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Home , Ingram Frizer, John Penry, Nicholas Skeres, Robert Poley, Thomas Kyd

Marlowe’s Ghost

Christopher Marlowe CHRONOLOGY

His life he contemned in the comparison of the liberty of speech . . . princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed. —Thomas Nash, The Unfortunate Traveler

1564 Feb. 26: Christopher Marlowe christened in Canterbury 1579 Kit studies the classics, music, and languages at the King’s School 1581 Marlowe commences divinity studies at Cambridge University 1584 Marlowe receives B.A. 1587 The Privy Council praises Marlowe’s “good service” to his country and orders the university to grant his M.A. degree Tamburlaine performed in London 1589 Marlowe and fellow poet Thomas Watson acquitted in self-defense following the death of William Bradley in a swordfight 1588-93 Marlowe composes Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and The Massacre at Paris 1591 Marlowe shares a room with dramatist Thomas Kyd 1592 Jan. 26: Marlowe arrested in the Netherlands for counterfeiting, sent back to England, and released by Burghley August: Workers riot in connection with The Contention Nov. 8: Buckhurst proposes Thomas Drury investigate a heretical and seditious sect possibly associated with Baines and Marlowe 1593 January: Marlowe writes Hero and Leander in Scadbury February: Rippon incident followed by arrest of Separatists The queen, Whitgift, and Parliament clash over religious freedom March: Richard Cholmeley’s Remembrances drafted charging Marlowe with atheism and sedition March 24: Separatist leaders Barrow and Greenwood hung April 5: The Dutch Church libel appears signed “Tamburlaine” May 12: Kyd arrested and under torture implicates Marlowe May 18: Privy Council issues a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest May 20: Marlowe released on his own recognisance May 27 or June 2: The Baines Note charging Marlowe with atheism, blasphemy, and sedition sent to the queen May 29: Separatist leader John Penry hung May 30: Marlowe “dies” in a tavern brawl in Deptford June 1: Coroner’s inquest finds Frizer killed Marlowe in self- defense and the poet “buried” in St. Nicholas’s Churchyard 24 Marlowe and Whitgift, the Mighty Opposites, Vie for the Queen’s Allegiance

’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensèd points Of mighty opposites. —Hamlet (5.2.64–66)

ost people today know little, if anything, about Chris- topher “Kit” Marlowe. As the archetypal angry young man on the Elizabethan stage, so the story goes, he died tragically at a young age from hubris, ambivalent sexuality, or other self-inflicted wounds. His budding genius was eclipsed by that of his exact contemporary, William Shakespeare, whom Ben Jonson extolled as as “Soul of the Age,” the “Sweet Swan of Avon,” and “the Starre of Poets,” and whom many consider to have been the most glorious writer of all time.1 Another main character in our drama will be Queen Elizabeth, who presided over this golden age of literature, culture, and exploration, and is one of the most revered monarchs—and best known women—in history. During her long forty-five-year reign, England adroitly maintained its independ- ence, narrowly avoided civil war between Protestants and Catholics, and evolved from a small, insular island nation into a mighty power, competing for supremacy with Spain, the richest empire in the world. Then there is John Whitgift, the third leading actor in our drama, who almost no one today has heard of. But at the time, he was the most loathed and feared man in England. For the first several generations of English set- tlers in America, he was remembered as a tyrant of biblical proportions, whose wave of religious persecution set in motion the Pilgrim and Puritan exodus. The position that he held, archbishop of Canterbury, continues 25 26 Hamlet today, though its occupant only attracts public attention when he upholds some obscure doctrinal point affecting the worldwide Anglican Church. Drawn together in a stormy triangle of competing allegiances and epic visions, the lives and fortunes of these three Renaissance spirits are indis- pensable to understanding Hamlet, the world’s most problematic play. In this titanic struggle, the stakes extended far beyond the courts at Whitehall and Elsinore. They involved nothing less than the soul of England and the modern world. Also central to this story are William Cecil, or Lord Burghley, the lord treasurer of England and the queen’s oldest and ablest adviser, and his son, Robert Cecil, who served on the Privy Council—the queen’s cabinet—for nearly a decade, succeeded his father, and orchestrated the peaceful accession of James VI of Scotland as England’s new king when Elizabeth passed away. Some of the paths and byways that we follow in this section, especially those involving arcane theological doctrines, royal pronouncements, and dialectical word play, may seem like digressions, leading away from the goal. But like pursuing a long, winding thread, they ultimately lead out of the dark labyrinth surrounding the Shakespeare authorship controversy into the light of understanding.

1 When That Fell Arrest

But be contented when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away, —Sonnet 74

Good Service he year 1593 began auspiciously, with Marlowe starting work on Hero and Leander. The plague had broken out the previous year and seriously disrupted the London stage. The author of Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and other immensely popular plays turned his hand to narrative poetry while waiting for theatrical life to resume. There was a brief respite from the epidemic at the end of January, and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris debuted at the Rose, but then the plague returned and the theaters again closed. The hia- Marlowe’s Ghost 27 tus brought economic hardship to those who earned their living from the stage, and during the last year, Marlowe’s fortunes had ebbed. In Flushing, an English outpost on the Dutch seacoast, he was charged with treason, apostasy (going over to the Catholic cause), and counterfeiting by Richard Baines, a former priest and informer for the Crown. Sent back to England in January 1592 by Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, Marlowe was interrogated by William Cecil, Lord Burghley—the lord treasurer, Queen Elizabeth’s principal advisor of state, and for all practical purposes England’s prime minister—and released despite the capital charges leveled against him. Marlowe’s charmed existence has led most historians to conclude that he was a courier, spy, or double agent and that his service to Her Majesty’s government went back to his university days at Cambridge.2 The religious wars of sixteenth-century Europe dominated the Elizabethan Age, and Protestant England maintained constant vigilance against Catholic plots, domestic and foreign. In 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded for conspiring against Elizabeth, her cousin, and the following year, the great Spanish Armada, a naval crusade bent on returning England to the Catholic fold, was turned back. At Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1581 at age seventeen and received his B.A. in 1584, Marlowe may have been recruited by Burghley, who, among his many official duties, was chancellor of the university. Absences of weeks at a time interrupted Marlowe’s studies, and rumors cir- culated that he was visiting Rheims, a town in France east of Paris near the site of an English college that trained and infiltrated Catholic priests into England. As a master’s candidate at Corpus Christi College, Marlowe was expected to take holy orders and become a Protestant divine. In 1531 Henry VIII severed relations with the Catholic Church in Rome, which opposed his divorce. A Protestant Order of Common Service and Prayer was introduced during the short reign of his son Edward VI, but the island realm reverted to Catholicism under his daughter Queen Mary in the early 1550s. Known as “Bloody” Mary, she instituted a reign of terror in which hundreds of Protestants were burned at the stake and nearly a thousand fled to exile on the Continent. The Religious Settlement introduced by Elizabeth, her step-sister and successor, in 1559 recognized the supremacy of the Church of England and granted the Crown “Jurisdiction over the State Ecclesiastical and Spirituall,” including the “reformation, order, and correction” of all “errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities.” The Act of Uniformity required all subjects to accept the Book of Common Prayer as the foundation of faith and worship and prohibited any “derogation, depraving, or despising” of its contents “in 28 Hamlet any interludes, plays, songs, rhymes, or by other open words.”3 While Oxford University had been purged of Catholics by the early 1580s, Cambridge remained a thicket of discontent. Some professors and seminarians privately resisted the Church of England’s new dispensation and sympathized with festive Catholic rituals and traditional doctrines that had been observed for centuries. Whatever his true sympathies, Marlowe’s absences and rumors caused university officials to withhold his master’s diploma. In June 1587, the Queen and Privy Council intervened on his behalf:

Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley [a variant on his name] was determined to haue gone beyond the seas to Reames & there to remain, Their Lordships thought good to certifie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaued him selfe orderlie and discreetelie wherebie he had done her Majestie good service, and deserued to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge: Their Lordships request was that the rumor thereof should be allaied by all possible meanes, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not Her Majesies pleasure that anie one emploied, as he had been in matters touching the benefitt of his country should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’affaires he went about.4

Since both Burghley and Francis Walsingham, the secretary of state and chief spymaster, were on the Privy Council at the time, historians conjecture that Marlowe infiltrated Jesuit cells on campus, posed as a Catholic convert on sojourns across the English Channel, or served as a courier to France or Belgium in order to garner intelligence on papal intrigues. Whatever his mission, university students of superior intellect and eloquence were prime can- didates for government service, just as they are today. Marlowe’s growing interest in the theater and wandering companies of players further lent him perfect cover for foreign travel and clandestine assignments. As Marlowe notes in The Massacre at Paris:

Did he not draw a sort of English priests From Douai to the seminary at Rheims, To hatch forth treason ’gainst their natural Queen? (21.105–107)

Christopher Marlowe lived in this era of religious upheaval. To understand his roles as scholar, dramatist, and spy, we must return to his roots. Christened on February 26, 1564, in the church of St. George the Martyr, Marlowe was born into a humble family in Canterbury, the historic pilgrimage city immortalized in Chaucer’s tales and home of St. Thomas à Becket, the twelfth-century martyr. His father, John Marlowe, was descended from Marlowe’s Ghost 29 a line of tanners and was a shoemaker from Ospringe near Faversham and later free-lanced as a law clerk. Kit’s mother, Katherine Arthur, was the daughter of a yeoman and his wife from Dover, the coastal city whose chalk cliffs overlooked the English Channel. His older sister, Mary, died when Marlowe was four and two younger brothers died at birth, so he grew up in a household with four younger sisters (Margaret, Jane, Dorothy, and Anne) and a brother, Thomas, who was born when he was twelve. In 1573, when Christopher was nine, Queen Elizabeth arrived in Canterbury on a state visit, or “royal progress” as it was called, and held court for two weeks. The event featured a magnificent banquet, pageants, and public entertainments treasured long after in the memories of local res- idents. In 1579, the young cobbler’s son enrolled in the King’s School in Canterbury on a scholarship for poor boys “destitute of the help of friends and endowed with minds apt for learning.”5 At King’s, a venerable choir academy administered by the dean of the Cathedral, he became proficient in music, history, literature, religion, grammar, rhetoric, and other classical subjects. The pupils composed poetry in Latin, performed elaborate plays in Latin and Greek, and were encouraged to speak in the tongue of Virgil and St. Augustine—the language of learning and divinity—at study, meals, and play. Like the other boys, young Christopher wore a long gown daily to class and sang in the choir. By virtue of his musical and literary talents, including the ability to compose verses, sing plain-song at sight, and master Latin syn- tax and grammar, he received a scholarship sponsored by Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury, to continue his education at Cambridge University. Except for his lengthy absences, Marlowe’s six and a half years at Corpus Christi College were outwardly serene. In addition to Latin, Greek, philosophy, rhetoric, logic, optics, and other core disciplines, he was exposed to the teachings of Erasmus and Continental humanism, Copernicus and other astronomers whose empirical observations challenged biblical orthodoxy, and theological disputes among the followers of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, who sought to reform not only Catholicism (which was still widely observed), but also purify the Church of England, which the more zealous, known as Puritans, saw as retaining popish practices. In his free time, Marlowe began to translate classical poetry into blank verse, probably starting with Lucan’s De Bello Civili, an account of the Roman civil wars. He also translated Ovid’s Amores, a racy collection of Greek and Roman myths, into rhymed couplets, a form he would later perfect in Hero and Leander. In the view of his biographers, Marlowe also started writing plays while at Cambridge. Evidently, his first effort, The True History of George Scander- beg, related the story of Albania’s Prince Castrioto, who was abducted by 30 Hamlet

Turkish invaders as a child, was renamed Scanderbeg, and became commander of the emperor’s armies.6 Learning his true identity, Scanderbeg embraced Christianity, returned to Albania, and freed his country from foreign rule. There probably followed an early draft of Dido Queen of Carthage, based on an episode in Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem of the founding of Rome, and Tamburlaine the Great, the saga of the Central Asian conqueror. None of the playwright’s original manuscripts survives, and Scanderbeg is lost completely, though Kit was referred to by that name by fellow poet Gabriel Harvey. Perhaps the most tangible legacy of Marlowe’s Cambridge experience is an oil painting that was uncovered in 1953 by workmen in the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi College where they took down a sealed wall. The portrait, which depicts a young man with a black velvet doublet, is strikingly similar to the famous Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare (done when the subject was about forty).7 The young man’s oval face is framed by long, wavy hair (reminiscent of Hamlet’s “knotted and combinèd locks” [1.5.22]), a high, thoughtful forehead, and gentle brows above dark, penetrating eyes. A thin moustache perches atop the tight, well-proportioned mouth, and a slight beard is hinted at around the outside of the subject’s jaw. The young scholar’s jacket reveals a touch of gold underneath (“The glass of fashion” [3.1.154]). While the law reserved such elegant attire for nobles, the sumptuary statutes exempted certain classes of individuals, including servants of the queen. Hence it would not have been out of place for a cobbler’s son who had performed “good service” for Her Majesty to be portrayed in such aristocratic attire. The sitter’s posture, with arms crossed and hands concealed in an iconic pose of an intelligencer, or government spy, suggests one who can trusted to keep a secret. In the top left corner, a Latin inscription reads “Aetatis suae 21 1585,” signifying that the subject is twenty-one, which corresponds with Marlowe’s birthdate of 1564. There also appear the words “Quod me nutrit me destruit,” or “That which nourishes me, destroys me.” The aphorism, believed to be a personal credo, refers to the subject’s muse, or divine inspiration, and appears in only one other instance in Elizabethan literature—in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, translated as “Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.”8 Indirectly, the credo appears in virtually all the Marlovian and Shakespearean plays. The portrait may have been taken down and plastered over in 1593, after the heresy charges against Marlowe were instigated or when he was reportedly killed in a drunken brawl. In Edward II, there is a possible echo of the portrait: Marlowe’s Ghost 31

. . . you must cast the scholar off And learn to court it like a gentleman. ’Tis not a black coat and a little band, A velvet-caped cloak faced before with serge (2.1.31–34)

Whether Marlowe is the subject of the Cambridge portrait (as most biographers and historians conclude), he returned from Flushing in the spring of 1592 as a prisoner in disgrace. In the fall, the poet’s star dimmed even further with publication of a tirade by Robert Greene entitled Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which charged him with atheism. In his deathbed con- fessional, the older poet praised Marlowe as “Thou famous gracer of Tragedians,” but he called upon his former colleague to give up his heretical views as he himself had done.9 The scurrilous charges rankled, and shortly after their publication, evidently in a wanton humour, Marlowe was involved in a street fracas, the second of the year, bringing him again to the unwanted attention of the authorities. By early 1593, at Scadbury, a spacious estate near Chislehurst in Kent that lay about an hour’s ride from London, Marlowe found a haven from his mounting troubles and a leisurely setting in which to drink at the spring of his muse. The manor of Thomas Walsingham (the second cousin of Sir Francis Walsingham, the late secretary of state), the estate brought Marlowe a multitude of blessings: protection from the plague, freedom from economic want, insulation from his literary rivals, an idyllic place to write, and patronage at court. Surrounded by a moat and entered by a drawbridge, the fourteenth-century manor was the epitome of idyllic beauty. In Hero and Leander’s lyrical descriptions we find a trace of Scadbury’s sylvan glades, and its ethereal willow trees and large lily pond are reminiscent of the setting for Ophelia’s tragic death in Hamlet. Marlowe and Thomas Walsingham had been friends and intellectual companions for several years. Biographers believe they met either through Thomas Watson, an older poet and musician who had saved Marlowe’s life in a sword fight in 1589, or Sir Francis Walshingham, Thomas’s older cousin and Marlowe’s probable spymaster. The Walsinghams were a family of ancient lineage noted for their patronage of music and the arts, and from his youth Thomas was a favorite of the queen at court. Thomas was also active in intelligence gathering for his cousin and had many contacts in influential circles at home and abroad. He was also involved in a circle of intellectuals known to historians as the Little Academy, or School of Night, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. Presided over by Sir Walter Ralegh, the poet and navigator, and the Earl of Northumberland, a northern baron who dabbled in alchemy and nascent chemical experimentation, the School of 32 Hamlet

Night, as an informal gentlemen’s club, attracted many of the leading explorers, navigators, and scientific minds of Elizabethan England. These included Thomas Harriot, the astronomer and mathematician; Robert Hues, the geographer; and Walter Warner, a philosopher and alchemist— known collectively as the Three Magi. On the periphery of the group, John Dee, the magus, occult investigator, and confidant of the queen, kept his own counsel. The Earl of Northumberland had a majestic library at his estate containing several thousand books, including the latest Continental works on natural science, philosophy, religion, and the arts, as well as four different globes and a collection of mathematical instruments. Marlowe may have made use of this magnificent collection and, like other members of the circle, given informal lectures on his latest intellectual discoveries. Such wide-ranging freedom of scientific inquiry and thought was strictly forbidden in Elizabethan England, even at Cambridge and Oxford, but Ralegh enjoyed the patronage of the queen. As long as their activities remained private, the shadowy School of Night was countenanced by the Crown. As Queen Elizabeth famously commented, she did not intend to “make win- dows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts.”10 Church officials, however, viewed the free-thinking aristocrats and their young colleagues as a veritable School of Atheism and sought every opportunity to shut it down. On May 18, 1593, Marlowe’s esoteric studies and arcadian interlude came to an abrupt and potentially disastrous end. In London, the Privy Council issued a warrant for his arrest, ordering Henry Maunder, a messenger for the queen, to “apprehend and bring him to the Court,” with the aid of others if necessary.11 The previous week, poet Thomas Kyd had been detained and imprisoned on suspicion of writing seditious posters accusing refugees from Flanders of taking local jobs and inciting apprentices to riot. Earlier in the year, the Privy Council had authorized the resettlement of the Huguenot immigrants—Protestants fleeing Catholic repression—who were skilled artisans. The agitation began shortly before Easter in mid-April when attacks on aliens began to appear on the streets of London. The latest man- ifesto attacking the foreigners, posted on the wall of the Dutch Churchyard on Broad Street on May 5, consisted of crude verses, including references to The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris, and was signed “Tamburlaine,” the avenging hero of Marlowe’s popular play of the same name. A rescue for Marlowe and Kyd was not out of the question. The previous year, in June 1592, after gathering at the Rose theatre, a group of felt- makers in Southwark marched to the Marshalsea prison to free some of their colleagues. A melee ensued and several workers were killed. The Privy Council briefly closed the theaters in retaliation. With its scenes of rebellion featuring Jack Cade, a rebel leader from the previous century, The True Marlowe’s Ghost 33

Contention Betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster had premiered that spring, and the authorities may have suspected that the play had sparked the uprising. Published anonymously in 1594 and, in revised form, included under Shakespeare’s name in the First Folio as Henry VI, Part 2, The Contention, in the view of some critics, was written by Marlowe.12 Fearing street riots and insurrection, the Privy Council met on May 11, 1593, and authorized city officials to seek out the Broad Street transgressors and use torture, if necessary, to identify them. A reward of 100 crowns—a large sum—was offered for information leading to their arrest and conviction. The next day, authorities searched the lodgings of playwright Thomas Kyd and seized “Vile hereticall conceiptes denyinge the deity of Jhesus Christ our Saviour.”13 Under torture, Kyd implicated Marlowe, his friend and fellow dramatist at the Rose theater, with whom he had shared a room two years earlier. Kyd claimed that the papers were Marlowe’s and had become unknowingly “shuffled” in with his own materials. Stretched on the rack, in a procedure known as “scraping the conscience,” the prisoner’s bones, joints, and tongue were further loosened, and Kyd recalled in meticulous detail a litany of Marlowe’s blasphemous views. On May 18, the Privy Council issued a warrant for his arrest. Rumors of Kit’s hand in The Contention and Sir Thomas More (another seditious play that appears to have come to the attention of the authorities about this time) may have focused suspicion on the dramatist. From Scadbury, Marlowe accompanied the queen’s messenger to the Privy Council, which met in the queen’s palace at Nonsuch, on May 20, and was released on his own recognizance on condition that he report daily to their lordships. The charges against him were not specified, and it is possible that he was arrested merely as a material witness in the libel investigation. However, as we shall see, his personal and ideological enemies were gathering further evidence of his reputed atheistic and seditious beliefs. Through the influence of his patron, Thomas Walsingham, or high friends at court, Kit momentarily escaped Thomas Kyd’s harrowing fate.

The Great Star Chamber

O perjur’d beauty! more corrupted judge! When to the great star chamber o’er our heads The universal sessions calls to count This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it. —Edward III (2.2.163–166) 34 Hamlet

Make fires, heat irons, let the rack be fetched. —The Jew of Malta (5.1.24)

he Star Chamber, one of the most infamous inquisitor- ial courts in history, took its name from the gilt stars painted on its ceiling in London’s Westminster Hall. Unlike the Sistine Chapel and other Renaissance mon- uments to enlightenment, the court was the site of swift and brutal justice. Dating to the period of the Lancastrian and Yorkist monarchs, it began as a special court for proceedings administered by the king and his councilors, including the trials of nobles immune from ordinary prosecution. Gradually it extended its jurisdiction to overshadow common-law courts and resolve criminal matters. Under Henry VIII, it was used to punish political opponents and enemies of the king. Under Elizabeth, his daughter, its sessions were public, but testimony was taken in secret. There was no jury and no appeals process, and torture was routinely used to extract confessions. Although the court of Star Chamber could not impose the death penalty, its sentences included whipping, pillorying, branding, and mutilation (such as the cropping of ears). Those accused of capital crimes could be handed over to the civil judiciary for trial and execution. In this era, slandering the queen, who was the head of both Church and State, drew a fine of 200 marks for the first offense, the pillory, and loss of both ears. A second offense was punished by hanging. The penalty for treason, sedition, or heresy was particularly cruel. The convicted was burned at the stake, boiled alive, or hung and, in the latter case, frequently disem- boweled while still breathing, and then drawn and quartered. The remains were buried in unconsecrated graves and the heads displayed on London Bridge or other public thoroughfare as a warning to the populace of the consequences for defying heaven’s will and duly constituted authority. Richard Topcliffe, the Crown’s principal torturer, interrogated suspects in a chamber of horrors in his own private residence and was known to have raped some of his victims.13 Hot irons and other gruesome instruments such as those depicted in a Hieronymous Bosch painting of the torments of hell were a routine part of his investigative toolkit. In the case of Thomas Kyd, no charges were made after he implicated Marlowe, but the taint of atheism caused him to lose his literary patronage. Broken on the rack, destitute, and bereft of friends, Kyd died within a year. The éminence grise behind the apparatus of ecclesiastical terror at the Marlowe’s Ghost 35 time of Marlowe’s arrest was John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury. According to various accounts, he was born in 1530 or 1533 to a mercan- tile family in Lincolnshire. The eldest of seven, young John was packed off to study in London at St. Anthony’s School (whose illustrious graduates included Sir Thomas More) during the reign of Henry VIII. Earning the reputation of a heretic because of his refusal to attend daily mass, the school- boy was sent back to his native Grimsby (a flourishing port despite its Dickensian name) by a nervous aunt with whom he was lodging. As Sir George Paule, the comptroller of Whitgift’s household and author of the earliest biography of the archbishop, noted, “[S]hee thought at the first, shee had receiued a Saint into her house, but now she perceiued he was a deuill.”14 At Cambridge University, he settled down under the guidance of John Bradford, a leading Protestant reformer who was later burned at the stake under Queen Mary. Whitgift wrote his doctoral dissertation on the pope as Antichrist and was prepared to leave for exile in Europe if Catholicism was restored. But Andrew Perne, his new mentor at the university who had nursed him through a grievous illness, advised him to “be silent, and not troublesome in voicing his opinion.”15 Portraits of John Whitgift in middle age, at the peak of his power, show an austere man of strong, well-balanced features with a clear focus and sharp, penetrating eyes. Of average stature and slightly sallow complexion, he had black hair and eyes and a medium-length beard. Later portraits show a jowly, much heavier man with a stern countenance. He never married, and no personal scandal was ever associated with his name. A harsh disciplinari- an, Whitgift had steadily risen through the ranks under Elizabeth, serving as master of Trinity College, vice chancellor of Cambridge University, and bishop of Worchester before becoming chief prelate of the Church of England in 1583. His predecessor, Archbishop Grindal, had refused to carry out the queen’s orders to curb the Puritans and lived the last seven years of his life under virtual house arrest. In the early 1570s, as vice chancellor of Cambridge, Whitgift had masterminded the ouster of Thomas Cartwright, the Puritan theologian and leader of the faculty, who opposed episcopacy and sought a reform of ecclesiastical abuses. “I do charge all men before God and his angels,” Whitgift sanctimoniously warned the Puritans, “as they will answer at the day of judgment, that under the pretext of zeal they seek not to spoil the church; under the colour of perfection they work not confusion; under the cloak of sim- plicity they cover not pride, ambition, vainglory, arrogancy; under the out- ward show of godliness they nourish not contempt of magistrates, popular- ity, anabaptistry, and sundry other pernicious and pestilent errors.”16 Though he believed that “insolent audacity against states and lawful reg- 36 Hamlet iment is rather to be corrected with due punishment than confuted by argument,” Whitgift’s Answer to a Certain Libel and Defense of the Answer to the Admonition approached a weighty eight hundred pages.17 He accused the Puritans of libel because they published anonymously. In a sermon at the Cathedral of St. Paul’s in 1583 on the anniversary of the queen’s coronation, the new archbishop selected as his subject the obedience due to magistrates. Quoting the church father Chrysostom, Whitgift reminded Elizabeth and assembled dignitaries, “Better it is to have a tyrant reign over us than to have no king at all.’ A realm without a magistrate is a choir without a chanter, a ship without a pilot, a flock without a shepherd, an army without a captain. Equality of persons engendereth strife; which is the cause of all evil. . . . The commandments of magistrates, being not against the word of God, bindeth in conscience, and are to be kept upon pain of damnation.”18 Upon assuming his new duties, Whitgift moved swiftly to suppress dissent and eliminate nonconformity on a national scale. One of his first acts as archbishop was to suspend between three hundred and four hundred ministers in the Canterbury region who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith or three new articles relating to the Book of Common Prayer. “His spies and informers prowled through the diocese,” as a modern Anglican historian observes.19 Penalties included arrest, detention, loss of benefices (ecclesiastical salaries and benefits) and, in the worst case, prae - munire, or the loss of property and life imprisonment. “Neither you, nor any one in England, shall preach without my leave,” Whitgift thundered at Thomas Settle, a Suffolk minister, whom he had locked up in “close” con- finement without light or fresh air for six years.20 When interrogating John Udall and Giles Wiggington, two respected ministers, the archbishop had them brought before the ecclesiastical commissioners laden with heavy chains. (He first authorized the use of torture against Catholics as bishop of Worchester.) During his tenure, as historian William Pierce concludes, “There is no record of a single case where motives of pity or compassion moved Whitgift to relent in his persecution of Non-conformists; or evidence that he ever forgave a man who once openly opposed him.”21 In the annals of misjustice, the ecclesiastical High Commission was unique in constituting a tribunal that never found a single person not guilty. In comparison, the Star Chamber was lenient. Whitgift’s excesses disturbed and polarized not only the Church but advisers to the Crown. “It grieves my heart to see the course of popish treason to be neglected, and to see the zealous preachers of the gospel, sound in doctrine . . . to be persecuted and put to silence as though there were no enemies to her Majesty and to the state but they,” lamented Francis Knollys, Marlowe’s Ghost 37 who had lived as a Protestant exile in Germany under “Bloody” Queen Mary and served as one of Elizabeth’s oldest advisers.22 In a letter, Burghley, Elizabeth’s principal councilor, told the archbishop that his methods exceeded “the inquisitors of Spain [who] use not so many questions to com- prehend and to trap their preys . . . [S]urely under your Grace’s correction this judicial and canonical sifting of poor ministers is not to edify or reform.”23 Yet the prelate enjoyed the absolute trust of the queen, who brooked no challenge to the supremacy of the Church of which she was head. When Parliament sought to curb Whitgift’s excesses in 1584, Elizabeth forbade members to discuss anything pertaining to “the cause of religion.”24 Three years later, when a committee of the House of Commons dared to address ecclesiastical reform, she had the leaders incarcerated in the Tower of London. Under Elizabeth’s and Whitgift’s leadership, the Church of England returned to the pomp of the medieval era. In The Dictionary of National Biography, Sidney Lee, the great Shakespearean biographer and critic, writes:

[Whitgift’s] father [a prosperous merchant from Lincolnshire] had left him a private fortune, which enabled him to restore to the primacy something of the feu- dal magnificence which had characterized it in earlier days. He maintained an army of retainers. He travelled on the occasion of his triennial visitations with a princely retinue. His hospitality was profuse. His stables and armoury were better furnished than those of the richest nobleman. The queen approved such out- ward indications of dignity in her officers of state, and the friendly feeling which she had long cherished for him increased after he was installed at Lambeth. She playfully called him “her little black husband,” and treated him as her confessor, to whom she was reported to reveal “the very secrets of her soul.” The whole care of the church was, she declared, delegated to him. She was frequently his guest at Lambeth, and until her death the amity between them knew no inter- ruption.25

In seeking out and punishing schismatics and heretics, Whitgift widened the prerogatives of the ecclesiastical court of High Commission. Overturn- ing centuries of tradition and law against self-incrimination enshrined in the Magna Carta, he forced opponents to testify against themselves prior to being accused and hence secure their own conviction. Still, many churchmen and influential laity objected to his authoritarian rule, especially Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (the one-time favorite of Queen Elizabeth) and Lord Burghley. In 1586, the archbishop moved to suppress public criticism altogether and initiated the Star Chamber Decree, which prohibited any manuscript from being set in type until it had been approved and licensed by himself or the bishop of London. The press of any printer who disobeyed would immediately be destroyed, and the unfortunate compositor would be 38 Hamlet jailed for six months and henceforth be banned for life from the printing trade. In reward for his vigorous action against dissent, Elizabeth (who had once had the right hands of a disobedient author and his printer chopped off) named her spiritual spouse to the Privy Council.

The Fatal Labyrinth of Misbelief

My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long The fatal labyrinth of misbelief, —The Jew of Malta (3.3.69–70)

First I protest and affirme, that the foresaide Iohn Whitgift, alias Canturburie, which nameth himselfe archbishop of Canturburie, is no Minister at all in the church of God, but hath, and doeth wrongfully vsurp, and inuade the name and seate of the ministerie, vnto the great detriment of the Church of God, the vtter spoyle of the soules of men, & the likelie ruine of this common-wealth, together with the great dis- honour of her Majestie and the state. And in this case do I affirme al the Lord bishops in England to be. —Martin Marprelate, The Just Censure and Reproofe of Martin Junior

n the face of Whitgift’s draconian statutes, a champion of religious liberty and free speech mysteriously appeared, like a medieval knight, publishing under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate. Over the course of a y e a r, beginning in October 1588 and ending in September 1589, a series of brilliant satires was clan- destinely published in the form of pamphlets or small books, attacking the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and lampooning the archbishop. Defending Cartwright and other Puritan leaders who had been silenced by the Church, Martin fearlessly attacked all forms of ecclesiastical tyranny and exposed “the bad & injurious dealing of the Archb. of Canterb. & other his colleagues.”26 One tract was disguised as a commission to the churchmen by “the highe and mighty Prince, and king Sathanas the Devill of Hell.” Ridiculing Whitgift’s royal progresses and penchant for mounted horsemen, Martin jibed in The Just Censure and Reproofe of Martin Junior, “Is seven score horse nothing, thinkest thou, to be in the train of an English Marlowe’s Ghost 39 priest?” In other broadsides, he branded Whitgift as the “Beelzebub of Canterbury,” “the Canterbury Caiaphas,” “a monstrous Antichrist,” and “a most bloody tyrant.”27 Incensed at this personal ridicule, which quickly became the talk of England and a subject of gossip at court, the archbishop took personal charge of rooting out the culprit. Whitgift issued a formal rebuttal that only provoked more derision from his witty opponent. Then, using literary fire to fight fire, Whitgift turned to Thomas Nashe, John Lily, Anthony Munday, and other poets and scribblers to reply in kind. One riposte, probably written by Nashe, was entitled A Counter-cuffe given to Martin Junior: by the venturous, hardie, and renowed Pasquill of England. Alluding to Martin’s seditious writings as verging on a hanging offense, the rejoinder purported to be “Printed Betweene the skye and the grounde, Within a myle of an Oake.”28 As the fusillades continued, the archbishop’s suspicions fastened on John Penry, an idealist young reformer from Wales who had protested against “Idolatry and superstition” in the Church of England in Parliament earlier in the year. Before the High Commission the previous March, the archbishop had personally interrogated the twenty-four-year-old clergyman, addressing him as “lewd boy,” and imprisoned him for a month when he failed to show proper deference.29 Now, six months later, Whitgift spared no resources to hunt down Martin and his printers. The archbishop stationed spies and informers in St. Paul’s Churchyard and other London bookstalls to apprehend distributors of the seditious pamphlets, but the elusive press kept one step ahead of the inquisitors. In Northampton, his agents finally caught up with their Welsh quarry and ransacked his lodgings, but Penry managed to escape to Scotland, the seat of Presbyterian nonconformity. In the dragnet, several printers and sympathizers who had sheltered Penry and the portable printing press were arrested and imprisoned. Under torture by officials of the Star Chamber, they refused to implicate the young firebrand, but the consensus of historians and literary scholars is that Penry was the mastermind or editor of the Marprelate tracts, but not the principal author. M a r tin himself vociferously denied in print that he was Penry, Job Throkmorton (an outspoken parliamentarian), John Udall (a preacher who was arrested as a suspect and later died in prison), or any of the other major suspects. With the destruction of the pilgrim press, Martin launched one final sally. But then, with Penry in flight and the underground support network in dis- array, the satires abruptly ceased. In suppressing the Marprelate dissenters, as Sidney Lee observed, Whitgift “showed a brutal insolence which is alien to all modern conceptions of justice or religion.”30 During the next couple 40 Hamlet of years, the archbishop further consolidated his authority, settling old scores and sending scores of clergy to prison, where several died. Ultimately, Martin’s irreverence—poking fun at the sexual improprieties of the bishops and making scatological references to the “groomes of his stoole”—lost him the support of many strait-laced Puritans, as well as the orthodox, and public opinion swung back toward the Church and the primacy of law and order. Things soon worsened as the reformers lost their chief patrons at court. Some historians speculate that Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth’s onetime favorite, secretly financed the original Marprelate pamphlets. But with his death in 1588 and that of Francis Walsingham in 1590, the Puritans lost their most powerful defenders. In the Privy Council, Leicester had been Whitgift’s chief opponent and had often “crossed” him in deliberations. In Christopher Hatton, then vice-chamberlain, Whitgift found a pliable ally, along with newly appointed members Lord Cobham and Lord Buckhurst. When the lord chancellorship became vacant, Queen Elizabeth offered it to Whitgift, but he declined, explaining that he was “growne into yeeres” and “had the burthen of Ecclesiasticall businesses laid upon his back,” especially “the troubles with so many sectaries.”31 Instead, he recommended Hatton, who assumed the post, as well as the chancellorship of Oxford University, which Whitgift also turned down so he could concentrate on securing religious obedience. In a preview of the events that snared Marlowe in his net, the archbishop brought Thomas Cartwright, his old enemy at Cambridge, and eight other divines to trial in 1591. In the ensuing dragnet, scores of dissenters and separatists were jailed in Newgate, Fleet, the Clink, and other prisons, where ten, including Rev. John Udall, died of cold, hunger, or sickness. In early 1593—the pivotal year in Marlowe’s young life, as he just turned twenty-nine—Whitgift convinced Elizabeth to ask Parliament to pass repressive legislation banishing all who refused to attend church or attended unauthorized religious meetings. As one of the queen’s biographers noted, “She thought the Puritans were seditious revolutionaries and troublemakers; and just as she hated the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands more than Philip II, Parma, and the Spaniards, she hated and feared her ardent Puritan sup- porters more than the Papists who were planning to depose and assassinate her. For years she had felt isolated, surrounded by Puritan-lovers, and almost powerless in their hands; now she had a strong conservative Archbishop of Canterbury who was prepared to defy the Puritans, confident in his power because of her support.”32 The conflict reached a climax in February 1593, when Elizabeth notified Parliament that she would tolerate no opposition in matters of religious uni- Marlowe’s Ghost 41 formity. In his opening message to the House of Commons, delivered on behalf of the queen, Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper of the Privy Seal, warned:

For liberty of speech, Her Majesty commandeth me to tell you that say yea or no to bills, God forbid that any man should be restrained, or afraid to answer according to his best liking, with some short declaration of his reason therein, and therein to have a free voice, which is the very true liberty of the House; not, as some suppose, to speak there of all causes as him listeth, and to frame a form of religion or a state of government, as to their idle brains shall seem meetest. She saith, no King fit for his state will suffer such absurdities . . . She hopeth no man here longeth so much for his ruin as that he mindeth to make such a peril to his own safety.33

In the face of these threats, Parliament passed a bill that treated all “seditious sectaries”—or those who “dispute the Queen’s authority in Ecclesiastical Cases . . . or attend unlawful Conventicles”—to the same punitive measures as Catholic recusants or secret practitioners.34 Those who did not attend church were fined 1 shilling for the first offense and then £20 a month for subsequent offenses. In 1585, Parliament had passed a law making it a treasonable offense for a Jesuit or seminary priest to conduct religious activities in England. Anyone who sheltered a priest was considered an accomplice and also, by definition, a traitor. During Elizabeth’s reign, 123 priests were executed, mostly by hanging, drawing, and quartering, and numerous Catholic laity, including women, who sheltered them also suffered martyrdom. Although the Catholic threat had receded after Mary Queen of Scot’s execution and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Crown stepped up its persecution of priests in the spring of 1593 as the witch hunt came to a head. Braving certain death if apprehended, Jesuit exiles continued to return to England from seminaries abroad. They ministered to the faithful, whose worship had been banned and who, like Elder Hamlet, feared they would leave this world “Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d” (1.5.81) without proper last rites. On March 26, the Privy Council issued a special edict against the Jesuits, and Topcliffe, the rackmaster and a fanatical anti-Catholic, stepped up his torture of Father Robert Southwell, the poet and priest whose fugitive works were widely read and admired. In the parishes, the cause of religious liberty was led by the Puritan divines, on the stage by Marlowe, and in the underground press by Marprelate. In Parliament, James Morice, a lawyer for the Court of Wards, carried the torch. Rather than challenge the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity directly, he appealed to the Magna Carta, the cornerstone of England’s constitutional monarchy, which he argued accorded private thoughts the same due process and protection of the law as any other prop- 42 Hamlet erty. In a stirring conclusion to his speech, Morice warned:

Wee . . . the Subjects of this Kingdome are . . . subject to lawfull aucthoritye and commaundement, but freed from licentious will and tyrannie; enjoyinge by lymitts of lawe and Justice oure liefs, lands, goods, and liberties . . . pourchased in a greate part not manye years paste by our auncestours . . . And shall wee as a degenerate offspringe by negligence . . . suffer the losse of a pretious Patrimony, yeild our bodies to be burned, our consciences to be ransacked, and our Inheritaunce to be disposed at the pleasure of our Prelates, and not so much as once open our mouthes to the contrarie?35

Richard Cosin, the archbishop’s main spokesman in Parliament, defend- ed the ex officio oaths, arguing that even children should be tortured into betraying treasonous parents or close relatives. He warned that anyone who invoked the Magna Carta to challenge ecclesiastical policies had already vio- lated the law of the land and could be prosecuted for disloyalty. As Parliament seethed over the archbishop’s repressive agenda and the queen’s veiled threats, Morice and another member of the House of Com- mons were arrested and detained for introducing a bill opposing Whitgift’s oath or voicing their opinions on related issues. Amid this spreading unrest, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, two dissidents, were tried and convicted of publishing seditious writings. They were Separatists, a minority movement among the godly who refused to submit in any way to ecclesiastical authority. Barrow, a lawyer, had languished in prison as an enemy of the state since 1587 after proclaiming that the Church of England was tainted and corrupt. Greenwood, an independent preacher who had dined with Marlowe when they were students at Cambridge, was already in prison at the time. He had been released briefly the preceding July but rearrested in December 1592 for forming a new congregation. The following exchange from Barrow’s interrogation with Whitgift and the Bishop of London is typical of the courage the dissenters showed in the face of abject terror:

BARROWE. I would not refuse to sweare upon due occasion. ARCHBISHOP. Will you then now sweare? BARROWE. I must first know to what. ARCHBISHOP. So you shall afterward. BARROWE. I will not swear unlease I known before . . . ARCHBISHOP. How say you? wil you sweare now? BISHOP ALYMER. My Lordes grace doth not show this favour to many. ARCHBISHOP. Fetch a book. BARROWE. It is needless. ARCHBISHOP. Why, wil you not sweare now? BARROWE. An oath is a matter of importance and requireth great considera- tion. But I will answer you truly, etc. Marlowe’s Ghost 43

ARCHBISHOP. Go to, sirra, answer directlie. Wil you sweare? Reach him a booke. BARROWE. But there is more cause to sweare mine accuser. I will not sweare. ARCHBISHOP. Where is his keeper? You shal not prattle here. Away with him. Clap him up close, let no man come at him. I wil make him tel another tale, ere I have done with him.36

Roger Rippon, a benefactor of Greenwood, also was arrested and died in prison on February 16, 1593. The next day, Separatists bore Rippon’s body from Newgate through the city streets with signs protesting his irreligious death. An inscription on the coffin read: “This is the corps of Roger Rippon, a servant of Christ, and her majesty’s faithful subject. Who is the last of sixteen or seventeen, which that great enemy of God, the archbishop of Canterbury, with his high commissioners, have murdered in Newgate within these five years, manifestly for the testimony of Jesus Christ. His soul is now with the Lord; and his blood crieth for speedy vengeance.”37 The pro- cession made a point of passing the home of Justice Richard Young, a magistrate and official beholden to Archbishop Whitgift who had a reputation for cruelty. Alarmed by the outbreak of public protest, officials cracked down on other dissenters, and on April 6 Barrow and Greenwood were hanged at Tyburn. In a speech before the House of Lords on April 10, several days after their execution and the day the repressive legislation was finally passed and Parliament adjourned for the spring, Elizabeth made pointed reference to her father, Henry VIII:

Many wiser Princes than myself you have had, but one only excepted—whom in the duty of a child I must regard, and to whom I must acknowledge myself far shallow—I may truly say, none whose love and care can be greater, or whose desire can be more in fathom deeper the prevention of danger to come, or resist- ing of dangers, if attempted towards you, shall ever be founded to exceed myself. In love, I say, towards you, and care over you.38

“By love and care,” as one historian explains, “she meant a ruthless deter- mination to prevent the people from being seduced by trouble-makers who would disturb religious uniformity, challenge the established order, and set England on the road to revolution and civil war.”39 John Penry, the probable organizer of the Martin Marprelate tracts, also fell victim to the witch hunt of Church and Crown in the spring of 1593. The previous autumn, he and his family had quietly returned from Scotland, where they had sought sanctuary for the previous three years. The Penrys’ fourth daughter, Safety, was named in honor of their exile. For several months, John served in Greenwood’s secret congregation near London, but 44 Hamlet on March 22, following the Rippon incident and the officials’ dragnet, he was identified by a local vicar and imprisoned. On March 26, Elizabeth authorized the creation of a royal commission to root out Separatists, schismatics, Catholic recusants, and others who “secretly adhere to our most capital Enemy the Bishop of Rome or otherwise do willfully deprave condemn or impugn the Divine Service and Sacraments.” As historian and Marlowe biographer David Riggs observes, “The High Commission’s crusade soon turned into the first all-out heresy hunt since the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary—and the last in English history.”40 Penry was brought to trial on May 21, the day after Marlowe was granted bail. Like Kyd’s apprehension several weeks earlier, the principal evidence against Penry consisted of manuscript notes found in his lodgings. From his prison cell, Penry painted a dire portrait of the many parishioners separated from their children and “clapt up without meat or mayntenance in a cold and unwholesome prison in this cold season.” Convicted of treason and sentenced to death on May 25, Penry protested his innocence and loyalty to the Crown. At the appointed hour, his wife, Eleanor, daughter Safety, and the other three little girls arrived at the execution grounds, but the sentence was delayed, possibly because of letters of appeal he had written to Burghley and the Earl of Essex, members of the Privy Council who he believed sympathized with his plight. However, four days later, on May 29—the day before Marlowe’s fateful encounter in Deptford—the archbishop of Canterbury and two of his allies, Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper of the Privy Seal, and Sir John Popham, the chief justice, signed the death warrant. Still in the midst of supper, Penry was whisked away to St. Thomas à Watering, an isolated pilgrimage spot on the road to Canterbury, and executed on a hastily constructed gallows. Nor was Penry’s body ever given to his distraught widow and children. The place of his burial remained unknown, though as we shall see there is circumstantial evidence linking him to Marlowe’s fate the following day. (A glancing allusion to the horrendous events in May 1593 may appear in the prayer scene in Hamlet, where Claudius’s treachery weighs heavily on his soul. Referring to murder, usurpation of power, and seduction of the queen, Prince Hamlet observes his uncle in the chapel “With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May” [3.3.84].) Like many martyrs to freedom of conscience during that perilous age, had he to do it over again, John Penry would certainly have agreed with James Morice that “deprivinge men of that which is more pretious than life it selfe” was not too high a price to pay for that “jewell inestimable, liber- tie.”41 Marlowe’s Ghost 45

2 Sovereign Reason

OPHELIA. And I of Ladies most deject and wretched, That suck’d the honey of his music’d vows; Now see that noble and most sovereign reason Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, That unmatch’d form, and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy —Hamlet (3.1.156–161)

pon assuming the throne, as part of the Protestant religious settlement, Elizabeth moved quickly to suppress the medieval morality plays, the Corpus Christi per- f o r mances, and other popular entertainments that reflected Catholic teachings. In authorizing civic plays to be performed, she instructed her officials to “permit none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated.”42 In granting the acting troupes license to perform “comedies, tragedies, interludes, stage-plays, and other such-like” in London and throughout the realm, the Crown prohibited any portrayal or reference on the stage to the deposition or death of a presiding monarch.43 Laid out in the form of a flower, the Rose theatre served as the birth- place of Elizabethan tragedy. The Theatre, the Curtain, and earlier play- houses had been built after Queen Elizabeth licensed the first public acting company in 1574. But the Rose—the first theater on Bankside, across the Thames from London—premiered Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and other path-breaking works and quickly became the hub of the London stage.44 Built by Philip Henslowe in 1587, the Rose consisted of a round, three-story, open-air amphitheater, surmounted by a small penthouse, from which pennants waved and trumpets blazed on the after- noon of a performance. Overlooking the Clink (a prison whose ono- matopoetic name has entered the language), the Rose’s trumpets were also in earshot of the bishop’s residence adjacent to the lockup, a bear-baiting arena, and an array of taverns, brothels, and gambling dens in dire need of the saving grace of the gospel or the muses. 46 Hamlet

Following Marlowe’s and Kyd’s successes, Henslowe enlarged the theater so that up to a thousand persons, including nobles in the galleries and groundlings in the pit, could enjoy the performances within listening distance of the tapered stage. The renovated structure furnished a canopy over the players, but its most striking innovation was a stage device known as the Heavens, a mechanical apparatus in which gods, thrones, and other celestial worthies could be hoisted aloft. For a poet like Marlowe steeped in myth and the supernatural, this technological marvel was a godsend. Edward Alleyn, the Rose’s leading actor, could perform Faustus with the good and bad angels hovering overhead, whispering divine or worldly inducements in each ear. From beneath the stage, denizens of the lower world—like the ghost in an early version of Hamlet attributed to Kyd—could emerge through a trap-door and make their spectral presence known. The theaters were closed on Sundays and other times of Common Prayer in order not to offend the churches, but officials and pious churchgoers still widely regarded the stage as a cauldron for heresy, sedition, and lewdness. In addition to the largely classical or “pagan” subject matter, they objected to the climate of crime, vice, and disease that flourished in the shadow of public entertainments. The Puritans were especially critical and, when they obtained control of the local government, banned the theaters from London. Hence Henslowe broke new ground, literally as well as figurative- ly, outside of the city limits with the construction of the Rose, to be followed by the Hope, the Swan, and the Globe.

Sweet Religion

O such a deed, As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words —Hamlet (3.4.51–54)

t Cambridge, Marlowe had studied the scriptures for nearly seven years and received an M.A. in theology. Though his career took him to the stage rather than the pulpit, his works dealt primarily with religious subjects. On average, each of his plays alluded to the Bible nearly one hundred times. Licensed by the archbishop or one of his censors, they explored controversial themes Marlowe’s Ghost 47 and humanized Scythians, Turks, Jews, and other outsiders who were rarely depicted favorably on stage or in print. To the orthodox, his dramas bor- dered on heresy and blasphemy. As we shall see, there is reason to believe that Dr. Faustus, his most powerful spiritual work, was censored and may lie at the heart of the feud between him and the archbishop. In tracing the origin and development of Marlowe’s religious views, the most formative early influence appears to be the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, in which thousands of French Huguenots were slaugh- tered. The rivers and streets of Paris ran red with the blood of Protestant men, women, and children in a horrifying assault that has been compared by recent historians to the surprise attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of countless innocents. Masterminded by Queen Catherine De Medici and Henri de Lorraine, the third Duke of Guise, the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre represented a turning point in the religious wars of the late sixteenth century. It led directly to the deaths of Charles IX and Henry III and to civil war between Henry of Navarre, the Protestant king and staunch champion of freedom of conscience, and the ultra-orthodox, pro-Spanish Catholics. Henry of Navarre later converted to Catholicism in order to unify France and end the war, giving rise to the famous quip “Paris is worth a mass.” But as Henry IV, he granted Protestants freedom of worship by issu- ing the Edict of Nantes, a seminal decree in the history of religious liberty. Following the blood-letting, many refugees streamed into England, where they were granted asylum by Elizabeth. In Canterbury, a popular destination for weavers and their families, she magnanimously allowed the Huguenot refugees to use part of the historic cathedral for their worship. Only eight when the tragedy occurred, young Kit may have observed the exiles as a choirboy at the cathedral or even learned to speak their tongue when the aldermen permitted the immigrants “to instruct their children and such others as desired to speak the French language.”45 Judging from his writings, the Bartholemew’s Day Massacre made a lifelong impression. The Massacre at Paris, the last play performed under his name, is devoted entirely to it, and the prologue to The Jew of Malta (published in 1633) celebrates the death of the Guise, the mastermind of the massacre and grand inquisitor, in the opening lines. In The Massacre at Paris, Marlowe mentions the Queen of England by name several times, one of the few direct references to Elizabeth in either the Marlovian or Shakespearean canons. In commending the monarch (“Whom God hath blessed for hating papistry” [24.69]), the young playwright extols the Protestant alliance between the Crown and Henry of Navarre. Indeed, the union between Elizabeth and Henry against the Guises (the family that wielded extremist Catholic power in France) and Spain (the 48 Hamlet mighty world empire ruled by Philip II) forms the spiritual and ideological background to the intelligence work that Marlowe may have been engaged in during his university days, in Flushing, and at the fateful rendezvous in Deptford leading up to the Shakespeare partnership. Kent, the coastal region where Marlowe grew up, was the principal seedbed for native English heresy. The shire witnessed more Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary than any other part of the realm. Sixty-one men and women were burned at the stake during her reign, including forty-one persons in Canterbury. According to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the dissenters included not only Calvinists but also a significant number of Anabaptists and freethinkers who denied the Trinity and other Christ-centered doctrines. John Marlowe, Kit’s father, may have witnessed one of the burnings in his early days in Canterbury. As William Urry, the longtime archivist in the city of Canterbury, wrote in his study, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury, “It seems probable that he [John Marlowe] came to Canterbury about 1556, becoming one of the crowds which, in the reign of Queen Mary, flocked to the sandy hollows at Wincheap half a mile away to watch more than forty Protestant martyrs dying at the stake for their beliefs.”46 In 1573, the year of the queen’s visit to Canterbury, several persons were executed for witch- craft, and the event may have made a strong impression on young Kit, who was only nine at the time. Richard Umberfield, one of John Marlowe’s apprentices, was imprisoned in London for his religious beliefs in 1590. John Cranford, the husband of Kit’s sister Anne, also appears to have been imprisoned briefly in a sweep of Puritans in London at about the same time. Anne herself was charged by local churchwardens in 1603 as “a blasphemer of the name of God.”47 Nor were Catholic martyrs unknown in Kent. In 1540, after being burned at the stake, a Friar Stone was parboiled in a ket- tle as Barabas was later in The Jew of Malta. It is reasonable to conclude from all these circumstances that Kit grew up in a family of religious liberals. Like beads on a Unitarian rosary, the theme of religious liberty runs through Marlowe’s poems, plays, and translations. Nearly all of his dramatic works deal with forbidden spiritual or political subjects. But they are presented with such wit, brilliance, and irony that they can be viewed as orthodox homilies on the wages of sin and rebellion to anointed monarchs. Elizabethan scholars today remain divided as to whether Marlowe was an atheist (as Robert Greene and other contemporaries charged), a pantheist (devoted to the Olympian gods and the muse), a proper divine (whose pre- cepts he had kept since studying for the ministry at Cambridge), a Puritan sympathizer, or a closet Catholic. Measure for measure, his religious orientation mirrors that of Shakespeare, who is passionately claimed by secular- ists, Protestants, and Catholics alike.48 Marlowe’s Ghost 49

To Cross to Lambeth

I’ll entreat you all To cross to Lambeth and there stay with me. —Edward II (1.2.77–78)

s the seventy-third archbishop of Canterbury in a hal- lowed line going back to St. Augustine, John Whitgift presided over the spiritual life of the nation from Lambeth Palace. An imposing, eleventh-century structure in London first used by St. Anselm, it featured a great red-brick gatehouse that included a porter’s lodging, chambers for the prelate and his staff, an “evidence chamber” for the ecclesiastical court, and a prison in the cellarage. In Croyden, the archbishop maintained a summer residence where he played the patron to the queen and the court, in addition to Thomas Nashe and other University Wits who lent their propaganda skills to the campaign against nonconformity and unbelief. From Lambeth, which sat across the Thames from Parliament, to the Star Chamber, where the Privy Council met when the queen was in London, was a convenient ride by his own private barge or a jaunt by rusty coach over London Bridge and back via the Strand. In London and its vicinity, Elizabeth customarily divided her time among five riverfront palaces: Whitehall, her principal residence, a sprawling edifice situated on twenty acres and containing some two thousand rooms (rivaling in size the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s residence, in Tibet); Hampton Court, a smaller residence that like Whitehall was assumed by the Crown when Henry VIII deposed Cardinal Wolsey; Richmond, the largest of her dominions, a castle with soaring turrets and onion-shaped domes; Greenwich, a stately residence down river from the capital; and Nonsuch, a uniquely named and appointed monument to Tudor extravagance in Surrey built by her father to rival French royal manors and gardens. In the sum- mers, the queen liked to stay at Windsor Castle, and on her progresses through the country she often stopped at Oatlands, a rural retreat in Surrey where she would ride or hunt game. Like the rest of the court, Archbishop Whitgift frequently accompanied the queen on her peringrations. Within twelve miles surrounding her person fell the verge, or sovereign zone of jurisdiction over murders and other capital crimes, which would play a pivotal role in Marlowe’s case. 50 Hamlet

As the flowers blossomed in the first week of May 1593, the archbishop must have felt immensely satisfied, basking in recent victories over his enemies, like Tamburlaine, in his role as “the scourge and wrath of God” (3.3.44). Like the Scythian emperor dallying with Zenocrate, John Whitgift now savored the absolute support of the queen, and his enemies were either caged like Bajazeth in Marlowe’s play or interred beneath the ground. The Puritans finally had been crushed in Parliament. A cowed House of Com- mons had passed his legislation banishing Separatists who refused to take the oath of allegiance. The two leading dissenters had been executed, the ringleader of the Marprelate tracts was in prison, and legislative troublemakers like James Morice had been dispatched to the Tower or house arrest. On the Catholic front, agitators such as Father Southwell were firmly behind bars, being ministered to by Topcliffe and his acolytes, and those priests still at large had fewer places to hide. Uncle John Canterbury’s star, as Martin Marprelate would say, was on the rise. On May 5, Whitgift’s triumph proved short-lived, with the appearance of the defiant wall posters at the Dutch churchyard and the threat of workers rioting in the streets. A pitched battle between English apprentices and Flemish Huguenots could quickly take on a religious or political aspect. The Rippon incident was still fresh in the authorities’ minds. The Strangers’ Church in London, the worship place for many Protestant immigrants fleeing persecution on the Continent, was considered a potential cauldron of dissent. As an indication of how seriously the Privy Council took the threat of sedition, it commanded London officials to spare no effort to root out the defiant poet, who had signed his libels “Tamburlaine.” The aldermen were instructed to use torture, if necessary, to extract a confession. After these orders were posted, the city council examined several young men about a conspiracy to drive out the foreigners, and some of the rioters were placed in the stocks, carted, and whipped as “a terror to other apprentices and servants.”49 As guardian of the commonwealth’s morals, the archbishop held dominion over the case, and he likely would have played a central role in any proceedings before the Star Chamber or ecclesiastical court of High Commission. The principal charges against Marlowe were made by Rev. Richard Baines, the spy and double agent. A former seminarian at Rheims and Catholic priest, Baines had served Francis Walsingham in the early 1580s as a double agent. He was also the one who charged Marlowe with treason, apostasy, and counterfeiting in Flushing the previous year. Marlowe, in turn, charged Baines with double-dealing, and the falling out was resolved only when Burghley, the chief spymaster since Walsingham died in 1590, intervened and released Marlowe when he was returned to England. Marlowe’s Ghost 51

In the course of the investigation, a group of playwrights, including Thomas Kyd, who had recently revised Sir Thomas More for licensing by the authorities, came under suspicion. The play, a dramatization of the life of the saintly archbishop of Canterbury, included scenes of a previous uprising against foreigners. Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels and Crown censor, had rejected the script, demanding that the insurrection scene be left out entirely at the authors’ “own perrilles.”50 In the face of a mutiny like that depicted in the play, the investigators evidently suspected that Kyd and his impecunious colleagues were inciting public riots to drum up business at the theater. Hence Kyd’s arrest on May 12 (and probably the staying of the play, which was never published in the lifetimes of its authors). Under torture, Kyd implicated Marlowe of atheism and sedition on the basis of “vile, hereticall” papers found in Kyd’s possession. The document seized in his quarters contained a passage by an anonymous writer using the penname Arian. It was originally quoted in a refutation of John Assheton, a priest who denied the Trinity, published in 1549 by John Proctor in The Fall of the Late Arian. Arianism was an early Unitarian movement within Christianity, dating to the Nicean Council in A.D. 325 and the triumph of Bishop Athanasius over Arius. Arianism held that the New Testament does not mention the Trinity and the doctrine had been invented by the bishops to control society through ignorance and submission to authority. With the Reformation, Arian views began to surface in Protestant quarters, giving rise to Socinianism in Central Europe and eventually Unitarianism in England and North America.51 In his sermons and edicts, Whitgift regularly bashed the Arians, classifying them with papists, anabaptists, and “other sects of heretics.”52 Biographers speculate that the incriminating passage may have been copied by Marlowe from Proctor’s book in the library of John Gresshop, headmaster of King’s School in Canterbury, where he had studied as a boy. “The document—merely a copy of part of a theological treatise already published—though unitarian in nature, was atheistic in the eyes of the orthodox,” observes Charles Read Baskerville, an authority on Elizabethan drama.53 In the course of the investigation, Baines prepared a list of allegations against Marlowe “concerning his damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of Godes word.”54 Among its seventeen allegations, the document, known as the Baines Note, states that Marlowe held that the world was at least two to three times older than the widely accepted biblical creation span of six thousand years, that religion was invented only “to keep men in awe,” and that as far as religions go, Catholicism was the most preferable because of its ceremonies, especially compared to Protestants, who were all “Hypocriticall asses.” The Note enumerated many alleged calumnies against 52 Hamlet

Moses, Christ, and the apostles, including the charge that Marlowe believed that “St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ” and, the most famous accusation of all, the opinion “That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies [boys] were fooles.”55 In a further reference to the Virginia weed, Marlowe is accused of stating “That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more ceremoniall reverence it would have bin . . . much better being administered in a Tobacco pipe.”56 C u r i o u s l y, Baines does not mention the incident at the Dutch Churchyard, the catalyst for Kyd’s and Marlowe’s arrests. Evidently that matter was considered less flagrant than the ones uncovered in the course of the investigation. One further capital offense, counterfeiting, is brought up. In the Note, Baines quotes Marlowe as saying that he had “as good a right to coin as the Queen of England,” a reference to the events that led to their falling out in Flushing.57 One of the most serious charges against the poet came amid jibes attributed to him about the early church fathers. Baines quoted Marlowe as saying that “Paul only had wit, but he was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience.” The sentiment directly undermined the cornerstone of Whitgift’s power. After all, the obedience due magistrates was the theme of the famous sermon the churchman had preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral—the apostle’s namesake—in his first major speech as archbishop.58 As for the underlying source of Baines’s animosity toward Marlowe, biographers and critics suggest it arose after the poet lampooned him in The Jew of Malta.59 On an earlier intelligence assignment in France, Baines suggested that a well or communal dinner of soup at the English seminary in Rheims be poisoned. In Marlowe’s play, he satirizes the incident while playing off the age-old libel that Jews poisoned the wells of Christians. In the play, Ithamore, Barabas’s obsequious Muslim slave, spikes a pot of rice porridge with a deadly herb and brings it to the convent. “Here’s a drench to poison a whole stable of Flanders mares; I’ll carry’t to the nuns with a pow- der” (3.4.114–15). The English seminary, located in Flanders at the time of Baines’s residency, later moved to Rheims, where Marlowe may have learned details of the plot. Curiously, porridge appears in the First Quarto of Hamlet, as we shall see later. Marlowe’s subversive subtext was that Christians were the real poisoners! But in Baines, who was portrayed as a Mohammedan vassal to a Jew enriched by heaven’s “blessings promised” (1.1.104)—both infidels in the eyes of the Church—Kit’s satire may have provoked an uncontrollable fury that sought satisfaction in blood. This sur- mise as to why Baines hated Marlowe gains further support from the Baines Note which echoes this incident and shows a familiarity with Marlowe’s Marlowe’s Ghost 53 writings. Alluding to The Jew of Malta, whose protagonist is named Barabas, one of the charges against the poet was that he asserted: “That Crist deserved better to dy than Barrabas and that the Jewes made a good choise, though Barrabas were both a thief and a mutherer.”60 Ithamore’s name, by the way, has been traced to a saintly Kentish bishop, whose miracle book was available in manuscript at Cambridge. In The Jew of Malta, composed shortly after the Marprelate tracts, Marlowe engages in a subtle bishop-bashing of his own. The Note ends with the declaration that Marlowe not only held blasphemous views, but also “almost into every company he cometh he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both god and his ministers.” Baines promised that he personally would testify under oath against Marlowe and produce “many honest men” who would do the same. Baines concluded that it was essential that “the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped.”61 The name of just one other potential witness in connection with Marlowe’s case is mentioned in the Note. His name is Richard Cholmeley, and he was the target of an anonymous informer’s report of sedition and atheism known as the Remembrances. In this set of two documents, believed to have been composed shortly before an arrest warrant was issued for him on March 19, or about six weeks before the Dutch Church libel, Cholmeley is quoted as saying that “one Marlowe is able to shewe more sounde reasons for Atheisme then any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie & that Marloe tolde him that hee hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raliegh & others.”62 Although Cholmeley was not arrested until after the events in Deptford in June, investigators may have intended that Cholmeley’s testimony serve as the second statement prepared under oath needed to convict Marlowe of atheism. The language of the Remem- brances and the Baines Note are similar, making use of boilerplate charges. (The Earl of Oxford had been accused by his enemies in virtually identical language.) This suggests that Baines had access to the indictment against Cholmeley (who is mentioned as being persuaded to atheism by Marlowe), and that both indictments may well have been drafted by a third party. Like his hero Tamburlaine, it was clear that Marlowe would “persist a terror to the world” (II.4.1.203) especially to the supremacy of the Church, and had to be silenced. Like flies, Baines and Cholmeley were caught in a web of intrigue, at whose center, motionless but all-seeing, waited England’s spidery chief prelate. In preparing the case against Marlowe, the archbishop evidently hoped not only to silence England’s most prominent playwright, but also to neutralize the influence of Burghley, his adversary, who had all charges against the poet-spy dropped in Flushing and who, along with his 54 Hamlet son, Robert, was now the chief refuge of religious dissenters on the Privy Council. Flush from his victory over the Puritans, the archbishop could be confident that Elizabeth would side with him in this matter. The reference to Sir Walter Ralegh in both documents would appear to be a further effort to ensure the monarch’s support. Since secretly marrying one of the queen’s maids in waiting the previous year, Ralegh had been banished from court. As one of Elizabeth’s most eligible suitors, he was expected to play the undying role of the heart-broken lover. In turn, Elizabeth performed her part as Gloriana, the eternal virgin queen. Though celibacy was largely a polite fiction at court, the queen expected her courtiers and churchmen to remain unmarried. In marked contrast to his predecessors, Whitgift stayed single and unattached until the end of his life, occupying as he did an outwardly chaste office, like Elizabeth, which brought them closer over the years. The dual references in the Note to tobacco, which was introduced in England by Ralegh, underscore the corrupting influence that the great navigator and his associates posed. Tobacco originated from Virginia, which was named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and the references to tobacco in the Note, which was addressed by Baines to her, surely would not go unno- ticed. There is a well-known story that Ralegh once won a wager against the queen by weighing the tobacco in his pipe before smoking and the ash that remained and demonstrating that the difference went up in smoke. In addition to having his eye on Marlowe, the ex-divine turned freethinker, Whit- gift clearly had his eye on larger quarry. As for Harriot, the only other person mentioned in the Note by name, like other sixteenth century astronomers, he could only be expected to undermine biblical authority with any discoveries he might proclaim. The archbishop appears to have harbored visions of closing down the entire Northumberland–Ralegh School of Scandal, which until now had enjoyed sovereign immunity. Marlowe’s Ghost 55

Vile, Heretical Conceits

And shall be straight condemned of heresy And on a pile of faggots burnt to death. —Dr. Faustus (3.1.183–184, B text)

arlowe and Whitgift’s relationship prior to spring 1593 remains unknown. As a former master and vice chancellor at Cambridge, Whitgift could well have met Marlowe on a visit to the university in the early 1580s as bishop of Worchester where he took a personal interest in rooting out Catholic seminarians from Flanders. As a member of the Privy Council, he was one of the Crown councilors who praised the young M.A. candidate’s “good service” for the queen and ordered his degree to be awarded. Thus as early as 1587, when he is listed as the first of the Privy Councilors to sign the document, Whitgift knew of Marlowe’s courier or intelligence service. While Whitgift may have approved of Marlowe’s clandestine activities in France, especially if they were to counter papal intrigues, he could not have been pleased when the dashing young graduate later forsook the ministry for a life in the theater. Not only would this probably have been perceived as a Luciferian fall from grace, but the subjects of Marlowe’s plays would have scandalized the staid theologian. With its hierarchy of archfiend, presiding devils, and apprentice demons, Dr. Faustus could be viewed as a parody of the Church of England. Its depictions of blasphemous incantations and rituals, culminating in conjuring up the spirit of Helen of Troy, were not only an object lesson to the pious, but also a catechism in the black arts to the curious and carnal. In the end, Faustus expires and is dragged down to hell, but the sympathy and forgiveness he extends to his colleagues is greater than that shown to him by heaven. Indeed, as many critics have pointed out, the play raises the troubling theological question of whether a heretic like Faustus is damned because he spurns God’s predestined grace, or is predestined to be damned by a wrathful God regardless of what he chooses. In Faustus and the Censor, William Empson presents the intriguing hypothesis that the play was heavily censored about 1590, thereby account- ing for the truncated A text (published in 1604) and the expanded or par- tially restored B text (published in 1616). Scholars have long puzzled over the relation and priority of the two versions. On the basis of the original English translation of the German Faust-book, Marlowe’s principal source, 56 Hamlet

Empson suggests that the original version of Kit’s play portrayed the magus successfully trying to escape hell and damnation. He believes that it was so blasphemous that Archbishop Whitgift excised the most objectionable scenes and lines and compelled the poet to change the ending to conform to Church doctrine. In his view, Kit cleverly rewrote major portions of the text but continued to parody the prelate and his minions and put across his heretical Socinian views. Empson contends that Marlowe likened Mephis- topheles and the devils to the “ruthless but adroit” archbishop and his ecclesiastical “Thought Police”: “Marlowe would realize quite early that his rash talk was being followed by official spies, and would enjoy hinting to the audience: ‘You are all like Faust; all being heard by official spies’. It would help to alert them for the main trick.”63 The censored version of Faustus, Empson concludes, was so transparent and well received by an approving public that Whitgift probably closed down performances altogether because it flirted with heresy. Though he accepts the conventional account of Marlowe’s death, Empson’s scenario would explain perfectly the genesis of the feud between the poet and the prelate that would lead to his arrest several years later. Whether Empson is correct (and many other scholars reject his theory), subversive readings apply to nearly all of Marlowe’s early works. Tambur- l a i n e p res ents the politically correct defeat of the infidel Turk and Mohammedans, but in the process the great Asian conqueror—“the scourge and wrath of God (3.3.44)”—dethrones sitting Christian monarchs (an Elizabethan taboo) and undertakes a scorched-earth policy toward his enemies not unlike that of the Protestant deity and his bishops. In Marlowe’s play, the Qu’ran is burned, warming the hearts of the Lambeth censors, but Muhammad is portrayed as “the friend of God” (II.1.1.137) who presides benevolently in heaven as a de facto co-regent with Jesus. The Jew of Malta portrays the conversion of Abigail, the daughter of the unscrupulous Jewish merchant, but Ferenze, the island’s Christian governor, like the arrogant, anti-Semitic knights of the cross portrayed in the play, proves more Machiavellian than her stereotyped father. E d w a rd II s y m p a t h e t i c a l l y defends the scepter and throne of the duly anointed monarch against the venal barons, but shows him to be subject to the wiles of his male lover, Gaveston. Its quip “that shall be shall be” (4.7.95) reminiscent of Faustus’s “Che serà, serà” (1.1.49) can be viewed as a parody of the Church’s doctrine of predestination. Dido Queen of Carthage commemorates Aeneas, the vaunted ancestor of Rome and Britannia, but reveals an untrustworthiness that passed through the royal bloodline. The Massacre at Paris extols Eliza- beth’s alliance with Henry Navarre, but can also be construed as inciting the passions for or against Huguenots in London in early 1593 when it debuted. Marlowe’s Ghost 57

There is little doubt that Whitgift would have been familiar with these plays. As archbishop of Canterbury, one of Whitgift’s duties was to super- vise the publication of all printed matter, both religious and secular, throughout the kingdom. Following the destruction of Marprelate’s pilgrim press, he consolidated his authority over not only theological tracts and commentaries, but also the licensing of books, plays, and poems. Plays, for example, were owned by acting companies, not individual authors, and in order to be performed had to be licensed by the Stationers’ Company. The Master of the Revels, in charge of entertainments at court, oversaw this office. As chief censor, it was his responsibility to ensure that scripts contained no treasonous, seditious, or irreligious material. Naturally, censorship severely curtailed what could be performed or published, but as an early form of copyright, licensing helped to protect theater troupes from stealing each others’ material. The First Quarto of Hamlet, for example, is thought by most scholars to be an unauthorized edition cribbed from an early version of the play. Textual analysis indicates that it was taken from an actor who played the part of Marcellus and wrote it down from memory. Theater companies were known to pay rival actors or employ swift scribes to pose as spectators and jot down dialogue during a performance. The official censor was Sir Edmund Tilney, the master of the revels, who traditionally reported to the lord chamberlain. But after the archbishop took direct authority over the Stationers’ Company, he answered to Whitgift. Hence, from 1586 until 1604—the period spanning Marlowe’s work and the first half of the Shakespearean canon—John of Canterbury was in charge of what was performed on the London stage. He often took a personal interest, as during the Marprelate crisis, when he intervened on behalf of Thomas Orwin, an anti-Martin printer whom the Stationers’ Company tried to shut down for routine commercial violations. The Stationers’ “master and bothe the wardens wayted at Lambeth [the archbishop’s residence] the wholle Daye about an answere for the staie that came from his grace for Orwyn,” a contemporary account reads.64 In giving special treatment to the printer of Pappe with a hachet, A Whip for an ape, and Marre: Mar-Martin; or Mar- Martin’s meddling in a manner misliked, Whitgift demonstrated that he would bend the law when it served his own ends. Another possible reason for Whitgift’s later persecution of Marlowe may have been that he suspected the iconoclastic playwright, who was nicknamed “Tamburlaine,” “Scanderbeg,” and “Machiavel” by his fellow poets, had a hand in the Marprelate affair. At Cambridge, Marlowe probably knew Penry and Barrow, who were later suspected of writing the tracts, and he had allowed Greenwood, who was executed along with Barrow, to occupy his scholar’s place and assume his commons when he left the university in 58 Hamlet

1581.65 The very name of the mysterious pamphleteer must have suggested London’s leading playwright. Mar-Prelate is usually taken to mean Bishop- Basher, from “mar,” the verb meaning “to damage” or “to deface.” All the variants of Marlowe’s name in print—Marlin, Marley, Marlo, Marlow, etc.— share a similar root. As a keen student of language, Kit would likely have been familiar with the etymology of his family name. Genealogists trace it to Marlowe, a village in Buckinghamshire, or derive the name from a farm- worker who spreads marl, a clay-like compound used as fertilizer. But its res- onance with Marlin or Merlin, the legendary wizard of King Arthur, was probably at the core of his self-awareness and identity. Robert Greene once lambasted his fellow scribblers with a dig at Kit, complaining at “mad and scoffing poets, who have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race.”66 Since Marlowe’s mother, Katherine, came from the Arthur family in Dover, this may have reinforced his early identification with Merlin and Arthurian romance. Marprelate’s first name, Martin, was an obvious tribute to Martin Luther, the bishop basher par excellence. In any event, the Marprelate tracts betray the hand of a comic genius, not just the impassioned zeal of Puritan reformers. As Francis Bacon was the first to observe, Martin treated matters of faith “in the style of the stage” and turned religion into “a comedy or satire.”67 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature terms the Marprelate literature “the chief prose satires of the Elizabethan period” and suggests that Martin was probably a poet with an innate sense of the theater:

For such warfare, Martin was eminently qualified. A puritan who had been born a stage clown, he was a disciple both of Calvin and Dick Tarleton [a famous clown during the earlier theater era]. His style is that of a stage monologue. It flows with charming spontaneity and naturalness. Now, with a great show of mock logic, he is proving that the bishops are petty popes; now, he is telling sto- ries to their discredit; now, he is rallying “masse Deane Bridges” [the Dean of Sarum, a notorious bully], on his “sweet learning,” his arguments and his inter- minable sentences. All this is carried on with the utmost vivacity and embroidered with asides to the audience and variety of “patter” in the form of puns, ejaculations, and references to current events and persons of popular rumour. . . . Martin’s wit is a little coarse and homely, but never indecent, as the anti- Martinist pamphlets were. . . His shafts are winged with zest, not with bitterness. “Have at you!” he shouts, as he is about to make a sally, and again, “Hold my cloake there somebody that I may go roundly to worke”; for he evinces, throughout, the keenest delight in his sport among the “catercaps.” . . All this reveals a whimsical and original literary personality utterly unlike anything we find in the attested writings of Penry or Udall. Yet, it must not be supposed that the tracts are nothing but “quips and quidities.”68 Marlowe’s Ghost 59

This portrait of Martin makes him sound positively Shakespearean. From the mention of quips, puns, and ejaculations to the coarse humor, this could easily be a description of Prince Hamlet. Only the bawdiness is restrained. “With the exception of his cruel reference to bishop Cooper’s domestic misfortunes,” as the Cambridge survey notes, there was “nothing that can be called definitely scurrilous in his treatment of the bishops.”69 Poor Cooper’s misfortunes consisted of being cuckolded by his wife—a perennial source of merriment in the Shakespearean canon. Marprelate may also be alluded to in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. A comic character named Sir Oliver Martext, a country bumpkin, behaves in an inebriated fashion, as some of the bishops depicted in the underground tracts. A fascinating combination of Luther and Touchstone, Martin marries a bold defiance of injustice with the clowning of a wise fool, the same endearing combination that Hamlet, the student at Luther’s university in Wittenberg, uses to put on an antic disposition to set aright what is rotten in Denmark. The evidence that Marlowe—the onetime Calvinist ministerial student and comic playwright—was Marprelate is suggestive, but far from definitive. Certainly, his involvement in the affair, whether as author, editor, or member of an editorial committee, cries out for further investigation. Nor can Marlowe’s hand in Sir Thomas More, which may have figured in his arrest, be ignored. According to literary scholars, at least six different poets contributed to the play: Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Kyd, and an unidentified author who wrote the revised insurrection scene known to researchers as Hand D. Marlowe had ties with all five writers, and as for Hand D, according to most scholars, it is William Shakespeare! As The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare states, “‘Hand D’ . . . bears a close resemblance both to the handwriting of Shakespeare’s attested signatures and to the habits of spelling and of handwriting implied by printed editions of his works.”70 The text is replete with jests and allusions that appear to mock the Elizabethan bishops and their primate. In the last act, during a skit on The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, Sir Thomas More summarily ends the enter- tainment, “Lights there, I say! / Thus fools oft times do help to mar the play,” paralleling the scene in Hamlet when Claudius cries “Lights” and abruptly terminates the performance. (Note “mar the play,” an allusion to Marprelate and a possible pun on Marlowe the playwright.) Far-fetched? The Cambridge History of English and American History doesn’t think so. “The introduction of the play within the play, together with More’s speeches to the actors and his insertion into their scenes of an extempore speech of his own, is a curious anticipation of Hamlet.”71 60 Hamlet

We may never know how much the archbishop suspected about Mar- lowe’s pseudonymous writings as the events in the spring of 1593 unfolded. It is evident that he would have applied the thumbscrews to whoever wrote the Marprelate tracts and kindred works. Like King Claudius, his suspicions must have mounted as Baines and Cholmeley—the Rosencrantz and G u i l d e n s t e r n of the affair—conveyed intelligence against young “Tamburlaine,” the infidel scourge of established authority, the heir appar- ent of the London stage, and the prince of poets who, in Ophelia’s memorable words, bent his knee only to “sovereign reason.”

3 Lawful Espials

“lawful espials . . . / . . . that seeing unseen”—Hamlet (3.1.35–36)

By commissioning Marlowe as a double agent, the authorities inserted him into opposing roles—loyal servant and subversive other. His assignment was to create the enemies that justified the exercise of state power; the crown encouraged him to voice what it regarded as sedition and heresy.—David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe

ay 30, 1593, the day Marlowe was reputedly slain, fell on a Wednesday. Adding to the confusion of events on that fateful date, the English observed the Julian calendar, while much of Europe adhered to the Gregor- ian that was ten days ahead. The discrepancy arose when farmers, sailors, and others whose livings depend- ed on harmonizing with the seasons noted that the time kept by the ancient Roman method was slightly out of joint. Astrono- mers proposed a revised calendar based on more precise scientific knowledge. Pope Gregory bowed to their secular wisdom, and Continental Eur- ope set its clock ahead ten days in 1582. Despite the superiority of the new system, Protestant England stubbornly adhered to the reckoning established by Julius Caesar’s soothsayers a millennium and a half earlier. (Elizabeth and Burghley both supported the reform but were blocked by the Church of England, which labeled it anti-Christ. Not until 1752 did Britain and its Marlowe’s Ghost 61

North American colonies formally switch.) Hence Elizabethan chronology (known as Old Style or O.S.) lagged behind that of the rest of Europe (known as New Style or N.S.). Many ordinary Elizabethans, however, observed both calendars, as it was more practical to be in rhythm with nature and in step with overseas commerce, Continental scholars, and English travelers abroad than blindly adhere to anti-Catholic prejudice. For example, May 20, 1593 O.S., the day Marlowe was arrested, could be written May 20/30. Coincidentally, May 20 was also the day that the harsh law requiring nonconformists to choose between allegiance to the Church or banishment went into effect. As it turned out, May 30 was the day of Kit’s fateful meeting in Deptford. The 20/30 conjunction, as we shall see, may have given rise to numerical puns in Hamlet and other plays. However intriguing, these dating games are beside the point, if Chris- topher Marlowe died on May 30, as the world has been led to believe. Kit’s last recorded day on earth has been the subject of intensive scrutiny and speculation, and investigators have come to strikingly opposite conclusions. Broadly, there are at least a half dozen major theories of what transpired. In itself, Marlowe’s survival would not be sufficient to establish him as the principal author of the Shakespeare plays. But it is a necessary condition and one on which the literary evidence ultimately hinges.

Purposes Mistook

Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trades of the world: and that whosoever commands the trades, commands the riches of the world, and consequently, the world itself. —Henry VIII

ating to the Norman Conquest, Deptford—Marlowe’s last known whereabouts on the south bank of the Thames east of the city—served for centuries as Lon- don’s chief port of call and shipyard. The harbor boast- ed a forest of tall ships, some bearing spices from the Italian city states; others brought cod from the virgin coast of North America or timber, furs, and wax from the icy northern wastes of Russia, and still others carried gold, booty, and other treasure pirated from the Spanish main. An English privateer once seized a ship containing over two million papal indulgences purchased by Philip II. The most famous vessel, The Golden Hind, had lain at anchor in Deptford since Sir Francis Drake, its captain, circumnavigated the globe in 62 Hamlet

1580 and was a major attraction for curious visitors from London and abroad. Lord Admiral Charles Howard, hero of the naval campaign against the Spanish Armada, lived on the edge of Deptford Strand, the central commons. The tall spire of the Church of St. Nicholas, an edifice dating to the twelfth century and once granted to the Knights Templars, looked out over Sayes Court manor, the principal estate; Trinity House, the maritime academy; and the Mill, whose giant stones ground barleycorn from water fed by the Ravensbourne brook. London was about three miles down river and the queen’s palace at Greenwich a mile upstream. Since Chaucer’s day, pilgrims had trudged over the cobbled streets from the Tabard in Southwark and crossed the old wooden bridge in Deptford on their way to Saint Thomas à Becket’s tomb in Canterbury. The Isle of Dogs, a marshy refugee for out- laws and thieves, lay across the Thames from the royal kennels housing the queen’s foxhounds. On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe was slain in a tavern brawl in Deptford. That is the verdict of history. However, like the crucifixion of Jesus, the assassination of Lord Darnley (Mary Queen of Scots’ husband and the king of Scotland), and the slayings of other controversial figures, questions have persisted about Marlowe’s death. His reputed killing has become one of the most investigated—and contested—murders of all time.

Version 1: The Theater of God’s Judgment

When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night —Sonnet 12

o contemporary account of what happened survives, though rumors spread that Marlowe had died in a drunken argument over payment of the reckoning, or bill. He was said to have spent the day with several acquaintances, one of whom was named Ingram. During the next decade and into the early seventeenth century, the story became embroidered in the retell- ing. The meal became “a feast,” and the dispute between Ingram (who set up their meeting, later rumor had it) and Marlowe broke out while playing at tables (backgammon). The reason for the quarrel was not simply money but “lewd love,” an argument over a rent boy, “a bawdy serving man,” or other squalid affection spurned.72 In some versions of the tale, Marlowe pulled his own knife instead of his assailant’s, surgery failed to save him, or Marlowe’s Ghost 63 he expired of the plague before the altercation even took place. From a tavern, the setting metamorphosed into an ale-house and finally, probably because of a bed in the room where the fight took place, a brothel. In one street fight variation of the tale, Marlowe was killed by fellow playwright Ben Jonson when leaving the Green Curtain playhouse.73 Whatever its exact circumstances, the pious saw his death as God’s judgment on his stubborn atheism. For performing idolatry on the stage, as we read in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of Gods Judgments (1597), the Deity turned Marlowe’s own hand against himself, and “blaspheming and cursing, he yielded up his stinking breath.”74 As the centuries passed and Christianity lost its hold, the theological cur- rents swirling around his last days faded. As far as most students of English literature were concerned, Kit was living dangerously. Like Tamburlaine, Faustus, and his other heroes, Marlowe overreached and brought about his own tragic fall. After a day of drinking, he got involved in a knife fight and was slain over a trifling matter of pence, the story went. Probably he unleashed a barbed jest that was taken the wrong way and provoked a vio- lent response. Those who live by their rapier wit die by it. Like Leander, the hero of the poem he left uncompleted, he was swallowed by the seas of his own passions. Or, as Prince Hamlet would have put it, Marlowe’s fate was an instance “Of deaths put on by cunning, and forced cause / And in this upshot, purposes mistook, / Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads” (5.2.381–83). Quod me nutrit me destruit. “Consumed with that which it is nourished by.”

Version 2: At Deptford Yard

QUEEN. But know not you Horatio where he is? HORATIO. Yes Madame, and he hath appointed me To meet him on the east side of the City Tomorrow morning. —Hamlet (Quarto 1)

ew information and fresh theories about the poet’s final day emerged as Marlowe’s genius was rediscovered by later generations. Through the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, following the publication of the First Folio and the reopening of the theaters after the Restoration, Shakespeare’s star was on the ascendant, and that of Marlowe, a brilliant but meteoric talent, 64 Hamlet was sinking below the literary horizon. A few eyebrows were raised about the authorship in the early nineteenth century. In 1819, the Monthly Review was the first to propose that the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare were written by the same hand. But in a curious twist, the article observed: “Can Christopher Marlowe have been a non de guerre assumed for a time by Shakespeare? . . . This much is certain, that, during the five years of the nom- inal existence of Marlowe, Shakespeare did not produce a single play.”75 The following year, a discrepancy emerged over the identity of Marlowe’s assailant. The only contemporary reference, by Vaughan in The Golden Grove in 1600, mentioned “one named Ingram.”76 In 1820, James Broughton, an antiquarian, found an entry in the burial register of St. Nicholas’s Church in Deptford noting that Christopher Marlow was “slain by ffrancis Archer 1 June 1593.”77 The surname “Archer” was clarified by a handwriting specialist familiar with the loops and swirls of Elizabethan lettering as a mistaken reading of “Frezer.” The rise of Romanticism led to a resurgence of interest in Marlowe. Exhilarated by “the lust for power in his writings, a hunger and a thirst after unrighteousness,” in critic William Hazlitt’s words, early nineteenth century scholars began to find Marlowe’s hand in Shakespeare’s early work, and there was general agreement that the two poets had collaborated on the Henry VI cycle, Titus Andronicus, and several anonymous plays.78 Altoget- her up to half of the Bard’s total output was attributed in whole or part to Marlowe on purely stylistic grounds before there was any real authorship controversy. In The History of Deptford, a Victorian account incorporating the new scholarship of the era, Nathan Dews II, proudly includes “Marlowe, the Dramatist” in his chapter on the town’s “Worthies and Men of Note.” In describing the poet’s tragic death, the focus of his tribute, he mentions the references from The Golden Grove, The Theatre of Gods Judgments, and the burial certificate found in St. Nicholas’s church. As a preface to his own version of what transpired, Dews notes that in Ben Jonson’s and George Chapman’s comedy Eastward Ho, published in 1605, reference is made by Sir Petronel Flash to a Captain Seagul about partaking of banquets “with full cups” aboard Sir Francis Drake’s flagship anchored in Deptford harbor. The play invokes “some good spirit of the waters [that] should haunt the desert ribs of her [the ship], and be auspicious to all that honour her memory.” Reconstructing events, he observes:

The old ship was evidently, therefore, devoted to the purposes of banqueting and feasting, and if it was frequented by ‘rare Ben’ in person, as may be inferred from his introducing it to Captain Seagul, no reasonable doubt can be entertained but that Kit Marlowe (as he was familiarly styled by Jonson) sometimes made one of Marlowe’s Ghost 65

the party who took boat at the Temple Stairs and dropped down the river to the Golden Hind at Deptford Yard. On one of these visits the ill-fated Marlowe met his untimely end. Under the influence of wine, he quarrelled with a low fellow named Archer, and at his hand, probably on board the old ship, received his death wound.79

In an age that celebrated Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, this account, penned in 1884, put as much patriotic spin on the event as it could.

Version 3: A Mortal Wound

I’ll give him something and so stop his mouth. —The Jew of Malta (4.1.107)

I think all men in Christianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped. —Richard Baines, Note

n the early twentieth century, the discovery of primary documents related to the case led to what became the authorized version of Marlowe’s death. In 1925, Leslie Hotson, a young graduate student in English literature at Harvard, was combing through dusty files in the Public Records Office in London. He said, “As I turned over the leaves of the Calendar of Close Rolls, my eye fell upon the name Ingram Frizer. I felt at once that I had come upon the man who killed Christopher Marlowe.”80 Further investigation led him to the discovery of the original coroner’s report (which had never been published or mentioned in print before), a writ of certiorari referring the case to Chancery court, and the queen’s pardon of Ingram Frizer. The basic facts, as described in the coroner’s report, are these: At about ten in the morning on May 30, 1593, Christopher Morley (one of the variants of Marlowe’s name) met at the house of widow Eleanor Bull in Deptford with three other men: Ingram Ffrysar, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. They passed the time together in a private room, dined at midday, and after dinner walked quietly in the garden of the house. At about 6 p.m., they returned to the room for supper. Morley and Ingram exchanged malicious words over “le recknynge,” or payment of the sum of pence for their meals. Violence broke out while Ingram was sitting on a bench between the other two men with his back to Morley, who was reclin- 66 Hamlet ing on a bed. Morley “maliciously drew the dagger of the said Ingram which was at his back” and wounded him twice on the scalp to a length of two inches and to a depth of a quarter inch. Wedged in by his companions, unable to take flight, and “in his own defence & for the saving of his life,” Ingram struggled with Morley for the 12d (penny) dagger, and unable to get away from Morley “gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died.”81 Mrs. Bull, the proprietress, evidently called in the local constable, the body was wrapped in a white burial sheet, and the assailant and two witnesses made themselves available to the authorities. Since the killing took place within the verge—the twelve-mile radius of the queen’s person—jurisdiction fell to the Crown coroner, Sir William Danby, instead of local officials. Within thirty-six hours, Danby had convened a formal inquest, a jury of sixteen men from the local community viewed the body, and after listening to testimony concluded that “the said Ingram killed & slew Christopher Morley . . . in the defence and saving of his own life, against the peace of our said lady the Queen.”82 On June 1, Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the northern corner of the Church of St. Nicholas. Within a month, Ingram was pardoned by the queen and freed from detention. William Danby’s account, in Latin, presented a bare bones description of Christopher Morley’s last day. For the first time, Marlowe’s assailant was positively identified, and Hotson verified that Ingram Frizer was in the employ of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron at Scadbury. Nicholas Skeres turned out to be a close associate of Frizer. In fact, both men had been involved in a confidence scheme to defraud a local man of his inheri- tance and had unsavory reputations. Robert Poley, the third man present on that fateful day, had served as a courier and intelligence agent for Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary of state and head of the secret service. Eleanor Bull was the widow of Richard Bull, a local official. In short, Hotson not only unearthed the basic facts of the case and an authoritative version confirming Marlowe’s death, but he also planted seeds of doubt as to its veracity and the folklore that had grown up around the event. The possibility that Frizer provoked the quarrel and attacked Marlowe, he said, could not be ruled out. In the end, Hotson decided to err on the side of caution and accept the veracity of Danby’s inquest. “Two courses are open to us: (a) to believe as true the story of Marlowe’s attack on Frizer . . . or (b) to suppose that Frizer, Poley, and Skeres, after the slaying, and in order to save Frizer’s life on a plea of self-defence, concocted a lying account of Marlowe’s behavior, to which they swore at the inquest, Marlowe’s Ghost 67 and with which they deceived the jury.”83 In his book The Death of Christopher Marlowe, Hotson observed that the facts could fit either scenario. “In all probability the men had been drinking deep (the party had lasted from ten in the morning until night!); and the bitter debate over the score had roused Marlowe’s intoxicated feelings to such a pitch that, leap- ing from the bed, he took the nearest way to stop Frizer’s mouth.”84 Over the next half century, scholars accepted the coroner’s report as gospel, and Hotson went on to become an acclaimed Shakespearean critic. “The mystery of Marlowe’s death, heretofore involved in a cloud of contra- dictory gossip and irresponsible guess-work, is now cleared up for good and all on the authority of public records of complete authenticity and gratifying fullness,”85 observed G. L. Kittredge, the great Hamlet authority. Such accolades—the final spadefuls of earth thrown on Marlowe’s unmarked grave—proved premature. In 1928, Samuel Tannenbaum, M.D., wrote The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe, questioning the medical evidence: “One who knows the anatomy and pathology of the human brain knows that it is impossible for death to follow immediately upon the infliction of [such a wound] . . . To have caused instant death, the assassin would have had to thrust his dagger horizontally into Marlowe’s brain to a depth of six or seven inches—and that could not have happened if Frizer and Marlowe had been wrestling as the witnesses described.”86 More likely, the victim would have remained in a coma for several days. A critic in the Times Literary Supplement raised further questions about the peculiar passivity of Skeres and Poley. Why didn’t they intervene and stop the fight? “Is it conceivable that any man in mortal earnest would recline on a bed to hack at an antagonist who is sitting upright and certain to retaliate? . . . and this without interference from the other two men who (apparently) waited passive. These two inactive observers were exceedingly competent to keep Friser within the reach of Marlowe; but as for separating them no such reasonable effort is recorded.”87 “There is something queer about the whole episode,” concludes John Bakeless, author of The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, the most authoritative biography. “Friser’s own wounds are strangely slight if Marlowe, armed with a dagger, really sprang at the seated and helpless man from behind, as the inquest states. It is also hard to believe that Friser sat with his back to any angry opponent while they disputed ‘le recknynge’ . . . It is also still to be explained why these four men—three precious scoundrels and a poet who had been involved in confidential government affairs—had business together so important that it required a whole day’s private conversation. The fact that Marlowe was at this time held by the Privy Council . . . makes matters still more suspicious.”88 68 Hamlet

In his new biography of Marlowe, Stanford scholar David Riggs contends that, on the basis of the coroner’s report, Frizer was obviously pum- meled with the hilt of the knife, not stabbed with its point, and therefore under the law his mortal retaliation did not justify a plea of self-defense. “The fact that the official account trivializes the killing should provoke skep- ticism, not acquiescence.”89 Far from closing the case, the discovery of the coroner’s report opened it even wider. Ever since, lawyers, surgeons, and literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic have jumped into the fray, taking sides, voicing fresh doubts, or constructing theories to fit the facts.

Version 4: Most Secret and Most Grave

Mother good night indeed this Counselor Is now most still, most secret, and most grave —Hamlet (3.4.229–230)

et even before the coroner’s report came out, there was speculation that Marlowe had faked his death and gone on to write the plays credited to Shakespeare. The first book devoted to a conspiracy was Marlowe Did It: The Secret of Three Centuries by William Ziegler, published in 1895. Based on the rumor that Kit and Frizer quar- reled over lewd love, Ziegler’s novelistic work portrays Marlowe dueling for the affection of Frizer’s wife in the bedroom of a Deptford tavern. In the melee, Frizer is slain and his wife, Alice, comes up with the idea of exchanging clothes and passing off the body of her husband for that of Kit, her old flame. “And now with the coroner’s verdict in,” writes Ziegler, “Francis Frazer buried under the name of Christopher Marlowe, the latter darkly brooding in obscure safety, and the world so conycatched that only after an interval of 300 years doth it see clearly.”90 In this version, fellow playwright George Peele and the actor Will Shakespeare aid and abet Kit in passing off his future work. The story concludes with Marlowe in mufti attending the opening of Hamlet several years later where he is recognized not only by forlorn Alice, but also by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe. An appendix with several dozen close parallels between Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s works anchors this admittedly imaginative work of fiction. In The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare,’ which appeared a half century later, Calvin Hoffman catapulted the Marlowe hypothesis onto the Marlowe’s Ghost 69 global stage. His theory that Marlowe didn’t die at Deptford but survived and went on to write the plays attributed to the Bard of Avon was first presented in an article in Esquire magazine at the end of 1955. Hoffman’s book came out the next year. A journalist, author, and Broadway press agent, Hoffman spent nearly twenty years on this project, a historical, literary, and artistic tour-de-force that introduces many of the themes that serve as cor- nerstones of the Marlovian cause. Hoffman is the first to identify the portrait at Cambridge University as Marlowe’s and to point out its uncanny likeness to the famous engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio, for example. He traces the influence of Marlowe on the early works of Shakespeare and shows that “no documentary evidence whatever exists of a personal nature in which any actor or writer speaks of Shakespeare during his lifetime as a practicing poet, playwright, or author.”91 He describes the heretical charges leveled against Marlowe, Kyd’s arrest, the Baines Note, and the connection with Ralegh’s circle. He dissects the coroner’s report and itemizes its shortcomings. Most impressive of all, Hoffman lists hundreds of paral- lelisms between Marlowe and Shakespeare’s collected works. Set side by side in double columns of small type, his thirty pages of quotations show that, if he were not Marlowe’s stand-in, the Stratford actor was one of the greatest literary poachers of all time. As for what happened in Deptford, Hoffman contends that Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron, masterminded the plot to save his life. The two men, in his view, were lovers, and this illicit passion underlay and motivated the deception. According to Hoffman, Walsingham and Marlowe planned the faked death in Scadbury and commissioned Skeres and Frizer to kill a sailor in Deptford (preferably an Italian, Spaniard, or other foreigner who would not be known or missed) and pass off his corpse as Marlowe’s. Meanwhile, in their plan, Kit would leave for Dover, bypassing the meeting at Mrs. Bull’s altogether, and flee to France. Through his connections at court, Hoffman continues, Walsingham paid off Danby, the coroner, to han- dle the inquest so that no suspicions were aroused. In brief, Hoffman explains, “Marlowe was to be ‘murdered.’ The charges against him would vanish with his ‘death.’ And paradoxically his life would be saved. The world leaves its dead in peace.”92 The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’ goes on to identify Thomas Walsing-ham, as the mysterious Mr. W. H. (as Elizabethan names were often hyphenated), to whom the Shakespearean sonnets are dedicated, and then presents a homosexual gloss on the poems. As he also points out, a servant who killed his patron’s literary companion and honored guest, even in self-defense, would very likely be dismissed. Hoffman’s theory explains why Frizer, the assailant, was welcomed back into Walsingham’s employ immediately after he was released from jail following 70 Hamlet the inquest and served him and his wife for many more years. Hoffman’s bold scenario scandalized the scholarly world and electrified many readers who had always had a hard time connecting the life of the actor who left his second best bed to his wife with the romantic poet who wrote Romeo and Juliet, Hamet, and Antony and Cleopatra. It also garnered the support of a small band of intellectuals and artists who formed the Marlowe Society.93 The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’ resurrect- ed Kit from the grave and transformed him into the literary anti-hero of the Elizabethan theater. My grandfather, David Rhys Williams, was one of several prominent advocates of Marlowe’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon at that time. As a young man in the early 1920s, he met Dr. Thomas Mendenhall (see “Shakespeare’s Ghost” below), a scientist who pioneered in the identification of disputed writings and who is known today as the father of stylomet- rics. Based on a scientific model, Mendenhall came to the unexpected conclusion that Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s works were written by the same hand. My grandfather was so inspired that he secured copies of Menden- hall’s charts (see Vol. 1, p. 124) and as a Congregational and later Unitarian minister pursued his interest in the religious dimension of the subject, giving sermons and lectures on the authorship controversy. In his book, Shakespeare, Thy Name Is Marlowe, published in 1966, he accepts many of Hoffman’s literary and artistic observations but takes a much more cautious and nuanced approach to the actual events in Deptford:

It is not even necessary to assume that the confessed slayer [Ingram Frizer] actually did any slaying in this instance; only that he and his two companions falsely identified the badly mutilated body of some unknown seaman or wanderer found already murdered on the Deptford waterfront and then told a plausible “cock and bull” story to support their identification.94

In addition to his caution about assuming a murder occurred, my grandfather remained agnostic about a homosexual connection between Marlowe and Walsingham, preferring to see the plot to rescue the poet as motivated by freedom of conscience and religious liberty. “The choice before Marlowe was a matter of life or death, for to risk conviction on the charge of heresy was to risk being burned at the stake—just as Francis Kett, also of Corpus Christi College, had been convicted and burned only a short while before.”95 Kett, who shared a dining room with Marlowe when he first came to Cambridge, was executed in 1589. My grandfather compares Marlowe’s situation to that of Michael Servetus, the Spanish theologian and medical doctor who wrote The Restoration of Christianity, arguing the unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. Although his work was published anonymously, Marlowe’s Ghost 71

Servetus added the initials M.S.V. in small type at the end. His theological opponent, John Calvin, identified the author as Michael Servetus of Villeneuve and had him arrested in Geneva and burned at the stake as a heretic, in the decade before Marlowe’s birth. Servetus was described at length in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, next to the Bible the most popular book in Elizabethan England, and undoubtedly came to Kit’s attention. As a freethinker, my grandfather reasons, Marlowe must have learned not to reveal or even hint at his identity in his writings under Shakespeare’s name, lest he suffer Servetus’s fate. Only in the sonnets, which were not meant for publication, did he disclose his innermost feelings about betrayal, exile, and despair. Aside from losing his identity as a poet and playwright, Marlowe lost his good name, as it was forever to be linked with stabbing a man in the back or “the coward conquest of a wretch’s knife / Too base . . . to be remembered,” as described in Sonnet 74. But unlike Hoffman, my grandfather does not put forward a candidate for Mr. W. H., noting that he could “eventually be identified as Walsingham, as William Hatcliffe as Leslie Hotson maintains, as Willie Hughes as Oscar Wilde has suggested, or as someone else.”96 About the only speculation he engages in concerns Marlowe’s religious beliefs: “If he were living today, instead of being arrested, he probably would be offered a chair in one of our leading theological seminaries.”97 In less than a hundred pages, Shakespeare, Thy Name Is Marlowe takes the form of a balanced, well reasoned brief. But the court of public opinion had yet to be convened, and the supreme tribunal—the academic Shakespeare conservatory—declined to hear the case.

Version 5: The King of Scots

MORTIMER JUNIOR. Letters! From whence? MESSENGER. From Killingworth, my lord. —Edward II (5.2.23)

s the four hundredth anniversary of Marlowe’s “death” drew near in 1993, historians began to look at the Deptford affair with new eyes. Scholars who narrowly conceived the Elizabethan court as unitary and Shakespeare’s plays as apolitical came under siege following the rise of feminism, cultural materialism, new historicism, and other fresh perspectives. From being 72 Hamlet viewed as a treasury of classical histories, pastoral elegies, and portraitures of timeless human psychology, the canon was discovered to be a repository of subtle social commentary and political insight into a monarchy beset with issues related to authority, conformity, and succession. In Marlowe’s case, critics could no longer take refuge behind the privy seal of Elizabethan documents, a boilerplate litany of charges of “atheism” drawn up by agents of a theocratic state, or the gossip that had become literary coin of the realm. By the same token, channeled versions of the poet’s last known day, psychic readings of the sonnets, and other Faustian sources carried as much weight as the ciphers that Baconians found in the First Folio. One incident in particular caught the attention of historians. Imprisoned in Newgate after a street fight with William Bradley in 1589, Marlowe met an inmate by the name of John Poole, whose jailhouse lectures on the art of counterfeiting played a crucial role in subsequent events. Viewed as a treasonous offense against both the state and the sovereign’s person, coining carried the death penalty. In the early 1590s, counterfeit Scottish coins started to circulate in England, and the Privy Council ordered an investigation. Marlowe was arrested for counterfeiting in Flushing in 1592 following accusations by Richard Baines, the Catholic apostate. Detained while in the company of Gifford Gilbert, the “goldsmith” (who curiously bore the inverse name of Gilbert Gifford, a Catholic double agent of the English secret service), Marlowe did not deny the charges and told Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, that the casting of one Dutch shilling was a mere test of skill. Intimating that he had powerful friends at court, Marlowe gave Sidney as character references the names of two prominent patrons, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Ferdinando, Lord Strange. Northumberland, the Wizard Earl, was the patron with Ralegh of the unofficial School of Night, while Lord Strange was patron of Lord Strange’s Men, a theater company for which Marlowe had written several plays. Strange was also a rumored match for Arbella Stuart, a descendant of Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret, the onetime queen of Scotland. The Wizard Earl, Lord Strange, and Arbella all had royal blood and were potential claimants to the English throne. Though each was Protestant, they became the lightning rod of Catholic hopes and conspiracies. Two major historical studies of Marlowe’s espionage connections appeared in the early 1990s that tried to make sense of this episode as well as other enigmatic incidents. The first, The Elizabethan Secret Services, by British historian Alan Haynes, presented a chapter on Marlowe as part of a larger analysis of Renaissance England spycraft. The second book, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl, a biographer of Thomas Nashe, Robert Dudley, and Robert Cecil, examines the Marlowe’s Ghost 73

Marlowe case in detail. Both researchers introduce a wealth of new material on the espionage background to the trajectory of Marlowe’s life, and many tantalizing personal relationships and connections emerge. Though covering much of the same ground, the investigators come to opposite conclusions. In the view of these historians, the Scottish connection is a key to the entire Deptford episode. As an independent monarchy, Scotland was both a potential ally and a potential enemy of England. Until the end of her life, Mary Queen of Scots sought an active alliance with continental Catholic powers to restore her to power in Scotland and enforce her claim to the English throne. Even after she abdicated in favor of her son, James, and was under house arrest in England, efforts continued to unite Scotland with Spain or France and to undermine England from the north. Both Catholics and Protestants vied for the allegiance of James, who was only an infant when he assumed the Scottish kingship. To keep James’s own ambition for the English throne in check, Elizabeth and Burghley fanned the prospects of Arbella Stuart, Mary’s niece and James’s cousin, who had royal blood and was under Tudor guardianship in London and Derbyshire. In 1591, Robert Cecil reportedly commissioned a portrait of the princess by Nicholas Hilliard, the miniaturist, to be taken to the Duke of Parma, the Spanish military commander in the Netherlands, to display her attractions. England faced further instability from its northern neighbor in respect to the royal succession. Over the decades, Queen Elizabeth had kept France, Spain, Scotland, and other countries continuously off balance by promising to marry one of their eligible monarchs and cement an alliance that would have greatly relaxed harsh strictures on English Catholics, if not returned the island to the papal fold altogether. By the early 1590s, however, as she neared sixty, it became clear that her procrastination, like Penelope’s in the Odyssey, was a clever strategy to pit the royal suitors against each other and enable England to remain independent. By the early 1590s, Elizabeth was too old to produce an heir, and court and Commons were preoccupied with who would rule after she passed away. In a vain effort to forestall the inevitable, the queen refused to name a successor because, as she famously put it, people favor the rising over the setting sun. Indeed, she forbade any public or private discussion of the matter, even among her senior ministers, which only fueled speculation and rumor. Her father’s will, ratified by Parliament, bypassed the Stuart line. But as king of Scotland, James Stuart, now in his mid-twenties, found widespread support, if he moderated his Presbyterianism, stopped flirting with the Catholics, and produced an heir. Though they revered their queen, the English resented the way she put off an orderly succession and, in a patriar- chal age tired of petticoat rule, many yearned for a strong male monarch. 74 Hamlet

Against this background, numerous Scottish intrigues flourished, including ones that Marlowe may have participated in or that may have contributed to the events in Deptford. The Flushing incident was related to Scotland in two ways: 1) the possible connection between Marlowe’s contacts with a goldsmith and counterfeiting Scottish and English currency and 2) the succession to the English throne through Lord Strange, his theater patron and rumored match to James’s cousin, Arbella. Burghley, Elizabeth’s principal advisor, and his son, Robert Cecil, were deeply involved in secret diplomatic contacts and espionage activities in Scotland. Since the death of Secretary of State Francis Walsingham, the chief spymaster, in 1590, Burghley had assumed many of his functions as foreign minister and head of the secret service along with his duties as lord treasurer. But Burghley, too, like Elizabeth, was aging, and he suffered from painful gout. With a view to a continuation of the policies that had kept England free and independent for a generation, he groomed his son, Robert, to succeed him. In 1591, young Robert was named to the Privy Council. Although the queen forbade any contact about succession with Scottish nobles or royalty, the Cecils carried out clandestine activities in the name of national security without her knowledge or consent. Among the Cecils’s most trusted agents in Europe was Robert Poley, the third man present with Marlowe, Frizer, and Skeres in Deptford on May 30, 1593. Poley worked his way up the espionage ladder for many years, serving as a courier, a spy, and a double agent. He played a key role in uncover- ing the Babington Conspiracy that led to Mary Queen of Scot’s execution. As a master of deceit, his skills at prevarication were legendary. For someone who had completely taken in the Catholic queen, her retinue, and sophisticated courtiers and ministers in several courts, misleading the provincial jury in Deptford would have been child’s play. “I will sweare and forsweare my self rather than I will accuse my selffe to doe me any harme,” Poley once avowed.98 In the early 1590s, Poley was promoted to directing espionage in the Low Countries, including Flushing, where Kit was detained. In September 1592, Poley returned to England and twice visited Canterbury. Coincidentally, Marlowe was visiting his hometown at this time, and Haynes speculates that Poley met with the playwright and Paul Ive, a fortifications engineer, sometime spy, and source for military details in Tamburlaine. Between the end of 1592 and early 1593, Poley made the first of several trips to Scotland. The longest lasted two months at the Scottish court, where he gleaned information for the Cecils on the latest intrigue between Spain and Catholic plotters. The disaffected Scottish earls had felt jilted by Philip II in 1588, when he launched his Armada to the south rather than landing troops to the north and attacking England across the border. Now Marlowe’s Ghost 75 they were lobbying for another Spanish invasion. Under torture, a Scottish Catholic found to possess compromising papers revealed to the English a possible Jesuit plot, known as the Scottish Blanks, to mount a new incur- sion. The road that led from Flushing to Deptford began at least seven years earlier during the Babington Plot, the most sensational of the Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth. Acting as a double agent in the mid 1580s, Poley had opened a direct communications channel between Mary Queen of Scots and her sympathizers in France, ferried letters for her to Scotland, and convinced young August Babington to participate. Things came to a head at a meeting at Poley’s lodgings on August 2, 1586 at which Babington and the other conspirators, including a Skyeres (probably Nicholas Skeres acting as a plant), were present. In the shadows was Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s later patron. After returning from France, where he had engaged in espionage work for his cousin, Francis, Thomas apparently served as a section- head in London and was seen with Poley when some of the plotters were apprehended.99 John Poole, the Dickensian coiner Marlowe met in Newgate (when he was temporarily imprisoned in 1589), was the brother-in-law of Sir William Stanley, the leader of the English Catholic exiles, and linked by marriage to Lord Strange’s father, Henry Stanley, the fourth Earl of Derby. Sir William Stanley was the military commander of an expatriate English regiment that was fighting Elizabeth’s forces in the Low Countries in alliance with Spain. To help fund Stanley’s forces, English Catholics robbed churches and cathe- drals of gold plate to be smuggled out of the country and melted into currency. Hence their need for coiners. Historians speculate that Marlowe was on assignment for the Crown to infiltrate Stanley’s camp by posing as a Catholic sympathizer and someone knowledgeable in the coiner’s art. Unfortunately, Baines, his old rival and confederate, panicked or decided to settle old scores and turned Marlowe over to the English civil authorities. Poley, meanwhile, was the operations manager for the Crown’s spies and counterspies in the region and may have been Marlowe’s controller. In any event, Baines’s accusations compromised the Flushing mission. The poet- spy was sent home as a prisoner, after which Burghley, in overall charge of the espionage network, quietly released him. Marlowe’s final troubles leading up to the events in Deptford began with the Dutch Church libel. Though direct evidence is lacking, Nicholl speculates in The Reckoning that Richard Cholmeley, “a government agent, a two- timer, a dirty tricks merchant,” was the libeler. Posing as a Catholic, Cholmeley had written previous libels and was known to dabble in verse. Nicholl sees his impersonation of the mysterious “Tamburlaine,” an allusion 76 Hamlet to Kit’s dramatic hero of the same name, in the Dutch Church libel as “the opening move in a smear campaign against Marlowe.”100 Cholmeley also figures in a second prong of the attack on Marlowe, but this time in the role as his accomplice or victim. The previous month, a set of documents by an anonymous informer, known as the Remembrances, appeared, accusing Cholmeley of blasphemy and sedition. It includes many of the same stock charges of atheism as the Baines Note but goes further in implicating powerful men at court. The document quotes Cholmeley as saying that virtually the entire Privy Council were “all Atheists & Machiavellians.” It threatens to produce witnesses to testify that they are “sounde Atheists” for “their lives & deeds showe that they thinke their soules do ende, vanishe, and perish with their bodies.”101 Specifically named are the lord admiral, the lord chamberlain, and the Cecils. The note further alleges, “This cursed Cholmeley hath Lx [sixty men] of his company” whose intent is “to drawe Her Majesties subjectes to bee Atheists” and “after her Majesties decease, to make a kinge among them selves & live accordinge to their owne lawes.”102 The Remembrances mention Marlowe in passing, noting that he delivered a lecture on atheism to Ralegh’s academy. In light of these two attacks on Marlowe, Nicholl views Thomas Kyd’s arrest in “a new and chilling light.” In his view, the “vile, hereticall conceiptes” document was shuffled into Kyd’s papers and was a deliberate fabrication intended to frame Marlowe for atheism and sedition. Though the inquisitors pressed their heresy campaign against Marlowe, Haynes observes in The Elizabethan Secret Services, it was the Scottish connection that proved his downfall. At the end of January 1593, Sir Walter Ralegh submitted an analysis to Elizabeth strongly warning of the Scottish menace. The courtier was still in the royal doghouse because of his unsanc- tioned marriage and hoped to get back into the queen’s good graces by alerting her to the intrigues of Catholics to the north and the vacillations of James. As the case against Marlowe developed, investigative attention focused on his connection with Ralegh and his circle of freethinkers. Haynes believes that Marlowe’s possible involvement in Scottish intelligence or politics alarmed the Privy Council. Shortly after the events in Deptford, Thomas Kyd, who had originally implicated Marlowe as an atheist, wrote a letter to the lord keeper, Sir John Puckering, in which he claimed that Marlowe “wold perswade men of quallity to goe unto the K[ing] of Scots, whether I heare Royden [a fellow poet and intelligencer] is gon and where if he had livd he told me when I saw him last he meant to be.”103 Though Kyd’s undated letter appears to have been written after Marlowe’s “death,” Kyd probably made the same charges under torture in May. In addition to the Cecils, another faction at court was dabbling in Marlowe’s Ghost 77

Scottish affairs behind the queen’s back. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, the dashing young courtier who had become Elizabeth’s favorite, had developed his own intelligence network to rival that of the Cecils. Although the queen was old enough to be his mother, Essex dutifully played the role of chief suitor for her affections and was richly rewarded for his flattery. He fought gallantly with Sir Philip Sidney and Leicester at the heroic battle of Zutphen in the Spanish Netherlands in 1586, became Master of the Horse in 1587, and was promoted to Knight of the Garter in 1588, though Essex’s headstrong and impetuous behavior exasperated the queen, and there were frequent scenes (including shouting matches) between them, followed by tender reconciliations. In February 1593, Elizabeth appointed her erratic courtier to the Privy Council. By this time, Essex had taken over key elements of Sir Francis Walsing- ham’s old espionage service that had not been appropriated by the Cecils. This included master spy Thomas Phelippes and the Bacons, Anthony and Francis. The latter were nephews of Burghley, but he constantly delayed their advancement in favor of his son, Robert. As a result, the Bacons grav- itated toward Essex, and Anthony ran a major spy operation in France where he was stationed for many years. Essex favored James to succeed Elizabeth, and on the earl’s behalf, Anthony Bacon opened a secret correspondence with agents in Scotland. Both Essex and Cecil supported the Scottish monarch as the successor most likely to ensure continuity with the existing order, but each jockeyed separately for influence in a future reign. Despite disagreeing about the motivation behind his death, both Haynes and Nicholl conclude that Marlowe died in Deptford, as a result of a quarrel over politics and allegiances, not the bill of fare. Haynes contends that the Cecils were afraid that Marlowe was a rogue agent who might betray the Scottish connection and sent Poley to Deptford to sound him out, but that the mercurial poet assaulted Frizer (who was there on behalf of Walsing- ham), and was slain in self-defense. He ridicules notions that Marlowe survived and was “spirited away to write the plays of Shakespeare with the Countess of Pembroke.”104 He also dismisses the possibility that Marlowe was assassinated, noting that he could easily have been silenced by imprisonment or the banning of his plays. However, Haynes believes there was a cover up of the affair to protect the Cecils. Nicholl argues that Marlowe was caught in the middle of a power struggle between the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1592, Ralegh’s star fell precipitously when Elizabeth discovered his secret marriage to one of her maids of honor. However, by March 1593, his fortunes were on the rise again. Ralegh spoke out in Parliament against the harsh suppression of Puritans and Catholics and was one of the few in the Commons to oppose 78 Hamlet a bill granting privileges to the Dutch immigrants. Essex’s purpose was “to complete the political demise of Ralegh, to finish off an already fallen enemy” who threatened his relationship with Elizabeth, Nicholl argues. “The chief agents of this propaganda are Richard Cholmeley and Richard Baines. Their ostensible target is not Ralegh himself, which would be too obvious, but his controversial friend and follower, Christopher Marlowe. Both of them present Marlowe as a menace to religion and society, and both explicitly link him with Ralegh.”105 The dirty-tricks manager for the campaign, Nicholl speculates, was probably Thomas Phelippes, the head of Essex’s continental network and a master manipulator. Not only was he handling Cholmeley, in Nicholl’s view, but he was also a member of the special commission established by the Privy Council in London on April 22 to investigate the Dutch libels, which he himself had instigated! The man behind the Remembrances Nicholl identifies as Thomas Drury, a low-level agent and past associate of Cholmeley and Baines. However, unlike these other informers, he feels, Drury is not working directly for Essex. He is a wild card and independently comes forward with his charges, motivated primarily by the reward for information leading to the identity of the Dutch Church libelers. In a letter written in August 1593 seeking payment for his services, Drury declares that he obtained the “desired secret.” Nicholl interprets this to refer to the Baines Note and the knowledge that Cholmeley was the author of the libel. On the strength of the charges leveled by Kyd and the various informers, Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council and an active investigation opened. Ordinarily, in such a perilous case, the poet’s word would not be enough for liberty to be granted. “In the realities of Elizabethan politics, it was not innocence that kept a man out of jail, but influence,” explains Nicholl. “. . . There is only one plausible candidate as the protector of Marlowe in May 1593: Sir Robert Cecil.”106 Sir Robert and his aging father were Marlowe’s protectors and had bailed him out of trouble in Flushing. Besides, Cecil and Essex were bitter rivals. Perhaps Marlowe’s detention could be turned to their advantage by discrediting Essex. “Is it at this stage that the signal goes out to the Netherlands, ordering the return of Robert Poley?” Nicholl asks. “Whatever the reasoning behind Marlowe’s release, his continued liberty in the last week of May strikes me as bad news for the Essex faction. He has been accused, he has been apprehended, and yet he remains free.”107 To prevent the conspiracy from back- firing, Nicholl believes that the Essex camp resorted to violence. “At this stage, I would say, Marlowe himself has become the major stumbling block in the Essex campaign. He is a voice of dissent. He is escaping from the con- fines of the part that has been written for him. But if Marlowe could be Marlowe’s Ghost 79 removed from the game, silenced in some way, then the ‘Note’, and all the other accumulated accusations, might be enough to keep the campaign moving towards its desired end, which is the political destruction of Sir Walter Ralegh.”108 The villain in the final slaying, The Reckoning concludes, is Nicholas Skeres. Though he is associated with Ingram Frizer and Thomas Walsing- ham, Skeres has been an intermittent servant of Essex. In 1589 he served as a courier for the earl, and he served under him in a military expedition in France several years later. In a deposition to the Star Chamber on an unre- lated case a month earlier in April 1593, Skeres identified the Earl of Essex as his “Lord and Master.”109 Though Frizer ostensibly arranged the meeting, Nicholl sees him acting under the instructions of Skeres, whom he tend- ed to follow in their joint confidence schemes. Poley arrived, possibly unexpectedly. The two agents questioned Marlowe, each with his own private agenda, Skeres to get Marlowe to give evidence against Ralegh, Poley to protect the Cecils’ interests. A fight breaks out, Nicholl posits, and Marlowe is slain, probably inten- tionally. In this hall of mirrors, Nicholl writes: “It was not Frizer who was pinioned between Skeres and Poley, so that he could not ‘get away’, but Marlowe. The shallow slashes on Frizer’s head were not inflicted by a man standing over him, but by a victim flailing and lunging for his life. The killing of Christopher Marlowe was not self-defense but murder.”110 Though not part of the conspiracy, Poley quickly realizes the political rami- fications. He goes along with the cover up and discretely protects himself and his masters. The Reckoning is a brilliant study of the shadowy Elizabethan underworld and firmly places Marlowe, the iconoclastic playmaker, in the midst of court intrigues and treacherous plots such as those dramatized by his works and later in those credited to Shakespeare. However, Nicholl’s conclusion that Essex or his faction masterminded the murder is thin and unconvinc- ing. He gives no evidence that the earl and Ralegh were still engaged in a bitter personal feud in early 1593. Recently released from the Tower, Sir Walter was still banished at court and was virtually a lone voice in Parlia- ment. Essex himself had only been named to the Privy Council on February 25, 1593, and it is unlikely that he would have fomented a conspiracy so quickly or challenged the Cecils and other entrenched members of the cabinet. Indeed, Essex was not even present at the crucial meeting of the Privy Council when the Dutch Church libel was discussed and action was taken to apprehend “Tamburlaine.” Archbishop Whitgift, however, was in atten- dance at this pivotal meeting, and during some of this period the queen and her court were in Croyden, staying at the archbishop’s residence. Hence he 80 Hamlet controlled the logistics of the Privy Council, as well as probably calling the shots at its meetings, especially since Burghley was ill and ailing. The evidence that Skeres was a “servant” of Essex is suggestive but not conclusive. At the time he was working with Frizer and Thomas Walsingham and could just as easily have been a “plant” within the Essex faction, pro- viding the Cecils with inside information on their chief rival. Aside from the Babington plot, the relation between Skeres and Walsingham may go back even further. According to historian John Bakeless, Walsingham was accompanied by a Skeggs, “who sounds suspiciously like Nicholas Skeres,” while serving as a confidential messenger in France in 1581.111 Skeres and his brother, Jerome, were also associates of Matthew Royden, the poet-spy to whom Marlowe was later said to have confided his plan to seek employment with James in Scotland. As for the modus operandi of the caper, neither Frizer nor Skeres were assassins or had a record of violence, before or after the incident. They were “conny-catchers,” low level swindlers and confidence men. If Marlowe was the target of an assassination, why kill him in a semi-public place and wait around for an inquest, when he could have been disposed of quietly in a back alley or on the high road to London? Interest- ingly, Frizer inexplicably remained in Thomas Walsingham’s employ after his pardon, and Marlowe’s patron made no attempt to erect a stone or monument to his memory in the Deptford churchyard or move his remains to Canterbury. The Reckoning ultimately raises more questions than it answers. In the second edition, published in 1995, Nicholl backs off from some of his earlier claims and gives more weight to the charges of heresy and blasphemy. “The new findings on the case are small specialist illuminations, but they cause some radical shifts in my argument,” Nicholl explains. “I draw back now from the more schematic kind of political ‘conspiracy theory.’ I focus more on the foreground figures: on the informers and persuaders and dissi- dent-hunters whose opportunist dealings wrap like a web around the last weeks of Marlowe’s life.”112 In particular, he looks more deeply into the role of Thomas Drury, but he still believes that the poet-dramatist died in Deptford. In a recent essay, Nicholl concedes that Marlowe’s “supposed ‘intent to go to the enemy’ was actually an attempt to infiltrate Catholic exile circles in Brussels; and that this was the reason he escaped any punishment after his arrest and exportation by Sir Robert Sidney.”113 Finally, in The Gunpowder Plot, Nicholl makes a U-turn about Marlowe’s usefulness to the Crown: “Just before Marlowe’s sudden death in May 1593, [Burghley] may have been considering using him again.”114 A third book, Who Killed Kit Marlowe?, offers still another scenario. It suggests that Charles Howard, the lord admiral who was identified in the Marlowe’s Ghost 81 informer’s note as an atheist along with several other Privy Council members, was the ringleader of a plot by senior officials to kill the poet to protect themselves in the event that he confessed under torture and implicated them in heretical beliefs. Aside from the fact that the admiral lived in Deptford, however, no evidence is advanced for this hypothesis. There is also speculation in other quarters that Marlowe was murdered because of incriminating information he may have learned about Audrey Walsingham, the wife of his patron. In the late 1590s, Audrey appears to have engaged in intrigues connected with James’s succession. Later, when he ascended to the throne, the king showered her with honors. For many years afterward, Audrey was involved in legal and property transactions with Frizer and, according to this scenario, he served as her hit man on this earlier occasion. Lack of evidence that the Walsinghams were married in 1593, however, appears to deal a fatal blow to this theory. Most likely, they were wed after the events in Deptford.115

Version 6: For Such a Guest Is Meet

GRAVEDIGGER. “O a pit of clay for to be made For such a Guest is meet.” —Hamlet (5.1.101–102)

aking into account the new evidence of Nicholl and other historians, a new generation of Marlovian researchers has weighed in with more plausible and sophisticated theories of what happened in Deptford than those presented by Ziegler, Hoffman, or my grandfather. Leading the campaign was A. D. (Dorothy or Dolly) Wraight, a British historian and co-author of In Search of Christopher Marlowe, a well-received biography of the poet published in 1965. In her lavishly illustrated life of Marlowe, Wraight focused on the heresy charges against him and hinted at Marlowe’s involvement with the Shakespearean canon. In the early 1990s, she wrote Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, a study of the creative relationship between the poet and the leading actor at the Rose theatre, offering further tantalizing clues to the authorship controversy. But she waited for thirty years to publish her magnum opus, The Story That the Sonnets Tell, in 1995. Like Tamburlaine, who in Marlowe’s stage production besieged his opponents with white 82 Hamlet streaming banners indicating his willingness to parley, then red banners sig- nalling approaching attack, and finally black emblems of combat, Wraight’s third book launched a full-scale assault on the Shakespeare establishment. In this work, Wraight presents a comprehensive case that Marlowe’s death was faked and that the poet went on to write the Shakespearean works. As a historian, she is more conscientious than her predecessors and has an ease and a familiarity with primary sources. As a literary critic, she also has a solid command of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s dramatic output, unlike other commentators, historians and the early Marlovian partisans alike, who tend to mention the plays and poems only in passing. Like Hoffman and my grandfather, Wraight believes that Marlowe’s arrest was instigated by the witch hunters in the Church of England and the Star Chamber. She doesn’t offer any new evidence of Archbishop Whitgift’s involvement, but she marshalls a solid case that the poet was caught up in the general persecution of heretics and nonconformists. She acknowledges Marlowe’s role as a spy or courier but dismisses Haynes, Nicholl, and other historians who believe he was the cat’s paw of political intrigues at court. Unlike Hoffman and many literary critics, Wraight rejects the notion that Marlowe was homosexual and devotes a part of her book, including an analysis of the sonnets, to trying to establish his heterosexual orientation. Though she dismisses a love affair between the poet and his patron, she suggests that Walsingham organized the events in Deptford out of a deep regard for Marlowe’s artistic genius and loyalty to a friend—one of the highest ideals in Renaissance society. In her view, Walsingham “summoned all his skill, ingenuity, and expert- ise in espionage to stage a faked murder, using Frizer, Poley and Skeres in a subtle plot; substituting another body whose face was disfigured by the facial wound, to enable Marlowe to escape.”116 Describing Deptford as “a four star venue” for staging the plot, she reviews many of the coincidences and anomalies noted earlier. She lays particular emphasis on Eleanor Bull, the proprietress of the “tavern” in Deptford. As William Urrey, the archivist for the city of Canterbury, first pointed out in his study of Marlowe in the 1970s, “What can be concluded is that the supposed ale-wife or bawdy- house keeper of Deptford dockside came of an ancient armorial family with members close about the queen and a distinguished ancestry going far back into the Middle Ages.”117 Her late cousin, Blanche Parry, had nursed Elizabeth as an infant and is often described by historians as the future queen’s only real mother—hence Eleanor would have been treated by the sovereign as family. Urrey also discovered new information about her husband, Richard Bull, who had recently died and was buried in St. Nicholas’s Churchyard. He turned out to be a sub-bailiff of Sayes Court, the ruling Marlowe’s Ghost 83 manor in Deptford, and an important official. Eleanor Bull also appears to be distantly related to William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son, Robert. Hence Mrs. Bull had connections with local authorities in the town and parish, as well as ties at court and the highest level of the Privy Council, who may have helped cover up the inquest and burial. The Marlovians generally hold that Poley was essential to the scheme because two witnesses were necessary if Frizer, the designated assailant, was to be exonerated for self-defense at the subsequent inquest. In Wraight’s view, Marlowe probably didn’t know the scope of the plot and was either not present at the meeting in Deptford or left early to set sail for the continent. However, she thinks that Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron and senior intelligence operative, was at hand to organize final details. She does not speculate on the identity of the body that may have been passed off as Marlowe’s. Wraight, Peter Farey, John Baker, and other Marlovians have also raised formidable questions surrounding the venue of the meeting. Why Deptford? Contrary to the authorized version, it was not neutral territory, nor was Mrs. Bull’s establishment part of a red-light district that an inebriated poet and his cronies chanced upon. First, Deptford was in convenient riding distance of Scadbury, Walsingham’s estate. Second, it fell within the verge, the jurisdiction of the Crown coroner, William Danby, a man who had known Burghley for a half century and who might be expected to do his bidding. Third, on the waterfront, Deptford was easily accessible to Robert Poley, who would have been returning by ship post haste from the Netherlands with letters for the queen, and fourth it served as a convenient disembarkation point for Marlowe should he decide to flee the country. If Essex set up the meeting, why invite Poley, who was loyal to the Cecils and probably Marlowe’s field officer? And how did Poley learn of the rendezvous except through Walsingham or one of the Cecils? One often overlooked fact about Poley is that he was apparently married to the daughter of poet Thomas Watson, Marlowe’s best friend and the man who once saved his life in a sword fight. He lived in the same neighborhood as Marlowe, north of London. Hence Marlowe and Poley appear to have been acquainted as parts of the same social circle, apart from their professional relationship. In addressing one of most puzzling pieces in the jigsaw puzzle, David A. More, an American investigator, makes the startling suggestion that the corpse passed off as Marlowe’s was that of John Penry, the nonconformist preacher who was executed the day before the Deptford meeting. Penry, the key suspect in the Marprelate controversy, was tried and convicted of sedition on May 21, the day after Marlowe’s arrest. Scheduled to be put to death 84 Hamlet on May 25, his sentence was unexpectedly delayed following Penry’s appeal to Burghley and the Earl of Essex. However, Whitgift and his cronies on the Privy Council moved quickly, obtained a death warrant, and secretly hung Penry on a hastily erected gallows at St. Thomas à Watering, about three miles from Deptford, on May 29. According to More, forensic experts agree that the body would be well preserved in England’s cool weather, and a knife wound to the face administered after the fact would hide his identity. As More put it, “Did Coroner Danby view John Penry’s body on June 1 instead of Christopher Marlowe’s? Burghley and Essex knew of the Welshman’s impending fate; he had written to both of them from prison protesting his loyalty and innocence. Essex’s man, Skeres, along with Poley and Frizer, could take care of removal and transportation to Deptford, a few miles away, under cover of darkness.”118 Danby was coroner of Marshalsea, the prison where John Penry was held until he was executed, so he could have easily procured the body as a substitute for that of Marlowe. More is not the only supporter of this hypothesis. Others point out that Penry’s body was never found, despite three letters to Burghley before he died, imploring him to see that it was returned to his family. “Since the British method of hanging kills by strangulation, the cadaver does not display the broken and elongated neck that deforms American victims,” John Baker, another indefatigable Marlovian researcher, observes.119 Moreover, the corpse would have slackened after about a day, when the rigor mortis wore off. With the dagger placed in the forehead, disguising the identity of the victim would have been significantly easier in an era before fingerprints, dental records, DNA, or other forensics. Waiting for the body to soften may account for the meeting in Deptford lasting from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The time elapsed from Penry’s hanging, at about 5 p.m. on May 29, to “Mar- lowe’s” stabbing at 6 p.m. on May 30 was just over twenty-four hours. Baker, an independent scholar from Washington State with the most comprehensive web site on the Marlowe/Shakespeare controversy, has investigated many aspects of Kit’s life and “death.” He makes a strong case that, while on assignment for the Crown in the late 1580s, Marlowe tutored young Arbella Stuart, an English heiress and James’s major rival to succeed Queen Elizabeth, for three years. Bess of Hardwick, her grandmother, identified a man named Morley as Arbella’s tutor and characterized him as one “much damnified by the leaving of the university.”120 The identification would appear to fit only Christopher Marlowe, not another Morley at Cambridge who graduated without being under any cloud. Historian Sarah Gristwood investigates this link in her recent biography of Arbella. “If Marlowe were Morley, then he would not be unique in literary history. And the identification takes a little colour from literary sources: in Marlowe’s Marlowe’s Ghost 85

Edward II (II.ii) the scholar Baldock hopes to be ‘preferred’ through the agency of a lady, cousin to the king, ‘Having read unto her since she was a child.’”121 According to Baker’s scenario, the Cecils had established a clandestine communications link with the Scottish court in order to prevent civil war and ensure a peaceful succession when Queen Elizabeth passed away, and Poley’s four trips to Scotland between the autumn of 1592 and the spring of 1593 fell under this rubric. Marlowe’s confidential disclosure to Kyd that he would “wold perswade with men of quallitie to goe unto the K[ing] of Scots” suggests, if it were true, that he was probably engaged in this enter- prise. The issue of the Scottish Blanks, the unsigned letter by Scottish nobles pledging to rise up against England, had reached a peak in the spring of 1593, along with the Puritan crisis in Parliament and Whitgift’s witch hunt against separatists, atheists, and other nonconformists. In a letter to his son, Robert, dated May 21, 1593, the day after Marlowe was released on bail, Burghley indicated that he planned to send another mission to Scotland and, the following day, followed it up with another missive that he indicated was so sensitive that he could confide to no one else.122 During this period, Burghley was sick and bedridden, and Whitgift took advantage of his absence from the Privy Council. At one point, the Lord Treasurer returned on a stretcher in order to thwart his adversaries. “We can be very certain Marlowe was bound for Scotland to be with James VI, later James I, in May 1593 and that the Cecils, and indeed all of England, were dependent upon him,” Baker concludes with a James Bondian flourish.123 Though Burghley attended meetings of the Privy Council on May 29 and 31, bracketing Marlowe’s “death” on May 30, the actual work of carrying out the deception in Deptford was probably left to his son, Robert, who in many ways was now running the country. Sir George Carey may also have participated in the affair. As the Knight Marshall, he exercised judicial authority within the queen’s “house and verge.”124 Along with coroner Danby, he could have controlled the inquest because the verge encompass- ing the scene of Marlowe’s reputed death fell under his jurisdiction. He would also have been ideally placed to cover up events afterward. As 2 Henry VI puts it, “[F]ear not. Whom we raise, / We will make fast within a hal- low’d verge” (1.4.21-22). Through the artistic patronage of his father, Henry Carey or Lord Hunsdon, Sir George may have known or been acquainted with Marlowe. When his father died several years later, he sought to succeed him as lord chamberlain, but Lord Cobham was selected by Elizabeth instead. In addition to this personal humiliation, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theater company Carey inherited from his father, was demoted to the Lord 86 Hamlet

Hunsdon’s Men. However, Cobham soon died, and Sir George was elevat- ed to the post. At a special performance at court in 1597, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, restored to its former status, performed a new play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, which lampooned the Cobham family.125 Critics assume that Shakespeare naturally took the part of his patron in Wives, but it could also have been a measure of literary gratitude on the poet’s part for a kindness extended in the past.

A Damnable Crew

Farewell, England. I’ll go to Flushing now. —Arden of Faversham

he most recent and comprehensive historical account of the events leading up to Marlowe’s death appears in Roy Kendall’s Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys Through the Elizabethan Underground. In this investigation of the links between the poet and his principal accuser, the New England scholar turns the accepted view of their relationship on its head, sug- gesting that Baines may have been Marlowe’s early mentor in atheism rather than his disciple. At the English seminary in Rheims a decade earlier, Baines was confined and tortured by the authorities and in a document known as the Renunciation confessed to a series of crimes and heresies:

This, then, was my course: the scandal and ruin of many young men and other colleagues (had not God in his singular grace dissuaded them both) by the example of a licentious life and unholy words and conversations in which I showed myself dissatisfied by the fasts and prayers but instead inclined to delights of the flesh, such that often I brought meat pies . . . into my cell on Friday evenings. I also missed the divine offices I was obliged to attend, and joked about them in the company of certain friends whose love and discretion I trusted.126

“[T]he portrait Baines paints of Marlowe in 1593 is close to Baines’ self- portrait of 1583,” Kendall observes.127 Kendall speculates that the immediate cause of the falling out in the Netherlands was over possible allusions to Baines in Marlowe’s new play Edward II. In his view, the play’s intrigues point to possible homosexual dalliances by King James of Scotland, as well as to plots against England that Baines may have been involved in and feared exposing on the stage. Alternatively, he suggests, as chamber mates in Flush- ing, Baines and Marlowe may have had a gay relationship that went sour. Marlowe’s Ghost 87

As for Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing who arrested Mar- lowe, Kendall suspects that he was much more involved in the affair than his letter to Burghley indicates. As the former ambassador to Scotland, Sidney was intimately familiar with court politics. As the brother of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, and a poet himself, Robert was attuned to political and dramatic nuances. Kendall notes that some of his poems are later alluded to in Love’s Labor’s Lost. In addition to Lord Strange and Northumberland, he thinks that Marlowe probably gave Robert’s sister Mary (wife of his other theatrical patron, the Earl of Pembroke) as a reference, but that Sidney prudently failed to mention this in his letter to William Cecil. At the time of Kit’s arrest for counterfeiting, a plot was afoot to replace Queen Elizabeth with Lady Arbella, and both Marlowe and Baines may have been involved in infiltrating the Catholic conspiracy on behalf of the Cecils. In any event, Sidney washed his hands of the pair, and Kit was quietly released back in London. Arden of Faversham, an anonymous play with references to counterfeiting and Flushing, was registered at the Stationers’ Company two months later. As many critics have concluded on stylistic grounds, it was probably written or co-authored by Marlowe. Arden may have been first performed by Pembroke’s company, further tying it to the Sidney circle. In unraveling the events leading up to the poet’s arrest and the Deptford affair the following spring, Kendall presents an entirely new scenario. Although he praises Nicholl’s investigation in The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe as meticulous, he dismisses as preposterous his conclusion that Essex masterminded a plot against Marlowe. Instead, he traces the genesis of the affair back to the later part of 1592, when Father Robert Parsons, the Jesuit expatriate, published a commentary against Elizabeth’s anti-Catholic edict of 1591. Directed primarily at Burghley, the attack accused the lord treasurer of misusing his power as master of the Court of Wards to line his own pocket and further the dynastic ambitions of his family (by having a grandson marry Arbella). With sarcastic wit, the Catholic father charged Cecil with treating the queen as “one of his wards.”128 In his commentary, Parsons further singled out Sir Walter Ralegh’s “schoole of Atheisme” for special criticism. In his Response, the Jesuit leader mentions “a certain necromancer and astrologer who lulls and beguiles the tender minds of the youthful nobility with the ingenious and agreeable fables by which he teaches them to scorn both Old and New Testament.”129 Kendall thinks this refers to Thomas Harriot, the astronomer and friend of Marlowe. But the almost identical language used by Baines in his Note charging Marlowe with jesting about the scriptures, especially the verb “scorn,” suggests that it may be an allusion to Kit. The word appears in the opening sen- 88 Hamlet tence: “A note containing the opinion of on[e] Christopher Marly concerning his damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of Gods word.” It also appears in the last paragraph: “he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers.”130 As Kendall explains, following charges of impropriety and atheism leveled against some of the queen’s principal advisers, Lord Buckhurst, a member of the Privy Council, wrote a letter to Sir John Puckering, his friend and ally on the council and the lord keeper of the Great Seal, on November 8, 1592, about releasing one-time government agent Thomas Drury from prison to do “some servis.”131 Both Buckhurst and Puckering had been active in the manhunt for Martin Marprelate and the secret press. Buckhurst had participated in the torture of printer Valentine Simmes (who survived and went on to print several of the Shakespearean plays, including the first edition of Hamlet), and Serjeant Puckering served as prosecuting counsel for the Crown. Now, several years later, the nature of the special assignment was not described in the letter. But in addition to his duties on the council, Buckhurst served as a commissioner for the ecclesiastical High Commission. Several months later, in April 1593, Drury was finally released from con- finement and ordered to “stay” or track down Richard Baines. Drury had also studied at Cambridge and was about the same age as Baines. As sometime government agents, their paths may have crossed previously. On May 13, 1591, a warrant had been issued for Drury and Richard Cholmeley on unspecified charges. Kendall relates these charges to a “damnable Creve [crew]” or “damnabell sect” that Drury described in letters he wrote in the summer of 1593, seeking a reward for his services. Kendall suggests that the crew or sect was a group of atheists or freethinkers that included not only Drury and Cholmeley but also possibly Baines and Marlowe. In any event, rumors about this group landed Drury in prison and prompted Buckhurst to release the former spy in return for informing on his colleagues as part of a wider investigation of suspected atheists. Spurred on by Buckhurst and Puckering (as well as the substantial reward offered by the London city commissioners for information on the Dutch Church libels), Drury set about tracking down the identity of “Tambur- laine.” Though even the authorities probably did not suspect Marlowe at first, they would have wanted to question him, especially regarding any enemies who wished to frame him. Hence the directive to apprehend Baines, a known enemy of Marlowe. Over the course of two years, suspicion fastened on Kit in connection with heretical or seditious activities on at least four occasions: the damnable crew in 1591; the Parsons’ attack on the school of atheism in 1592; Robert Greene’s dying injunction in Greene’s Groatsworth Marlowe’s Ghost 89 of Wit praising “Thou famous gracer of Tragedians” but calling upon him in 1592 to renounce his heretical views; and the Dutch Church libel in 1593. (Amazingly, Marlowe is alluded to in all four instances, but his name does not surface.) In Kendall’s view, Drury extracted from Baines the Note incriminating Marlowe by name, or possibly even wrote it himself (as he may have the Remembrances which also identifies Kit as a propagator of atheism). In short, Baines may have been forced into betraying Kit in a manner similar to Kyd (whose second letter, elaborating on Marlowe’s heresies, Kendall thinks may also have been written by Drury!), though as a former victim of the “strapedo” in France, just the threat of torture was probably enough to make Baines confess. Hence, the charges against Marlowe probably stemmed from the same source. Though they represented a mixture of truths, half-truths, and lies, Kendall concludes, the sentiments attributed to the poet did not mirror the true views of Kyd, Baines, or Cholmeley. Rather, they appear to reflect “a dark portrayal by Lord Buckhurst.”132 Who was Buckhurst, and how does he fit into the larger picture? Buckhurst was Thomas Sackville (1536–1604), a nobleman who was knighted and made a baron by Elizabeth early in her reign. In 1571–72 (and again in 1591), he served as ambassador to France, and in 1586 (and later in 1598) as an envoy to the Netherlands. Beyond these diplomatic distinc- tions, he is best known as the co-author with Thomas Norton of Gorboduc, the first English tragedy and the play that introduced blank verse on the Elizabethan stage in 1561. An accomplished writer and poet, he also contributed verse to The Mirror of Magistrates but soon abandoned his literary career for affairs of state. He served as a commissioner of state trials and in 1587 notified Mary Queen of Scots of her sentence of death. Originally a disciple of Burghley, Buckhurst grew close to Whitgift, who had been vice- chancellor at Cambridge when he studied there. In his biography, Sir George Paule describes Buckhurst as one of the prelate’s closest associates. As commissioner of Ecclesiastical Causes, in Kendall’s memorable phrase, Buckhurst was “effectively Archbishop Whitgift’s third eye.”133 With Puckering, the president of the Star Chamber and de facto national chief of police, he led the law and order faction in the Privy Council. Along with Chief Justice Popham, Justice of the Peace Young, torturer Richard Topcliffe, and other enforcers, they effectively controlled the courts, the prisons, the execution process, and all other matters relating to internal security. Kendall does not probe into the rivalries of the Privy Council, but he notes that in the Remembrances, all the leading councilors are attacked except Buckhurst and Puckering. These include the Cecils, the lord admiral, and the lord chamberlain, who are all associated with Marlowe and served as his patrons or protectors. 90 Hamlet

Surprisingly, beyond mentioning Whitgift in passing, Kendall does not tie him directly into the investigation of Marlowe or mention any of the tumultuous events earlier in the year, including the parliamentary debate on religious freedom, the execution of the Separatist ministers, and the broad crackdown on religious nonconformity that spring. Kendall also does not question the account of Marlowe’s death in Deptford and relegates his own theory to a footnote. In his view, “all roads lead to the Cecils,” and Burghley and his son, and possibly the queen herself, probably ordered the death of the ex-divinity student after he became more of a liability than an asset. Conversely, he feels that Marlowe may have died in a “happy accident” in a genuine quarrel with Frizer.134 Curiously, except for that mention, the events in Deptford are not touched on at all. Instead of exploring Marlowe’s fate, Kendall devotes the rest of his book to Baines’s death and tries to unravel the mystery surrounding his identity. At least three well educated men by the name of Richard Baines lived in England during the late Elizabethan era, and as Kendall shows, historians have routinely confused them. For over a century, it was believed that Marlowe’s Baines was executed in 1594 at Tyburn for stealing a cup from a tavern. The story represented a measure of poetic or karmic justice to Kit’s own reputed end in a Deptford tavern. In recent years, the discovery of a Rev. Baines, who lived out his life as a parish rector in Waltham and died peacefully in 1610, has been favored by many researchers. Kendall leans toward resurrecting the Tyburn Baines and shows that, in an amazing coincidence, the 1616 edition of Dr. Faustus has a new comic scene with a character named Dick who steals a cup in a tavern.

VINTER. O, are you here? I am glad I have found you. You are a couple of fine companions! Pray, where’s the cup you stole from the tavern? ROBIN. How, how? We steal a cup? Take heed what you say. We look not like cup-stealers, I can tell you. VINTER. Never deny’t, for I know you have it, and I’ll search you. ROBIN. Search me? Ay, and spare not. Hold the cup, Dick. Come, come, search me, search me. ROBIN. Come on sirrah, let me search you now. DICK. Ay, ay, do, do. Hold the cup, Robin, I fear not your searching. We scorn to steal your cups, I can tell you. VINTER. Never outface me for the matter, for sure the cup is between you two. ROBIN. Nay, there you lie. ’Tis beyond us both. VINTER. A plague take you! I thought ’twas your knavery to take it away. I thought it away. Come, give it me again. ROBIN. Ay, much! When, can you tell? Dick, make me a circle, and stand close at my back, and stir not for thy life. Vinter, you shall have your cup anon. Say nothing, Dick. ‘O’ per se ‘O’, Demogorgon, Belcher and Mephistopheles! (3.3.9–34 B-text) Marlowe’s Ghost 91

Kendall expresses astonishment at the coincidence or parody of the name Dick, which is the nickname of Richard, Baines’s first name. I would also add that the verb “scorn” echoes the Baines Note and Father Parsons’ Response and that making Dick (i.e., Baines) draw a magic circle while three devils are summoned turns the tables on his chief informer by showing him trafficking in the black arts. Also, Robin not only anticipates Robin Good- fellow in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but his punning line “Nay, there you lie. ’Tis beyond us both” prefigures the comic exchange in Hamlet between the gravedigger and the prince: “’Tis a quick lie sir, ’twill again from me to you” (5.1.108). From another point of view, of course, the parallels may not be a “happy” literary accident or posthumous in-joke by the two editors whom theater producer Henslowe paid for additions to Faustus. If the poet survived Deptford and went on to live and revise his own play, it would be akin to his parody of Baines in The Jew of Malta (and possible Edward II). Incredibly, Kendall never considers the possibility that Marlowe survived, though at one point, in another context, he writes, “[D]eaths in the murky world of espionage can often be ‘blinds’ for disappearances.”135 Kendall’s study is the most balanced and nuanced of the revised authorized accounts of Marlowe’s last years. It provides vital new information on Baines and transforms him from a Judas into a tortured soul with a claim on our sympathy. It offers fresh perspectives on the Flushing affair, Marlowe’s relations with the Sidneys, and the expatriate English Catholic community on the Continent. While it doesn’t deal with the authorship question, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines offers several tantalizing references to Shakespeare, including evidence that Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, as some critics believe, is based on Marlowe. Most of all, the account provides many new investigative paths and clues pointing to Archbishop Whitgift as the real power behind the campaign against Marlowe. Kendall cites evidence even as far back as 1591 that the prelate was actively hunting the seditious and heretical crew involving Drury, Cholmeley, and possibly Baines and Marlowe. As for Buckhurst and Puckering, the two privy councilors who sparked Drury’s release, they play the aristocratic roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as errand boys in carrying out their master’s will. The entire affair may have been a power play against the Cecils. Burghley (“a brake on the severity of others”) had clashed with Whitgift on matters relating to religious suppression, emerging as the chief defender of the Puritans and Separatists since the deaths of Leicester and Walsingham.136 He even went so far as to rebuke the archbishop for employing methods exceeding those of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1592, the Crown received intelligence pointing to a new Spanish invasion. Coinci- 92 Hamlet dentally, Father Parsons, the author of the attack on Burghley and Ralegh, masterminded the effort to unite Spain and Scotland against England. According to Kendall, this was the Lennox Plot in which Baines may have been involved. Given the confluence of these events, and the all-out launch against religious nonconformity in the foreground, it appears that Whitgift, Elizabeth’s “little black husband,” was determined to settle past accounts. Ailing from gout, Burghley was hard pressed to thwart the domestic witch hunt, especially since he himself was accused of being soft on atheism. Robert, his son, undoubtedly bolstered his resolve. Though still young by court standards and not yet officially named principal secretary by the queen, he comes across in the historical record as wise beyond his years, crafty like his father, and extraordinarily capable. In my view, as will be explored in more depth in the sections that follow, William Cecil made the providential decision to save Marlowe, and Robert Cecil directed the rescue operation from behind the scenes through Thomas Walsingham and Robert Poley. Although he comes to a different conclusion on how the events in Deptford unfolded, Nicholl agrees that the younger Cecil was probably Kit’s primary backer, “There is really only one plausible candidate as the protector of Marlowe in May, 1593: Sir Robert Cecil.”137 As for Buckhurst, the commissioner of Ecclesiastical Causes and the archbishop’s “third eye,” his uncompromising attitude toward dissent, recusan- cy, and atheism was beyond reproach. He was undoubtedly carrying out Whitgift’s direct orders or acting under his aegis. But Buckhurst may have had ulterior motives of his own. As the co-author of Gorboduc, he would have had mixed feelings about Marlowe’s rise to fame as a playwright. On the one hand, Kit had turned blank verse into the dramatic coin of the Elizabethan stage. On the other, he used it to put forward what the Church regarded as blasphemy, heresy, and sedition. In what may have been the first volley in the war of the poets (which reached a climax with Ben Jonson’s later attack on Shakespeare, among others), do we not detect Thomas Sackville staging a real-life literary revenge that only the father of English tragedy could conceive and execute? Kendall does not consider the question or connect the dots pointing to Marlowe’s survival after the Deptford affair, but he finds it puzzling that, as all these events unfolded, Kit became increasingly “desperate for the public and/or his peers to understand the true Marlowe, and that Shakespeare via Touchstone [the clown in As You Like It] was close to the mark in connecting the misunderstood Marlowe with his death in the ‘little room.’”138 The various glosses on the revised standard version of Marlowe’s death by Haynes, Nicholl, Kendall, and others have had the salutary effect of putting the case under the historical microscope and placing the espionage con- Marlowe’s Ghost 93 nections center stage. In the academic and literary worlds, it has given rise to an emerging new paradigm that Marlowe was probably murdered because of his political knowledge or connections and that the argument over the bill was part of the script. From accepting this premise, it is not difficult to imag- ine that, amid so much intrigue and disinformation at the highest levels, Marlowe’s death itself was staged and a wholly different kind of cover story—one that affected his literary identity as well as diplomatic service— was fashioned. (For convenience, the following table summarizes the various agents and their allegiances that we have encountered.)

Table 1. Espials (spies), Intelligencers, and Informers

Agent Probable Superior(s) Christopher Marlowe Burghley and Robert Cecil Thomas Walsingham Burghley and Robert Cecil Thomas Drury Lord Buckhurst and Sir John Puckering Richard Baines Lord Buckhurst and Sir John Puckering Richard Cholmeley Thomas Drury Robert Poley Burghley and Robert Cecil Nicholas Skeres Earl of Essex or Thomas Walsingham Ingram Frizer Thomas Walsingham Thomas Phelippes Earl of Essex

4 Impress of Shipwrights

Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week, What might be toward that this sweaty haste Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day, Who is’t that can inform me? —Hamlet (1.1.84–88)

In recent years, the Marlovians have built a solid circumstantial case for Marlowe’s survival. He had the motive, means, and opportunity to stage his death in Deptford. It could even be argued that the preponderance of evi- 94 Hamlet dence now points to his probable survival rather than to his murder or manslaughter. However, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the poet survived is another matter. It is to the explosive Russian connection, whose significance has only recently been recognized, that we now turn.

Muscovites

Disguis’d like Muscovites —Love’s Labor’s Lost (5.2.303)

n a groundbreaking essay, “Visible Bullets: Tambur- laine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,” Richard Wilson, professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Lancaster and an authority on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama, throws entirely new light on the Deptford affair. He cites evidence showing that Mrs. Bull’s house in Deptford housed an office associated with the Muscovy Company, a trading company whose chief agent from 1576 to 1599 was Anthony Marlowe, “long identified as a Crayford relative of Christopher Marlowe, and a cause, we may infer, of the dramatist’s fatal connection with the Deptford docks.”139 From a squalid, murky tavern, the site of Kit’s last recorded day on earth turns into a familial outpost and possible Elizabethan stage set. The Muscovy Company, England’s first joint stock company, was char- tered in 1555 by the Privy Council, five of whose members were future members of the company, and enjoyed a virtual monopoly on trade with Russia. “From Virginia to Persia, the Muscovy Company straddled the ship- ping and caravan lanes of world trade; but the hub of its activity was its warehouse in Deptford, where up to £10,000-worth of cordage was stowed,” Wilson explains. “That ‘the fleet which defeated the Armada was rigged with Russian tackle and cable’ was due to the bills and invoices that meshed in this store, where the Company’s London agent was charged with executing some of the most secret orders of the state.”140 In addition to helping defeat the dreaded Spanish invasion, the Muscovy Company and its shipbuilders from Deptford built a fleet of twenty ships for the Tsar. The Russian connection was so strong and enduring that a century later Peter the Great came to Deptford to work as an ordinary carpenter in the naval shipyards. During his stay, he made his accommodations in Sayes Court and frequently attended the local Quaker meeting. Marlowe’s Ghost 95

Principals or promoters of the Muscovy Company (also known as the Russia Company) included Sir Francis Walsingham, the secretary of state and spymaster; Burghley, the lord treasurer; and George Barne, a Woolwich broker and Walsingham’s brother-in-law. They worked closely with “the bailiff of the clerk of the Greencloth, the very Richard Bull in whose offices on Deptford Strand, long mistaken for a tavern, Christopher Marlowe would eventually pay his own mysterious reckoning.”141 Walter Marlowe, Anthony’s uncle, was a charter member of the Company; his cousin, also named Walter, was related by marriage to Walsingham; Benjamin Gonson Sr., his mother’s brother was naval treasurer; another cousin, Benjamin Gonson Jr., was clerk of ships; and the younger Gonson’s daughter was married to Christopher Browne, clerk of the Greencloth (the official in charge of the receipt of all goods into Queen Elizabeth’s royal household) and Richard Bull’s boss. Bull’s father had worked as Deptford master shipwright, and his grandfather and uncle had served as navy treasurers. In reality, the Muscovy Company, Wilson concludes, was “a cartel” of Kent families, including the Marlowes, the Walsinghams (whose stepson was the main agent in Russia), the Cecils, and military heroes such as Richard Hawkins, the famous naval commander (who was also married to a Marlowe cousin). Enjoying a virtual monopoly of trade with Russia and all areas lying “northwards, northeastwards or northwestwards,” the company reaped immense profits (up to 1800 percent return to investors). The ultimate aim of the Muscovy Company was to find a northern sea passage to China and limitless Asian markets. In 1576, Martin Frobisher set off on a sailing expedition from Deptford in quest of the Northwest Passage in one of Elizabethan England’s most heralded feats of navigation. As P. M. Handover explains in his biography of the Cecils, “Burghley and Walsingham derived much of their political strength from their appreciation of trade—they were both early members of the Muscovy Company, and Walsingham was a lifelong supporter of the search for the north-west passage. There was an ele- ment of national pride in that search for a northerly route to China, England having come late to the adventure of discovering the globe, but those who financed the repeated voyages believed that the ‘vent’ won for English cloth would be far richer than the markets of the East Indies or of the New World.”142 In 1607, Henry Hudson left from Deptford on the 80-ton Hopewell on his first voyage for the Russia Company. Eventually, the firm’s fortunes were eclipsed by the East India Company, founded in 1599 on the model of the Muscovy Company, which gained a monopoly on the lucrative sea route to the south. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Wilson suggests, was based on Ivan the Terrible, the current Russian Tsar. (Shakespearean critic A. L. Rowse noted this likeness several decades earlier, including the parallel 96 Hamlet between Ivan’s murder of his son and Tamburlaine’s slaying of Calyphas.143) The play shows an intimate diplomatic and geographic knowledge of Central Asia based on confidential intelligence reports, maps, and other company documents. In addition to the Russian empire, the company imported goods from the Italian city-states and Persia. One typical instruc- tion authorizes the agent in Shemakha to dispatch two hundred camels with spices, silks, and 770 tomans, or notes of currency, each worth about £5. Other expeditions ventured as far as the Moluccas and the Spice Islands. Goods such as these imported by the Russia Company were received at the Deptford docks, home of the company’s fleet and site of a vast warehouse. Items earmarked for the use of the royal household were handled by Richard Bull, Eleanor Bull’s husband, at his residence on Deptford Strand. Bull died in 1590, three years before the Marlowe affair. It is not known whether the Greencloth continued to maintain an office in his widow’s house. But Christopher Browne, the clerk and Bull’s former boss, continued to live at Sayes Court. Married to a Marlowe cousin, he would have had extensive dealings not only with Eleanor Bull but also with Anthony Mar- lowe. Other activities may also transpired at the Bull residence. Anthony Marlowe may even have had his headquarters there, as the Strand was a more fashionable setting for meetings than the docks or warehouse. Eleanor ran an “ordinary,” or private eating establishment, not a pub or tavern. But given her husband’s associations and her own connections at court, it is likely that her establishment served as a convenient meeting place for government officials, merchants, and spies and possibly even as a “safe house” for the intelligence network of her kinsmen, the Cecils. (Burghley handled the will of Madame Bull’s cousin at court, leaving her £100.) Wilson does not question the authorized versions of Marlowe’s death, except to note that it occurred in a completely different venue than com- monly believed. He also points out that the day after being pardoned by the queen for the poet’s death, Ingram Frizer and his associate, Nicholas Skeres, were busily employed, selling “a number of [surplus] guns and great iron pieces” from the Muscovy Company’s warehouse, on behalf of the Walsinghams.144 The ultimate irony, in Wilson’s literary view, is that the company’s largest outstanding account was for wax—a symbol of Icarus’s melting wings, a favorite image in the Marlovian plays—supplied to the Crown. Prior to Wilson’s essay, the major mention of Anthony Marlowe was in John Bakeless’s biography a half century earlier. He speculates that the poet’s older relative may have provided shelter in Deptford to his young kinsman after his arrest. “[Walsingham’s manor] was doubtless open to him, but it was too far away, and it is not hard to understand [Marlowe’s] reluc- Marlowe’s Ghost 97 tance to return to his patron’s country seat, whence he had probably been taken under arrest only two days before . . . Marlowe may have turned to Anthony Marlowe, wealthy merchant of Deptford, supposed to have been his kinsman, representative of the Muscovy Company and contractor to the Admiralty, whose influence with the government would have been use- ful.”145 In looking further into the Russian connection, I found confirmation that Anthony Marlowe was managing the Muscovy Company in 1593. On December 22, the navy issued a warrant to Christopher Baker to receive into the company’s warehouse at Deptford “of Mr Marloe, marchaunte, agent of the Muscovy house,” certain “parcells of cordage,” that Marloe duly delivered in January 1594.146 He also took possession of forty-four cables that had been ordered by the lord admiral and Sir John Hawkins. The Russia Company’s formal business was conducted at Muscovy House in Seeding Lane in London, where ambassadors and special dignitaries were customarily lodged. It remained the company’s headquarters until 1580 when it was bought by Francis Walsingham, who once entertained Robert Poley under its roof and died there in 1590. The company also leased Botolph’s Wharf from the city of London. Since there is no indication that the company obtained new offices in London, it is possible that it moved its entire operation to Deptford during this period, which coincided with rising Catholic intrigues against the Crown and the threat of Spanish invasion. Under the watchful gaze of the English navy, Deptford would have enabled the company to carry out its secret government contracts, sensitive trade missions, and nautical expeditions far removed from diplomatic and commercial spies. William Cecil (Lord Burghley) was a charter member of the Muscovy Company, delivering £25 “to the societe of the adventurors into Russia” shortly after it was founded in the early 1550s.147 Within three years, he invested another £75, following a disastrous return voyage in which three out of four ships were wrecked. To take advantage of favorable weather con- ditions, ships to Russia ordinarily left the Thames at the beginning of May, arrived in St. Nicholas, the Russian port of call, by the end of the month, loaded their cargoes by the end of June, and returned to Deptford by August 10. However, in the event all the goods were not ready, “one good ship or two” would customarily leave Deptford between June 1 and 10 and stay at St. Nicholas until the middle of August.148 June 1, 1593, of course, was the day that Marlowe was “buried” in St. Nicholas’s Churchyard (note the saint’s name is the same as the Russian destination!). Hence, it is possible that the staging of Christopher Marlowe’s death was planned to coincide with the disembarkation of one of the company’s auxiliary vessels, so that he could even have been safely stowed aboard on the very day the coroner and 98 Hamlet sixteen members of the jury convened to proclaim his death. Since the ship took the northern route to Russia, it could have dropped Marlowe off in Scotland so he could carry out his mission for the Cecils.149 As the Clerk of Ships in Deptford, Benjamin Gonson Jr., a Marlowe cousin, would have been ideally situated to facilitate his escape. Though a relatively modest investor in the company, Burghley was the most important one. Since he oversaw the queen’s diplomatic and foreign policy, he was consulted on virtually all critical matters. In a letter to Cecil, one company official diplomatically observed that Ivan the Te r r i b l e “beheaded no small number of his nobilitie,” and that he was anxious to depart from a country that used the axe even more than it was used in England!150 Cecil was active in the company until his death. In 1597, Robert Dove, one of the Russia Company’s senior members, appealed to Burghley as “the Companies patron and best frinde” to intervene with the queen in pacifying the Tsar, whose feathers had been ruffled by the Crown’s Turkish policy.151 William Cecil’s distinctive portraits show him in a furred robe with a gold chain of office. One wonders if the large fur coat was Russian, possibly a gift from the company or tailor-made from the sables the ambassador from Moscow presented Queen Elizabeth. Michael Locke (or Lok), the Muscovy Company’s London agent before Anthony Marlowe, may have played a singular literary role in Kit’s literary afterlife. Locke had been instrumental in persuading the company to grant a license and give financial backing to Martin Frobisher to seek a northwest passage to the Far East. Through Burghley, who had employed the navigator in the past, other privy councilors were persuaded to invest in the expedition. Locke also arranged for John Dee, the magus and polymath, to tutor Frobisher and his officers in the nautical arts, and he also raised money from financier Sir Thomas Gresham, who streamlined London’s financial center, founded the Royal Exchange, and established Gresham College, whose cur- riculum included navigation. Because of his business acumen, Locke has been put forward as a model for Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.152 In his capacity as manager of the Muscovy Company, Anthony Marlowe prospered. One year he received a bonus of £200 for his managerial talents, and Wilson hints that he may have enriched himself in dubious dealings involving the Walsinghams and other company directors. As “Visible Bullets” shows, Queen Elizabeth herself engaged in clandestine armaments shipments to Ivan the Terrible through the company, and graft was widespread. Anthony was also a patron of the theater and signed an appeal sup- porting construction of a new playhouse in Finsbury, north of London. The web of connections radiating from the Russia Company casts an entirely new light on Deptford as a venue for what transpired at Mrs. Bull’s Marlowe’s Ghost 99 establishment on May 30, 1593. It reveals that Marlowe had not only a professional connection with Deptford, but also a personal, familial one. None of these relationships has been addressed by those historians or literary scholars who now concede that Marlowe may have been the target of an espionage plot but accept his death in Deptford as a given. Another thread that has not been pursued is the Separatist link to Deptford. In March 1593, following the Rippon incident, over fifty members of a nonconformist church were arrested and thrown into prison. Under interrogation during the next two months, many of them admitted secretly meeting in Deptford. “Henry Withers shipwrighte dwellinge at Deptford Strande of the age of xxvii yeares was committed a moneth paste, beinge taken at the assembly in the woodes,” a typical summary by the High Commission reads. “Hee saieth that hee hath bene of said assemblies this halfe yeare by meanes and persuasion of the shipwrights and they did assem- ble themselves every Sabbath daye at dyvers houses.”153 While there is no evidence that Mrs. Bull’s residence served in such a capacity, there appears to be a local populace, including shipwrights of the Muscovy Company, that would have been sympathetic to Kit and provided logistic support, if necessary, in his escape. In letters and petitions smuggled out of jail, the dissenters address their appeals to Burghley, Essex, and Hunsdon in hope that they would bring their plight to Queen Elizabeth’s attention. Rev. Francis Johnson implored Burghley to keep the Separatists’ appeals private and under no circumstances show them “to the Prelate of Canter[bury] and other our adversaries, who will the more either contynue my restrainte in prison or hasten the ende of my dayes in this lyfe.”154 In a possible dress rehearsal of Marlowe’s rescue, plans were made in 1591, to save Rev. John Udall, who had incurred the queen’s displeasure following the Marprelate affair and was languishing in prison under sentence of death. A group of London merchants arranged for him to be pardoned and banished to Turkey, the seat of Christendom’s historic foe, Islam, where ironically freedom of religion for Christians and Jews was tolerated. Sir Walter Ralegh proposed the deal, Burghley and Essex interceded with the queen, and Archbishop Whitgift “condescended” to the arrangement.155 Unfortunately, Udall died in prison before it could be carried out. However, the Turkish connection suggests that the Russia Company, which monopo- lized trade in that part of the world, was involved, and as a company director and foreign secretary, Burghley played the pivotal role. Now in 1593, two years later, when Marlowe, another dissenter and one with familial ties to the merchants, faced torture and execution, would not the rescue committee have been reactivated and inspired to move with more haste? Indeed, the entire case grows ever more curious as each new piece of evi- 100 Hamlet dence emerges. Marlowe, the hot-headed poet, turns out to have been a trusted servant of the Crown who was recognized by the queen and Privy Council for his “good service” to Her Majesty’s government. He was a man experienced at putting on an antic disposition in infiltrating Catholic sympathizers, posing as a counterfeiter in Flushing, and evidently performing other missions for the government. As an actor and a dramatist, he could have helped stage manage his own death. Poley, Frizer, and Skeres, the three drinking buddies in the affair of his end, were all spies, double-agents, or confidence men who had been associated with special assignments or dubious transactions in the past. Walsingham, the patron at whose nearby manor house the dramatist was staying, had been a high level operative in the secret service and controller of the three underlings. The venue for the tragic encounter, Mrs. Bull’s residence, was not some seedy bar, but a private establishment that housed offices connected with the poet’s patrons at court and linked to a powerful trading company managed by his own kinsman. The proprietress herself, Eleanor Bull, was not a widowed fishwife who ran a bawdy house, but a gentlewoman from a distinguished heraldic family with powerful connections at court, in the town, and with the Cecils. She may even have been a personal or family friend of the poet’s. The Nathaniel Bull who attended the King’s School in Canterbury and was a classmate of young Kit’s may have been her son.156 The convergence of the Russia Company, Lord Burghley, the Walsing- hams, and the country’s leading adventurers, navigators, and scientists opens an entirely new window not only onto Marlowe’s personal story, but also onto his original literary output and the Shakespearean works. One hopes that the emergence of all of these new Deptford connections—political, commercial, military, nautical, and artistic—opens the floodgates for future research on Marlowe’s last days as Marlowe and the historical and literary sources for his early work and the plays attributed to Shakespeare. By all indications, Deptford was friendly turf to Kit and his compatriots. It provided what Sun Tzu in The Art of War called “tenable terrain,” or what today we call home-court advantage (see Table 2). On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe’s life and meteoric rise to theatrical fame came to a sudden and dramatic end. The graveyard in St. Nicholas’s churchyard where he is said to have been buried contains the final resting place of the Bulls, Christopher Browne, Martin Frobisher, and several other actors in this historical drama, but evidently not Kit himself. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet who, when pressed to explain whose grave he was digging, answered, “for my part, I do not lie in’t, yet it is mine” (5.1.104– 105), the skull of Christopher Marlowe, a man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy, would appear to lie elsewhere. Table 2. Marlowe’s Deptford Connections

* = Kinsman ** = Patron *** = Government Superior This chart shows the many close family ties, theatrical links, and Secret Service and courtly connections among Marlowe, his protectors, and the participants in the Deptford Affair. Marlowe’s “death” at the Bull residence on May 30, 1593 fell within the verge, the 12-mile radius of the queen’s person. Hence jurisdiction fell to Sir George Carey, the knight marshall, and William Danby, the queen’s coroner.

THE MUSCOVY THE QUEEN AND PRIVY COUNCIL COMPANY THE COURT ***Burghley, Lord *Anthony Marlowe, Blanche Parry, Treasurer and kinsman Manager Elizabeth’s late nanny, of the Bulls cousin of Eleanor Bull *Walter Marlowe, and the ***Cecils ***Robert Cecil, Acting ***Lord Burghley, Secretary to the Queen ***Francis Walsingham, *Christopher Browne, Charter Members Secretary of the *** Sir Francis Walsing- Greencloth and Lord of ham, late Secretary of Ingram Frizer and the Manor, Deptford State and head of the Nicholas Skeres, servants Secret Service to **Thos. Walsingham, Richard Bull, Sub-Bailiff sold company arms the of the Greencloth ***Henry Carey, day after Frizer was Lord Chamberlain and pardoned for Kit’s death William Danby, Queen’s later patron of the Coroner and friend of Shakespeare Company THE BULL ***Lord Burghley RESIDENCE PATRONS **Sir George Carey Eleanor Bull, Widowed Knight Marshall over- **Charles Howard, proprietress of a private seeing the verge, son of Lord Admiral’s Men eating establishment Henry Carey, and later patron of the **Thomas Walsingham, The residence housed Shakespeare Company Secret Service officer the Customs Office of the Greencloth which THE ADMIRALTY THE DEPTFORD received goods from the PARTICIPANTS Muscovy Company for ***Charles Howard, delivery to the Court Lord Admiral Ingram Frizer, Servant of **Thos. Walsingham Richard Bull, Eleanor’s *Benjamin Gonson, Sr. late husband and Sub- former Naval Treasurer Nicholas Skeres, Servant Bailiff of the Greencloth of the ***Walsinghams *Benjamin Gonson, Jr. and Frizer associate Nathaniel Bull, classmate Clerk of Ships of Marlowe’s at King’s Robert Poley, Secret School in Canterbury Separatist Shipwrights Agent for the ***Cecils

101 102 Hamlet

5 A Great Reckoning

[I]t strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. —As You Like It (3.3.14–15)

ike errant celestial bodies, the orbits of Church and State in Elizabethan England crossed and narrowly avoided colliding in the spring of 1593. From what we know now about the fateful meeting on May 30, 1593, it appears that a high-ranking diplomatic mission was aborted and a new one begun. As best we can conclude, the stage (Mrs. Bull’s establishment, housing offices linked to the Muscovy Company), the actors (Frizer, Skeres, and Poley), the director (Thomas Walsingham), the producers (the Cecils), and the dramatist (Marlowe) were all parts of an elaborate performance to stifle the heresy investigation of Christopher Marlowe and save his life. For all the mystery surrounding the Deptford meeting, “le recknynge,” like a linguistic key to the authorship controversy lock, continued to perplex long after the poet was dead and buried. Like a bad English penny or Dutch shilling, literary allusions to the reckoning mentioned in the coroner’s report on Marlowe’s murder continued to turn up in the years to follow. A cluster of references surfaced about five years later, most notably in As You Like It, as we shall see in “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” in a sequence of events culminating in the publication of Hamlet.

Only the Moonlight Shall Be Witness

“This is the course, that I do now freely speake vnto you, and I do require you, that euen the night it selfe may shew you to be mindfull of your noble courage and to be mindfull of your honor & reputation which you have purchased and continued so many years. . . . onely the moon light shall be the witnesse of your valure.” . . . These & such like speeches did he vse vunto his soldiours, as it were in jest and meriment. —Jacques Lavardin, The Historie of Scanderbeg Marlowe’s Ghost 103

s a dramatist, Marlowe used the theater as a vehicle to establish an alternative center of cultural authority and create a counter myth. As Patrick Cheney shows in Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, Marlowe fashions a counter national identity based on personal liberty, freedom of speech and inquiry, and romantic love rather than imperial ambition, material wealth, and the cult of chastity, as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and works by other court poets. One of the ways Marlowe accomplishes this on the stage was through a literary device known as metatheater, or embedding ironic commentary or dramatic action in the text that reflects on the play itself or the theater as a social institution. In Dr. Faustus, Edward II, The Massacre at Paris, and his other plays, Marlowe stages pageants, masques, plays-within-the-play, or other entertainments that mirror contemporary events or call attention to the creative, artistic, or prophetic function of the stage.157 Given Kit’s tendency to hold a dramatic glass up to the audience, the question naturally arises whether the Deptford affair was a dramatic performance. Beyond enabling Marlowe to escape a tragic fate, the events of May 30, 1593 may well have been choreographed for literary as well as espionage purposes. There are performative elements in the coroner’s report that suggest the rendezvous at Mistress Bull’s was scripted. As part of the struggle between Marlowe and the archbishop—“the mighty opposites”— the play-within-the-play that early summer day in Deptford (if, indeed, it were a play) can be called The Reckoning, after the argument over the bill of fare that reputedly provoked the fatal quarrel. Marlowe’s “death” in Deptford while dining has echoes of the Last Supper, as Appendix A notes. I originally thought that some of the theological echoes and parallels in the coroner’s report were deliberate. Not only was Kit the consummate poet and dramatist of his day, but according to tradition he was also an actor and likely had experience directing and staging productions. As an M.A. in divinity and the author of Dr. Faustus, Kit would have found the opportunity to parody the Church too inviting to pass up. But eventually I concluded that I was on the wrong track. However, there is a highly charged mythic connection between the events of May 30, 1593 and the Shakespearean plays, especially Hamlet, which may be more inten- tional. May 30 was the annual festival day of Hecate, the goddess of magic and forbidden knowledge.158 As the queen of Night and goddess of the Underworld, she and her furies appear in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Dido Queen of Carthage, Hero and Leander, and the other Marlovian plays and poems. Hecate also plays a central role in Hamlet. She is also invoked in The the Murder of Gonzago, the play-within-the-play, in which Prince Hamlet 104 Hamlet contrives to catch the conscience of the king. While the scene in Hamlet in which Hecate plays a vital role still lay a decade in the future, the earliest version of the play, the Ur-Hamlet, dating to about 1589, may have included a prologue in which Hecate appears directly on stage. Scholars believe it was written by Thomas Kyd (possibly with Marlowe’s assistance), and it may have been incorporated into Der Bestrafte Brudermord (“Fratricide Punished”), an early German version of Hamlet that was performed by touring English actors. In the prologue to Der BB, Hecate summons her furies and calls down mayhem and mischief on the Danish court. (See pages 125-126 in volume 1 of this edition of Hamlet for the text.) The prologue’s tone, cadence, and imagery are similar to the opening scene of Macbeth in which the three witches appear around the bubbling cauldron. Hecate also makes a dramatic appearance later in Macbeth, and she is mentioned in 1 Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsum- mer Night’s Dream, and King Lear. In fact, Hecate or her companions— known as the three weird sisters, the fates, or the adamantine destinies— appear in about two-thirds of the Shakespearean plays (see Appendix B). But how would Kit have developed such an abiding interest in Hecate? From his time at Cambridge through his days writing for the London stage, Marlowe was attracted to “infidel” religions (including Islam and Judaism), the supernatural, and the occult. As the guide of the dead, the mistress of the furies, and divine witch, Hecate appears in various classical myths and legends. Kit probably first came across the goddess in the Homeric hymns, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She also appears in secular guise as shown by the stirring speech of Scanderbeg, Marlowe’s earliest hero. At first, Kit’s interest in magic and the occult was probably literary. But as his career blossomed in London, his involvement may have taken a more active form. Many of his friends and associates were associated with the informal School of Night (as it was first called in Love’s Labor’s Lost). The intellectual circle around Ralegh and Northumberland earned a reputation for unorthodox religious views. And Francis Kett, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and other noted freethinkers also may have crossed Kit’s path. As the Shakespearean play makes clear, the School of Night was more of an academy than a coven. Even Richard Cholmeley only charged Marlowe with delivering a lecture on atheism, not practicing black magic. Yet as a classicist, Kit could not help but identify the School of Night’s tutelary muse with Hecate, the goddess of Night and esoteric knowledge. As a dramatist, he would also have equated night with tragedy and day with comedy. In ancient Greece and Rome, people celebrated Hecate’s annual festival, with a day of feasting. They purified their houses, set out offerings (especially at crossroads), and visited her temples and sacred groves. Choruses of Marlowe’s Ghost 105 children, wreathed in flowers, sang hymns of praise in honor of nature and the goddess. They prepared Hecate Suppers for the priests, priestesses, and spirits of the dead, featuring crescent-shaped honey cakes decorated with tiny torches and poppy seeds, along with pomegranate wine. In the goddess’s ancient rites, we can see a prototype of the Last Supper, “the funeral baked meats [that] / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” in H a m l e t (1.2.182–183), and the modern birthday cake and candles. Throughout the year, Hecate Suppers were also held on the thirtieth of each month, culminating in the major annual celebration in May. Of course, there is no evidence that Christopher Marlowe, classicist par excellence and student of magic, deliberately staged his “death” during a feast on Hecate’s day or invoked her moonlight to witness his escape. Nor is there reason to believe that he deliberately waited ten days after his arrest on May 20 to time his last reckoning to coincide with the ancient pagan hol- iday. But the timing is striking, and he would have been familiar with such observances as described in Ovid’s Festi. Even the props match. The 12- penny knife that the coroner’s report cited as the cause of Marlowe’s death has mythic significance. As the triple goddess, Hecate carried a knife to cut the umbilical cord at birth, dissolve delusions to a clear, unfettered knowledge of reality while living, and sever the spirit from the body at death. (See Appendix B for an astonishing literary coincidence involving his assailant.) Was the May 30 meeting at Mistress Bull’s in Deptford a Hecate Supper? This would not be the first time that Kit timed a production or publication to coincide with an anniversary. All of Marlowe’s works were registered at the Stationers’ Company on days that had a personal or social significance. For example, Tamburlaine was registered on August 14, 1590 (August 24 New Style) on the anniversary of the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, which played a formative role in his religious development and is enshrined in the title of a later play. August 14 was also the date the Marprelate printers were arrested (including Valentine Simmes, the later printer of Hamlet) by Archbishop Whitgift’s pursuivants. The Jew of Malta was entered on May 18, 1594, the first anniversary of Marlowe’s arrest warrant, by Nicholas Ling, who later published Hamlet. Hero and Leander entered the docket on September 18, 1594, the same month and day Thomas Watson saved Kit’s life in a knife fight. Dr. Faustus was registered on January 7, 1604, evidently in remembrance of Francis Kett, the young divinity scholar who shared his dining hall at Cambridge and was burned at the stake in 1587. The fact that Hamlet was later registered on St. Christopher’s Day, July 26, 1602, and that virtually all the other works attributed to Shakespeare were also entered on meaningful dates suggests that the selection of May 30 for Kit Marlowe’s final performance on an Elizabethan stage was no excep- 106 Hamlet tion.159 As a playmaker, Kit had an acute sense of timing and a flair for the dramatic. After the warrant for his arrest was issued by the Privy Council, he surrendered on May 20, two days later. Had he intended to flee the country and avoid the imprisonment and torture that Thomas Kyd had suffered, he would not have waited for the queen’s messenger or reported to her palace. The Cecils evidently tipped him off, probably through Thomas Walsingham, reassuring him that, unlike the hapless Kyd, he could expect bail on his own recognizance. After all, for seven years Marlowe had performed “good service” for Her Majesty. At this point, Marlowe and his protectors on the council probably took a wait-and-see attitude, hoping that the witch hunt would blow over. It is not clear whether they knew Lord Buckhurst and Serjeant Puckering had employed Thomas Drury to seek out Richard Baines and gather further testimony incriminating Marlowe. Nor is it known whether they were aware of the Remembrances in which Chol- meley charged Kit with atheism. However, it is clear that Marlowe, even if he were detained merely as a material witness in the investigation of Kyd and the Dutch Church libels, by now faced capital charges. On May 21, the following day, Whitgift and his allies ratcheted up the inquisition against dissenters by bringing John Penry to trial, convicting him, and sentencing him to death. They sought to execute him immediately for his seditious activities, including the Marprelate tracts, but the preacher’s heart-rending appeals to Burghley and Essex won him a temporary reprieve. Possibly because of the urgency of the Penry situation (or Robert Cecil’s intervention, as some historians suggest), the Baines Note on Marlowe, originally intended to be delivered about May 26 or 27, was delayed until June 2 or 5, giving Kit several more days of liberty. But sud- denly, on May 29, the archbishop and his cronies signed Penry’s death warrant and had him summarily hung before the Privy Council met and any further delays could be taken. Penry’s precipitous execution sent a clear signal that Whitgift, Buckhurst, and the ecclesiastical commissioners were out for blood, and Marlowe would probably be next on their list. In a showdown with the Cecils on matters of faith, the prelate could count on the queen, especially since the ailing Burghley was barely able to attend council meetings. It was probably at this point—the sudden execution of Penry—that the final decision was made to stage Marlowe’s death in Deptford. The village was friendly turf, site of the Muscovy Company, managed by his kinsman Anthony Marlowe, with whom Kit may already have been staying since May 20 when he left Scadbury. The company’s headquarters were located in Eleanor Bull’s house, which doubled as an ordinary (a private eating place). Such an establishment would have been a convenient location for secret service rendezvouses and may have been a regular Marlowe’s Ghost 107 safe-house. The discretion of Mistress Bull, a relation to the Cecils and mother of one of Kit’s schoolmates in Canterbury, would be assured. Admiral Charles Howard, hero of the Armada and the patron of Mar- lowe’s company, the Lord Admiral’s Men, lived in Deptford, site of the navy’s shipyards, and may have been involved in Kit’s rescue. He also sympathized with religious dissenters. For example, in June 1591, when Udall’s case was raging in the Star Chamber, the Lord Admiral took up the cause of Eusebius Pagit, an Oxford graduate and schoolteacher, who was accused of Puritan leanings. “[O]ut of compassion of this poor man’s case,” Strype, the archbishop’s biographer records, Howard passed along Pagit’s heartfelt letter to him to “the Lord Treasurer”—i.e., Burghley.160 It is not clear whether they succeeded in assisting him at the time, but in 1604, after Whitgift’s death, Pagit received a post as rector in a London church. Like Marlowe, he was a student of theology, a chorister, and prolific writer. Aside from the Admiral’s possible involvement, Deptford was a hotbed of Separatist discontent. In addition to some shipwrights who could be counted on to supply logistical support, individual jurymen also may have been favorably predisposed to someone like Marlowe, who was in trouble with the detested ecclesiastical commissioners and their pursuivants. Rather than having Marlowe flee and go into exile, the decision was evidently made for Marlowe to “die” and then to provide him with a new identity. This would effectively close his case. Whether he was by nature quar- relsome or merely put on an antic disposition in connection with his government service, Marlowe had a reputation for hot-headedness. A sudden death in a quarrel with drunken companions over payment of the bill would not be out of character. Such an end was an Elizabethan commonplace. However, the cover story that Kit had attacked a man from behind and received a mortal wound in the scuffle was a stroke of theological genius. The archbishop and Puritan bluebloods thus took his death as a sign of divine justice. The atheist’s own hand had been turned against himself. Buried in an unmarked grave, the playwright who had introduced the black arts to the London stage would now be suffering the quenchless fires of hell. By coincidence, Christopher Marlowe “dies” in a tavern brawl in the early evening of May 30, 1593, hours or days before the Baines Note is delivered, a trial is convened, doom is pronounced, and the burning pyre is lit. (The archbishop once ordered an accused atheist to perform penance at St. Paul’s Cathedral by standing with a dry faggot on his shoulder to concentrate his mind on the punishment for heretics!) The May 30 meeting produced the desired effect. When the Baines report was finally delivered in early June, so far as Archbishop Whitgift and Queen Elizabeth were concerned, Marlowe had yielded up the ghost and the charges were moot. 108 Hamlet

In Hamlet, the prince narrowly escapes the death warrant entrusted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by rewriting the script Claudius has designed for him and jumping ship with the pirates. Beyond a reasonable doubt, as the scene in Hamlet later hints, Marlowe took matters into his own hands in Deptford and was the “Author / Of his own just remove” (4.5.71-72).

This Sceptred Isle

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serve it in the office of a wall, Or as [a] moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, —Richard II (2.1.40–50)

ew evidence strongly suggests that Marlowe escaped his destiny in Deptford, but the question remains: Why did Burghley, with the probable assistance of his son, Robert Cecil, and possibly Charles Howard, the lord admiral, and the Careys, intervene to save Marlowe’s life in May 1593? These men did not reach the highest corridors of power by being romantic or sentimental. As a low-level agent or espial, Marlowe would have been expendable. Even if Kit served as Lady Arbella’s tutor, had performed heroic service as a scout during the Armada invasion, and played a leading undercover role in Scotland or on the Continent, more senior and trusted officials had been and would continue to be sacrificed at the altar of Machiavellian policy. As an iconoclastic playmaker who flirted with subversive and blasphemous themes, the poet and dramatist was playing with fire. However mighty his lines, they would not save him from the archbishop’s quenchless flames. In addressing the queen, directly or indirectly, in his works, he was also court- ing disaster. Like the imperious African queen whom Kit daringly compared her to in his play, Dido Queen of Carthage, Elizabeth did not tolerate criti- Marlowe’s Ghost 109 cism or sleights. Marlowe’s superiors were not unsympathetic with his libertarian or pop- ulist views. Lord Burghley had a long history of opposing the bishops’ excesses. In the case of Robert Cowdrey, a provincial rector who had been suspended by the bishop of London for refusing to wear the surplice and observing the prayer book in every detail, the lord treasurer engaged James Morice to defend him. On another occasion, after the Privy Council received petitions from scores of ministers protesting Whitgift’s inquisition, Burghley was joined by the lord admiral in rebuking the bishops for their “extreme usage” against men “that were known diligent preachers.”161 But so long as he enjoyed the queen’s ear, Whitgift could afford to ignore the entreaties of his colleagues, deny the zealous ministers a living, and clap troublemakers in irons. The Cecils had tried to save the lives of the nonconformists in the spring of 1593, especially Penry, but the prelate and his cronies ignored the usual judicial process and had them summarily hung. As a freethinker, without the support of orthodox churchmen, Puritans, or Separatists, Christopher Marlowe had pulled John Whitgift’s beard once too often. Like the capering Martin Marprelate, silencing him before he told too many tales out of school was seemingly in everyone’s best interest. However sympathetic these councilors were to his artistic genius, however much they loathed the primate and his spiritual hold over the queen, Kit did not in all likelihood owe his survival to emotion or conscience. In that drossy age, the decision to protect Marlowe would have been based principally on reasons of state. For all of his brashness and heretical tendencies, he articulated a vision in his works of a strong, unified England that was instrumental in molding public opinion behind the Crown and fur- thering its expansion on the world stage. Though he was “no timerous servile flatterer of the Commonwealth,” in Tom Nashe’s words, his works are patriotic to the core.162 And none are more so than The Massacre at Paris, which debuted in London in January 1593, just months before he was snared in the archbishop’s net. Celebrating the quest for gold, spices, and new territories to colonize, Kit’s plays reflected the spirit of the age. Even in Dr. Faustus, as A. L. Rowse notes, there was “the appeal to patriotism, to the nationalism of a small country uncertain of itself, acute and boastful, in this age.”163 Marlowe’s last play under his own name broke new dramatic ground in several ways. It was the first major Elizabethan play on a contemporary political theme—the St. B a r tholemew Day’s Massacre—and it concerned sitting monarc h s , Elizabeth, Henry III, and Henry Navarre. In shattering these taboos on stage, Marlowe invited his audience to participate directly in matters of state. In a few eloquent lines, Navarre expresses the goals of the Franco-English 110 Hamlet alliance against Spain, the Pope, and the Catholic League:

How many noble men have lost their lives In prosecution of these cruel arms, Is ruth and almost death to call to mind. But God, we know, will always put them down That lift themselves against the perfect truth; While I’ll maintain so long as life doth last, And with the Queen of England join my force To beat the papal monarch from our lands, And keep those relics from our countries’ coasts. (18.9–17)

To the Cecils, maintaining England as a strong, sovereign state was the foremost priority. With a population of only four million, the island realm was dwarfed by the continental Catholic axis, whose combined strength (plus potentially that of Scotland to the north) was many times this number. Marlowe’s brilliant rendition of the Crown’s foreign policy was a jewel inestimable. As students of history and patrons of music and architecture, as we shall see more fully in the next section, the Cecils understood the role that ideology and art played in world affairs. In the absence of a standing army and a daily press, a playwright who could inspire patriotic fervor in the mass- es was a godsend. From Dido to Tamburlaine, from Faustus to The Jew of Malta, a passion for empery, geographical expansion, and celestial influence on affairs of state shines through Marlowe’s work. While Massacre was the most propagandistic play to appear under his name, Marlowe probably composed Edward III, an anonymous work that celebrates the English victory over the Spanish Armada, several years earlier. Recently accepted into the Shakespearean canon, Edward III may have premiered before Queen Elizabeth at court in Richmond at Christmas 1588 or during the following year. It was probably performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men with Edward Alleyn, who starred in Tamburlaine, in the lead role. Though set in an earlier era, the stirring scenes of naval engagement mirror England’s recent triumph over the Spanish fleet.

MARINER. The proud armado of King Edward’s ships, Which at the first, far off when I did ken, Seem’d, as it were, a grove of wither’d pines; But drawing near, their glorious bright aspect, Their streaming ensigns wrought of color’d silk, Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers, Adorns the naked bosom of the earth: Majestical the order of their course, ------Marlowe’s Ghost 111

They plough the ocean hitherward amain. (3.1.64–78)

The play goes on to commemorate the English victory in some of the most moving battle scenes since the Iliad. The name and formation of the ships, the roar of cannon (which were not in use during Edward III’s actual reign), and other contemporary references invoked England’s glorious triumph over its arch foe and would have been instantly recognized by an admiring queen, court, and Elizabethan viewing audience. Numerous simi- larities in style and content, including several mentions of Muscovites and Turks, mark Edward III as Marlowe’s probable creation. Some of the military descriptions in the play are based on Sir Francis Walsingham’s and Admiral Howard’s secret intelligence reports. In all likelihood, these would have been made available to Marlowe, who stood already in their service, in contrast to other writers, especially William of Stratford, who at this time remained a complete unknown. And Marlowe had family in the conflict. Heeding the national call to arms, John Marlowe, the poet’s father, served as one of two hundred bowmen dispatched by the city of Canterbury to set up a post at Northborne, on the coast, to turn back the Armada. Christo- pher himself may also have served the effort in an intelligence capacity.164 Some critics also assign The Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Yorke to Marlowe. These anonymous early plays, both patriotic and instrumental in helping to fashion England’s national identity, subsequently appeared, revised and polished, as the the second and third parts of Henry VI and were published in the First Folio under Shakespeare’s name. The first part of the trilogy, 1 Henry VI, is also often credited to Marlowe, as well as The Famous Victories of Henry V, an important source for 1 and 2 Henry IV and a minor source for Henry V. A comprehensive analysis of the patriotic and geopolitical dimensions to Marlowe/Shakespeare’s oeuvre is beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it to say the collected works succeeded beyond the greatest expectations of the poet’s powerful patrons. The patriotic sentiments introduced in The Massa- cre at Paris, as A. L. Rowse observes, “running deep and true into the past, elaborated in nearly a dozen plays all the way from the Henry VI trilogy to the end with Henry VIII, constituted one of the prime sources of inspiration for the genius of Shakespeare.”165 “This sceptred isle” and the other immor- tal passages not only created the golden age of English drama, but also contributed very palpably to the rise of the British Empire, the settling of America, and the global triumph of the English language. Naturally, the questions arise why Whitgift remained so tone deaf to Marlowe’s patriotic voice and why the queen didn’t stay his punitive hand and prevent the poet’s 112 Marlowe’s Hamlet case from moving forward. As we shall see in “Hamlet’s Ghost,” Hamlet poses some of the same puzzling questions concerning Gertrude’s blind support of Claudius and neglect of her son. At a practical level, the events of May 1593 quickly spun out of control. The archbishop’s witch hunt had assumed a frightening momentum that the Cecils, the lord admiral, and their allies could no longer impede or deflect. Penry, the mastermind of the Marprelate affair, was interrogated ten times over the previous two months. In questioning scores of the imprisoned Separatists, the upper echelons of the Church and the judiciary were enlist- ed, including John Popham, Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench; Edmund Anderson, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas; Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; John Alymer, Bishop of London; Thomas Egerton, Attorney-General; Edward Stanhope, Chancellor to the Bishop of London; Edward Coke, Speaker of Parliament; Richard Cosin, the ecclesiastical lawyer; and especially Richard Young, the vindictive Justice of the Peace before whose house the demonstrators had marched with a coffin in the Rippon incident. Add to this boiling cauldron the Dutch Church libel, the “atheistic” papers found in Kyd’s possession, the Baines Note, and the Cholmeley documents, and it is clear that Kit did not have a prayer before the Star Chamber or the ecclesiastical High Commission. Like Faustus beset by the Prince of Darkness and a legion of devils intent on claiming his soul, the clock over Kit’s head inexorably approached the stroke of midnight. Had Christopher Marlowe truly met his reckoning in a little room in London’s port, the world as we know it would be very different. As an antagonist, John Whitgift ranked with Mephistopheles, Tamburlaine, the Duke of Guise, Barabas, and Marlowe’s other epic villains. But a special providence appeared to cushion his fall, enabling Kit to rise again and soar over his detractors. By way of epilogue, Thomas Thorpe, makes a veiled allusion to the poet’s survival in the introduction to Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s First Book, which he published in 1600. Thorpe observes that Kit’s “ghoast or Genius is to be seene walke in the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets.”166 Since only one other book by Marlowe is known to have been in print at this time, the other works, or “sheets,” may refer to Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and several plays published under Shakespeare’s name. The enigmatic reference to Marlowe’s ghost prowling the St. Paul’s bookstalls suggests a more corporeal spirit than the specter haunting the Elsinore battlements. As for Thorpe, he went on to publish Shake-speare’s Sonnets which were registered at the Stationers’ Company on May 20, 1609 (May 30 New Style), the anniversary of Marlowe’s arrest in Scadbury and “death” in Deptford.