6. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 131-161

Second Age: Schoolboy; Chapter 9, Shakespeare's Small Library; Third Age: Lover, Chapter 10, The Married Man

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Ben Jonson was a man of books. Although he didn't attend university, he collected books and commented on them, and played a large part in getting Shakespeare's First Folio published. When his library was destroyed by fire in 1623, perhaps taking his own copy of the First Folio with it, he began collecting again. As Bate comments, "If only Jonson's annotations on Shakespeare had survived instead of those on Justus Lipsius's De Calumnia or Clement Edmonds's Observations on the autobiographical and historical writings of Julius Caesar!"

But no books known to have been owned by or annotated by Shakespeare have shown up, or at least the ones that have shown up are mostly demonstrable forgeries, leading Bate and others to conclude, "Where Jonson was a methodical reader, Shakespeare was an opportune one. He snapped up phrases and ideas from his reading, storing them in his capacious memory. He may not have bothered with underlinings and marginal annotation."

Bate conjectures that he may have borrowed most of the books that served him as sources for the poems and plays, and that one of the people who loaned him books was Richard Field, whom he had known at school in Stratford and who printed not only Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece but also North's Plutarch and a Latin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Field may also have supplied Shakespeare with Holinshed's Chronicles and John Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, which was a source for Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare seems to have paid tribute to Field in Cymbeline with a reference to "a very valiant Briton" named Richard du Champ. When Field printed foreign language books, he sometimes translated his name into the corresponding language on the title page, as when he called himself Ricardo del Campo in several Spanish books.

Another source for borrowed books would have been Shakespeare's patron, the earl of Southampton, and one of the patron's of Shakespeare's acting company, the earl of Pembroke. Ben Jonson may also have loaned or sold him books from his own library of more than two hundred volumes. But "even among literary men in the period it was not common to own large numbers of books," Bate notes. "The greatest scholar of the age, splendidly named Julius Caesar Scaliger, left 1,382 volumes at the time of his death in 1609."
I suspect that Shakespeare skimmed many a new volume at the bookstalls outside St. Paul's, but closely rad fewer books than is often imagined by bookish scholars, who (like everyone who writes about Shakespeare) have a subliminal desire to make him more like themselves than he really was."

Books would also have been a encumbrance for a man who never took permanent lodgings in London and who traveled to Stratford at least once a year. Among the books that Shakespeare may have owned are Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses and North's Plutarch, some of Ovid's other works in the original Latin, Horace's Odes, the plays of Plautus and Seneca, Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, perhaps in the Thomas Speght edition of Chaucer in 1598 or 1602, which would have been where he read "The Knight's Tale," the source for The Two Noble Kinsmen, on which he and Fletcher collaborated. He may also have had a copy of Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote, where he would have found the story of Cardenio that was the basis of the lost play on which he is said to have collaborated with Fletcher.

He may have known Gower's Confessio Amantis, the main source of Pericles, in which Gower himself appears as Chorus, but since the play was begun by George Wilkins, Shakespeare may have borrowed the book from Wilkins. There are no other borrowings from Gower in Shakespeare's work. When he was working on the history plays, he must have had a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles close at hand, as well as Edward Halle's Union of the Two Noble Illustre Families of Lancaster and York. His biblical allusions suggest a familiarity with the Bible in the Geneva translation and "the officially sanctioned Bishop's Bible," as well as the Book of Common Prayer.

Florio's translation of Montaigne influenced parts of The Tempest, and he probably consulted Florio's English-Italian dictionary and grammar, as well as a "teach-yourself-French handbook called Ortho-epia Gallica, by a Warwickshire contemporary named John Eliot," which would have taught him "enough French to put together the language lesson in Henry V." William Painter's Palace of Pleasure was a collection of stories by Greek, Roman, Italian and French authors, including Boccaccio, whose Decameron provided the story that is the basis of All's Well That Ends Well. The plots and details in Othello, Much Ado, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure come from a variety of Italian sources or French translations of them. Bate suggests that Italian would have been easier for Shakespeare to read than French because of his training in Latin.

Earlier plays were sources for King John, Henry V, King Lear and of course Hamlet. Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto was a source for The Winter's Tale and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde for As You Like It. It's unclear whether Shakespeare knew Spenser's The Faerie Queene, but he seems to have admired Samuel Daniel, particularly the sonnet sequence Delia, and probably read Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. He knew Sidney's prose Arcadia, from which he borrowed for the Gloucester plot in King Lear.

Thanks to his undoubted friendship with Richard Field and his very probable acquaintance with John Florio, Shakespeare had easy access to these books. This body of literature offers a deep insight into the mental world in which he lived. If one bears in mind the method of close reading in which he was trained at school, not to mention his prodigious memory for both the plays that he saw or acted in and the other books he devoured and disposed of more casually, then there need be no anxiety about the idea of a middle-class provincial grammar-school boy having the intellectual resources to write the plays. 

The parish records of Stratford-upon-Avon for 1570 through 1630 reveal that three-fourths of the men who married for the first time did so between the ages of twenty and thirty. "The mean age was twenty-six. The most frequently occurring was twenty-four. These figures are consistent with national averages." Only three men were in their teens when they married, but there was only one of these "in the whole sxty-year period whose bride was pregnant on the day of their marriage: the glover's son, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare." And people have been gossiping about that fact for the better part of the last four hundred twenty-eight years.

We know that "on November 27, 1582, a license was issued for the marriage of William Shaxpere and Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton." It was a special license, issued when the banns were not going to be read for three Sundays before the wedding, and it required "a bond of sureties, guaranteeing that the prospective partners were entitled to marry. The Worcester registry has such a bond, dated November 28, 1582, referring to William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford.... The wedding may be assumed to have taken place in early December 1582.... Susanna Shakespeare was baptized on May 26, 1584, so even if she was born somewhat prematurely there can be no doubt that Anne was pregnant on her wedding day."

Which Anne was it? Whateley, for whom the license was issued, or Hathwey, the name on the bond? (The Shaxpere/Shagspere problem is a negligible one: "Elizabethans were slapdash about names.") And was she named Anne? "Miss Hathaway, whom we always call Anne, is actually referred to in her father's will as Agnes, which would have been pronounced "Annes." Unless you want to make a big deal about it, and some do, it's best to assume that the clerk who meant to write down "Hathwey" got confused in the process, "perhaps because that same day a William Whateley had been involved in a case before the church court." The reference to Temple Grafton, a village much further away from Stratford than Shottery, where the Hathaways lived, is harder to explain. One theory holds that Anne had "been born a Hathwey in Stratford and married a Whateley in Temple Grafton" and that she was a widow. But Anne Hathaway had been recorded as unmarried in her father's will in the autumn of 1581, so that's cutting the whole marriage-widowhood-remarriage thing pretty close. "The probability is that Anne was indeed a 'maiden' and that she was in some form of service, perhaps with a distant relative, in Temple Grafton.

Her pregnancy would not have been much of a scandal: "it was generally agreed that a union was legally binding once a solemn spousal promise had been made, so the bedding often preceded the wedding." The age difference was more unusual: William was eighteen; Anne was "in her twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year." Some like to read Venus and Adonis, "in which an innocent boy is seduced by a sexually  voracious older woman (or rather goddess)" as autobiography.

I have an instinctive sense that the wooer whom Shakespeare most resembles is Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: clever but cold, an adventurer and a wordsmith who always looks after himself, a man on the lookout for a wealthy woman to help him out of a financial crisis and who has the good fortune to find one who is beautiful, ultraintelligent, and attracted to him. But there is no more evidence for this fancy than for the idea that William was somehow like Adonis (or Petruchio or Orlando or any of his other characters) or that Anne was like Venus or Kate "the shrew" or Adriana, the put-upon wife of The Comedy of Errors. 

Shakespeare's marriage may be the result of adolescent infatuation or an arranged marriage between two families who were close to each other. Anne was an heiress and Shakespeare's father was in debt. But Bate finds only "two certainties" in what we know about the marriage: One is that Shakespeare "was a sexually active young man" who found himself the father of three children -- Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith -- before he turned twenty-one. The other is that "the first formal record of his life subsequent to his baptism emerges from the diocesan consistory court."

We don't know what happened next, though an old story holds that he became "a schoolmaster in the country," which he couldn't have done in a grammar school of any great repute without a degree from university, although "he could have gained a post in a lesser school or as an 'usher,' a master's assistant." He could have supported his family that way, but sometime in the late 1580s he went to London to seek his fortune. Which he succeeded in doing: "By the summer of 1597 he was in the position to buy his wife New Place, the second-largest house in town -- albeit a property that was in a neglected state of repair, allowing him to obtain it at a knock-down price."

But it's the way he went about making his fortune that's surprising: Nobody got rich as an actor, and even when he realized that and started writing plays as well as acting in them, that was "an even more unlikely source of income than playing.... There were no wealthy writers." Bate sketches out the lives of twelve of the "most highly regarded dramatists among his contemporaries" to prove his point:

• John Lyly, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "in very modest circumstances," age 52. 
• George Peele, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "reputedly of syphilis" and in "financial difficulties," age 40.
• Robert Greene, born 1558, Cambridge educated, married once, died "in extreme poverty," age 34. 
• Thomas Kyd, born 1558, grammar school educated, never married, died "in poverty," age 35. 
• George Chapman, born 1559 or 1560, education unknown, never married, died without achieving financial success, age 74.
• Anthony Munday, born 1560, privately educated, married twice, died, with "an estate valued at the not-insignificant sum of £135," age 73. 
• Michael Drayton, born 1563, education unknown, never married, died, "with an estate valued at just under £25," age 68. 
• Christopher Marlowe, born 1564, Cambridge educated, never married, died, "stabbed to death by a twelvepenny dagger inserted just above the eye," age 29. 
• William Shakespeare, born 1564, grammar school educated, married once, died, "leaving a considerable property portfolio and several hundred pounds in cash," age 52. 
• Thomas Nashe, born 1567, Cambridge educated, never married, died, in "almost certain poverty," age 33. 
• Thomas Dekker, born about 1572, probably grammar school educated, married twice, died, "in debt, leaving his second wife in straitened circumstances," age about 60. 
• Ben Jonson, born 1572, Westminster School educated, married once, died, "impoverished but not in debt," age 65. 
• Thomas Heywood, born 1573, Cambridge educated, married once, died, "in respectable circumstances," age 68.

Shakespeare's "predecessors can be divided into those who married for money and those who were bachelors, either because they preferred to keep the company of men or because they could not afford to marry. No other major writer of the age married before reaching his legal majority, as he did." Like Shakespeare, Chapman, Drayton, and Munday tried to make a living by writing, but none of them invested in an acting company as he did. Munday, Chapman, Drayton, and Jonson achieved what financial stability they managed from patronage, and not from publication or theater performance. "It is striking that the men who did best out of their writing were the ones who began as actors: Munday, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood." The career that most resembles Shakespeare's is Heywood's: He began as an actor, made his reputation with a poem, Oenone and Paris, that he modeled on Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and also became a shareholder and playwright for a theater company, the Queen's Men.

Shakespeare made his fortune not by "literary innovation but by a business decision," buying into the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 and sharing in the profits. "The best estimate is that, once fully established, Shakespeare may have made between £150 and £200 per year from his shareholding. Modern comparisons are difficult to sustain, but in early-twenty-first-century terms, that is roughly the equivalent of £30,000-£40,000 or $60,000-$80,000 per year.... A few people in Elizabethan and Jacobean England were very much richer than Shakespeare, but the vast majority were very much poorer -- indeed, a high proportion of the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon were in poor relief." Moreover, Shakespeare sustained his wealth with investments in property in Stratford.

Becoming an investor of this kind, making enough money to keep the family going, and sustaining a marriage for well over thirty years: these are not the achievements of the romantic lover, but they are manifestations of love.

3. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 30-52

First Age: Infant; Chapter 3, The Boy From the Greenwood

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Shakespeare's paternal grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a yeoman farmer; his maternal grandfather, Robert Arden, owned the land that Richard farmed. It lay on the edges of the Forest of Arden. "Like Corin in As You Like It, the Arden family farmed on the edge of the forest.

In the romance, Rosalynd, by Thomas Lodge that was Shakespeare's source for As You Like It, the forest was actually the Ardennes, in France. Although Shakespeare "domesticated the setting," hints of that foreign location remain in the play: "The first we hear of the exiled Duke is that, 'like the old Robin Hood of England,' he is in the forest with a group of 'merry men.' Ostensibly the qualifier 'of England' is an indication that the action is supposed to take place in France, but the deeper effect is to identify Arden with Sherwood."

One of the themes of the play is the contrast of "the natural order of the forest with the flattery and envy of the court" -- the two polarities of Shakespeare's own life, Stratford versus London. Shakespeare invented two characters not in Lodge's original, Jaques and Touchstone, who "spar with each other because the satire of the former and the witty foolery of the latter are rival modes of mocking courtly pretensions."

"The merging of Ardennes and Arden is only the most extreme example of Shakespeare's tendency to swerve back to his point of origin." The fairies and artisans of A Midsummer Night's Dream are more English than Athenian, and in All's Well That Ends Well, Helen "disguises herself as a pilgrim on the way to 'Saint Jaques le Grand." Since she is traveling between Italy and France, Samuel Johnson, who assumed that the object of her pilgrimage was the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, "remarked that she appeared to have gone someway out of her road." But Shakespeare is also alluding to the parish church of St. James the Great in Snitterfield, the village where his father was born. Other such allusions appear in the Henry IV plays: "Peto was the name of a commissioner in a 1581 Stratford law case involving John Shakespeare, while a Bardolph and a Fluellen appear alongside Shakespeare's father in a 1592 list of those absent from church for fear of process for debt."

"The social and natural ecology of rural Warwickshire plays a key part in his vision.... He was a provincial outsider, and that may go some way to explaining why he was so fascinated by outsiders such as Shylock the Jew and Othello the Moor in Venice." The first reference we have to him in London, by the rival playwright Robert Greene in 1592, stigmatize him as an outsider, "an upstart crow." "English culture has a long history of men from the professions, armed with degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, looking down their noses at hardworking men from a trade background who lack a degree (which in the Elizabethan age allowed you to call yourself a gentleman). Greene's Groatsworth of Wit goes on to call Shake-scene a 'rude groom' and a 'peasant.'"

But Shakespeare was up to the challenge, and he wrote Venus and Adonis "as if to show that you didn't need an Oxford or Cambridge degree to turn out elegant poetry in imitation of the classics of ancient Rome." But even in it he introduces elements of country life that have an actuality that comes from direct observation, such as his account of "poor Wat," a hunted hare. "There can be little doubt that poor Wat is a Shakespearean memory of a pursuit through the warrens of his native Warwickshire." In one of his earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew, he adapts an earlier anonymous play. Both begin with the framing device of Christopher Sly watching the performance, but in the earlier play "this scene is completely without local realization, whereas Shakespeare's version ... is full of detail, ranging from questions of the proper pedigree of rural gentry families to specific Warwickshire place-names."

About ten years later, writing As You Like It, he uses his own given name, William, for the country bumpkin  who encounters the court fool Touchstone.

Katherine Duncan-Jones brilliantly suggests that Touchstone as well as William is a version of Shakespeare: "Their dialogue can be read as an exchange between the wealthy and quick-witted playwright and the provincial youth he has left behind him in the Forest of Arden."

Shakespeare's Warwickshire origins are also reflected in the play King John, which is, Bate asserts, the one history play "that most explicitly asks what it might mean to speak for England." It deals with the questions of legitimacy and inheritance that were especially significant "at a time when an aged childless queen was sitting on the throne." King Lear also deals with the question of legitimacy in the conflict between the virtuous legitimate heir Edgar and the villainous bastard Edmund, but King John provocatively reverses things with "a more challenging possibility: suppose that a great king dies and that his bravest, most honest, and most intelligent son is an illegitimate one."

The Bastard in King John was born in Northamptonshire and "is the voice of Shakespeare's own place of origin, the Midlands, deep England. He is given a choice: to inherit the Falconbridge estates or take his 'chance' and assume the name, though not the patrimony, of the royal father who sired him out of wedlock." The Bastard's identification with the Shakespearean Midlands is also emphasized by his allusion to his his half-brother as "Colbrand the Giant," a legendary Danish invader who was defeated by Guy of Warwick in a popular folk tale. "If Robert Falconbridge is symbolically Colbrand, then Philip the Bastard is symbolically Guy, a Warwickshire folk hero. Perhaps he is even a version of Robin Hood, with the sheriff of Northampton standing in for his colleague from Nottingham." And just as Robin Hood was a supporter of Richard Coeur de Lion, "As the play progresses, the Bastard's role shifts to that of stand-in for the dead Coeur de Lion.... The Bastard is the conscience of the nation, the symbolic heir of Lionheart, the voice of the shires." And Bate sees him as a surrogate for Shakespeare as well: "Who speaks for deep England? A challenger of legitimacy. An entrepreneur. A player. A man who idealizes the shires even as he leaves them to enter the theater, the market, the emergent empire. Who speaks? A Shakespeare."

The only other member of his family to follow William Shakespeare to London was his brother Edmund, sixteen years his junior. Edmund died in 1607, and the records of the church where he was buried, "a short walk from the Globe Theatre," list him as "a player." It's possible that he served as an apprentice to his brother, for a list of the apprentices in the company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men dated 1597 or early 1598 includes the name "Ned." Edmund would have been the right age at the time, about seventeen. Bate says that Edmund probably died of the plague: "For most of the time from the summer of 1606 to the summer of 1608, plague raged and the theaters remained closed." William probably spent much of this time in Stratford, where his daughter Susanna married the physician John Hall in June 1607 and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, the following February.

John Hall was a skilled herbalist, and he left a casebook describing many of his cures.

We must always be wary of attempts to map Shakespeare's life onto his work. But writers cannot avoid drawing on their experience. Is it a coincidence that in Shakespeare's earlier works there are just two comic doctors -- Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor -- whereas in the plays written after John Hall's arrival in Stratford-upon-Avon, there are several dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men? Among them are the physician who has to deal with that difficult patient Lady Macbeth, the doctor who revives the exhausted King Lear in the quarto version of that play, and Dr. Cornelius in Pericles, that play about father and daughter, death and rebirth, written in the wake of Edmund Shakespeare's death and during the final months of the pregnancy of Susanna and perhaps the first weeks of the life of Shakespeare's first grandchild, Elizabeth.

The later plays also make much of the contrast of city and country: the court in Sicilia and the countryside of Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, and the court in Cymbeline contrasted with the countryside of Wales.

For Shakespeare, London was the place associated with the pursuit of honor, status, wealth, and recognition at court, but also the place of plague and mass death. And of the commercialization of sex: the link between the theater industry and the sex trade was symbiotic.... Stratford-upon-Avon, in contrast to London, was associated with stability, community, garden, field, and health.... It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Shakespeare turned to pastoral romance in the plague years around 1607-10: of all his plays, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are the ones that have the most distinctive air of having been written back home in Stratford.

John Hall's herbal knowledge also dovetails with his father-in-law's own botanical interests. Of the reference to Innogen's mole, "cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / in the bottom of a cowslip," Bate asks, "Is there any other English poet, save the countryman John Clare, who has such an eye as this?" (Bate has written a biography of Clare.) Ophelia's flowers and Lear's garland are two of the more familiar instances of Shakespeare's botanical knowledge. "When Lear's fantastic garland is described, it contains exactly what one would find in an arable field and its margins in England at the end of summer or the beginning of autumn.... Shakespeare, brought up in the country, had a field education, in all probability before he even went to school."

Shakespeare was born into the herbal economy of rural England.... Perhaps because he toured Kent with his fellow actors, Shakespeare observed the thriving samphire-gathering trade on Dover cliff. But he always remained more interested in the domestic rather than the global plant economy. He evinced little interest in the international spice trade. Not even The Tempest, with its imperial matter and semi-New World setting, is about the things on which empire was built; trade, spice.... Provincial Shakespeare, who had been an infant deep in the shires, was always more interested in different species of pear and apple than the globalized nutmeg and saffron market.

[Bate's observations reinforce something I've always thought about in considering the arguments of those who claim that the country bumpkin couldn't have written the sophisticated plays, and that therefore they must have been the work of an educated nobleman like the Earl of Oxford. But turn the argument on its head: Would Oxford -- or Bacon, or Marlowe, or Queen Elizabeth, to name the more far-fetched "contenders" -- have had the kind of first-hand knowledge of rural life and specifically of Warwickshire that Bate amply demonstrates William Shakespeare to have had?] 

12. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 293-315

Chapter Fourteen: Waiting for the End

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The playhouses were shut down as "a menace to public safety" on June 23, 1592, and remained closed when the plague arrived in August. In the meanwhile, Robert Greene wrote an anti-theatrical open letter, published in A Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance, to Marlowe, Nashe and Peele, urging them to stop writing for the theaters. Greene accuses Marlowe of a Machiavellian atheism and predicts he will come to a bad end.

Marlowe returned to Canterbury that summer, and in September was charged with brawling in the streets. He was sued by William Corkine, a tailor, who said Marlowe attacked him. Marlowe's lawyer countered with the charge that Corkine had attacked Marlowe. The case was settled out of court.

Marlowe was accumulating a substantial criminal record. He had been arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. He had been taken for coining and remanded to Lord Burghley. The justices of Middlesex Country and the City of Canterbury knew him as a street fighter and violent man. He had failed to keep his bond. He had been publicly accused, albeit under an alias, of atheism, a crime punishable by death. To make matters worse, the attacks on the stage, coupled with the resurgent plague, threatened his livelihood.

During the theatrical hiatus, Marlowe returned to Ovid and to verse, responding to the Countess of Pembroke's wish for Ovidian poems. He set out to retell the story of Hero and Leander, basing his poem on the version by Musaeus. "Marlowe's narrator weaves in and out of Musaeus's story, embellishing his Greek source with decorative tableaux, meandering digressions and seductive ploys." Hero and Leander "taught Elizabethan readers everything they needed to know about sex but were afraid to ask -- both normative and illicit, heterosexual and homosexual." The first edition, published posthumously in 1598, was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham by the printer, Edward Blount, who claimed that Marlowe would have wanted it that way. (Shakespeare, too, was using the period when the theaters were closed to write verse such as Venus and Adonis and to hunt for patronage.)

Marlowe's translation of Lucan's Civil Wars was also probably done about this time, and was also published posthumously. Lucan was on the side of the Republic, and his work "sides with the losers, Brutus, Cassius, Cato and Pompey.... If the Aeneid is about the creation of the Roman empire, the Civil Wars looks toward its destruction.... Writing rapidly, and under a virtual death sentence, Lucan portrays a world governed by accident, where radically contingent events destabilize te master-narrative of the imperial regime."

The theaters reopened in at the very end of 1592, and at the end of January Marlowe's last play, The Massacre at Paris was performed by Strange's Men. The existing text seems to be a "memorial reconstruction," based on the actors' recollections of the play and the roles they played in it. It is half the length of each of the parts of Tamburlaine and of The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It covers the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 and the conflict between the Duke of Guise and King Henri III that took place in 1586-88. Marlowe's intent was "to set the most shocking aspects of the French religious wars before English theatregoers."

Although his play follows the historical record, Marlowe introduces the fictional murder of the Protestant philosopher Peter Ramus by the Duke of Guise, again to demonstrate the abuse of a base-born scholar. And the story of Guise and Henri III follows the same pattern as Edward II:  "Henri takes up Edward's part, Gaveston, Spencer and Baldock metamorphose into Epernoun, Mugeroun and Joyeux; Mortimer becomes the Guise; and the young Edward III finds his counterpart in the Protestant King of Navarre."

Some of the material in the play is based on Marlowe's firsthand knowledge of the conflict between the king and Guise, which he had obtained during his work as a spy. "The brief documentary scenes that succeed one another in The Massacre at Paris resemble diplomatic dispatches; these were the raw material of intelligence fieldwork.... His dramatization of Henri's final testament includes at least one detail that appears only in Lyly's confidential report to Queen Elizabeth about the assassination.... To judge simply from what the actors remembered, Marlowe was evolving away from the stage and towards a more direct confrontation with the history of his own times."

9. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 221-249

Chapter Ten: Notoriety. Chapter Eleven: "He Is Like Dr Faustus"

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Marlowe's play turned Tamburlaine into a popular-culture hero, "an urban legend of plebeian self-assertion," but it also "had a galvanizing influence on the career of his twenty-three-year-old creator." It also led other university graduates, such as Robert Greene, George Peele and Thomas Lodge, to venture into the theater with plays that imitated Tamburlaine. But only Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy came close to matching Marlowe's poetic and dramatic skill, and the success of their plays revolutionized English dramatic verse: "Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic playwrights used rhymed lines; henceforth the dominant medium would be blank verse." Moreover, "In The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine, subjects punish their rulers. Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic violence runs from the top down or circulates among equals; henceforth, it issues from the bottom up as well."

Tamburlaine benefited from accidental good timing as well:

The zenith of Tamburlaine's war upon the world ... comes with the destruction of Babylon. In biblical typology, this event prefigured the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world. For the spectators of 1587, confronting the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada and the armies of the Pope, the fall of Babylon warned the English that they too lay in the path of divine vengeance.

There were critics, of course. Thomas Nashe belittled Marlowe and Kyd for their use of "the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse." And Ben Jonson would later refer to "the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers," although Jonson's put-down is perhaps aimed more at the imitations than at the original. Then, as now, there was a sense that popular acclaim vitiated a work's pretense to be Art. And then there was the problem of upstart writers with no university education, such as Kyd and, later, Shakespeare.

The art of making "pure iambic verse," formerly the preserve of educated scholars, had become available to any customer who could afford standing room in the yard or the price of a drink. That is why a social conservative like Nashe found Marlowe's blank verse so disturbing: anyone could make it.

The images in Tamburlaine that most caught the imagination of the time were the caging of the emperor Bajazeth; the white, red and black tents; and the harnessed kings with the bits in their mouths drawing Tamburlaine's chariot. They captured not only the popular imagination but also the religious: The Puritan John Field preached a sermon comparing the black tents to the wrath of God. "John Field, the prominent anti-theatrical writer, apparently refers to a live performance of Tamburlaine."

Next up seems to have been Dr. Faustus, although exact dating of the play is difficult. There was a vogue of plays about magicians in late Elizabethan times, but no one knows whether Marlowe set the fashion or followed it. His main source was an English translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Faustus. The German book appeared in 1587, and the translation may have appeared shortly after, although the only surviving text dates from 1592. The German book was such a success on the continent that translations into Danish, Dutch, French and Czech came out immediately, so it's not likely that the English version should have been five years behind.

The Faust legend seems to begin with Simon Magus, a first century C.E. Samaritan who is referred to in Acts 8:9-24, and in the Apocrypha. He was said to have "kept the reincarnated Helen of Troy as his consort" and to have had a disciple named Faustus whom he turned into his double. The real-life George (or Johann) Faust died about 1540. Philipp Melanchthon, the follower of Luther, is responsible for publicizing the legend that Faust had sold his soul to the devil, part of the hard line that the Lutherans took on witchcraft.

Marlowe's version doesn't take Faust nearly as seriously as the Lutherans did. His Faustus is given to mistakes such as quoting Cicero when he's supposedly reading Aristotle, quoting Aristotle when he thinks he's talking about Galen, and so on. "The erudite author, Christopher Marlowe, did know the right citations and scripted the wrong ones into Faustus's part." He also mangles quotations from Scripture: "Faustus chops each of the Scriptural verses in half, in both cases citing the divine condemnation while omitting the promise of redemption that follows. After proclaiming 'The reward of sin is death,' St Paul writes, 'but the gift of God is eternal life' (Romans 6:23)." In doing so he follows the example of Calvin, who also "isolates the first half of Romans 6:23 and insists that 'all sin is mortal.'" In Calvinist doctrine, only the elect will receive the forgiveness of God and receive eternal life.

Critics rightly point out that Faustus is hideously mistaken about the Bible; but the Church he is rejecting has taught him to make precisely these mistakes. Marlowe, who had already been taxed with atheism, unveils in Dr Faustus the ecclesiastical basis of his own unbelief.... Divine justice was supposed to terrorize the reprobate into good behaviour; yet the godless had ample reason to disbelieve in a God who had already condemned them to sin and damnation regardless of their earthly conduct.

And despite Faustus's ambitions to "wield godlike powers," he becomes nothing more than "a magician for hire and confidence man," reduced near the end of the play to practical jokes on a horse trader. In this respect, Faustus is something of a self-portrait of Marlowe: "Herein lay the irony of giving poor boys like John Faustus and Christopher Marlowe a classical education. Books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority.... Dr Faustus signals Marlowe's awareness of his own position in the world after Cambridge."

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.