Christopher Marlowe: the muses’ darling

Many fascinating secrets and mysteries surround the life of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the most fiery character in English literature.  None of his letters, diaries or drafts has survived to throw light on his spectacular classical education, covert homosexuality, defiant atheism, career as a spy, role as a cunning counterfeiter, five arrests, and accidental or deliberate murder.

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival (Norton/Bodley Head, 334p, $32/£25) is erudite and stylish (though repetitive).  In his Acknowledgements, the well-beloved and well-connected Greenblatt gratuitously lists 38 admirers who have only a precarious connection to his book. Marlowe—whose name is not mentioned in the long title—sometimes swerves out of the book for many pages while Greenblatt fills in the blanks of his life with a masterly evocation of the historical and cultural background.  Traitors, for example, were hanged, cut down while still alive, cut into four pieces and disemboweled.  (Some kind people may have suggested, when punishment became less severe, that victims be sliced into halves instead of quarters.)  Greenblatt is especially good on the relations of Marlowe and Shakespeare, who collaborated on parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy.

Marlowe’s father John, a poor uneducated shoemaker in Canterbury, had a belligerent temper and got into trouble for two serious brawls with his apprentices. Marlowe fils had a “dangerous reputation for blasphemy and provocation.”  An enemy declared that Marlowe was able to show sound reasons for atheism based on the forbidden speculations of the “School of Night”, which also included Sir Walter Raleigh and the brilliant scientist Thomas Harriot.  Liberated from all theological and moral restraints, such scholars believed that knowledge brought power, not virtue.

Greenblatt writes that Marlowe had “fantastic verbal adroitness, a streak of violence and taste for risk-taking. . . and was daring, reckless, rash, overreaching and possibly doomed.”  He condemned himself by claiming that “Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest,” and that “Christ and St. John were lovers.”  He also boldly declared that “he had as good a right to coin as the queen of England,” and “they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.”

With  brains and luck Marlowe won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School in Canterbury.  Its main, and almost exclusive, purpose was to train the scholars to speak and write fluent Latin.  Somerset Maugham also went to King’s School.  He too was a homosexual, atheist, playwright and spy, and is buried on the grounds of the school (which he disliked).  In 1979, when I was teaching for a year at the University of Kent in Canterbury, I took the Catholic novelist Anthony Burgess to the Cathedral.  As we strolled through the Precincts, he reminded me that it had been built and consecrated as a Catholic church and, he firmly believed, still was one.

Marlowe’s scholarship to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, “was intended to recruit gifted young students from poor families for lifelong service in the Church of England,” a calling for which he was clearly unsuited.

Marlowe was arrested five times in his short life.

In September 1579 he was involved in a street brawl and arrested on suspicion of murder.

In January 1592 he was arrested in the Netherlands for trying to counterfeit Dutch shillings.

In May 1592 he was arrested for threatening constables in Shoreditch.

In September 1592 he was again arrested for assaulting a man in Canterbury.

On May 12, 1593 he was accused under torture, by the playwright Thomas Kyd, of atheism—a capital offence.

But Marlowe always escaped and was never convicted of any crime.

All the English kings before Henry VIII were Catholic.  Henry broke with the Pope and the Catholic Church, his son Edward VI was also Protestant, his elder daughter Mary was Catholic and his younger daughter Elizabeth was Protestant.  Most of the English had been brought up as Catholics and found it confusing, difficult, even impossible, to keep changing their religion under the fierce laws of these changing rulers.  Under Elizabeth (1558-1603), Catholics suffered extreme penalties for secretly practising their religion.  During her reign, in which Marlowe spent his entire life, there was always the great danger of invasions by France and Spain, who wanted to kill Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic king.

While at Cambridge, Marlowe was recruited as a spy by Sir Francis Walsingham: a most subtle searcher of hidden secrets, a distinctly alarming, spiderlike and ruthless inquisitor.  Marlowe’s contemporary Thomas Nashe wrote that the poet, well-equipped as a spy, had “the art of dissembling at his fingers’ ends as perfect as any courtier”.  Convincing evidence exists for his espionage: his unexcused absence from Cambridge between February and July 1587; his increased expenditure at the buttery when he returned; the expensive dress he wore in his portrait; his 1592 arrest for counterfeiting in the Netherlands, which proved he’d been on the Continent; and an extraordinary intervention on his behalf.  In 1587, after Marlow had been absent from the university without permission for long periods, he was denied an MA degree.  But a high-level letter from the Queen’s Privy Council informed his college that “he had done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded for faithful dealing.”  Three days later he was granted the disputed degree.

Marlowe went to Rheims—a town in northern France with a magnificent cathedral— where Catholic priests were trained before returning to Protestant England to perform Mass in secret.  From 1580 to 1587 the Catholic seminary in Rheims was the nursery of almost every political intrigue by exiles against Elizabethan England.

Posing as a Catholic dissident and acting as a secret agent, Marlowe reported on the clandestine activities in Rheims, and carried hidden documents in cipher back and forth across the English Channel.  He even learned how to send secret messages in an egg by using invisible ink on the outside and having it seep into the white on the inside.  Greenblatt writes that Marlowe “entered a world in which virtually everyone was in disguise and it was fantastically difficult to know whom to trust. . . . He was involved in betraying people whom he knew and who trusted him.”  In the early 1930s the notorious modern spies—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—were also recruited at Cambridge.

Like his rival Shakespeare, Marlowe created many great lines:

 Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove.

(“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”)

I clinged her naked body, down she fell.

Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss;

Jove send me more such afternoons as this.

(Translation of Ovid’s Fifth Elegy)

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,

And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about;

And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere

Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

(Tamburlaine)

In 1971, when I traveled by Volkswagen to Iran, I also, like Tamburlaine, “rode in triumph through Persepolis.”

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of  Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss;

Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies!

Why this is hell nor am I out of it.

 Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come!

(Last 3 quotes from Doctor Faustus)

To hide those parts which men delight to see. (Edward II)

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?  (Hero and Leander)

Greenblatt observes of Marlowe’s mighty line and Central Asian hero, “it is rare for a work of art to change everything so quickly and decisively.  But Tamburlaine [1587] is one of those rare instances.  No one in English poetry had ever spoken with the grandeur and magnificent self-confidence of Marlowe’s Scythian hero.”  A modern equivalent of this radical change occurred in 1922 when Joyce published Ulysses and Eliot The Waste Land.

Greenblatt remarks that “Marlowe’s Malta is a world of ruthless trickery and danger.”  In the Jew of Malta Barabas “embarks on a series of homicidal schemes that he carries out with sadistic glee.”  At the end of the play his evil plot is foiled and he drops through a trapdoor into a cauldron of boiling oil.   Hemingway took the italicised words from The Jew of Malta—“But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead”—as the title of his story.

In 1511 Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation at Wittenberg University, 40 miles north of Leipzig in Germany.  Both Marlowe’s Faustus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet have studied there.  For the first time on the stage Doctor Faustus used the intimate soliloquy to reveal the complex inner life of the characters.  In that play Mephistopheles’ recruitment of Faustus recalls Marlowe’s recruitment as a spy: “The play brilliantly captures the courtship dance that leads up to the demonic compact—the fraught conversations, the misgivings, the assurances, and the promises, the approach to the fatal moment after which there is no turning back.”  Three superb modern versions of the Faust legend are Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936), the film of that novel starring Klaus Maria Brandauer (1981) who makes a pact with the Nazis to advance his stage career, and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947).

In 1585 the 21-year-old Marlowe was portrayed with flaming auburn hair touching his collar, pale skin, high forehead, deep-set penetrating eyes, drooping split mustache, thin beard along his jaw and chin, full lips and a cool, pert, superior expression.  The zig-zag pattern of his black, velvety, puff-sleeved doublet slashes the cloth to reveals an orange silk lining.  He wears a fine linen shirt with a wing-like white collar covered by a thin veil, and shows his right hand above his crossed arms.  Three vertical rows of 14 large gold buttons on his chest and 16 horizontal buttons on his sleeves form a large, square, cryptic W.  This initial could suggest his work for the spymaster Walsingham.  The symbolism of his dress also identifies Marlowe as a poet.  The buttons form a stylized Greek psi, which stands for his psyche: his mind, spirit or soul.  The Latin motto on the picture, translated as “That which nourishes me destroys me,” was prophetic.  Hero and Leander described the luxurious dress in the portrait: “The outside of her garments were of lawn, / The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn.”

Greenblatt calls Marlowe a Conradian “secret sharer.”  Like the adventurous espionage of Christopher Marlowe (sometimes spelled Marlow), Charlie Marlow (with initials CM) in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness goes on a competitive, duplicitous and dangerous mission in hostile territory beyond the seas to find the hidden mad Kurtz.  Christopher Marlowe courted danger and “felt the thrill of a tightrope walker, aware that one slip could lead to a fatal fall.”  In Heart of Darkness Charlie Marlow observes of Kurtz, “It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. . . . He had stepped over the edge while I had been permitted [by his fatal example] to draw back my hesitating foot.”

Gifted poets like Marlowe, who died in their twenties with their promise unfulfilled, include Thomas Chatterton, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mikhail Lermontov, Arthur Rimbaud, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.  As Marlowe wrote in  Doctor Faustus, “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight.”

On May 30, 1593 in Deptford, a port on the south bank of the Thames, Marlowe spent eight daylight hours, from 10 to 6, with three acquaintances at the house of widow Bull.  After a seemingly trivial argument about paying the reckoning (the bill) for eight meals, the hot-blooded Marlowe started the fight, wounded one of the men and then, in self-defense, was stabbed deep in the right eye and died instantly of the wound.  There are many theories about this murder.  Greenblatt agrees with David Riggs who concluded, in his biography of 2004, that Marlowe “was killed because of his atheism” and that “the fatal command was given by Elizabeth herself when she urged that it be prosecuted to the full.”  But this does not explain why they murdered a valuable secret agent and waited eight hours to kill him.  In As You Like It, the court jester Touchstone alludes to the death of Shakespeare’s friend: “When a man’s verses cannot be understood . . . It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath last year.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking  at Hemingway will appear on November 19th, The Biographer’s Quest in April 2026.

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