise that he would murder the queen for 800 crowns. The murder of the Protestant Prince William of Orange in 1584 sent a shock through the English parliament, which passed the Act for the Queen's Surety that prescribed the death penalty for would-be assassins and also for any potential successor to the crown who knew about a plot -- i.e., Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1585, Sir Francis Walsingham's expenditures for surveillance jumped almost tenfold. This was also the year that Marlowe began his frequent absences from Cambridge. Thomas Walsingham acted as his cousin's recruiter and liaison with agents in the field, such as Robert Poley, who was a Catholic and was married to a member of the Watson family. "These facts make it likely that Watson and Poley were allied to one another as brothers-in-law, cousins by marriage, double agents in Secretary Walsingham's employ or simply as members of the recusant community." In 1583, Poley arranged to be imprisoned in the Marshalsea, which had many Catholic priests who were detained and tortured there. Secretary Walsingham did not entirely trust Poley because he sometimes took steps such as corresponding with an agent of Mary, Queen of Scots, without checking in with Walsingham first. This "brings out the fundamental dilemma of freelance intelligence work. Spies conspired with the enemy in order to extract their secrets; but if they did so without 'consent and direction' from the Council, they were apt to be accused of the very crimes they sought to discover."

George Gifford, meanwhile, was still in the pay of the Duke of Guise for his promise to kill the queen, and in the summer of 1585 his brother William, who would become Archbishop of Rheims and Primate of France, and his cousin Gilbert Gifford enlisted a soldier, John Savage, to carry out the murder. Also involved in the plot was the priest John Ballard, who posed as a soldier named Captain Fortescue, or "Foscue." In England, Ballard/Fortescue began recruiting members of the Catholic gentry such as Anthony Babington, Charles Tilney and Edward Windsor to support an invasion. He also met with John Savage and with Bernard Maude, who had connections at court and was able to obtain a passport for Fortescue to return to France in 1586. But Maude was a spy in Walsingham's employ. And Walsingham had a bigger target in mind: Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham had managed to get Gilbert Gifford on his side to move the plot along so that he could trap not only the conspirators but also Mary.

Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to France, was informed of the plot by Ballard, who was eager to get the Spanish involved in an invasion plan. Mendoza was cautiously optimistic, writing to Philip II about the details of the plot, and telling Ballard to keep him apprised of the details. He especially wanted to know how many English Catholics could be counted on to support the conspiracy. Spain would prepare to invade if they could be supplied with the information.

Back in London, Ballard assumed the Fortescue role again and related the details of the plot to Anthony Babington, who somewhat reluctantly agreed to join the plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Babington needed a friend at court who could obtain a passport for him to travel abroad, and he found it in Robert Poley, whom Babington began calling "Sweet Robin." Poley egged him on, and Babington fell for the trap: He "rashly sent Queen Mary a letter 'touching every particular of this plot.' Mary wrote back endorsing the conspiracy. [Walsingham's right-hand-man] Thomas Phelippes intercepted her letter and the trap snapped shut." Many of the agents involved in exposing the assassination plot would later appear again in the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

Queen Elizabeth was reluctant to carry out the prescribed sentence for Mary's involvement in the plot. She "took extraordinary measures to contrive that Mary die a 'natural' death. The queen twice jailed her cousin in a draughty, foul-smelling addition to Tutbury Castle, where Mary was afflicted by the odour of manure heaps." She also hinted that she would be pleased if someone else took the initiative of getting rid of Mary and "made it clear that one of her ministers would have to trick her into signing Mary's death warrant." The French ambassador, who was the only person in England who could have effectively protested Mary's execution, was tricked by one of Walsingham's operatives into knowledge of a phony assassination plot against Elizabeth. The ambassador was put under house arrest and "Secretary Davidson obligingly placed Mary's death warrant in a stack of routine documents that required the queen's signature." Mary was executed on February 14, 1587. "Elizabeth flew into a rage" and "had Davidson, the scapegoat, arrested and fined 10,000 pounds for transmitting the warrant that she had signed.... The theatre of the world, however, was wider than England. Instead of being pacified by Elizabeth's show of grief, King Philip II began to assemble the Spanish Armada."

In Edward II, "King Edward's estranged queen and her consort, Lord Mortimer, take extraordinary steps to avoid the blame for murdering the king." Edward is imprisoned in a sewer in hope that he'll die, and the queen says he wishes his death "were not by my means." Mortimer makes the order of execution ambiguous so that it can be read as either an order to spare the king or to kill him, and he has the executioner murdered. In The Jew of Malta Barabas says

As good dissemble that thou never mean'st 

As first mean truth, and then dissemble it; 

A counterfeit profession is better 

Than unseen hypocrisy. 

Hypocrites like William Allen "refused to acknowledge ('dissembled') the unseen discrepancy between their religious vocation and their violent takeover plots." Baines, Maude, Poley and Gilbert Gifford pretended to believe in a religion so they could infiltrate it. "Barabas sides with the counterfeit professors. An agent who sees another person's religion as a fiction has the advantage over a believer deluded by his own cant." The Massacre at Paris, written in 1592, is "a retrospective history of the period when Marlowe became involved with the secret service.... The only way to survive in this world is to know your enemies' plans ahead of time; the losers in this play are always those without reliable intelligence."

5. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 98-126

Chapter Six: The Teacher of Desire

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Once he received his B.A., Marlowe had freedom to leave Corpus Christi for extended periods, and took advantage of it for weeks and sometimes months throughout his M.A. studies. The last time he was recorded as present at the college was in March 1587. But the only recorded appearance away from the college comes in Canterbury in August 1585, when he served as witness to the last will and testament of the mother of a fellow student. He signed his name as "Cristofer Marley." "It is his only extant autograph signature."

During this time, he may have devoted himself to translating Ovid's Amores, the "most obscure and lascivious" of Ovid's love poems.

Marlowe's translation of the Amores bears many traces of apprentice work. His line-for-line rendering frequently departs from the plain sense of the original, occasionally lapses into obscurity and lacks the sure metrical touch of his other verse, especially Hero and Leander, his later Ovidian poem. Although the botched translations in Marlowe's All Ovid's Elegies occasionally stem from errors in his Latin texts, many are his own doing. For this reason, scholars surmise that Marlowe put the Amores into English while a student at Cambridge. 

Marlowe's translation is "more direct and coarse" than the original, and he might have been prosecuted if he had published it under his own name. "The very act of translation forged a bond between Ovid and Marlowe, who revived the Roman poet's radical commitment to sexual licence and freedom of speech." When Marlowe's translations of the Elegies were published six years after his death, Archbishop Whitgift ordered them copies of them to be rounded up and burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard. Elements of the translation can be detected in his later work, including Hero and Leander, Dr. Faustus and Edward II. He also revived the ancient rivalry between Ovid and Virgil in Elizabethan England:

Edmund Spenser had staked his own claim to be the "Virgil of England" by publishing his inaugural book of pastoral eclogues, The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) and undertaking The Faerie Queene, a national epic of Virgilian proportions. Marlowe's translation of the Amores thus cast him in the Ovidian role of Virgil's ancient rival.

Marlowe's lyric, "Come live with me and be my love," is also an early work. He parodies it in his plays, including three times in Dido, Queen of Carthage, which dates from the mid-1580s. It was inspired by the song sung by the Cyclops to Galatea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It was untitled until it was reprinted in the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, where it was called "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." But the poem itself doesn't specify the genders of the speaker or the person spoken to -- the "kirtle" referred to in the poem could be either a man's tunic or a woman's dress or skirt.

In Marlowe's sources monologue turns into dialogue and the Passionate Shepherd becomes the protagonist in an Ovidian tragedy. After Galatea says no, the Cyclops crushes her lover Acis to death with a rock. ... When [Marlowe] recasts "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" in dramatic form, he does so in a context of rape, possession, prostitution and abandonment. 

The university men who turned to drama did so first for the children's companies made up of choirboys from the Chapel Royal, St. George's Chapel Windsor and St. Paul's, which performed at court throughout the sixteenth century. In 1576 the Chapel Children began performing for paying spectators at the Blackfriars Theatre under the supervision of William Hunnis, the Master of the Chapel Children, in a partnership with the Earl of Oxford and John Lyly. Like Marlowe, Lyly left Cambridge with no desire to have a career in the Church. So he wrote a prose narrative, Euphues: Or, The Anatomy of Wit, which became a bestseller in 1579 and was followed by an equally successful sequel, Euphues and His England in 1580.

Oxford, Lyly's patron, was trying to make a comeback at court after causing a scandal: He had secretly converted to Catholicism while in Italy, and when he returned to England he made friends with some Catholic noblemen whom he betrayed to the queen. In retaliation, the victims charged Oxford with "pederasty, atheism and repeated attempts to murder his enemies. Many of these accusations are quite believable." Some of the charges also echo the ones that Baines would later make against Marlowe, and "offer a glimpse of the libertine sentiments that circulated within Oxford's circle. Even if Marlowe did not belong to that circle, he knew people who did."

The evidence suggests that Dido, Queen of Carthage was written for the Chapel Children around 1584-85. It was not published until 1594, when it was attributed to both Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. But Nashe may simply have been the one who prepared the text for print; it "seems to be mostly Marlowe's work."

John Lyly gave Marlowe a model of what it meant to be a major playwright. Lyly had an immediate, transforming impact on the language of English comedy; his prose marked a qualitative leap forward from the rambling, invertebrate syntax of his predecessors. The finely crafted symmetries between the sound and the sense of Lyly's sentences enabled the children to project complicated ideas without losing their audience. Marlowe brought about a comparable revolution in the language of verse tragedy. Where Lyly invented an English approximation of Ciceronian prose, Marlowe captured the lofty sound of Virgil's epic verse in English poetry.

The difficulty was finding an equivalent for English verse to the quantitative metres of Latin, which are based on the length of the vowel sounds. For the long and short syllables of Latin, English poets were forced to substitute stressed and unstressed syllables. They "found it difficult to employ polysyllabic words without clogging the flow of the verse. Here is Surrey [in his translation of the Aeneid] on the run-up to Queen Dido's suicide: 'But trembling Dido eagerly now bent / Upon her stern determination.'" The alternative, sticking to monosyllables, produced monotonous lines like these from Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc, the pioneering blank verse tragedy: "Yield not, O King, so much to weak despair, / Your sons yet live and long I trust they shall." In 1575, George Gascoigne published Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, in which he advocated "accentual iambic metres ('a foot of two syllables whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long') in a five-foot line.... Gascoigne had discovered iambic pentameter." But Gascoigne was skeptical about the ability of English verse to achieve "the richness and complexity that he recognized in classical poetry."

Marlowe's solution is found in the opening lines of Dido, Queen of Carthage:

Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me:
w     s  w   s  ws     w   s    w   s
I love thee well, say Juno what she will.
w s    w    s     w   s w  s    w   s

Both verses contain the five pairs of alternating weak (w) and strong (s) syllables that constitute an iambic pentameter line.... In the first foot, "gen-" is at once the second syllable of the iamb "Come gen-" (ws) and the first syllable of the trochaic (sw) word "gentle." In the second "Gan-" likewise completes the iambic foot "-tle Gan-" (ws) and initiates the trochaic "Gany-" (sw).... Since polysyllabic words in English generally have trochaic (sw) rhythms ... trochaic words invariably disrupt iambic meters, however slightly. Marlowe turns this supposed liability into an asset. 

Marlowe also alters the tone of Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, which was supposedly "about manly Roman piety prevailing over effeminate Eastern passion." On the other hand, Ovid and Chaucer "saw Aeneas as a cad and a prig." "Marlowe considers this question from a queer point of view," juxtaposing the homosexual love of Jupiter for Ganymede and the heterosexual love of Aeneas for Dido. He parodies "Come live with me and be my love" by having Jupiter say "Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me."

For Renaissance humanists, this was the definitive myth about homoerotic love, Jove's choice of Ganymede over Juno epitomized the Socratic preference for boys over women.... The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. During the Renaissance, men were encouraged to love boys if both parties belonged to the same class and the relationship was not mercenary.... The stigma of sodomy attached to the base interloper who traded sex for reward and threatened the marital alliances that maintained class privilege.... The Earl of Oxford, the leading patron of boy actors in the mid-1580s, was himself a pederast, the only titled Elizabethan to be charged with sodomy.

As for Dido and her fate, Marlowe follows Ovid in minimizing her "moral culpability" and "enlarges the role of Cupid to show Dido as the victim of forces beyond her control."

Virgil's hero epitomizes the self-denying ethic taught in Renaissance Latin lessons, and Marlowe's play finds him wanting. Despite the misogyny that surrounds her, the radical will in this early play belongs to Dido. She alone speaks with the voice of desire that would become the trademark of Marlowe's tragic heroes.... When he writes Edward II a few years later, the conflict of king, queen and Ganymede descends from Mount Olympus into history, and the struggle between opposed sexualities comes to its appalling conclusion.

3. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 45-62

Chapter Three: Speaking Like a Roman

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At 14, Marlowe began attending the King's School, which "provided scholarships for 'fifty poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends and endowed with minds apt for learning.'" The headmaster was John Gresshop. Before Christopher was awarded a scholarship, his father apparently paid the school fees by providing shoes and board for two students under Gresshop's care. The scholarship students received four pounds per annum: "entire families got by on less than that."

The King's School put on a play at Christmas every year, which may have been Marlowe's introduction to theater. He later wrote his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, for child actors, and memories of the Christmas play may have influenced it. In Marlowe's play, Virgil's characters are treated irreverently. "Whenever Marlowe first conceived of it, Dido falls within the festive tradition of inversion and misrule. It affords a precious glimpse of the desires that grammar school tried to repress."

In the fifth form at the school, students had to learn to make speeches and compose poetry in classical Latin. "The best Scholars composed them out loud, as if they really were native speakers of that abstruse and difficult language." The ones who were looking for scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge "studied oratory and poetry side by side." Oratory was easier because the student simply needed to learn the "figures of thought," the elements of effective argument still found in textbooks on composition: "paraphrase, cause and effect, contrast, example and vivid description."

Versification was much more difficult because it was based on the length of vowel sounds: "In a well-made line of Latin verse, the quantity of every vowel in every word matches up with the set pattern of long and short vowel sounds that constitute the metrical line." But no one knew what classical Latin sounded like, and English speakers have no first-hand experience of vowel length as a part of the language. So students had to memorize a system of rules. They were expected to compose  hexameter lines orally because it was assumed that Ovid and Virgil had done so. At the King's School, the ones who were most successful at this were sent to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. These were, typically, the sons of the poor:

In a school system where social prestige was an acceptable substitute for work, the rich could hardly be told to slog through the thousands of syllable quantities that had to be memorized before one could speak the Latin of Ovid and Virgil "for the phrase, as they did." The gentleman's son sensibly refused to take the "pains and diligence" needed to attain this level of fluency in classical Latin, especially at a moment when the long-range value of such training had yet to be proven in the market-place. In the meantime, the labour-intensive regime of poetry lessons provided a convenient mechanism for distinguishing the deserving from the idle poor.

So Marlowe and the other upwardly mobile students set about memorizing these thousands of syllables, as well as "variant forms that could be used because, and only because, the best poets had used them" in moments of "poetic license." His success at this is reflected in the praise of his contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson's praise of "Marlowe's mighty line."

The early tributes to Marlowe never mention his plays; they refer instead to his innovative verbal craftsmanship. For his peers, Marlowe's great achievements were an English blank verse line that stood up to Virgil's stately measures, and a rhymed English couplet that reproduced the elegance and wit of Ovid's love poetry. These breakthroughs came about eight years later, in Marlowe's early twenties, but Master Gresshop's translation workshop instilled the habits of mind that underlay the later innovations.

There were "figures of poetry as well as figures of oratory" that included "fifteen schemes of spelling," "thirty-two schemes of syntax," and "nineteen species of trope." For example, Jupiter could be called Jove if the meter forced you to pick a one-syllable word. There was also hyperbole and "a multitude of stock expressions," from which Marlowe drew when he had Tamburlaine praise Zenocrate as "lovelier than the love of Jove, / Brighter than is the silver Rhodope, / Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills..." And finally there were "figures of thought," which were drawn from oratory and from Cicero, St. Paul and the Church Fathers.

"In the schools of ancient Rome, verse composition and prose oratory marked successive phases in the education of a well-rounded public speaker." But in Elizabethan England, the orator was valued over the poet. "If orators were advocates, poets were 'makers,' articulate craftsmen who fashioned pleasing verbal artefacts out of airy nothing.... The poet was the orator's disreputable younger brother."

The poet's powers of persuasion had no ethical agenda; his licence to recombine syllables and words into seductively beautiful works of art knew no limits. His object was delight, and his notorious mentor was Ovid, the celebrant of wanton love and continuous change. Critics viewed the maker with mixed feelings of fascination and disapproval.... In fact, making verses was an infinitely more more complex mental task than making speeches. It is the difference between composing a double sestina in the language of Provençal and writing a business letter in French.

But the Scholars were expected to master both, which led to a group of "base-born" poets who wrote for money: Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson. In Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney argued that only gentlemen should write poetry. It was too important to be left to such lowlifes. Marlowe not only made his living from poetry, he also "formed strong personal attachments to stories about poverty, poetry and social mobility. The thundering eloquence of Tamburlaine's blank verse lines turns the Scythian shepherd into a mighty monarch and establishes Marlowe's supremacy in the London theatre of the 1580s at a stroke."

At school, Marlowe had a reputation for being "gentle and courteous." He conformed to the school's standards of behavior in order to make his way in the world. But after they left school, many of his fellow scholarship students became rebels against the establishment: The farmer's son Henry Jacob took two degrees at Oxford but "joined the Separatist movement and went into exile in Holland, .... later established a Congregationalist Church and founded a settlement in Holland." Samuel Kennet first became a Puritan and then converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit with a "mission to reconvert the English people." Benjamin Carrier became chaplain to James I before defecting to Rome. And Marlowe's accuser Richard Baines claimed that Marlowe planned to become a Catholic.

Moreover, many of the scholarship students found themselves unable to find work. Sir Francis Bacon argued that King James I should not found any more grammar schools because the produced young men "unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people."

The worst cases of all were young men like Christopher Marlowe, who received their BA and MA degrees, but still proved unable, or unwilling, to fill a respectable place in society.

2. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 25-44

Chapter Two: Lessons Learned in Childhood

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At the age of six, Marlowe started attending petty school, which taught children to read and write. Instruction largely consisted of learning the ABC's and memorizing religious texts, including a Catechism that contained the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Parents whose children, eight years and older, who could not say the Catechism were subject to a fine of ten shillings. The petty schools had been founded by Henry VIII: "He and Elizabeth viewed the instruction of children in English as a way of fashioning obedient subjects." The aim was to wean Englishmen off of Catholic iconography by instructing them in the Scriptures, but the method was not particularly successful. In one of the charges of atheism leveled against Marlowe by Richard Baines, Marlowe was said to have proclaimed, "if there be any god or any good Religion," it would be found in Catholicism because of its ritualistic and ceremonial character -- its theatricality. "The reformers overestimated the capacity of words to impose uniform meanings on the impressionable minds of young readers."

Moreover, because the method of instruction relied on memory of the text and not on examination of the ideas within the text, those who actually did think about what they had memorized began to question it. "The Tudor programme of popular religious instruction created the agnostic reaction that it was meant to pre-empt." The doctrine of the Trinity was a particular stumbling block, partly because it was not specifically based in the Scriptures. "During Marlowe's lifetime, atheism, a category unknown to the pre-Reformation world, became the 'sin of sins.'" Early "atheists" also questioned the doctrine of eternal damnation. "The fear of God was the bedrock of moral order in Marlowe's England." Contributing to the burgeoning unbelief was the instability of the church: "As the state church changed back and forth between Protestant and Catholic regimes, the dubious assertion that God upheld princely rule had the unintended consequence of compromising divine authority."

Meanwhile, young Marlowe also learned about the world on the streets of Canterbury, which because of its location on the way between Dover and London "attracted a steady stream of diplomats, soldiers, merchants and messengers going to and from France." The event that caused the greatest stir was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris on August 24, 1572, when Catholics led by the Duke of Guise murdered three thousand Protestants. Then, with the encouragement of Charles IX, another ten thousand were killed in other French cities. Refugees fleeing to England told the grisly stories, and bought the word massacre to England. In French the word originally referred to a slaughterhouse, but it now came to mean "mass murder." In Lyons, the soldiers had refused to carry out the execution of Protestants, so the authorities sent butchers into the prisons to do the killing. Two of Marlowe's early plays, Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta contain scenes of massacre, and the last of his plays to be performed was The Massacre at Paris.

In 1573, when Marlowe was nine years old, Queen Elizabeth visited Canterbury and on September 7 celebrated her fortieth birthday.

The queen had a genius for incorporating the rejected symbols of the Catholic faith into her own self-image.Trading on the discarded cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Elizabeth would fashion herself into the secular counterpart of the virgin queen.... Marlowe shared the queen's fascination with theatrical constructions of sovereignty. His early masterpiece Tamburlaine the Great considers monarchical self-fashioning from the standpoint of a young playwright at the outset of a stunning career. 

The record of Marlowe's education has a gap from the age of eight, which is when tradesmen's children usually left petty school, to the winter of 1578-79, when he won a scholarship to the King's School. During those six years, his father may have paid for his education at the King's School, but given the expense and his family's low income it's likely that he attended a free grammar school that Archbishop Matthew Parker had founded when Marlowe was five. "Since candidates for the Parker scholarship that sent Marlowe to Cambridge had to read music at sight, Christopher doubtless acquired this facility in the schoolhouse across the street from the Eastbridge Hospital."

The usual grammar school texts were William Lyly's Short Introduction of Grammar and A Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. Henry VIII and Elizabeth mandated Lyly's grammar because it was based on classical Latin texts and not on medieval church Latin: "It prepared Marlowe and his schoolfellows to think like Ovid and Cicero rather than St Thomas Aquinas." The Catechism instilled in students the basics of Calvinism: "bondage of the will, predestination, election and reprobation." The aim was to teach students obedience. Students copied these texts by hand and then repeated what they had transcribed under questioning. The entire system depended on "rote memorization and repetition." The Grammar involved learning "page after page of Latin verb forms and syntactical constructions with no overarching system to guide them through the maze." When they did begin to read Latin texts they were "actively discouraged from thinking about what they meant." It was, Lyly explained, "a discipline for governing boys by teaching, admonishing, rebuking, punishing and on all occasions." The whole system was designed to inculcate, as Riggs puts it, "a generalized attitude of deference to authority that suited the needs of Renaissance princes."

Classes were typically from six or seven in the morning to seven at night, six days a week, with religious instruction on Sundays and holidays. Meanwhile, boys who had left school at the age of eight and had not yet become apprentices, as they would in their teens, were left to run free. Even apprentices had the late afternoon, Sundays and holidays free. "Learning Latin was the labour-intensive alternative to indigenous youth culture."

The emphasis on classical Latin over medieval led to a contempt for the vernacular. "Medieval Latin incorporated the English word order; classical Latin dissolved it. Marlowe's introductory work on prose translation emphasized style at the expense of piety. It implied that the Holy Scriptures were inferior to the work of classical Roman authors." So when in one of his reported "blasphemies" Marlowe said that the New Testament was "filthily written," he was saying what "He had been taught to think ... since the age of ten." His dismissal of Christ's apostles as "base fellows" was also a consequence of his teaching.

The irony of these "damnable" opinions is that the apostles were supposed  to be base fellows. That was why Jesus chose them for his ministry; they spread the Word to all who had ears to hear in language that anyone could understand.

Marlowe also imbibed some of the contradictory messages of Calvinism. "Under Elizabeth I, external conformity became the master principle of church discipline." Even if you were not of the elect, those with a "true and lively faith," you were expected to behave as if you were. "In the Calvinist theology of the Catechism, only two or three of Marlowe's schoolfellows were presumed to speak from the heart, and God alone knew who they were." The rest were expected to go through the motions. "Queen Elizabeth, Archbishop Parker and Lord Burghley sought outward compliance with the state church, rather than inner assent to its doctrinal content," which Riggs aptly describes as a "'don't ask, don't tell' approach."

The tacit acceptance of hypocrites, commonly known as "close" or "inward" atheists, explains why unbelievers rarely came out of the closet.... Closet atheists were part of the social order; open atheists cried out for swift and violent retribution."