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 pre- sided 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 gov- ernment 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 intro- duced 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 seminar- ians privately resisted the Church of England’s new dispensation and sym- pathized 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 pos- sible 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.