Shakespeare’s Ghost

William Shakespeare CHRONOLOGY

[W]e will both our judgments join In censure of his seeming —Hamlet (3.2.85–86)

1564 April 25: William Shakespeare christened in Stratford 1582 John Whitgift, Bishop of Worchester, waives the marriage banns for Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway 1585 Shakespeare’s twins christened 1585-94 Shakespeare’s Lost Years 1593 June 1-10: Spy Robert Poley, on official business for the queen, disappears for ten days, possibly assisting Marlowe to flee June 12: Venus and Adonis appears under Shakespeare’s name ?1593-98 Marlowe in exile in Italy writing comedies 1594 The Rape of Lucrece published under Shakespeare’s name Dr. Lopez, Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, executed as a spy The Comedy of Errors performed at Grays Inn in London First mention of Shakespeare as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men 1595-97 Several Shakespearean plays published anonymously, including Titus Andronicus, Richard II, and Richard III 1598 Love’s Labor’s Lost, first play published under Shakespeare’s name George Carey succeeds as patron to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men 1599 Marlowe’s works are revived and he possibly returns from Italy Archbishop Whitgift orders Marlowe’s books burned The Globe Theatre opens and As You Like It debuts with a tribute to Marlowe and his “death” in Deptford 1600 Several plays registered under Shakespeare’s name 1601 Richard II and the Globe actors implicated in the Essex Rebellion Shakespeare’s troupe temporarily banished from court 1603 Queen Elizabeth dies and is succeeded by James I Lord Chamberlain’s Men become the King’s Men First Quarto of Hamlet published 1604 Archbishop Whitgift dies Second Quarto of Hamlet published 1609 May 20: Sonnets registered on anniversary of Marlowe’s arrest 1616 Shakespeare dies and leaves “second best bed” to his wife 1623 First Folio published

114 WILL SHAKESPEARE ABSENTS HIMSELF FROM FELICITY AWHILE TO TELL MARLOWE’S STORY

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me? If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. —Hamlet (5.2.340–345)

The Shakespeare Compact

So likewise we will through the world be rung, And with my name shall thine be always sung. —Ovid’s Elegies (translated by Marlowe) (1.3.25–26)

he Shakespeare authorship controversy features not one, but two major specters. Besides the enigma sur- rounding Marlowe’s meeting in Deptford and the question whether he was made a ghost or survived as a ghostwriter, Shakespeare’s origin and development are s h r ouded in mystery. Shakespeare sightings before 1593 are almost as rare as Marlowe sightings after that date. Aside from notices of family christenings, a marriage record, and scat- tered property and legal transactions, there is no documentary evidence about William of Stratford’s literary career, including his education, early

115 116 Hamlet acting or writing experience, and arrival in the capital. A half-dozen plays later attributed to him in the First Folio were performed on the London stage before he is mentioned in connection with a theater company. The story that he got his start on the stage by holding the reins of a horse for a playgoer is probably as apocryphal as the tale that he left Stratford after poaching a nobleman’s deer. Like a stream of electrons in a vacuum tube or the contrails of a supersonic plane, Shakespeare’s physical existence between 1585 and 1594 (like Marlowe’s after 1593) can be inferred but not seen. Whatever Will’s antecedents, in The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642, Andrew Gurr presents an elegant solution to some of the vexing questions surrounding the realignment of the English theater during the year after Marlowe’s “death” and the sudden appearance of the first works under Shakespeare’s name. Gurr, an authority on the Elizabethan stage, suggests that Henry Carey, the lord chamberlain (also known as Lord Hunsdon), and his son-in-law Charles Howard, the lord admiral and patron of the Admiral’s Men, concluded a deal to divide the London theater between their respec- tive companies. As Gurr explains:

A single company had been established eleven years before as the Queen’s Men, but it had lost its hegemony. Setting up two companies was a sounder policy than having just one, since it gave better insurance against any future loss of the capac- ity to entertain royalty. London’s two leading actors, Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, were each allocated a company of fellow-players and a playhouse belonging to someone in their family, and each company was given a set of already famous plays. One secured Marlowe’s, the other Shakespeare’s.1

The Admiral’s Men would continue to play in the Rose theater south of the city, using works written by Marlowe prior to his reported slaying as its chief repertoire, while the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men would perform at the Theatre north of the city, featuring the works posterity has attributed to Shakespeare. The recent deaths of Lord Strange and the Earl of Sussex added to the urgency of consolidation. Hunsdon’s new troupe was formed in May 1594 from remnants of Lord Strange’s Men, Lord Pembroke’s Men, and other companies. Overall, the London theater had fallen on hard times after the plague had closed the stage for most of the previous year and a half. Except for brief spells, such as the debut of Kit’s The Massacre at Paris in January 1593 and occasional tours in the provinces, most players were out of work between June 1592 and April 1594. The friendly rivalry between the two companies continued over the next decade, as the Chamberlain’s Men moved into their new playhouse, the Globe, south of the city, in 1598, creating what Gurr calls “the only effec- tive democracy of its time in totalitarian England.”2 In counterpoint, the Shakespeare’s Ghost 117

Admiral’s Men left the decaying Rose and moved to the newly built Fortune to the north. The two impresarios, James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, ran their respective theaters with a sympathetic but deft hand. Burbage’s son Richard, the star of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, performed many of the leading Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet, which appear to have been composed with him in mind. At the Rose and later the Fortune, Edward Alleyn, the consummate tragedian of his time and Henslowe’s son-in-law, continued to pack the house with revivals of Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Although Gurr doesn’t mention it, before the Lord Chamberlain’s Men moved into the Theatre in the winter of 1594–95, Henslowe produced Titus Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, and Hamlet, suggesting he already had access to the early versions of the Shakespearean plays and the Ur-Hamlet of Kyd and/or Marlowe. Up and coming Ben Jonson, who would succeed as the dominant playwright in the following decade, started to write for both companies. Following Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (which probably first staged Shakespeare’s Hamlet) became the King’s Men under James I’s patronage, while the Admiral’s became Prince Henry’s Men, under the crown prince. Overall, the new arrangement provided London with the most sublime theatrical experience since ancient Athens. Yet financial security and eco- nomic stability may not have been the only motives for the consolidation. The two patrons, the Lord Admiral and Lord Hunsdon, were supporting actors, if not direct participants, in Marlowe’s rescue. This web of corre- spondences suggests that the two patrons (with the approval and encour- agement of the Cecils) deliberately entered into the new arrangement in order to provide a secure venue for Kit’s new works. In all likelihood, but- tressed by marriage alliances among three sets of families, Carey and Howard enthusiastically entered into the new arrangement not only for the material advantages it conferred but also out of shared inner convictions. Similarly, in the interest of secrecy, Marlowe himself appears to have willingly surrendered all credit for his subsequent works to William of Stratford. As privy councilors, both Carey and Howard had a history of sympa- thizing with religious reform and moderating the excesses of the archbish- op and the churchmen. Many of Marlowe’s early plays were performed for the admiral’s company, and he may have served as an intelligencer for the naval commander during the Armada campaign. Howard had served as lord chamberlain in 1583–1585 and evidently arranged for his cousin, Edmund Tilney, to serve as Master of the Revels and oversee performances at court and on the London stage. Hunsdon succeeded Howard in this post and both men naturally would have resented John Whitgift’s heavy-handed move to seize control over the registration and censorship of plays. Huns- 118 Hamlet don’s son, Sir George Carey, was the knight marshall with authority over the verge—the sovereign zone around the queen’s person—that played a pivotal role in Marlowe’s murder investigation. Both Hunsdon and the admiral had been accused of atheism in the dossier prepared against Marlowe and knew how trumped up charges could assume a life of their own. In addition to the orthodox theologians on the right, they had to navigate around the Puritans and city commissioners on the left who would close down the theater alto- gether. “The Lord Mayor was appeased by a ban on players using city inns,” Gurr observes, explaining the compromise arrived at. “Now plays could be confined to the two counties north and south of the city where Howard controlled the local magistrates.”3 Again in 1600, when the London theaters were closed following a crackdown by the archbishop on seditious and lewd material, the Privy Council allowed only the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men to perform, reaffirming the arrangement struck six years earlier. Anthony Marlowe, Kit’s kinsman, may have also played a role in the arrangement. The influential manager of the Muscovy Company signed an appeal to the Privy Council supporting construction of the new Fortune theatre, where the Lord Admiral’s Men, Kit’s old company, intended to move. It is possible that the elder Marlowe contributed some support to his junior relation, possibly even financing or defraying his expenses in self- imposed exile. Because of his ties to Deptford, Anthony Marlowe and the Lord Admiral would have been especially close. In “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” we will examine the broad contours of how these arrangements played out. Printer Richard Field and patron South- ampton were particularly instrumental in launching the new relationship. Overall, I hesitate to call the entire phenomenon the “Shakespeare conspir- acy” or “plot” because these terms have a pejorative connotation. The “Shakespeare caper,” “sting,” or “op” are too frivolous, and the “Shake- speare matrix” or “shaXpeare Files” smacks of the occult. From beginning to end, the authorship question resembles nothing so much as a dramatic partnership—and a comic one at that. I have decided to refer to it as the Shakespeare Compact, which is meet, or appropriate, as the gravediggers in Hamlet would say. The performative elements involved include a faked death, mistaken and switched identities, baseless slanders, supernatural effects, and the union of high and low—patrons and poet, university wit and talented country boy, nobles and groundlings—which echo the Shakespearean comedies themselves. The mutual bonds between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Hunsdon and Howard, Henslowe and Burbage, and their supporting cast constitute a marriage of true minds that brought happiness and blessings to a gilded but deeply flawed age and to a grateful posterity. Shakespeare’s Ghost 119

1 A Mechanical Solution

It was in the counting and plotting of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, however, that something akin to a sensation was produced among those actually engaged in the work. In the characteristic curves of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself. —Dr. Thomas Mendenhall, “A Mechanical Solution for a Literary Problem”

n the absence of definitive evidence—such as signed manuscripts of the poems and plays, a secret diary, or other historical documents—the case for or against any candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare’s works remained open. Historians and literary critics analyzed the circumstantial evidence and arrived at opposite con- clusions. A more objective standard of determining the provenance of disputed writings, stylometric studies, emerged early in the twentieth century with the scientific analysis of literary works that eliminat- ed as much as possible personal evaluations and judgments. The story of “Shakespeare’s Literary Fingerprint” begins during Reconstruction, following the U.S. Civil War. Dr. Robert Mendenhall, a physics professor at Ohio State University and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, devised a mechanical method to determine the author of a disputed work. By counting the number of let- ters in each of the words of an author’s literary corpus—whether prose or poetry, a letter or a novel—and plotting the total number of words of two- letters, three-letters, four-letters, etc., on a graph, a unique individual ratio- curve appears. No two people exhibit exactly the same proportion; thus given a sufficient number of words—ideally 100,000 or more—the real identify of a disputed or anonymous document could be ascertained with near certainty. Mendenhall reported his discovery in an article in Science on May 11, 1887. “The chief merit of the method consisted in the fact that its application required no exercise of judgement,” he explained. “ . . . Characteristics might be revealed which the author could make no attempt 120 Hamlet to conceal, being himself unaware of their existence . . . The conclusions reached through its use would be independent of personal bias, the work of one person in the study of an author being at once comparable with the work of any other.”4 During the hotly contested presidential election of Rutherford B. Hayes and James G. Blaine, he became intrigued with unsigned editorials in the New York Herald. The articles contained a small total number of words, making the margin of error quite high, but even so, Mendenhall discovered that the ratio-curves matched those of Blaine’s niece, a widely read author. As the new century began, a prominent Baconian approached Menden- hall, asking him to apply his method to the Shakespeare authorship contro- versy. A theory originally introduced in the mid-1800s held that Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher, essayist, and lord chancellor under James I, was the real author of the sonnets and plays. But the Bacon hypothesis soon became mired in the quest for secret codes, hidden ciphers, and other occult evi- dence. As can be seen in the books today on a code hidden in the Bible, vir- tually anything could be read into the literary entrails of the Folio, whose obscure orthography, misplaced fonts, and other irregularities appeared to have been composed by the clowns in Dr. Faustus or the gravediggers in Hamlet. In this maddening jumble of text and type, Baconians saw Kabbalistic revelations of Sir Francis’s hidden hand communicating in code with his brother Anthony, the spymaster. Accepting the challenge, Mendenhall hired a team of young women to count the words in the First Folio, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and other writings, and as a control, over a million words from the writings of other Elizabethan poets, including Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. To the disappointment of his patron, but not surprisingly to anyone who has read Bacon’s turgid prose, Mendenhall found that Bacon’s ratio- curve was light years apart from the author of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and the other masterpieces. However, the tedious undertaking did not go for nought. “It was in the counting and plotting of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, however, that something akin to a sensation was produced among those actually engaged in the work,” Mendenhall reported in December, 1901. “In the characteristic curves of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself.”5 Today’s computer technology makes stylometric studies such as these faster, more reliable, and more sophisticated. A recent computerized study replicated and corroborated Mendenhall’s original study. English researcher Peter Farey found a correlation of up to 99.98 percent between Marlowe’s plays and those attributed to Shakespeare.6 A recent stylometric study of function words such as “but,” “and” and “the” found a distinct difference Shakespeare’s Ghost 121 between the Marlovian and Shakespearean canons.7 However, taking prob- able date of composition into account, Farey found that Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s curves progressed with age and meshed exactly. He also looked at the percentage of run-on lines and “feminine” endings (in which an extra syllable is added to the regular iambic line of ten syllables) and found “a perfectly smooth curve can be seen to pass through the two groups of plays.” In a further development, Louis Ule, a statistician and editor of a Marlowe concordance, found that Marlowe and Shakespeare’s vocabulary were virtually indistinguishable. The rate that each canon added new words (known as hapax-legomena) to new plays differed by only 1 percent.8 Ule also found that the expected vocabularies among different genres (such as dramatic works, amorous poems, and moral poems) “is much the same for Marlowe as it is for Shakespeare.”9 Several other stylometric studies have also shown a strong correlation between individual plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, Kit’s The Jew of Malta contains an average of 11.74 props (e.g., swords, crowns, scepters, coins, etc.) per thousand lines, compared to an average of 11.48 for the Shakespearean tragedies as a whole, while other Elizabethan works range from 4.2 to 22.10 In writing this book, I was struck by the similarity between the use of biblical imagery in Hamlet and in Marlowe’s earlier plays. Turning to two standard reference works, I compared the use of biblical references, allu- sions, and echoes in the writings of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The books were Christopher Marlowe’s Use of the Bible, edited by R. M. Cornelius, a p r ofessor of English at Bryan College, and Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays, edited by Naseeb Shaheen, who has published many arti- cles on Shakespeare in scholarly journals. These compendiums show that both Marlowe and Shakespeare relied primarily on the Geneva Bible (the scripture favored by the Puritans), followed by the Bishop’s Bible, and that each made infrequent references to one of several other English bibles that were circulating at the time. A statistical comparison of the references reveals a striking similarity between the overall use of the scriptures. Both the Marlovian and the Shakespearean works refer to the Gospel of Matthew more than to any other book in the Bible. The Book of Psalms is the second most popular book referred to in each canon. In fact, as the accompanying table shows, eight of the top ten books are the same. Revelation and the Gospel of John are referred to more in Marlowe than in Shakespeare. One explanation for this would be that, after the Baines Note accusing him of blaspheming the apos- tle John, Marlowe consciously or unconsciously shied away from referring to John’s work, including Revelation, which was traditionally assigned to him. Instead, the Shakespeare works rely more often on Mark and Proverbs. 122 Hamlet

Table 3. Frequency of Biblical Allusions and Echoes in the Marlovian and Shakespearean Works

Rank Marlowe Shakespeare Hamlet

1. Matthew Matthew Psalms 2. Psalms Psalms Genesis 3. Revelation Luke Job 4. John Genesis Matthew 5. Luke Job Proverbs 6. Isaiah Revelation I Corinthians 7. Job Mark Isaiah 8. Romans Romans Revelation 9. Genesis Isaiah Luke 10. Hebrews Proverbs Ecclesiasticus

The total number of references is also comparable. Dividing Marlowe’s 1037 primary biblical references or echoes into eleven groups, including seven plays, three narrative poems, and short works (all grouped together), Professor Cornelius’s count averages out to 94.3 references per work. The list of 3483 biblical references in Shakespeare, divided among the thirty-nine plays indexed (including those in the First Folio, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Sir Thomas More) averages 91.7 references per play—a differ- ence of 3 percent. Of course, this comparison is very approximate, since the two editors may have selected references based on different literary criteria and their own subjective reading of the works. In annotating Hamlet for this edition, I identified more biblical refer- ences (see Annotations), bringing the total allusions and echoes in the play to 135. According to this reckoning, Hamlet alludes to forty of the eighty- two books in the Elizabethan era Bible, including, the Apocrypha, or just under one half. The Psalms and Genesis with twelve references or echoes each are tied for first, followed by Job with eleven and Matthew and Proverbs with ten each. Seven of the top ten books, including Isaiah, Luke, and Revelation, are the same as those in the above table. New additions include 1 Corinthians, Ecclesiasticus, and Proverbs, which is number ten on the overall Shakespearean list, but not in the top ranks of the early Marlovian works. Again, the overall pattern remains consistent. In comparison to Marlowe and Shakespeare, other Elizabethan play- wrights used the Bible much less frequently. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a primary dramatic source for Hamlet, has only seven references, Shakespeare’s Ghost 123 while Marton’s Antonio’s Revenge, a revenge tragedy that may also have made use of the lost Ur-Hamlet (attributed to Kyd and/or Marlowe), has only eight biblical correspondences, according to the experts. If this signifi- cantly lower frequency of biblical references holds up in the writings of other playwrights, we can tentatively conclude that the Marlovian and Shake- spearean works refer to the Bible about ten times more often than those of other contemporary dramatists. Finally, there is a significant overlap among the references in Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, about 20 percent of the passages in the Bible referred to in Dido (eight out of thirty-seven) are also alluded to in Shakespeare’s plays. In the first part of Tamburlaine, the percentage rises to nearly 40 percent (fifty-four out of 137 references), including fourteen out of seventeen references to the exact same passages in Matthew and ten of seventeen in Revelation.11 As we might expect, a profound knowledge of holy writ fits the profile of Marlowe, who prepared for the ministry at Cambridge, studied Latin and Greek, and received his M.A. in theology. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s life to suggest that he had comparable learning or religious sophistication. Actually there is a significant difference in the use of scripture in the two canons. In an introductory essay, Professor Cornelius marvels at Marlowe’s scrupulous use of the Bible in his works. “The treatment of judgment, which appears in all of his plays, is quite detailed and balanced, for Marlowe refers to both pains and punishments, rewards and righteous justice. In general, he is Biblically orthodox in presenting God as sovereign with respect to the machinations of men.”12 In contrast to Marlowe, Shakespeare, he asserts, is much more provocative, frequently using biblical humor and levity to make a point and even verging on flippancy! As examples, he cites The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which Launce compares himself to Christ; The Comedy of Errors, in which even Noah’s flood could not clean the face of Nell, the greasy kitchen maid; and Much Ado About Nothing in which women are claimed to be superior since men are made from dust. “None of these instances has a counterpart in Marlowe,” he observes.13 How can we explain this discrepancy? Like a sketch artist who composes a drawing of a missing child or adult that attempts to approximate how the person has aged, we need only focus Marlowe’s literary light through the prism of the events in Deptford to see how it manifests differently in the guise of Shakespeare. After May 30, 1593, Marlowe wrote from the com- parative freedom and safety of exile rather than under the direct gaze of the London censor, which could account for the emergence of this satirical strain, especially in the Italian comedies. This tendency reaches its zenith in Hamlet’s puns on the Lord’s Supper and the graveyard scenes. 124 Hamlet

The lighter theological vein accords with the general thematic change from the Marlovian plays, which dramatize the effects of evil, to the works attributed to Shakespeare, which focus on the restorative powers of the good. After Deptford, Kit appears to have transformed his inner demons and furies into angels and benevolent elves and fairies. He continued to invoke the spirits of darkness, especially Hecate, the queen of Night, but he let her inner radiance shine. Like his namesake Merlin and his hero Ovid, author of Metamorphoses, Kit mastered the art of transmutation, magically changing night into day, tragedy into comedy, and revenge into an immortal medita- tion on the human condition. In brief, scanning Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s literary and theological DNA proves a close, if not an exact, match. A variety of scientific, linguistic, and religious comparisons shows beyond a reasonable doubt that their col- lected works were composed largely by the same hand.

2 The Muse’s Springs

Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs. —Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (motto from Ovid’s Amores) The First Heir of My Invention

Marlowe is the greatest discoverer, the most daring pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before Marlowe there was no genuine blank verse and genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the path made straight for Shakespeare. —Algernon Charles Swinburne

s if on cue, following Christopher Marlowe’s “death” and sudden exit from the Elizabethan stage, Will Shake- speare made his literary entrance with publication of Venus and Adonis. Composed in the same style and tone as Hero and Leander, the lyrical narrative was registered anonymously with the Stationers’ Company on April 18, 1593, about the time the first anti-alien libels were Shakespeare’s Ghost 125 posted in London. Ironically, the poem was approved by Archbishop John Whitgift, who oversaw publication of all printed material and whose name appears on the registry. Anonymous authorship was not uncommon in an era when theater troupes or printers owned the rights to a play. In William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Stanley Schoenbaum mentions the appearance of a printed copy of Venus and Adonis with Shakespeare’s name as early as June 12.14 There is no author listed on the title page, and the dedication page with Shakespeare’s name appears to have been inserted into the volume after publication. This suggests that he volunteered or was chosen to take the credit for the poem in the two weeks after Marlowe’s “death” in Deptford. Dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, Venus and Adonis was offered as “the first heir of my invention.” Why was this young nobleman the dedicatee? A grandson of a former lord chancellor under Henry VIII, Southampton became a ward of William Cecil, or Lord Burghley, at age eight following the death of his father. In London, he lived with Burghley and his family in Cecil House in the Strand and was brought up like a son. Although the boy was a Catholic, when he was twelve, Burghley enrolled him at St. John’s College at Cambridge, a Puritan strong- hold, where he received his master’s degree in June 1589, just two years after Marlowe did. Hence their stay at the university overlapped by about five years. In 1588, through Burghley’s influence, Wriothesley was admitted to Gray’s Inn, one of the inns of court or law schools. The following year he was introduced to the queen and soon acquired a reputation as a generous patron of literature and the arts. In the early 1590s, he accompanied Essex to France and in later years participated in military expeditions to the Azores, Cadiz, and Ireland. Southampton’s wealth, rising influence at court, and intellectual and cultural interests made him the perfect patron. In addition to Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece—another narrative poem attributed to Shakespeare that came out in 1594—is dedicated to Southampton. In 1605, the earl sponsored a performance of Love’s Labor’s Lost in his home at which Queen Ann, the wife of James I, attended. Some critics believe that the sonnets addressed to the Fair Young Man allude to an intensely personal relationship between Shakespeare and his patron and that the mysterious Mr. W. H., to whom the Sonnets are dedicated, is Henry Wriothesley, with his initials reversed. However, there is no direct evidence linking the wealthy aristocrat and the Stratford actor. According to Shake- spearean scholar A. L. Rowse, Leander, the tragic hero in Hero and Leander, is modeled on Southampton, and the earl patronized Marlowe as well as Shakespeare. But again there is no evidence for such a tie or an intimate con- nection. 126 Hamlet

Another possibility, advanced by poet Ted Hughes, is that Burghley commissioned Venus and Adonis as part of his campaign for Southampton to marry his granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere. When Wriothesley rejected the proposed match, he explains, Cecil arranged for John Clapham, one of his secretaries, to compose an allegorical poem, Narcissus, derived from the clas- sical tale, about a young man who abandons Venus, the goddess of love, for self-love, falls into a pool and drowns, and is turned into a flower. “Shakespeare’s poem, while the same campaign was still in full swing, could well be seen as a continuation of Clapham’s brief, almost as if it had been commissioned for the purpose,” Hughes suggests. “It has been pointed out that one possible explanation for the fact that this daringly erotic poem was approved and licensed by one of the most morally severe theological censors of the age, Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was that Burghley some- how authorized it.”15 Of course, as England’s leading poet and a govern- ment agent already reporting to Cecil, Kit would have been a far more like- ly candidate to be tapped for the assignment than the unknown William of Stratford. A clue to the possible relationship between Shakespeare and Southamp- ton comes from Dr. John Ward, a London physician, who moved to Stratford in the 1660s, became vicar of the local church, and lived there for nineteen years. Curious about Shakespeare’s life, Ward reported that Shake- speare “supplied ye stage with 2 plays every year, and for yt had an allowance so large, yt hee spent att the Rate of a 1,000£ a year as I have heard.”16 According to Ward’s diary, he met with Shakespeare’s surviving relatives, friends, and neighbors who knew him before he died in 1616, including Thomas Hart, his nephew, and a Mrs. Queeny, who is apparently Judith Shakespeare, the actor’s daughter, who married Thomas Quiney and died in her late seventies. In his diary, Dr. Ward writes: “I have heart yt Mr. Shakespeare was a nat- ural wit, without any art at all; he frequented ye plays all his younger times, but in his elder days lived at Stratford.”17 This description suggests that he was natively intelligent but had little formal training (“any art at all”) and that he worked in the London theater in early manhood (though apparent- ly not as a writer) and retired in late middle age to his boyhood home. Traveling troupes of players came to Stratford periodically, and young Will may have come under the spell of the theater at that point. In any event, it would have been unprecedented for any poet to receive a thousand, much less a hundred, pounds for a manuscript. The typical payment for a play was several pounds at most, and a printed edition that was successful and broke even on sales of 500 copies would typically make a profit of £1 a year. Once for a special performance, the Globe theatre received 40 shillings to make Shakespeare’s Ghost 127 up for the anticipated loss at the gate. By comparison, the annual budget for the entire Elizabethan secret service was only about £2000, and after expenses the archbishop of Canterbury earned £1500 a year. While Shakespearean biographers today tend to ignore Ward’s diary, Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, also reported that South- ampton bestowed £1000 on the young actor early in his career.18 Whether given to Shakespeare once at the launch of his career or annually, the enor- mous figure suggests a business agreement to run a theater company rather than write individual plays.19 The earliest plays attributed to Shakespeare are believed to have been composed and performed between 1587 and 1591. The last Shakespearean plays are dated to about 1611. The First Folio con- tains thirty-six plays, and there are several more such as Edward III that lit- erary experts now generally assign to his hand. The interval between these two dates, some eighteen to twenty years, corresponds with the production of about forty plays, or two a year. Some skeptics speculate that the fantastic payment to Shakespeare was a bribe, or even blackmail, not to reveal his part in the masquerade. More like- ly, it was used by the novice actor or stage manager to became a sharehold- er in a theater company. It is unnecessary to impugn Shakespeare’s charac- ter or attach primarily financial motives to the arrangement. Compounding the mystery, Shakespeare’s formative years are a complete blank. The first documented account of his presence in London is in late 1594. The meager facts suggest that William of Stratford was employed immediately after the events in Deptford to serve as a theatrical stand in and literary alias for Marlowe and prior to this time had no major involvement in the world of arts and letters. Burghley, who had served as Henry Wriothesley’s guardian and de facto father since early adolescence, evident- ly made the arrangements. He watched over both Southampton and Marlowe at Cambridge, where he was chancellor, and it is reasonable to con- clude that they knew each other from their university days. There is simply no information about when Shakespeare first came to the capital or became involved in the stage. Shakespeare’s dark years—a virtual cipher between 1585 and 1594—allow for many potential relationships to have developed among the principals. The most plausible is contact between Marlowe and Shakespeare at the Rose or some other theatrical venue where the careers of the two young men—born within two months of each other— may have intersected in the late 1580s or early 1590s. In his hometown, Will is last mentioned in connection with the birth of twins, Judith and Hamnet, to him and his wife, Anne Hathaway, in 1585. Nine years later, in 1594, he is listed with Will Kempe and Richard Burbage as members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in London who received payment for a performance at 128 Hamlet court. In the interim, Will may have served Lord Strange’s Men or the Earl of Pembroke’s Men as a prop man, stage manger, or member of the cast. The stipend he received in 1594 does not specify his services, but Kempe and Burbage were both actors. The case for Shakespeare as a budding poet and dramatist at this early period rests largely on a pun. In Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Robert Greene warned dramatists not to trust actors because of their mendacity and lack of learning. In his splenetic narrative, he singled out “an upstart Crow . . . that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and . . . is in his owne con- ceit the onely Shake-scene in a country.”20 On the basis of the pun on “Shake-scene” and the parody of a passage in 3 Henry VI, “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!” (1.4.137), scholars have concluded that this is the earliest known literary reference to Shakespeare. Published in 1592, it appears to place William of Stratford as solidly employed within the London theater and to document the formative stage of his acting and writing career. As the chief source for The Winter’s Tale and a minor source for Troilus and Cressida, Greene evidently knew young Shakespeare and, it has been sug- gested, even collaborated with him on Titus Andronicus, 1 and 2 Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and other early works. Yet, in Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, A. D. Wraight shows convincingly that Greene referred not to Shakespeare but to Alleyn. Starring in the title role of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Alleyn had risen to prominence as an actor and was known to “shake a stage,” a common term for great actors of that time. As the manager of the Lord Admiral’s Men as well as a tragedian, he employed Greene as a writer, but they had a falling out.21 The “tiger’s heart” line is actually from The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Yorke, the early version of 3 Henry VI, a play that some scholars independ- ently assign to Marlowe. I would also point out that two years earlier in Never Too Late, Greene had taunted Alleyn and Marlowe in similar language: “Why Roscius [Alleyn], art thou proud with Esop’s Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler [Marlowe, the shoemaker’s son] hath taught thee to say Ave Caesar, disdain not thy tutor.” “Ave Caesar” is a famous phrase from Edward III, a play now widely attributed to Shakespeare! Hence, the main linchpin of the case for young Shakespeare as an author and dramatist is very shaky indeed. It is possible that Shakespeare shared Marlowe’s idealism, passion, and even free-thinking spirit and entered into a partnership with him for larger social, religious, or political ends. Thomas Cartwright and Job Throkmor- ton, the great Puritan opponents of Archbishop Whitgift, hailed from Warwickshire and visited Stratford. Young Will could have been inspired by Shakespeare’s Ghost 129 their impassioned sermons and speeches. Over the years, Shakespeare acquired a reputation as a tight spender and quarrelsome landlord and neighbor, but these need not detract from the possibility that he had his own youthful visionary bent. There is also a darker possibility for the genesis of their partnership. A Catholic will signed by his father, John Shakespeare, reportedly turned up hidden in the thatch roof of the family’s cottage in Stratford in the eigh- teenth century. Knowledge of such clandestine religious practice by the anti- Catholic spymaster Walsingham in the 1580s or by the Cecils in the early 1590s, may have been used against Shakespeare. As a struggling young actor, Will could have been blackmailed into participating in the arrange- ment on condition that his recusant sympathies or those of his family not be exposed. His mother was also distantly related to Robert Southward, the Jesuit priest who was later martyred. Further, one of the cousins in his extended family, John Somerville, was arrested in 1583 as part of a Catholic plot to assassinate the queen. In the new book Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, several leading Shakespearean scholars explore the extensive network of Catholic connections among the Shakespeare clan, Stratford, and the Jesuit underground. It is hypothesized that Will’s intro- duction to the stage came through the Catholic Stanleys, including Ferdi- nando, patron of Lord Strange’s Men (for whom Marlowe wrote).22 Though well known for mentoring young earls, princesses, and other future leaders of the realm, Burghley was also a shrewd judge of character at the low end of the social scale, and young Will may have come to his atten- tion. In 1585, a London official wrote a letter to Cecil referring to Nicholas Skeres as one of the “Masterless men and Cutpurses whose practice is to robbe Gentelmen’s Chambers and Artificers’ Shoppes in & about London.”23 Instead of turning Skeres over to the magistrates and hangman, Burghley apparently referred him to spymaster Walsingham because of his singular talents. In addition to his apparent participation in the Babington Plot, Skeres was one of the three men present at Marlowe’s “death” in Deptford. Perhaps because of stalwart performances by men such as Skeres, the lord treasurer readily agreed to employ the lowly actor from Stratford in an intelligence caper of another variety. Although stridently anti-Catholic, Burghley protected Protestant dis- senters, Separatists, and freethinkers like Marlowe whenever possible. Robert Browne, who matriculated from Corpus Christi College in Cam- bridge about a decade before Marlowe, is a case in point. A member of a prominent family that was related to the Cecils, Browne was arrested and jailed on numerous occasions for publicly criticizing the Church, but each time he was released through Burghley’s influence. In the early seventeenth 130 Hamlet century, his followers, known as Brownists, set sail for America and found- ed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Robert Browne came to be known as the father of Congregationalism. There is no known connection between Browne and Marlowe, but their ties to Corpus Christi College and Burghley warrant further investigation. (One of Marlowe’s Canterbury neighbors, Robert Cushman, hired the Pilgrim vessel the Mayflower.) Given the enormous personal risks that playwrights like Kyd and Marlowe faced from orthodox theologians, it is likely that Shakespeare, at least in the beginning, did not know the real identity of the author whose works he passed off as his own. Venus and Adonis’s dedication to South- ampton as “the first heir of my invention” punningly suggests that the vol- ume is the first to come out under an invented name. In addition to external ties, Venus and Adonis also shows internal evi- dence that it was compiled by Marlowe. Like Hero and Leander, it is a charming fable about why human love is doomed to fail. In each case, the poem enlarges and reshapes its classical source to embody the author’s own philosophy and insights. Though presumably written before Venus and Adonis, Marlowe’s poem alludes to its sequel in the opening lines (“Where Venus in her naked glory strove / To please the careless and disdainful eyes / Of proud Adonis” [12–14]) and, like Shakespeare’s, occasionally abbreviates Adonis’s name to Adon in later references. In both poems, the beautiful youth is referred to as “rose-cheeked,” an epithet not found in the classical myths. (“Rose- cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase” [3] in Shakespeare and “Rose- cheeked Adonis, kept a solemn feast” [93] in Marlowe.) In comparing Adonis to Narcissus, Shakespeare describes how the self-absorbed young man “died to kiss his shadow in the brook” (162) while Marlowe’s Leander “leapt into the water for a kiss / Of his own shadow” (74–75). In Ovid’s account of the original Greek myth, Narcissus drowns trying to embrace his own reflection in a pool, but there is no mention of him kissing his shadow. Curiously, Leander’s face is likened to that of a woman in both Marlowe’s poem and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20. The passages describing the heroines’ liquid pearl tears are also parallel,24 and both poems include a description of a powerful steed that, disdaining to be controlled, breaks its reins, stamps its hooves, and exchanges restraint for freedom.25 The maritime scenery in the two poems also appears to have been arranged by the same set designer, with numerous references to the sea, waves, coral, breaks, and other coastal images. Of course, both myths are originally set in the Mediterranean, but Venus and Adonis’s description of pursuing the deadly boar “o’er the downs” (677) suggests the southeast English coastline, not Crete, the island sacred to Venus. This reference Shakespeare’s Ghost 131 would more likely come to Marlowe’s mind, who drew upon childhood memories of the cliffs of Dover, where his grandparents lived, than that of Shakespeare, who grew up in inland Warwickshire. (The same later holds true in Hamlet, whose “dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o’er his base into the sea” [1.4.76–77] is not found in Elsinore in Denmark, but in Kit’s childhood haunts.) The predominant hue in each narrative poem is also the same. From the opening line of Venus and Adonis (“the sun with purple-color’d face” [1]) to the bed of flowers the lovers lie on (“blue-veined violets” [125]) to the falling of the fruit (“the mellow plum” [527]) that foreshadows their sepa- ration, the bloody injury that Adonis suffers, the “purple tears, that his wound wept” [1054]), and his final transmutation into an anemone (“A purple flow’r sprung up” [1168]), the Shakespearean poem clothes its star- crossed lovers in tragic indigo. In Marlowe’s tale, “the Morn . . . puts on her purple weeds” (571–572), oblations of “wine from grapes outrung” (140) are made at Venus’s temple, the heroine’s resplendent attire has a lining of “purple silk” (10), and Hero adorns her lover with “purple ribbon wound” (590), a pun on Adonis’s wound and a presentiment of Leander’s fate. As the day bathes both sets of lovers with its life-giving rays, so the fall of darkness mirrors their parting and separation. “When they resign their office, and their light, . . . / Who bids them still consort with ugly night” (1039, 1041) Shakespeare sings, while Marlowe’s lyric refrain muses, “But he the day’s bright-bearing car prepared / And ran before as harbinger of light, / And with his flaring beams mocked ugly Night” (814–816). Finally, in each story, love’s complaint is compared to decay in the natural world. “Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime / Rot, and consume them- selves in little time” (131–132), Shakespeare sighs, while Marlowe draws the same moral in a field of grain: “The richest corn dies if it be not reaped; / Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept” (327-328). The verses echo Marlowe’s motto and Sonnet 73: “Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Compared to Shakespeare’s later plays, which lift entire lines and themes from Marlowe, the theft of images and ideas in Venus and Adonis is relatively light. However, it has sufficiently vexed scholars so that they postulate that Shakespeare must have had access to a manuscript copy of Marlowe’s work before writing his own. As A. L. Rowse states, “The poems are full of echoes of each other, theme, arguments, phrases, whole passages.”26 Are these sim- ilarities harmless examples of literary poaching, coincidence, or prophecy? Occam’s razor offers the simplest solution: the two poems were written by the same hand. As for Venus in the poem attributed to Shakespeare, the goddess may have been modeled, at least in part, on Mary Sidney, the Countess of 132 Hamlet

Pembroke, one of the leading literary patrons of the Elizabethan era. Three years older than Kit and Will, she married the Earl of Pembroke when she was sixteen. Contemporary accounts suggest that the Pembrokes’ marriage, though it produced an heir, was largely one of convenience, with both the aging noble, previously married and more than thirty years older than his glamorous bride, and Mary pursuing their separate interests and dalliances. The countess, the sister of poet Sir Philip Sidney and an accomplished writer of blank verse in her own right, went on to complete her brother’s unfin- ished work after his heroic death on the battlefield against the Spanish. Marlowe wrote a glowing tribute in Latin to Mary in the introduction of Amintae Gaudia, a posthumous book of poetry by his close friend, Thomas Watson, who died on September 26, 1592. Addressing “the Most Illustrious Noble Lady, adorned with all gifts both of mind and body,” Marlowe com- pares her to a goddess “to whose immaculate embrace virtue, outraged by the assault of barbarism and ignorance, flieth for refuge.” Could the haven possibly refer to her intervention on his behalf in Flushing, where he was detained by her brother, Robert, the governor, on charges of counterfeiting earlier in the year? Likening his own “slender wealth” to the “seashore myr- tle of Venus,” he promises to invoke Mary’s name as “Mistress of the Muses” in all of his own future works. Marlowe’s Edward II and several anonymous plays attributed to him were performed by the Pembroke’s Men, her husband’s theatrical company. Mary’s son, William Herbert, is the principal candidate for the mysterious Mr. W. H., to whom Shakespeare’s Sonnets are dedicated. Edward Blount, the publisher of the First Folio, was Mary’s trustee, and the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works is ded- icated to William and his brother. This intricate web of connections with the countess and her family has led some critics to conclude that she and Marlowe may have been romantically attached.27 Beside Mary Sidney and Southampton, Richard Field, the printer of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, may have been instrumental in Marlowe’s literary return under Will’s name. Field came from Stratford, as did Shakespeare, their two fathers were acquainted, and this connection is widely viewed by historians and critics as the missing link between Will’s lost years and his move to London. Field served as an apprentice to Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot refugee printer. After the man died in 1587, Field married his widow and inherited the business, which included a monopoly on publishing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of Marlowe’s favorite books, in both English and Latin. He also published Holinshed, Plutarch, and many of the other sources that were used in the composition of the Marlovian and Shakespearean plays. Field also published a number of news pamphlets about religious strife in France that Kit used as background for The Massacre Shakespeare’s Ghost 133 at Paris. In the relatively small world of writers and publishers, Field and Marlowe were no doubt acquainted. Field may also have been a member of the School of Night and met Marlowe through Ralegh’s circle. The title page of Venus and Adonis men- tions that the book is “Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Churchyard.” In his testimony against Marlowe, Thomas Kyd implicated several other unnamed members of the informal academy, including “some stationers in Paul’s Church- yard.”28 In his statements extracted under torture, Kyd observed that they met under “the sign of the White Greyhound.” Since Field’s books were sold at this alehouse, it is highly probable he was one of the stationers allud- ed to. He also published Sir Philip Sidney’s works, tying him into Pembroke’s circle, to which Kit was related through Lord Pembroke’s act- ing company and Philip and Mary Sidney’s other brother, Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing. Less well known is the connection between Field and Burghley. Field printed Burghley’s The Copie of a Letter sent out of England to Don Bernar- din Mendoza, Spain’s ambassador in France, along with other material relat- ed to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The following year, Field wrote a dedicatory letter to Burghley in a book that he printed by George Putten- ham entitled The Arte of English Poesie. It’s possible that Field printed other documents for the Crown’s chief councilor, but the Armada documents are the only ones catalogued in the British Museum. According to another Spanish emissary, Burghley secretly supplied poets with material for their plays. “Evidently Feria [Spanish ambassador to England] was doing what he could to discredit Cecil with his mistress,” explains Elizabethan historian Conyers Read. “It was at this juncture that Feria protested against comedies in London which made mock of his royal master. He said that Cecil had sup- plied the authors of them with chief themes.”29 In William Cecil: The Power Behind Elizabeth, Alan Gordon Smith con- tends that Burghley orchestrated the publication of numerous “encomiums of the new regime” in its struggle to thwart Catholic conspiracies and estab- lish a new patriotic English identity. “Whole chapters might be filled con- cerning these official and semi-official publications: from Jewel’s Apology to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. So important was this purely literary side of the rev- olution that, in the midst of his stupendous political labours, he would con- stantly take a personal hand in it himself.” In addition to drafting his own works such as Declaration of the Queenes Proceedings since her Reign and Execution of Justice, Burghley “had to rely, for the most part, on anonymous pens, for many of which he found regular employment.”30 Hence, as the center of the Crown’s fiscal, diplomatic, and espionage web, the lord treas- 134 Hamlet urer and de facto prime minister also oversaw its propaganda and literary activities. Even if he knew Will from Stratford, Field could have served as the inter- mediary for Burghley, whose patronage he enjoyed. In helping the elder statesman and his son find a mouthpiece for Marlowe, he may have initially recommended Will and vouched for his discretion, as well as arranged for the publication of the first volume bearing his name. Venus and Adonis, which he printed, was already well into production when Marlowe was arrested. The short period of time (two weeks) between the poet’s dramat- ic “death” and Shakespeare’s literary “birth” suggests established connec- tions and a secure support network (such as Her Majesty’s secret service) already in place that could swiftly implement contingency plans. The Latin inscription on the title page of Venus and Adonis—“Vilia miretus vulgus: himi flauus Apollo /Pocula Castaliapelena minisiret aqua”— further links Marlowe and Shakespeare. In his translation of Ovid’s Elegies, Marlowe rendered the passage: “Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, Faire Phoebus led me to the Muses’ springs” (1.15.35–36). The couplet is almost a perfect koan for the events in Deptford: “Let base conceited Archbishop Whitgift and his cronies admire vile things, the divine light of truth led me safely to the Muse’s springs.” Phoebus referred to Apollo, the sun god. “Vile” also echoes “vile, hereticall conceipts” which Marlowe was accused of holding in the Baines Note and “the notablyst and vyldist arty- ckeles of Athemysme” in Drury’s letter to Anthony Bacon. The pure “springs” of the Muse further contrasts the “vile” attempt by Baines to poi- son the communal well in France, as Marlowe satirized in The Jew of Malta. The subsequent lines of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid (first published in 1598) are even more revealing:

About my head be quivering myrtle wound, And in sad lovers’ heads let me be found. The living, not the dead, can envy bite, For after death all men receive their right. Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire, I’ll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher. (1.15.37–42)

These lines reinforce the image that the poet’s true work will live on, even though his name has been taken from him and metaphorically burned at the stake. The line “The living, not the dead, can envy bite” alludes to Thomas Kyd’s beseeching letter to Sir John Puckering, the lord keeper, after the events in Deptford, when he made further allegations of heresy against Marlowe and closed with the Latin proverb: “Quia mortui non mordent,” or Shakespeare’s Ghost 135

“The dead do not bite.”31 There is another allusion to vileness in Sonnet 121: “’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, / When not to be receives reproach of being.” “Mount higher” in the last line is a characteristic Marlovian image for Tamburlaine, the Duke of Guise, and his other aspir- ing anti-heroes. Finally, the dedication of Venus and Adonis promises the Earl of Southampton a “graver labor” in the future, a pun of greater things to come from the grave of the “dead” poet. The word play and black humor—rem- iniscent of Mercutio’s dying pun in Romeo and Juliet, “Ask for me to-mor- row, and you shall find me a grave man” (3.1.97–98)—are comic touches worthy of the future author of Hamlet.32

Little Latin and Less Greek

Well, let me see—oh, I’ve got it—you can do Hamlet’s soliloquy . . . The first chance we got, the duke he had some show bills printed; and after that, for two or three days as we floated along, the raft was a most uncommon lively place, for there warn’t nothing but sword-fight- ing and rehearsing . . . All of us but Jim took the canoe and went down there to see if there was any chance in that place for our show. —Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

nlike the anti-Stratfordians, I do not think that Will Shakespeare was uneducated. They point to a lack of uniformity in the spelling of his name as proof of his poor literacy, but in an era before standardized spelling, grammar, and punctuation, the variations are not qual- itatively different than those of Marlowe. While there is no evidence that Shakespeare attended grammar school, there is also none to the contrary. And by modern standards, local schooling was very rigorous and demanding. Through a schoolmaster’s col- lection of books or a private library such as that of Richard Field, Shake- speare could have acquired a sound basic education in Stratford or at some point during the lost years. Even granted that he may have been a natural wit, as Dr. Ward reports, he would still have needed to acquire the special- ized knowledge of theology, law, medicine, and other disciplines that per- meates the plays. That, too, could have been obtained through diligent self- study and perseverance. So on this basis alone, I would not dismiss him as the author of the works attributed to his name. After all, another rustic, barefoot boy, Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare’s 136 Hamlet greatest successor as a prose stylist, left school after only three years, and thereafter gained his education by reading in the fields or by candlelight, borrowing books, and polishing his rough-hewn jottings. In Lincoln’s case, physical evidence for his authorship includes original manuscript papers and drafts, as well as contemporary accounts of the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural speech—generally recognized as his most Shakespearean oratories. According to his son, Robert, Lincoln always carried an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, his favorite, with him in the White House. His wry sense of humor, pacifist inclinations combined with a talent for military strategy, and unswerving devotion to the cause of liberty strike a Marlovian refrain. And ironically, John Wilkes Booth, a Shakespearean actor, assassinated him while attending a play at a Washington theater. As a Warwickshire country boy navigating the Avon like an English Huck Finn, then, Shakespeare could have developed a native genius and enlarged his “little Latine and lesse Greeke,” in Ben Jonson’s words, through some as yet unknown agency. And like Twain’s protagonist, Will could have been intuitively bright, honest, and intellectually curious. I recoil at those who put Shakespeare down to build up their own candidate and assume that only an aristocrat could have written the canon. Hugh Trevor- Roper, the Elizabethan historian, dismisses Shakespeare as “a common oaf” who could not possibly have written the plays.33 If Shakespeare were illiter- ate, as some handwriting experts attest, he could still have been a born sto- ryteller, like Homer, one of the ancient Celtic bards, or Garrison Keillor today. Many Shakespeare biographers speculate that he worked as a school- master for a Catholic family in Lancashire and is the William Shakeshafte referred to in a contemporary will. In the course of researching and editing this volume, I seriously enter- tained the possibility that Shakespeare, the native genius, wrote not only his own work but Marlowe’s! In the early 1800s, as we saw, the Monthly Review first proposed that since the works attributed to the two playwrights were so similar, Shakespeare must have adopted Marlowe as his pen name before performing and dramatizing plays in his own right. According to this sce- nario, Marlowe was such a valuable intelligencer that the Walsinghams or Cecils provided him with a literary cover to carry out his assignments. With Southampton and Richard Field orchestrating arrangements, Will Shake- speare, a young, self-educated poet, was selected to pass off his earliest works under Marlowe’s name. In this way, Marlowe’s “legend,” or spurious biog- raphy, gained him wider entrée into courts, manor houses, and literary salons in Scotland, France, and other venues. According to this theory, after Marlowe died, accidentally or on purpose, in Deptford in 1593, Shakespeare continued publishing under his own name, and no one was the wiser. Shakespeare’s Ghost 137

While theoretically possible, it is more likely that Will Shakespeare’s forte lay in his abilities as an actor, artistic director, stage manager, or entrepre- neur rather than in his skill as a poet or playwright. As a principal share- holder, he may have brought to the Globe, Fortune, and other London stages the kind of “mighty” presence that Marlowe, Kyd, and Jonson brought to the written page. In fact, the success of the Shakespearean plays in the mid 1590s and early 1600s may owe as much to his organizing genius as to the scripts. Will’s ability to help negotiate shrewd business deals (for which literacy was essential), harmonize outsize egos such as the Burbages (James, the original entrepreneur, who built the Theatre; Richard, his son, the actor; and Cuthbert, the other son, who built the Globe) and Marlowe himself (even at a distance), and avoid the lash of the censor, the scorn of Archbishop Whitgift, and the peevishness of the queen may have required skills of heroic proportions. Shakespeare may largely have been responsible for keeping together the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later known as the King’s Men under King James) for twenty years—the Golden Age of the English stage—through plagues, rebellions, scandals at court, and personal melodramas surrounding his cast, printers, and high-strung chief playmaker. Given the amount of time that he was away from his family in Stratford, a case can be made that Will Shakespeare deserves to be enshrined in the the- atrical book of martyrs as a result of his selfless service to a higher literary and spiritual cause. As we will see in the next section when analyzing Hamlet, there is good reason to believe that Kit and Will enjoyed an excellent working relation- ship. Though he may not have been formally educated or skilled in writing, Shakespeare as a “natural wit” probably served as a sounding board for the poet’s dramatic conceptions and stage characterizations, contributing insights, imagery, and improvisations that may have found their way into the playscripts as well as on the stage. Until more evidence is forthcoming, I feel it is justified to consider their partnership a creative collaboration and retain William Shakespeare’s name as co-author. Will’s crankiness, petty suits, youthful poaching, marital spats, and leg- endary tippling at the Mermaid Inn may be no more indicative of his true character than Marlowe’s infractions. As Charles Nicholl observes, “On the basis of Marlowe’s police record—perhaps known to the coroner, perhaps not—we can say that he had twice been involved in violent clashes, in pub- lic, though in neither case can we be sure that he was the aggressor, and in neither case was he subsequently charged with any crime.”34 In a litigious age, Shakespeare’s peccadilloes, like Marlowe’s indiscre- tions, can be viewed as little more than isolated instances that do not neces- sarily outweigh their positive character traits or ability to carry out their pro- 138 Hamlet fessional duties. It was common in that era for a gentleman to have up to a dozen lawsuits pending at any moment. Over time, as their partnership strengthened, Shakespeare evidently became Marlowe’s willing alter ego, faithfully carrying out essential practical tasks to bring the poet’s immortal verse to the stage and to gain them a chance at posterity. As we shall see, Hamlet appears to portray their relationship in this light.

3 Hand in Hand

The young Shakespeare must have heard the music of Marlowe’s mighty line for the first time when he came to London . . . without Marlowe, there would never have been the Will Shakespeare whom we know. —Thomas Marc Parrott, William Shakespeare: A Handbook

The Place of Death and Sorry Execution

[T]he Duke himself in person Comes this way to the melancholy vale, The place of [death] and sorry execution —The Comedy of Errors (5.1.119–121)

n 1594, following the plague that had closed public entertainments for most of the previous two years, the London theaters reopened. After Lord Strange’s sud- den death that summer, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men replaced Lord Strange’s company. The Comedy of Errors, possibly the earliest production of a Shake- spearean play, took place at Gray’s Inn in London on December 28, 1594. “[T]here was a great Presence of Lords, Ladies, and worshipful Personages, that did expect some notable Performance at that time,” explains the Gerta Grayorum, a contemporary account. Those in attendance included “the Right Honourable Lord Keeper, the Earls of Shrewsbury, Cumberland, Northumberland, Southampton, and Essex, the Lords Buckhurst, Windsor, Mountjoy, Sheffield, Compton, Rich, Burleygh, Mounteagle, and the Lord Thomas Howard; Sir Thomas Henage, Sir Robert Cecill; with a great number of Knights, Ladies, and very worshipful Shakespeare’s Ghost 139

Personages.”35 The inns of court, the law schools in London, included many prominent Puritan sympathizers such as Nicholas Fuller, who defended the four divines brought to trial by the archbishop of Canterbury in the Star Chamber trial in 1591, and Henry Finch, who spoke in Parliament against Whitgift’s bill to suppress religious dissent in 1593. Gray’s Inn, in particular, is associated with many of the key figures in the Marlowe saga. William Cecil studied there, as did his son, Robert, and old classmate William Danby, the queen’s coroner. It was also Francis Walsingham’s legal alma mater. The presence of Burghley, his son Robert Cecil, Southampton (Shakespeare’s new patron), and Henage (a crony of Burghley on the Privy Council) at The Comedy of Errors suggests that the debut of Shakespeare as a dramatist was organized by the same powerful men who helped stage Marlowe’s “death” in Deptford and arranged for the publication of Venus and Adonis. The presence of Essex and Northumberland (the Wizard Earl and associate of Ralegh and the School of Night) further indicates the audience’s free-thinking sympathies, as both of these men were accused of atheism in the Remembrances against Richard Cholemley. Conspicuous by their absence are the queen and Archbishop Whitgift. Their closest ally present is Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper and former attorney general who had been active in the persecution of dissidents, and Buckhurst, an instigator of the investigation of Marlowe. As the first person mentioned in the account, Egerton represents the Crown and Buckhurst, as ecclesiastical high commissioner, the Church. Hence, the tenor of the per- formance will inevitably find its way back to Whitehall and Lambeth, and the play is performed not without risk. What, then, did this assembled audience see? On the surface, The Comedy of Errors is a domestic comedy about marital infidelity based on a tale by Plautus, the Roman dramatist. The play opens with the Duke of Ephesus notifying Egeon, a Syracuse merchant, that since all foreign commerce is banned he will face the death penalty unless he pays a huge ransom. Egeon explains that he has been searching for his wife and one of his infant twin sons who were lost in a shipwreck twenty-three years earlier. The other son, Antipholus, at age eighteen, had set out looking for his lost brother. Accompanying him was Dromio, a servant whose twin also disappeared in the calamity. The Duke listens sympathetically to Egeon’s tale about search- ing for his lost family and gives the prisoner the rest of the day to come up with the money. The main plot revolves around Adriana, a suspicious housewife, who is married to Antipholus of Epheus, the lost twin. She locks him out of the house when she thinks he is having an affair with another woman. In reali- 140 Hamlet ty, her husband is not straying. But, accused by his wife of being bewitched by the devil and in need of exorcism, he goes off to dine with a courtesan. As Adriana’s fears and inability to listen mount, she terrorizes her guests and servants, further increasing the level of anxiety in the household and com- munity. The misunderstandings quickly spiral out of control as the two pairs of masters and servants individually come into contact and constantly mis- take each another’s identities. In the end, Emilia, the abbess in whose prio- ry Antipholus of Syracuse seeks asylum, peacefully settles the dispute by ex- plaining to Adriana that her unwarranted suspicions and petty jealousies have driven her husband away. Emilia herself turns out to be the lost wife of Egeon. Misunderstandings are cleared up, estranged and lost relatives are reunified, and domestic felicity is restored at a feast of celebration. Over the years, literary critics have commented on the religious tone of The Comedy of Errors, especially its being set in Syracuse, the city visited by St. Paul and mentioned in his letters to the Ephesians. But beyond being a liturgical homily on the virtues of trust and honest communication between spouses, some critics view the play as fundamentally a parody of the religious crisis created by Archbishop Whitgift and Queen Elizabeth. As Donna B. Hamilton, an English professor at the University of Maryland, shows in Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England:

For Errors, the components that furnish the key connecting links between its Plautine plot and the contemporary church-stage controversies include the Ephesus setting, female characters whose parts are crossed with the protestant topoi for the church, slapstick comic routines that rework the conformist-non- conformist contests over who would be insiders and who outsiders in the church, and a domestic plot that represents the conflicts that fears of unfaithfulness (in marriage or in church politics) spark.36

In this play, the ancient Roman setting and plot is refashioned into an incisive commentary on contemporary issues of religious authority and obe- dience. The shipwreck in the opening of the performance, Hamilton sug- gests, echoes a famous metaphor that John Foxe, author of Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs, second only in popularity to the Bible in Elizabethan times), used in a letter to John Whitgift warning him to take a course of moderation toward religious dissent. Adriana’s authoritarian and peevish nature reflects that of Queen Elizabeth; her husband, Antipholus of Ephesus, mirrors the outrage of the upright but unjustifiably maligned Puritans; and Antipholus of Syracuse, the foreigner, by default represents nonconformists (Separatists, Jews, and atheists), who are entirely excluded from the social discourse. Connecting the play directly to the great parliamentary debate of 1593 Shakespeare’s Ghost 141 that preceded Marlowe’s arrest, Hamilton argues that “Adriana’s situation as one in which contamination appears to have occurred, but has not, paro- dies and challenges the conformist rhetoric that discredited presbyterians and puritans by referring to them as ‘Antichristian’ and dangerous.”37 “In the world outside the play,” she continues, “exclusion policies were the mainstay of the careers of Whitgift and Bancroft, who promulgated their platform in part by associating nonconformity with popery, labeling it ‘[A]nti-christian.’”38 Adriana “uses the same style of demonizing” used on the Puritans by the archbishop; the bishop of London; Richard Hooker, author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity who had called for the burning of heretics; and Richard Cosin, the Church’s Parliamentary spokesman.39 In the play’s puns, pranks, and slapstick routines, moreover, Hamilton sees Shakespeare’s “rearticulation, and literalisation, of the Marprelate rhet- oric. By way of that reconfiguration, Errors reinstates this forbidden lan- guage, and in the very venue—the theatre—from which it had, in 1589, been officially banished.”40 Beneath Shakespeare’s “comic violence,” she sees a satire on authoritarian church doctrines and the archbishop’s cam- paign of “unremitting and arbitrary violence.” She shows that the play’s theme of equality and language of brotherhood derives from the Marprelate tracts. “Shakespeare reconstituted the contested term ‘brother’ so that the emphasis is not on divisiveness or difference,” she writes, “but on difference (Syracusan and Ephesian) that is ultimately subsumed and overridden by sameness. In this case, brotherhood is not a problem, but the solution.”41 At the end of the play, while joking about who should enter the church first, the Dromios decide: “We came into the world like brother and brother; / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another” (5.1.425–426). Although Hamilton does not mention Marlowe in connection with the play or deal with the authorship controversy in her book, in The Comedy of Errors Egeon, the shipwrecked foreigner facing “the place of [death] and sorry execution” by virtue of his alien customs and beliefs, may represent Marlowe. His lost wife, the wise Abbess Emilie, symbolizes the true church that welcomes and embraces all people and beliefs. “The Abbess recognizes that all those present and in contention are actually one family—her family,” observes Hamilton, “and . . . at the end of the play, she takes all of them (including the insider Ephesians and the outsider Syracusans) with her into the church.” In a parody of religious controversies, the play “deflates the threat that conformists understood the puritan challenge to represent, and argues that a more tolerant attitude toward nonconformists can foster unity.”42 The Comedy of Errors illuminates the critical issues of Church and State confronting England in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign and the paranoid 142 Hamlet and xenophobic environment in which Marlowe, like Egean, was caught. For an accused heretic who has just entered the Cecilian witness protection program and changed his identity, The Comedy of Errors is a tolerant, for- giving, and remarkably Christian work.

The Troublesome Reign

To none will we sell, to none deny or delay, right or justice. —Magna Carta, 1215

istories were the third major dramatic form on the Elizabethan stage after tragedies and comedies. Marlowe’s Edward II introduced the genre along with the early Shakespearean plays dealing with the Hun- dred Years War and the War of the Roses. King John is usually dated to the early 1590s, but there is no indica- tion of when it was first performed, and it did not see publication until the First Folio. King John followed closely on the heels of an anonymous work with a similar title, The Troublesome Raigne of King John. The latter was published in 1591 by Thomas Orwin (the printer favored by Archbishop Whitgift) and performed by the Queen’s Men. Though both plays treat the same subject, their approach is opposite. Where the version performed at court glamorizes the virtues of authority and obe- dience, King John celebrates liberty and defiance. As Donna Hamilton observes, “Shakespeare’s revisions of The Troublesome Raigne, most of which occur without significant disturbance to the story-line, involve the systematic excising of one set of values and the replacing of those values with another set.”43 Where the authorized version emphasizes the divinely ordained right of monarchs and the prerogatives of officials, the Shakespearean focuses on the law and individual rights. In fact, as Hamilton points out, the two plays mir- ror the great parliamentary debate between James Morice and Richard Cosin in 1593. In the Commons, Morice compared King John’s struggle to preserve the throne from papists and to govern according to law with the effort to defeat Archbishop Whitgift’s suppression of religious dissent and to preserve hallowed rights of privacy and liberty of speech. Morice and other Puritan defenders repeatedly invoked the Magna Carta, which was intro- duced under John’s reign, as the foundation for English liberty and the cor- nerstone of its constitutional monarchy. The Troublesome Raigne reflects Whitgift’s and Elizabeth’s view that the Shakespeare’s Ghost 143

Church, the Crown, and the lords formed the three pillars of the realm. In contrast, as Hamilton shows, “Shakespeare also dropped the reference in The Troublesome Raigne to the idea that the clergy comprise one of the three estates, an idea that the bishops were anxious to defend and that those inter- ested in mixed government, including the presbyterians, were determined to undermine.”44 She shows that the Shakespearean works broadly adopted Martin Marprelate’s revised model of government in which the three estates were the king, lords, and Commons and that King John’s language echoes the sentiments of Marprelate and John Penry, the Separatist divine who was executed the day before Marlowe’s fateful encounter in Deptford. A close reading, Hamilton concludes, makes it difficult to accept the Shakespearean version as an apology for Tudor rule, as it is often viewed by critics. Through subtle omissions of material related to obedience and repression and the addition of new scenes, he managed “to ventriloquise the arguments used in defence of the religious nonconformists, including the argument that in some cases authority figures themselves are to blame.”45 In the end, the historical King John, one of England’s most despised monarchs, was forced to give in and sign the Magna Carta. King John’s final portrait of the king’s reign shifts the focus away from royal prerogatives to the inherent ability of the common people to govern themselves justly with- out the undue interference of rulers and ecclesiastics—a sentiment best expressed up until now in the poems and plays of Marlowe and, as we shall see in the next section, significantly developed in Hamlet.

Base Contagious Clouds

Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. —1 Henry IV (1.2.197–203)

Shakespeare’s subconscious mind was drenched in Marlowe, and from first to last threw up a rain-bow spray. —A. L. Rowse, Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Works 144 Hamlet

ext to Hamlet, Falstaff is the best known and most beloved character in Shakespeare’s plays. Historically, the jocular knight errant in the Henry IV plays and the Merry Wives of Windsor is based on the life of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, an early Protestant martyr accused of heresy who died at the stake in the early fif- teenth century. In Elizabethan England, Oldcastle was well known through Holinshed’s Chronicles, Stowe’s Annales, and The Famous Victories of Henry V, an anonymous play that many critics attribute to Christopher Marlowe. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments includes a wood- cut depicting Oldcastle enduring his “cruell Martyrdom,” bound to a pyre of faggots and raising his voice to heaven amidst the curling flames. Early performances of 1 Henry IV used Oldcastle’s name in the script. But it was soon changed to Falstaff, a name echoing a Lollard insurrection that Oldcastle led after breaking out of the Tower of London. Originally a term of derision like “Puritan,” the appellation “Lollard” was given to fol- lowers of John Wycliffe, who first translated the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century. Although suppressed, the Lollards elicited wide- spread sympathy among the lower classes. By Elizabethan times, they had come to be seen as forerunners of the Protestant Reformation. Best known for his forays at the alehouse, his wenching, and other world- ly pursuits, Falstaff is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare’s most original creations, but his personality derives from another historical figure. In her book Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, Kristen Poole, an English professor at the University of Delaware, makes a convincing case that Falstaff is largely based on Martin Marprelate. In the essay “The Puritan in the Alehouse: Falstaff and the Drama of Martin Marprelate,” Poole con- tends that the Henriad (as the three parts of Henry IV and Henry V are known) continues the irreverent attack on the Church of England that Martin launched six or seven years earlier. “Dramatizing the historical per- sona of Oldcastle, a renowned reformist leader, Shakespeare followed the pattern that the anti-Martinists had established for representing religious dissent. In the process, Falstaff assumes the characteristics of Martin Marprelate himself, reproducing Martin’s irreverence for established author- ity and bringing the dynamics of religious controversy into a burgeoning sphere of public print culture.”46 In a lively discussion of the Marprelate affair, Poole shows that Arch- bishop Whitgift’s attempt to silence the scathing satirist and sponsor anti- Martin performances on stage only fueled the mayhem and spirit of disobe- dience to authority that Martin’s pamphlets sparked. In addition to keeping Martin’s spirit alive in Falstaff’s oversize personality, the Shakespearean play Shakespeare’s Ghost 145 mimics the dialogue of the Marprelate debate in selected passages. Poole shows that the humorous patter among the fat knight, young Prince Hal, Doll, Mistress Quickly, and Pistol frequently alludes to, echoes, or puns on the Martin/anti-Martin controversy. For example, the name of the humor- ous character Pistol puns on “The Epistle,” the first of the Marprelate tracts. In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff quotes scripture twenty-six times, and his idiom recreates that of Puritans of the Elizabethan era. “Within the Henriad, Fal- staff assumes a voice and role similar to that of Martin Marprelate, becom- ing a swelling carnival force that threatens to consume Hal’s ‘princely privi- lege,’” Poole concludes. “The ever ‘glutted, gorg’d, and full’ Falstaff virtu- ally embodies the removal of social, hierarchal boundaries: Falstaff becomes the community which can, through jest, ingest its leaders. His rotund, expansive figure, emblematic of carnivalesque festivity, potentially signifies absorption and loss of social distinction. Like Martin, Falstaff thus chal- lenges the very hierarchies that constitute the structure of church and state.”47 On the surface, the Shakespearean treatment appears to be making fun of dissenters, but Falstaff’s endearing buffoonery and self-deprecation, like Martin’s, ultimately win the audience’s allegiance and heart.48 Although Poole does not address the authorship controversy, the Marprelate affair broadly set in motion the events culminating in the final suppression of reli- gious dissent; the executions of the Separatists Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry; and the arrest of dramatist Christopher Marlowe. Following Kit’s “death,” The Comedy of Errors, King John, and the Henry IV cycle continue the dialogue about issues of Church and State that have been banned from the pulpit, Parliament, and the stage. Their veiled explo- ration of religious taboos illustrates the continuity among Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus and the early Shakespearean plays, a theme that gives way to the pas- sion and exuberance of the Italian comedies but which returns, like a venge- ful ghost, in Hamlet and the later tragedies. 146 Hamlet

4 My Outcast State

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate —Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

itus Andronicus, the first Shakespearean tragedy, is derived from the classical tale of Philomel, a woman who is raped and has her tongue cut out and hands chopped off so she cannot identify her attackers. Rendered dumb, Lavinia, the ravished heroine in the Shakespearean play, nevertheless manages to implicate her assailants by pointing to the story of Philomel in a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and writing their names in the sand with a staff. As critics point out, Queen Tamora, the villainess, bears a striking resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, while I would add that Aaron, her dark Moorish lover, echoes John Whitgift, whom she termed her “little black husband.” Note Aaron was the name of the high priest in Israel, an office that Martin Marprelate and other religious reformers accused the archbish- op of Canterbury of aspiring to. Attacked by his enemies and rendered dumb like Philomel (who is mentioned in Amintae Gandia and in Edward III), Kit can only speak obliquely through clever allusions and the fabric of his art. Yet like Titus and his ravished daughter, he fashions “a tongue to speak” truth to power (3.1.145). From now on, puns, jests, and other sub- tle word play and theatrical devices will be the means he will use to maintain his identity, keep his spirit high, and work to create a more just, tolerant world. Through verbal alchemy, Marlowe after “dying” in Deptford and becoming a literary ghost will wield his literary rapier, or shake his sword or spear, under the guise of Will Shakespeare, whose name coincidentally puns on this image. Self-imposed banishment from the kingdom of arts and let- ters constitutes a tragic fall. But like Aeneas’s exile in the Aeneid (one of his favorite subjects and a later theme in Hamlet), it promises the start of a new life and the founding of a new republic in which libertas—the ancient Latin ideal of personal freedom—and the will of the governed prevail. Shakespeare’s Ghost 147 Beyond the Alps

Albeit the world think Machevill is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps; And now the Guise is dead, is come from France To view this land and frolic with his friends. To some perhaps my name is odious, But such as love me, guard me from their tongues; And let them know that I am Machevill, And weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words. Admired I am of those that hate me most: Though some speak openly against my books, Yet will they read me, and thereby attain To Peter’s chair; and when they cast me off, Are poisoned by my climbing followers. I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance. Birds of the air will tell of murders past? I am ashamed to hear such fooleries: ...... But whither am I bound? I come not, I, To read a lecture here in Britain, But to present the tragedy of a Jew —The Jew of Malta (Prologue 1–30)

n addition to many references to exile and banishment in the Shakespearean sonnets and plays, one of the strongest indications of Marlowe’s survival is in the prologue to The Jew of Malta. Though originally com- posed in the early 1590s, the play was not published until 1633, when the prologue may have been added or revised. (The play was registered at the Stationers’ Company in 1594, but if it was printed, no copies survived.) Machevill refers to Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, the Renaissance handbook on state- craft, and was one of the nicknames by which Marlowe was known. The Guise refers to the Duke of Guise, the mastermind of the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, chief persecutor of Protestants in France, but generically to all bigots and torturers such as Archbishop Whitgift, Topcliffe, and their acolytes. In the prologue, Marlowe confirms that his troubles stemmed from 148 Hamlet heresy (“I count religion but a childish toy”), but muses that rumors of his death (“birds of the air will tell of murders past”) are false. Coincidentally, Archbishop Whitgift, the Guise in the passage, once used a similar phrase in his famous sermon to the queen: “Thou shalt not speak evil of the prince of thy people; no, not in thy secret chamber (that is, in thy heart): for the birds of the air will bewray thee.”49 According to this reading, the poet fled beyond the Alps to Italy, where he lived and wrote in exile for several years, before returning—like the wan- dering Jew he had become—incognito to England. The early Shakespearean comedies, including The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice, take place in Italy, and many readers have been puzzled at how the London actor could have accumulated such an intimate knowledge of the Italian peninsula and its customs.50 Altogether, thirteen of the Shakespearean plays—more than one in three—are set in Italy or ancient Rome, and The Tempest takes place following a voyage from Naples. Recent scholarship suggests that the author need not necessarily have traveled to Italy. Richard Field’s publications alone provided much of the basic source material for the plays. But the local coloring, the perfect dialect, and other nuances have led other critics to conclude William of Stratford must have traveled there. Instead, according to our perspective, Marlowe did. It is likely that, after Marlowe completed his urgent task in summer 1593, the Cecils advised him to go to Italy or some other distant location until matters cooled off. From Scotland, the Netherlands, France, or some other first stop, Marlowe evidently made his way across the Alps to Italy, the heart of Renaissance science, art, and religion. As an intelligencer or couri- er, Marlowe was not necessarily involved in military espionage or the unsa- vory activities we associate with clandestine operatives today. “[S]o-called ‘spies,’” as historian P. M. Handover, an authority on the Cecils’ continen- tal intelligence network, reminds us, were “the equivalent of modern news- paper correspondents and consular reports.”51 Aside from pertinent military and diplomatic information and news regarding royal births, deaths, and weddings, William and Robert Cecil were primarily interested in economic and mercantile data. Marlowe’s familial association with the Muscovy Company would have prepared him for this task as well as possibly given him a commercial cover. Contrary to the critical view that Kit wrote exclusively tragedies and his- tories, Tamburlaine originally had comic scenes that have not survived, and Dr. Faustus’s use of clowns and puckish humor is the prototype for the Shakespearean plays. From his temporary place of exile, Marlowe could have sent manuscripts of his comedies back to England via diplomatic courier, vis- iting countrymen, or Italians bound for London. A Midsummer Night’s Shakespeare’s Ghost 149

Dream may have followed this route. According to some critics, it was first performed on January 26, 1595, for the wedding of Elizabeth Vere, Burghley’s granddaughter, and William Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, who had succeeded his late brother, Lord Strange, Marlowe’s patron. Previously, Elizabeth had been engaged to Southampton, but he refused to tie the knot (as some of the Shakespearean sonnets may allude to). The comedies from this period include The Taming of the Shrew, a por- trayal of the war between the sexes that opens with a staged performance relating to the identity of Christopher Sly; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a romance about courtship set in the city of the same name; and Love’s Labor’s Lost, a satirical play set in Navarre about young courtiers who forsake their vow to shun women following the arrival of a visiting princess and her ret- inue. Romeo and Juliet, the exception to this light-hearted pattern, recounts the tragic love between two young people caught in the midst of a family feud. In its imagery and staging, especially the famous balcony scene, the play draws heavily on The Jew of Malta. In Marlowe’s earlier work, Abigail is “scarce fourteen years of age” (1.2.378), the same as Juliet. When she appears on the upper balcony of the stage, her father Barabas cries out:

But stay, what star shines yonder in the east? The loadstar of my life, if Abigail. (2.1.41–42)

“When Shakespeare copies this picture, he brightens it, in accordance with the more youthful and ardent mood of Romeo,” Harry Levin, the great Shakespearean critic at Harvard, explains:52

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. (2.2.2–3)

While there are well documented Italian sources for the play, Marlowe may have based Juliet’s character partially on Arbella Stuart, the young English heiress he may have have tutored in London and fallen in love with. Marlowe was evidently dismissed from his post because of a clash with Bess of Hardwick, Arbella’s strong-willed grandmother, or for reasons of state, Burghley assigned him elsewhere. The infatuation or attachment may have been strong and persisted over the years. During the Stuart era, as plots still swirled around her, Arbella was imprisoned after attempting to elope. Echoing Romeo and Juliet’s most famous line in her own verse, Arbella lamented about her parted lover: “My friend! my friend! where art thou?”53 150 Hamlet

(Curiously, in the same verse, she also mentions “Round hall and hamlet,” a possible echo of Hamlet playing at the Globe. Like her mentor and admired dramatist, she writes in iambic pentameter.) Like Abelard and Heloise, the legendary medieval French lovers, Arbella’s separation from her tutor in the arts of love and poetry may have foreshadowed the madness and tragic death that lay ahead. Another cloud from the past that could have drifted onto Marlowe’s serene Mediterranean horizon was the Lopez affair. Dr. Lopez, the physician to Queen Elizabeth, was executed for treason in June 1594 for his supposed part in a conspiracy to kill the monarch. According to most historians, Lopez, a leader of the Jewish and Marrano (Christian convert) community in England, was innocent of the charges brought against him. Through a mixture of naivete and ambition, he became embroiled with Spanish spies and double-agents, who had been compromised, if not originally commis- sioned, by the English secret service. In brief, Lopez fell victim to the con- tinuing power struggle between the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil. In the end, both factions ended up sacrificing the poor doctor, for Machiavellian reasons of policy, though Elizabeth herself wanted to spare his life. As the drama unfolded at court and became the talk of the town, Henslowe revived The Jew of Malta on stage at the Rose theatre. It quickly became the hit of the season, fanning popular sentiment against Dr. Lopez because of its stereotypical representations of Jews. As many critics have observed, Marlowe’s play is a subtle satire on anti-Semitism, not an attack on Judaism. But this was “caviary to the general” (2.2.401) as Prince Hamlet lamented on the fickleness of the groundlings. Marlowe actually refers respectfully to Lopez and to the Jewish community in England in Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta.54 From a historical perspective, it was the last act in the spectacle that had consumed England for a year and a half, from Archbishop Whitgift’s campaign in Parliament to suppress nonconformity to the Marlowe affair and an abortive effort to charge Ralegh with heresy. When news of the Jewish doctor’s fate reached him in exile, the poet was undoubtedly sad and disillusioned. Not only had Lopez been sacrificed on the altar of English bigotry and intolerance, but the Cecils and Essex, Marlowe’s erstwhile supporters, had declined to save the poor man, or heed the pleas for mercy by his wife and nine children. To add insult to injury, Marlowe’s own play had been used as propaganda to fan the flames of reli- gious hatred. Against this backdrop, a tragic replay of the John Penry frame up and execution, Marlowe appears to have refashioned a traditional Italian tale into a new play with a Jewish motif, The Merchant of Venice. Though it has also been widely criticized for its usurious depiction of Shylock, Merchant presents an essentially humanistic view of Jews in a country from Shakespeare’s Ghost 151 which the children of Israel had been expelled in 1290. Marlowe may also have written it in partial tribute to his martyred former commoner at Cambridge, Francis Kett, who was burned at the stake in 1589, among other things, for voicing the opinion that the Jews had a historical right to return to their homeland. Faustus was later registered at the Stationers’ Company on January 7, 1604, evidently in honor of the anniversary of Kett’s execution. Finally, during Marlowe’s Italian sojourn, one wonders whether he tried to see Giordano Bruno, the astronomer, who was languishing in a Vatican jail as a heretic. Like the great Polish scientist Copernicus, the former Domi- nican monk’s view that the universe is infinite and that we live in a multi- plicity of worlds countered prevailing Church doctrines that the earth was the center of God’s creation. He also wrote extensively on the occult and magic, which would have strongly appealed to the author of Dr. Faustus. Bruno had visited England from 1583 to 1585 and met with Northumber- land, Ralegh, Harriot, and other luminaries of the School of Night. Marlowe may have met Bruno during his visit to Canterbury or later in Paris on one of his diplomatic missions. Coincidentally, Richard Field was Bruno’s English publisher. There is also speculation that Bruno was a mole for Francis Walsingham in Paris. Theologically, Bruno held that God is “a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”55 As Dorothy Wraight has pointed out, Marlowe’s conception of divinity in Tamburlaine, Part II comes close to this concept: “He that sits on high and never sleeps / Nor in one place is circumscriptible” (2.2.49–50).56 Given Bruno’s prominence in Dr. Faustus, I like to imagine that Marlowe, like his namesake St. Christopher, tried to spirit him to safety, as he does in the revised edition of the play. Alas, unlike Faustus, Marlowe did not have a magic girdle of invisibility to whisk away the free-thinking stargazer, and Bruno died at the stake in 1600. All Kit could accomplish was to include him in a new scene in the revised version of Dr. Faustus. Published in the 1616 edition, it elevates Bruno to the status of “rival pope,” a prophetic insight into the widening chasm between science and religion that would divide Western civilization even more than the split between Catholicism and Protestantism. Marlowe’s other major tribute to Bruno and his doctrine of an infinity of worlds, as we shall see, occurs in Hamlet, where the ghost of Copernicus, the Polish astronomer—as much as that of the elder Danish monarch—haunts the stage. 152 Hamlet

Ambitious Naturally

All women are ambitious naturally —Marlowe, Hero and Leander (428)

MARINA: Proclaim that I can sing, weave, sew, and dance, With other virtues, which I’ll keep from boast, And will undertake all these to teach. I doubt not but this populous city will Yield many scholars. —Pericles (4.6.183–87)

f a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius,” writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of Her Own, “I venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman who made the ballads and the folk songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of a midwinter’s night.”57 In the seventy-five years since Virginia Woolf introduced Judith, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, there have been seismic shifts in Elizabethan scholarship that strengthen a feminist reading of the Shakespearean canon. Multicultural studies have recently added new insights and avenues of inquiry in respect to sexual identity, gender, and cross-dressing, which appears in many of the plays. Feminist literary criticism has questioned whether Shakespeare, the provincial Stratford resident who described no books in his will and famous- ly left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne Hathaway, could have composed the sublime plays celebrating female learning. Neither Susanna nor Judith Shakespeare, the actor’s daughters, could read. Susanna signed her marriage certificate with an X. Nor have any personal books or correspondence besides business documents been located. “How could you have girls mature in your household while you were writing Romeo and Juliet and Portia’s lines and them not to learn these parts, not to learn to read and write and take the lines of Juliet and Portia and these wonderful women?” asks John Baker in the PBS documentary Much Ado About Something. “Miranda is educated at her father’s elbow.”58 In Shakespeare’s defense, it might be countered that relatively few women Shakespeare’s Ghost 153 in that era, especially in small towns and villages like Stratford, were literate. Though female poets such as Mary Sidney, Arbella Stuart, and Queen Elizabeth were of the nobility, primary schools offered education to girls as well as boys, and there were even female schoolteachers. According to Baker, the only surviving copy of the first printing of Venus and Adonis was owned by Frances Wolfreston.58 A middle-class woman who lived from 1607 to 1676, she would have been a little girl when Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, Cymbeline, and other late Shakespearean plays were composed. Her library of plays, poetry, and other works was auctioned in London in the nineteenth century. In Shakespeare’s Division of Experience, Marilyn French observes, “More than any other poet, Shakespeare breathed life into his female characters and gave body to the principle they are supposed to represent.”59 Contrasting masculine and feminine genres, she contends that tragedy, with its emphasis on hierarchy, power, and rationality, is primarily male in its orientation, while comedy, with its focus on communality, language, and intuition, is female. “Shakespeare was a powerful supporter of certain ‘feminine’ values,” she concludes. “. . . He never settled for the received idea even in the area [sex] where it most deeply implanted itself . . . He never stopped searching for a way to reintegrate human experience.”60 Many of the leading Shakespearean heroines, including Juliet, Portia, Beatrice, and Rosalind, appear in the Italianate plays, evidently composed in exile. The southern Mediterranean climate and environment would have exerted an overall moderating influence on the poet. The milder weather, calmer waters, and lighter diet in Tuscany, Venice, and Padua may have helped to soothe, at least temporarily, Marlowe’s regrets over losing his name and celebrity and contributed to a lighter, more expansive tone to his writing. Compared to the English, Italians were more passionate, verbal, and progressive in matters relating to the sexes, and these qualities come through in the comedies and romances of this period. Living in Catholic Italy may also have softened his strident view of Catholics. One of the main literary arguments against Marlowe as author of the Shakespearean works is that the plays of which his authorship is certain—all tragedies—are overwhelmingly masculine and his female characters under- developed. In fact, so this argument goes, Zenocrate, Imogene, Abigail, Dido, and the other women in his plays are portrayed as little more than sex objects who know or are kept in their “place.” In Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, Simon Shepherd challenges this view, showing that beneath a veneer of conformity and obedience, Marlowe’s approach to sex- uality, including his depiction of both men and women, was as subversive as his theological and political views. In Tamburlaine, for example, “Far from 154 Hamlet collapsing into ‘female’ hysteria, Zenocrate takes on the role of Presenter, a role that was traditionally the male narrative voice of truth against the mime- sis of emotion.”61 Similarly, in Dido Queen of Carthage, Shepherd explains, the queen takes the “‘male’ part of wooer, the powerful woman dressing a man as she wants to see him, choosing to transfer her tokens of allegiance from one man to another.” In the original Aeneid, Virgil “has her break down with emotion, verbally defeated,” while in Marlowe’s play “it is Dido who has the fullness of speech, the male is silent.”62 Noting similar con- structions in The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II, he con- cludes, “Marlowe’s texts, then, could be said to explore the construction of gender difference in representation and to problematise it. Expectations about ‘feminine’ speech and emotionalism are questioned, assumed values rejected. At moments the privileged male gaze, which oversees the differen- tiation of gender, has its power and pleasure unsettled.”63 In a related issue, gay and lesbian critics have contributed to the dis- course on sex and gender, pointing out that Marlowe’s rumored homosex- uality or bisexuality could help explain the sexual ambivalence of plays pub- lished under Shakespeare’s name. “If Marlowe did escape [and go on to write as Shakespeare],” contends Carolyn Gage, a lesbian playwright, “it would explain . . . the playful gender-bending that appears in so many of the plays, especially the comedies. It would explain the sonnets about separa- tion, and if Marlowe was indeed gay, it would explain the sonnets about gay love.”64 In an era when homosexuality was a capital offense, his portrait of the love between Edward II and Gaveston clearly suggests that it was more than platonic. Some critics even go so far as to see a veiled allusion to this bond with King James of Scotland and his male favorite. Similarly, Mar- lowe’s depictions of Jove and Ganymede and other same-sex liaisons in poems and plays show a clear attempt to push the boundaries of social dis- course on sexual preferences and practices. As a whole, however, gay critics are as divided about Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s sexuality as straight ones. Because of a possible allusion to the Essex rebellion (see below), some critics question whether Hamlet was ever performed on the London stage during the Elizabethan or Stuart eras. For one of the earliest English per- formances of the play, I like to imagine that it took place at Ladies’ Hall, a private academy for young noblewomen in Deptford. The play-within-the- play in Hamlet features a traveling actress, evidently from Italy, performing the role of the Player Queen, a daring innovation in an era when all female parts were customarily performed by men or boys on stage. The ladies of the school in Deptford performed Cupid’s Banishment, a masque for Queen Anne in 1617. In their address, the young women acknowledged the sover- eign’s “gracious favour” and begged her indulgence: Shakespeare’s Ghost 155

Pardon, yon glorious company, you stars of women! And let the silent rhetorick of that gracious look That works a league betwixt the state of heart Vouchsafe to shine upon our childish sports. We profess no stage, no Helicon— Our muse is homespun, our action is our own. Thou, bright goddess, with thy sweet smile grace all Our Nymphs, Occasion, and our Ladies’ hall.65

There is something both poignant and sublime about this group of young women composing and putting on their own productions in sight of the royal palace in Greenwich and the reputed burial plot of England’s greatest dramatist in St. Nicholas’s churchyard.

5 Bonfires for My Overthrow

Now will the Christian miscreants be glad, Ringing with joy their superstitious bells And making bonfires for my overthrow. —Tamburlaine (3.3.326–28)

It is a fault, I confess, to suffer lewd ballads and books touching man- ners. But it were a greater fault to suffer books and libels, disturbing the peace of the church, and defacing true religion. —John Whitgift, The Defense of the Answer to the Admonition

ith the defeat of the Puritans, the execution of the Separatist leaders, and the drawing and quartering of Catholic priests, Archbishop Whitgift had finally imposed religious obedience and uniformity through- out England in 1593. Marlowe had escaped the stake, but not the reckoning of the almighty. As far as the pri- mate was concerned, the poet’s worm-eaten corpse was now lying in an unmarked grave and his soul was enduring the ceaseless tor- ments of hell. The years between 1594 and 1597 brought famine, disease, and starva- 156 Hamlet tion throughout England as heavy rains fell and the harvests failed. During this period following his “death,” Marlowe’s presence was not entirely gone from the English stage and drawing room. Dr. Faustus was performed twen- ty-four times at the Rose from 1594 to 1597, and several early, unautho- rized editions of his translation of Ovid’s Elegies may have circulated. But in the absence of the incendiary playmaker, the theater largely quieted down for several years. The new man of the hour on the London stage, Shake- speare had not openly defied authority. The queen enjoyed the command- ing majesty and lyrical beauty of his verse and frequently invited his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to play at court. With the death of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon in 1596, patronage of the company had passed to his son, George. As knight marshall overseeing the verge, the twelve-mile judi- cial radius of the queen’s person, young Carey had an impressive record of military service to the Crown, but he was rumored to be a member of the School of Night. From the archbishop’s point of view, he would need to be watched, especially after the queen named him lord chamberlain two years later. With each advancing year, the question of who would succeed Elizabeth grew more urgent, with baseless rumors and rumblings of disquiet spread- ing through court and Commons. The archbishop’s old adversary, Burghley, had finally gone to his eternal reward, but his hunchback son, Robert, con- tinued as principal secretary and, like his father, had recently been named as the master of the Court of Wards, which put him in a position to influence domestic affairs. The Earl of Essex continued to be his main rival, vying for the queen’s allegiance. Why Elizabeth always forgave the tantrums and dis- obedience of her latest favorite was an unfathomable mystery. But then, he commanded the support of Southampton and other powerful nobles. As the new century approached, the London poets and scribblers, the lightning rods of public dissatisfaction, had fallen out with one another. The war of words pitted Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, two of the Univer- sity Wits whom the archbishop had employed in the campaign against Mar- prelate, as antagonists. Harvey had referred to Marlowe in some of his ear- lier works, and Nashe’s name had appeared as the junior co-author or edi- tor of Kit’s Dido Queen of Carthage. To the prelate’s mortification, the object of their feud was Andrew Perne, the late vice-chancellor at Cam- bridge University and mentor of the archbishop himself. In 1589, Perne died suddenly over dinner at Lambeth Palace in London “without a moment for repentance,” as Elizabethan historian Patrick Collinson notes (and, we might add, like Elder Hamlet!).66 Indeed, there was much to repent for. Not only had he cravenly capitulated during Queen Mary’s reign and embraced Catholicism to save his own skin and high position, but at the Shakespeare’s Ghost 157 request of Marian bishops he dug up the body of two Strasbourg Protestant divines and had them publicly burned at the stake. Later, under Elizabeth, Perne was restored as vice-chancellor and presided yet a third time over the reformers’ ashes, restoring them to favor in a memorial service. The end result of the Harvey-Nashe clash was that Perne’s bones (and, indirectly, skeletons in Whitgift’s closet) were dug up and raked over the printed coals. In a separate incident, Nashe and Ben Jonson were arrested on suspicion of writing Isle of Dogs and imprisoned in the Marshalsea for several months along with two actors in 1597. No copy of the anonymous play has survived, but it is believed to have attacked Lord Cobham, the lord chamberlain, who had received preferment over George Carey, the patron of the Shakespear- ean acting troupe, and soon they found themselves in the custody of Richard Topcliffe, the rackmaster. The Privy Council took the matter so seriously that they closed all the theaters down for several months. Nashe later was forced into hiding and lived as a fugitive from summer 1597 until January 1599. The Isle of Dogs was the notorious “no man’s land” in the Thames between the queen’s palace at Greenwich and Deptford. It is not known whether the play alluded to Marlowe’s fate. In a crackdown on unauthorized performances, common players or min- strels other than those “belonging to any Baron of this Realme, or any other honorable Personage of greater Degree” were deemed “Rogues Vagabondes and Sturdy Beggers” and ordered “stripped naked from the middle upwardes and shall be openly whipped until his or her body be bloudye” and sent from parish to parish to confess their disobedience. Dangerous actors were subject to banishment and, if they returned without lawful license or warrant, “Death as in case of Felony.”67 Meanwhile, the renewed threat of a Spanish invasion turned London into an armed camp, as thousands of volunteers flocked to London and sur- rounding areas to drill and take defensive measures. In this turbulent atmos- phere, the archbishop put his heel down on the printed word as well as the stage. On June 1, 1599, with Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, Whitgift issued a series of “commandments,” confiscating all “unseemly satires and epigrams.” Over the years, Whitgift had often complained that “many lewd light books and ballads fly abroad.”68 In a large bonfire in the Stationers’ Court y a r d three days later, the prelates publicly burn e d Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies, as many of Nashe’s and Harvey’s writings as could be located, and selected writings of Hall, Marston, Middleton, and Davies. Altogether, thousands of books and pamphlets were consigned to the flames.69 The queen finally named George Carey, Nashe’s patron, lord chamber- lain when Cobham died suddenly, but Carey could no longer protect the 158 Hamlet satirist from the wrath of the archbishop. In the aftermath of this repression, as in Thomas Kyd’s case, Nashe lost his patronage and within two years was dead at age thirty-three. Under Queen Mary, the bonfires of Smithfield, where legions of Protestants were martyred, became a byword for her bloody reign. Under Elizabeth’s and Whitgift’s rule, the bonfires of love poetry and other literature created an indelible stain.

No Reckoning Made

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

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head —Hamlet (1.5.82–83)

s You Like It, one of the most delightful of the Shakespearean comedies, is believed by historians to have debuted at the new Globe theatre in Southwark in the autumn of 1599, only a few months after Arch- bishop Whitgift ordered the burning of Marlowe’s ele- gies, Nashes’ satires, and other “wanton” material. Virtually all scholars agree that it includes a daring ref- erence to Marlowe’s “murder”:

When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reck- oning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical. (3.3.12–16)

The passage, spoken by Touchstone, the wise fool, refers to Marlowe’s “death” over the reckoning, or bill, in Deptford on May 30, 1593. The pas- sage invokes Marlowe’s celebrated line, “Infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37), in The Jew of Malta, which has a multiplicity of meanings, includ- ing Barabas’s vast wealth, the confines of the Elizabethan stage, and human- ity’s spiritual and mental constitution.70 The lines can be interpreted to mean 1) that being silenced as a poet deadens the soul and is a fate worse than death and/or 2) persecution and censorship wound the spirit more Shakespeare’s Ghost 159 truly than a knifing (real or faked) in Deptford. The word “wit” alludes to Whitgift and prefigures its appearance in the revelatory passage in Hamlet, where it is boldly coupled with “gifts.” In another scene in the play, Marlowe is addressed directly, and the sec- ond line of the couplet quotes another famous line in Hero and Leander: “Dead shepherd, now I find your [thy] saw of might, / “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” (AYLI 3.5.81–82, H&L 176). Later in As You Like It, Rosalind makes another allusion to the poem Marlowe was working on at the time of his reported demise:

Leander, he would have liv’d many a fair year though Hero had turn’d nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drown’d; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was—Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4.1.100–108)

In Marlowe’s poem, Hero and Leander meet during a riotous festival of Venus and Adonis during which poets “Compile sharp satires” (127). This reference in As You Like It may glance at the Harvey-Nash feud, as well as link Kit with the first published Shakespearean work, Venus and Adonis. “[M]idsummer night” further echoes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Shakespearean fairy tale romance that shares the comic tone of the mythic dalliances in Marlowe’s poem. By disputing the identity of the drowned man and characterizing the official history of the time as lies and calumnies, As You Like It may be calling into question the official version of Christopher Marlowe’s “death.” As we shall see in the next section, Hamlet appears to have similar allusions. In a fourth possible reference to Marlowe, Rosalind remarks, “The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause” (4.1.94–97). This echoes the Baines Note in which Marlowe is accused of flouting biblical orthodoxy by proclaiming “That the Indians and many Authors of Anti- quitei [have] assuredly written of above 16 thouwsande yeeres agone, wher Adam is proved to have lyved within 6 thowsande yeeres.”71 Finally, Touchstone provocatively compares himself in a pun to Ovid (the Roman poet Marlowe translated and whose elegies were burned in the streets of London), who was living in exile: “I am here with thee and thy goats as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths” (3.3.7–9). As You Like It was registered at the Stationers’ Company in 1600 and marked “to be staied,” suggesting that the poet or his publisher may have 160 Hamlet had second thoughts committing its daring allusions to Marlowe in print. Unlike several other plays stayed, or put on hold, at this time, it was never published in its own quarto. Eventually As You Like It appeared in the First Folio in 1623. The prudent thing, of course, would have been for Marlowe not to call attention to himself. But as in Hamlet, Kit could not resist dig- ging up the past and bantering about his survival. Aside from matters of political correctness, the question arises and remains unanswered, How did the author of As You Like It know about the coroner’s report mentioning “le recknynge”? According to the writ of cer - tiorari found by Leslie Hotson in the British archives, Queen Elizabeth per- sonally instructed that all matters pertaining to Marlowe’s death and inquest remain confidential. Hence, the coroner’s report was buried in deep bureau- cratic storage and lost for the next 325 years. The plot doesn’t just thicken, it ferments in Coroner Danby’s otherwise bland report, oozes out of Widow Bull’s upper room, and begins to fill the stage of the Rose, Globe, and other theaters and the streets of London illuminated by the bonfires of Marlowe’s and Nashe’s burning books. According to Chris Fitter, an English professor at Rutgers University, As You Like It further refers to Thomas Nashe’s plight following the burning of the books. In an article “The Slain Deer and Political Imperium,” Fitter contends that Jacques’s elegy on the dying deer alludes “to the recent vio- lence of the authorities against satire and satirists, and even perhaps evokes the fate of Thomas Nashe.”72 Nearly one third of medieval and Renaissance England consisted of forestland reserved for the hunting of the nobility. The widespread sympathy elicited by Robin Hood’s exploits in slaying the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest grew out of deep popular resentment to what Fitter calls “a predatory social class” that had made outlaws of the common people. In 1599, the year the play appeared, the Crown was prosecuting vio- lators in the court of Star Chamber for being “very dissolute, riotous and unruly persons, common nightwalkers and stealers of [the Queen’s] deer out of the forests, chases and parks.”73 The wounded deer in As You Like It, Fitter suggests, is a lament for Thomas Nashe, who “Left and abandoned of his velvet [friends]” (2.1.50), received a mortal wound as a “poor and bro- ken bankrupt” (57), and “was in fact dead within two years of Whitgift’s commandment.”74 “[I]dentification of the ‘poor sequester’d’” deer with a now outcast Thomas Nashe,” Fitter concludes, “. . . would seem to fit well with what I read as an extended passage of veiled protest by [Shakespeare’s] Company against the destructive courtly censorship of the book-burning that had taken place so recently and publicly on the streets of London.”75 A similar reference to a wounded deer in Hamlet, revised about this time, echoes this passage, as we shall see in “Hamlet’s Ghost.” Shakespeare’s Ghost 161

The reference to Marlowe’s “reckoning” in As You Like It is just one of a cluster of reckonings that appears at this time. Exhibit B is Edward Blount’s tribute to Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron, which appeared in the form of a dedication to the poet’s Hero and Leander. As we saw, Marlowe began writing the poem in early 1593 while staying at Walsing- ham’s estate in Scadbury and was interrupted by the summons from the Privy Council. Now five years later, Blount, a publisher and friend of both the poet and his patron, pens a dedication in the first edition of the work in 1598. It is worth quoting in full (emphasis mine):

To the Right Worshipful SIR THOMAS WALSINGHAM, KNIGHT Sir, we think not ourselves discharged of the duty we owe to our friend when we have brought the breathless body to the earth; for, albeit the eye there taketh his ever-farewell of that beloved object, yet the impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an after-life in our memory, there putteth us in mind of farther obsequies due unto the deceased; and namely the per- formance of whatsoever we may judge shall make to his living credit and to the effecting of his determinations prevented by the stroke of death. By these meditations (as by an intellectual will) I suppose myself executor to the unhappily deceased author of this poem; upon whom knowing that in his life- time you bestowed many kind favours, entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth which you found in him with good countenance and liberal affection, I cannot but see so far into the will of him dead, that whatsoever issue of his brain should chance to come abroad, that the first breath it should take might be the gentle air of your liking; for since his self had been accustomed thereunto, it would prove more agreeable and thriving to his right children than any other foster countenance whatsoever. At this time seeing that this unfinished tragedy happens under my hands to be imprinted, of a double duty, the one to yourself, the other to the deceased, offering my utmost self now and ever to be ready at your worship’s disposing. EDWARD BLOUNT76

Phrases such as “the performance of whatsoever we may judge shall make to his living credit” and “entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth” imply that the Deptford episode was staged and that Walsingham directed or played a role in it. Note the possible allusion to Kit’s eye injury, part of the official cover story and the immediate cause of death in the coroner’s report. Indeed, the whole passage has a tongue-in-cheek quality about Marlowe’s “after-life.” The contrast between the poet’s “right children” and offspring of “foster countenance” appears to refer to writings published under Marlowe’s own name and to those published under Shakespeare’s. There may be several other possible uses of the word in connection with Marlowe (see Appendix A) that form a cluster of reckonings. Using the word “reckoning” in connection with Marlowe’s death appears to have been 162 Hamlet a code word among the Elizabethan literati that, like the password at Elsinore, gained you admittance to the castle of understanding, as the new century approached and Elizabeth’s reign drew to a close.77 Since the coro- ner’s report was under lock and seal, it would appear that someone with inside information, probably Robert Cecil, leaked its findings to the poet. As You Like It, Julius Caesar (about the murder of a sitting monarch by his own most trusted associates), and Hamlet mirror the anxiety and dis- content that spread through English society in the twilight of Elizabeth’s reign. As James Shapiro, a professor of literature at Columbia University, notes in Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, the Shakespearean plays are obsessed with Marlowe in the late 1590s following completion of the early histories and the Italian comedies: “Shakespeare seems to be very much aware of what Marlowe is up to and chooses to chart a parallel course, virtually stalking his rival.”78 Several other plays from this period, including Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, borrow themes, characters, and lines from Marlowe’s early works. The Passionate Shepherd is repeatedly echoed, and material from Tambur- laine, The Jew of Malta, and Dr. Faustus finds its way into these works. The expropriation, or recreation, of Marlowe’s writings, Shapiro explains, culmi- nates in Hamlet. Perhaps the most provocative use of “reckoning” or its variants is in Shakespeare's Sonnet 136, in which the poet openly proclaims that he is “Will”:

If thy soul check thee that I come so near, Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will, And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there; Thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfill. Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love, Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one. In things of great receipt with ease we prove Among a number one is reckon’d none: Then in the number let me pass untold, Thou in thy store’s account I one must be, For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing me, a something sweet to thee. Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will. (1-14)

Since “will” was an Elizabethan word for lust, critics make much of the poem’s erotic word play. However, it would also seem to refer to deeper concerns related to the poet’s name, identity, and “untold” passing. Shakespeare’s Ghost 163

Pistol Him

Pistol him, pistol him! —Twelfth Night (2.5.37)

ollowing the death of James Morice, the voice of con- science in Parliament, a cowed House of Commons met only once between 1597 and the accession of King James in 1603. Though largely suppressed, the cam- paign for religious liberty reemerged following the trial of John Darrell, a Puritan divine, who appeared before the ecclesiastical High Commission in 1598. He was charged with performing exorcisms, a practice observed by Catholicism but prohibited by the Church of England. After his conviction, Darrell defend- ed himself in manuscripts smuggled out of the Tower and printed illegally in the Netherlands, provoking another round in the conformity and censor- ship crises that had lain dormant since the Marprelate tracts a decade earlier and the parliamentary debate of 1593. Fearful of being caught up in the dragnet, poets and dramatists rushed into print to demonstrate their loyalty to the Church. Anthony Munday wrote several plays extolling religious obedience. Even John Dee, the ven- erable magus whose own magical practices made Darrell’s exorcisms look like child’s play, felt obliged to write A letter, containing a most briefe dis - course apologeticall . . . for the lawfull, and christian course, of the philsophicall studies and exercises. Dee’s transparent missive, dedicated to Whitgift, pro- claimed his devotion to Elizabeth and steadfastly denied any connection with witchcraft. Amid this controversy, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night debuted about 1601 or 1602. Like The Comedy of Errors, it is a light-hearted comedy, whose only apparent connection with religion is its ridicule of Malvolio, who assumes the stock portrait of a zealous Puritan. Though widely regarded as a harm- less spoof, Twelfth Night is every bit as subversive as its predecessor. Revolving around a household headed by Olivia, a lady “whose reclusivity and passivity are among her chief characteristics,” as Donna Hamilton shows in Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England, the play explores the issues surrounding the Darrell controversy. “During the late 1590s, Whitgift and Bancroft’s strategy for containing opposition in the church was the twofold strategy of extending toleration to all moderate puritans,” she explains, “while at the same time pursuing with 164 Hamlet particular vengeance only religious extremists, the latter of whom they could then isolate rhetorically for the purpose of representing all nonconformity as dangerous fanaticism.”79 In the play, Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s strident attacks on Malvolio, including “Pistol him, pistol him,” resurrect the “epis- tle” idiom associated with Martin Marprelate. Toby charges Marvolio with being possessed by the devil and in need of exorcism, which Hamilton con- siders a link to John Darrell’s case. “The link is best made not by way of sim- ilarities, however, but by way of difference, for Darrell was the exorcist not the one possessed. By reconstituting the exorcism so that now it is the super- structure that performs the ‘magic’ of exorcism, as opposed to the base structure, Shakespeare manages a parodic reversal. His displacing the activi- ty of exorcism on to the officials, and in a way that changes exorcism into a metaphor, provides the means for demystifying the officially sanctioned action that had been taken against nonconformists.”80 As in the Darrell’s underground missives, Twelfth Night refers to the urine of the possessed, the ecclesiastical court is mocked (in a scene in which Malvolio is confined to a dark room and interrogated by the fool Feste), and letters falsely attributed (to Olivia) are misconstrued as authoritative. From the overall construction of the plot to the characterizations and comic dialogue (which comes dangerously close at times to parodying the New Testament), Hamilton concludes, Twelfth Night mocks the forced union of Church and State and presents an eloquent plea for reconciliation. In the final scene, “Shakespeare brings Malvolio face to face with Olivia and represents the great lady as willing to make amends. Explaining that she is not the one who perpetrated the fraud against him, Olivia assures Malvolio that ‘when we know the grounds and authors of it, / Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge / Of thine own cause’” [5.1.353–355].81 Darrell’s clandestine publications may be linked to those of Marlowe. The first edition of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies, was printed “At Middleborough” in 1592. The site turns out to be not the sleepy English fishing village of the same name, but Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, a Dutch province noted for its beehive of printers. Material banned by the censor, including Puritan tracts, some of the Martin Marprelate literature, and Separatist works, was printed here, given a false imprint, and smuggled back into England. Though more racy than rebellious, Marlowe’s book, as we have seen, was high on Archbishop Whitgift’s list of “unseemly” volumes consigned to the flames. In a recent essay, “At Middleborough: Some Reflections on Marlowe’s Visit to the Low Countries in 1592,” Charles Nicholl notes that the Dutch Middelburg was located contiguous to Flushing, where Marlowe and Baines were roommates until they fell out. Though the connection with the near- Shakespeare’s Ghost 165 by printers remains a conjecture, the proximity “would provide another aspect to Marlowe’s undercover work in the Low Countries: an involvement in clandestine printing.”82 In Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines, Roy Kendall further suggests that a book against the Trinity that Kit allegedly wrote was published here. Following the Deptford events, several contem- poraries mentioned that he had written such a tract, but if so it has not sur- vived. It should also be noted that in 1591, shortly before Marlowe’s arrival, Robert Sidney, governor of Flushing, seized three thousand copies of Separatist Henry Barrow’s books and had them burned. Arthur Billet, a young scholar about Kit’s age involved in the clandestine printing of this lit- erature in Middelburg, was apprehended by Sidney, returned to England, and turned over to Archbishop Whitgift. The Middlebourgh link could help explain why Whitgift put Marlowe’s books on his index. The sudden appearance of proscribed publications by Darrell, the imprisoned Puritan exorcist, may have triggered unpleasant associations with Marlowe and occasioned the archbishop to burn him posthumously, just as his mentor, Andrew Perne, dug up and roasted the bones of two Protestant divines. Whitgift’s bonfire proved to be his last hurrah. Consolidating his power after his father’s death and being named principal secretary to the queen, Robert Cecil quietly maneuvered to have Richard Bancroft, who preached at Cambridge when he was a student, named bishop of London in order to moderate the archbishop’s power. Through Bancroft, Cecil gained control and influence over the printing and publishing trade. Together, they even sanctioned the printing of Catholic discourses in a successful attempt to divide ordinary English Catholics from Jesuit priests and superiors stationed abroad. Of course, it is not known whether any relationship continued between Marlowe and Cecil after Burghley’s death. Though every bit as shrewd as his father, Secretary Cecil prided himself in his personal loyalty and steadfast- ness. “[M]y manner is not to fly [from] men in difficulties,” he once stated. And on another occasion, he added, “I have never had made myself so base as to have betrayed my friend, where my allegiance had not been in bal- ance.”83 Through the Merchant Adventurers trading company in Middel- burg that he patronized, Cecil almost certainly would have known if Marlowe were engaged in clandestine printing. “[F]rom my tender years I have been greedy of literature, and a lover of literary men,” Cecil once wrote, suggesting that he took an interest in poets and playwrights.84 Renowned for their leading contribution to Elizabethan architecture and patronage of music, the Cecils’ devotion to the arts has often been over- looked amid all their other accomplishments. Among the writers they pat- 166 Hamlet ronized was John Lyly, one of the University Wits and a probable associate of Marlowe. A new study of the Cecils as patron of the arts concludes that their household was “the nearest thing to a humanist salon that sixteenth- century England possessed, and a university in itself.”85 In addition to quietly taking control over publishing, Robert Cecil may have also consolidated his authority over the stage in the early years of the new century before the queen and archbishop passed away. Sir George Buck took over de facto control of the Revels office from his uncle, Edmund Tilney. As master of the Revels, Tilney was in charge not only of entertain- ments for the queen and court, but also broadly relations with the London stage, including the censorship of plays. He had originally been appointed in 1577, probably through the influence of his cousin Lord Howard of Effingham (later the lord admiral and patron of Marlowe’s troupe) and Burghley. Buck enjoyed a close relationship with Robert Cecil, carrying con- fidential dispatches for him to Middelburg in 1601. If Kit returned to England toward the end of the century and stepped up his theatrical pro- duction, it is likely that Buck, with a possible nod from Cecil, would have been sympathetic to his scripts. Whether or not he turned a blind eye to their topical punning (satirized by Prince Hamlet as “tropical” [3.2.229]), provocative allusions, and other subversive subtexts, the Shakespearean plays take on a harder edge as Elizabeth’s reign ends and James’s begins. Drama ran deeply in the Cecil family blood. After Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558, William Cecil delivered patriotic, anti-Catholic speech- es to players in hostels and taverns to drum up support for the Act of Uniformity. This Polonius-like charge to actors continued until his death. In one case before the Star Chamber in 1596, records show that “The Lord Treasurer would haue those that make the playes to make a comedie here- of, & to acte it with these names.”86 At Theobalds, the Cecils’ country manor twelve miles from London, a play was staged on several occasions before the queen that dramatized Burghley’s desire to retire and be suc- ceeded by his son, who was disguised as a hermit. (Though Elizabeth joined in the merriment and prepared a comic charter to be read in the perform- ances, she did not heed his message; she never allowed the elder Cecil to leave office and delayed promoting the younger Cecil for several years after he assumed responsibilities for the post.) Robert evidently wrote the dra- mas—real plays-within-the-play—himself or had them commissioned. Some critics think that these episodes are alluded to in The Tempest and that Prospero, the wise old magician who wishes to retire to his cell like the her- mit in the Cecilian productions, was based loosely on Burghley.87 Not one to be upstaged, the Earl of Essex followed his rival Cecil’s playlet with one of his own, which was performed before the queen on the Shakespeare’s Ghost 167 anniversary of her accession. In this performance, largely composed by Francis Bacon, Essex played himself and engaged in debate with an old her- mit, a secretary of state, and a soldier, each of whom tried to convince him to abandon love of his royal mistress to attain his station in life. As another play-within-the-play—and one obviously satirizing the Cecils—it prefigured an even more dramatic, real life performance involving many of the princi- pals in Marlowe’s career as well as the Globe players and a Shakespearean play.

The Late Innovation

When the vilest of all indignities are done unto me, doth religion enforce me to sue? Cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power infinite? —Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

s the new century arrived, the queen turned sixty-eight, A r chbishop Whitgift sixty-nine, and Marlowe and Shakespeare would turn thirty-seven. Amid complaints of civic disorders, the Privy Council limited playhouses in London to Richard Burbage’s new Globe and Edward Alleyn’s new Fortune theatres and productions were curtailed to twice a week. Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice were all published in 1600, as well as England’s Helicon, an anthology of verse, including Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. As England’s Irish campaign floundered, several military deserters were executed as an example to others, and in York two Catholic priests were hanged. Several printers were locked up for printing Essex’s Apology, and Whitgift prohibited the printing of portraits or likenesses of anyone except the queen. Elizabeth received two Moorish ambassadors from the Barbary coast and welcomed the Russian ambassador, who presented her with a pair of breeding sables. In Scotland, James narrowly avoided an assassination attempt, and in a hand-to-hand struggle with the king, two conspirators died of their wounds. On the domestic front, the bishop of Exeter petitioned the ecclesiastical High Commission to deal with a breakdown of law and order in his diocese and punish atheists and blasphemers who baptized a cat, administered com- munion to a dead horse, and married a goose and a gander. In the drama surrounding Elizabeth’s long reign, the final act climaxed with the Essex Rebellion. For nearly a half century, the queen had navigat- 168 Hamlet ed her ship of state through treacherous waters (the Spanish Armada), hid- den shoals (marriage suits pressed by the crowned heads of Europe), and internal rot and disrepair (repression of religious dissent). As her final voy- age approached, the stately vessel was wracked with mutiny from some of its highest-ranking officers. In an ironic spin of Fortune’s wheel, many of the dramatis personae in the Marlowe saga converged and made their swan song on the Elizabethan political stage in the cold month of February 1601. The deaths of Francis Walsingham, Lord Burghley, James Morice, Thomas Kyd, Anthony Bacon, and Thomas Hooker substantially diminished the cast. Besides the queen and Essex in the lead roles, Archbishop Whitgift, Robert Cecil, Thomas Egerton, Francis Bacon, Sir Robert Sidney, and Southampton played sup- porting parts, the Globe actors provided the chorus, and James VI, Arbella Stuart, Shakespeare, and Marlowe’s ghost made their presence felt like black-clad Kabuki moving invisibly in the background. The story of the Essex rebellion deserves to be described in detail, if only to demonstrate that the arrangement involving Marlowe and Shakespeare remained largely intact after Burghley died and, surviving perhaps its greatest challenge, continued into the reign of James I. The true motive of the Earl of Essex, the focus of the conspiracy, is still debated by historians four hundred years later. Did he seek only to protect the queen from corrupt advisors and ensure a smooth succession for King James of Scotland as he insisted, or did he intend to depose Elizabeth and proclaim himself king, as his opponents charged? In either case, the basic facts are uncontested. For over a decade, Essex, the brilliant but erratic courtier, had been Elizabeth’s court favorite. Despite frequent outbursts, he enjoyed a meteoric rise and was showered with honors and preferments. In 1598, after one heated scene in the Privy Council when he rashly turned his back on the queen and started to draw his sword, she boxed his ears. Following Burghley’s death, the queen relied heavily on Robert Cecil, Essex’s old rival, who constantly outmaneuvered him at court. Ralegh, another of the earl’s opponents, had rehabilitated himself and once again commanded the queen’s palace guard. Warned by his elders to show Elizabeth more obedi- ence, Essex replied that he could not do so “as a slave,” proclaiming that “Princes may err and subjects receive wrong . . . but I will show constancy in suffering.”88 As commander of English forces in Ireland, Essex disobeyed Elizabeth and concluded a humiliating treaty with the Irish rebels. Fearful of being eclipsed by Ralegh, Robert Cecil, and other rivals back home, he halted the military campaign and hastened back to England against the monarch’s Shakespeare’s Ghost 169 instructions in September 1599. His principal advisor, Southampton (to whom Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece had been dedicated), accompanied him, along with a small band of swordsmen. Galloping non- stop, Essex made straight for the palace at Nonsuch and burst into the queen’s bedchamber unannounced. The queen had never allowed a man into her bedroom and was aghast to be accosted partially dressed, without her wig, and devoid of make up. Fearing a coup, she humored her young courtier, promising to meet him in a proper setting. Later that day, when they met, Essex proved inarticulate and confused, and Elizabeth treated him with royal disdain. Ultimately, she placed him under house arrest, where he slid into sickness and despair over the next eight months. A hearing before a royal commission finally convened in June 1600. Sensing a change in the political winds, Francis Bacon, Essex’s former major domo and spy handler, turned vehemently against his lord and master. Among the other stony faces on the commission, only Archbishop Whitgift showed Essex the slightest consideration, offering his former student a cushion to sit on as if to soften the impending blow. As expected, the councilors deferred his fate to the pleasure of the queen. For his tacit support of the brash young courtier, Whitgift earned the queen’s rebuke. Their estrangement weighed heavily, and “the good olde Archbishop came sometimes home much grieued and perplexed.”89 Elizabeth eventually set Essex at liberty, but banished him at court and stripped him of his titles. Over the years, he had served as member of the Privy Council, master of the ordnance, and master of the queen’s horse and won high military posts, and he lost all of this. But the most devastating punishment was loss of the royal lease on revenues from the import of sweet wines. Despite his tearful pleadings and show of contrition, Elizabeth refused to renew the lucrative monopoly she had bestowed upon him in bygone days and kept the custom duties for herself. In a letter to the queen, Essex begged her to change her mind, complaining that he had become a laughing stock: “The frantic libeller writes of me what he lists; they print me and make me speak to the world, and shortly they will play me upon the stage.”90 In the face of financial ruin, Essex and his alter ego, Southampton, who was also living beyond his means and had been briefly jailed in the Tower and banished from court by Elizabeth because she disapproved of his marriage, conspired to provide England with fresh blood. They communi- cated secretly with James in Scotland, rallied disaffected northern earls and Welsh gentry, and inveighed against Cecil, Ralegh, and other perceived ene- mies at court. The earl’s London residence, Essex House, assumed the air of an armed camp, attracting ambitious nobles, disgruntled ex-army officers, and Puritan ministers to preach to the multitude gathered there. 170 Hamlet

The plot they developed called for Essex’s supporters to infiltrate Whitehall Palace, seize the guards, and clear the way for Essex and his shad- ow privy council to meet with the queen and assume the mantle of power. Heralds would fan out through London with news of the uprising and stir up popular support. A sympathetic Parliament would be called into session to ratify the change and put on trial and punish former councilors who had misled the queen. As doubts rose about the wisdom of such a venture, the plotters decided to steel their own faltering resolve, as well as whip up pub- lic sentiment, by staging a dramatic performance about the abdication of an English monarch whose situation mirrored Elizabeth’s. For this purpose, they selected Shakespeare’s Richard II, a play about a childless king who was deposed by the popular Bolingbroke and later murdered. Supported by the London multitude, Bolingbroke went on to assume the throne as Henry IV. After the play debuted in 1595, the scenes of Richard’s deposition and mur- der were censored because of their close parallel with Elizabeth’s situation. On February 6, 1601, several aristocratic associates of Essex went to the Globe theatre and asked the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to put on a special performance of the play. Explaining that the benefit would be for their own edification as well as the local citizenry, they offered to supplement the gate with forty shillings. Hesitant about being embroiled in courtly intrigue, the troupe explained that Richard II was no longer in their repertoire, the actors had forgotten the lines, and an old play probably wouldn’t attract much attention. But the stipend was sizeable and Southampton, as Shakespeare’s patron, may have sweetened the pot and pressured the company to comply. By the next afternoon, the actors had recalled their lines and gave a stalwart rendition of Richard II, probably including the excised deposition and mur- der scenes, before Lord Monteagle, Sir Gelli Meyrick, Sir Christopher Blount, and other conspirators. The previous summer, the Privy Council had imprisoned Dr. John Hayward in connection with another subversive historical text. His History of Henry IV was dedicated to Essex and referred to “his future greatness,” which the queen took to mean the earl’s expectation of succeeding to the throne. Consulting Francis Bacon, she inquired whether there was sufficient cause to try the good doctor for treason. When Bacon replied “for treason surely I find none, but for felony many,” she asked that Hayward be charged with theft for plagiarizing from Tacitus, the Roman playwright.91 Suspecting a more satirical hand behind the volume, she demanded that he be put to the rack to reveal his accomplice. To settle the authorship controversy, Fran- cis Bacon recommended instead that Hayward be given pen and ink to con- tinue the narrative. It would be easy enough, he told the queen, to deter- mine whether the sequel equaled the literary quality of the original. At Shakespeare’s Ghost 171

Hayward’s trial, Attorney-General Coke charged that “the Doctor selected a story 200 years old and published it last year intending the application of it to this time.”92 Hayward confessed to falsifying history and testified that Essex frequently attended Shakespeare’s Richard II “himself being so often present at the playing thereof and with great applause giving countenance to it.”93 Though Elizabeth was not present at the Globe performance, as in the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, the sovereign regarded Essex’s staging of Richard II with shock and alarm. In emergency session later that day, her advisors met and sent a messenger to Essex demanding he present himself before the Privy Council. He demurred for reasons of his physical safety and at dawn the next morning sent heralds through the city rallying supporters to his cause. In a final effort to prevent bloodshed, a delegation of privy councilors went to Essex House, including Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, who carried the Great Seal of England with him, and ordered the rebels to disperse, but they were unceremoniously taken hostage. In mid-morning, Essex and several hundred armed supporters left Essex House, but instead of proceeding to the palace, which was only lightly guarded, they headed toward the City to augment their forces with the thousand men promised them by the sheriff of London. The delay gave the Crown time to rally support. As soon as he learned of the uprising, Archbishop Whitgift dispatched a contingent of “threescore men well armed, and appointed” across the Thames to protect the palace and mobilized another forty armed horsemen to remain in readiness if need- ed. Thomas Cecil, Robert’s elder brother and the new Lord Burghley, braved the mob in the City, reading a proclamation in the queen’s name branding the earl a traitor and promising amnesty to those who lay down their arms. When the sheriff’s support and the expected popular uprising failed to materialize, Essex retreated to his residence, where he discovered that the detained privy councilors, his last bargaining chip, had been released. As Whitgift’s men and troops loyal to the queen from London and outlying areas converged on Essex House with musket and cannon, the earl burned as much incriminating evidence as he could, including a pouch or locket that he wore around his neck with secret correspondence with James in Scotland. As Essex drew his sword to make his final stand, the queen’s men called a truce, allowing the women inside, including Essex’s wife and sister, to leave peacefully. Sir Robert Sidney, the former governor of Flushing who had arrested Marlowe and sent him back to England, negotiated sur- render terms with Southampton, who came out on the roof. In exchange for the promise of a fair trial, the conspirators capitulated. The archbishop’s troop conveyed Essex and Southampton to Lambeth and thence to the 172 Hamlet

Tower of London. After twelve hours, the rebellion was over. On February 17, Essex and Southampton were brought to trial at Westminster Hall. Lord Buckhurst, who had set the informers on Marlowe eight years earlier, presided, flanked by eight judges, Attorney-General Coke headed up the prosecutors, and nine earls and sixteen barons served as the jury of peers. Sir Walter Ralegh commanded the security detail. In laying out his case, Coke referred directly to the staging of Richard II at the Globe and drew parallels between the dramatic representation and the earl’s conspira- cy. Francis Bacon, also one of the prosecutors, compared his former lord to an Athenian tyrant who seized power by declaring that he was protecting the sovereign from bad counsel. Accusing him of a Machiavellian strategy in the Hayward affair, Bacon said that the earl sent “only a cold formal letter to the Archbishop to call in [Hayward’s] book . . . knowing that forbidden things are most sought after.”94 Southampton pled for leniency, insisting that he had not once drawn his sword. When it was pointed out that he was seen brandishing a pistol, he explained that he had confiscated it from a man in the street. In his own defense, Essex delivered an eloquent defense of his principles, denied any wrongdoing, and accused Robert Cecil of conniving with Spain to deliver the crown to the Spanish Infanta. Other plotters spread word that the secretary designed to marry the Lady Arbella and seize the throne in her name. In the most dramatic moment of the trial, Robert Cecil, who had been mysteriously absent, suddenly appeared to defend his good name. Turning to Essex, he declared, “For wit I give you the preeminence—you have it abundantly. For nobility, also I give you place—I am not noble; yet a gen- tleman: I am no swordsman—there also you have the odds; but I have inno- cence, conscience, truth and honesty to defend me against the scandal and sting of slanderous tongues.”95 When Cecil denied that he was conspiring with the Spanish, Essex called upon Sir William Knollys, his uncle, to testi- fy to the secretary’s treachery. But Knollys swore that Cecil mentioned the Infanta’s claim only to repudiate it. The testimony proved devastating to the earl’s defense. In an exchange that curiously paralleled the final scene in Hamlet between the prince and Laertes, Robert Cecil assured Essex, his rival, “I forgive you from the bottom of my heart,” to which the defeated earl replied meekly, “And I, Mr. Secretary, do clearly and freely forgive you with all my soul; because I mean to die in charity with all men.”96 After deliberating in tobacco-wreathed chambers, the peers found the two defendants guilty of high treason, and the lord high steward sentenced Essex and Southampton to death by hanging, disembowelment, and quar- tering. A few days later, Essex made a full confession. On February 25, he was beheaded after praying for forgiveness and blessing the queen and her Shakespeare’s Ghost 173 ministers. The more gruesome penalties were waived because of his aristo- cratic pedigree. At the request of Robert Cecil, Southampton’s death sen- tence was commuted, and he was confined to the Tower for life. Several other key conspirators, including those who had staged the performance of Richard II, also received the axe. Overall, the proceedings open an eerie window on what might have happened if Marlowe had not kept his appoint- ment in Deptford and stood trial for atheism, heresy, and sedition in 1593. Though it would have lacked the pomp and ceremony of Essex’s tribunal, Buckhurst (with Whitgift behind the scenes) likely would have presided over the court of ecclesiastical High Commission, and the verdict would have been a foregone conclusion. Unlike the nobles, the horrendous means of execution probably would not have been mitigated. In the aftermath of the Essex rebellion, Shakespeare’s company remained in disgrace. Although Elizabeth commanded them, perhaps in revenge against the earl, to perform before her on the eve of Essex’s execution, they were not allowed to appear at court the following Christmas. For several years, the Crown did not allow any plays dealing with conspiracy or rebel- lion on the London stage. Having incurred the monarch’s displeasure, the Globe players toured the provinces in self-imposed exile until her anger dis- sipated. The title page of Hamlet mentions that the play was performed late- ly in the universities. The text may allude to the Essex rebellion in the scene when the traveling players arrive in Elsinore. “I think their inhibition, comes by the means of the late innovation,” Rosencrantz explains to Hamlet (2.2. 316–317). Though other interpretations have been advanced, many critics hold that the “innovation” is a euphemism for the earl’s recent uprising. In an oft-quoted remark to jurist Sir William Lambarde, Queen Eliza- beth exclaimed shortly after the Essex rebellion, “I am Richard II, know ye not that? He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40tie times in open streets and houses.”97 Most histori- ans assume that she was referring to Devereux. By encouraging Puritan zealots, Separatists, and other religious malcontents, he “forgot God” and the church, as well as his divinely sanctioned monarch. Essex was reported to have attended Richard II many times, and at his trial he denied that he was encouraging religious nonconformity. However, another interpretation of the queen’s remarks is that she was referring to the author of the play rather than the leader of the rebellion. Yet in Shakespeare’s case, no charges were ever brought, as they had been against Hayward (who wrote a prose edition that enjoyed a much smaller circulation). Except for the royal disfa- vor and temporary banishment of the entire acting company, Will suffered no personal censure for his role in the affair. The fact that Southampton, his patron, was the principal co-conspirator should have been sufficient cause 174 Hamlet for Elizabeth to order him placed into Master Topcliffe’s custody. Or did Francis Bacon intervene again in yet another authorship controversy? Could the queen have been referring to Marlowe, as critic John Baker asks? Certainly the phrase “He that will forget God” fits the common per- ception of Kit as an atheist and blasphemer better than the erratic earl, who was noted for his personal piety. If so, this suggests that the queen knew or suspected “Shakespeare’s” true identity. Yet if Marlowe was living in hiding or in foreign exile, he was beyond her reach. Of course, out of spite, Eliza- beth could have closed down the Globe and denied the dramatist a venue. Her reasons for leniency are unknown. Elizabeth reportedly spared Southampton’s life because he was without an heir, and she didn’t want to extinguish a peerage. Whatever arguments Robert Cecil used to convince her, Southampton had longstanding ties with the Cecils. The convicted co-conspirator also had ties with Charles Howard, the lord admiral and Kit’s old patron, as well as Richard Field, Edward Blount, Thomas Thorpe, and other printers and publishers associated with Marlowe. This network of relationships suggests that Wriothesley’s life may have been spared as much to protect his patronage of Shakespeare to the tune of £1000 annually (and thus ensure an outlet for the plays) as to con- tinue the earl’s hereditary line. Not long after, the Countess of Pembroke, whom Kit had once ad- dressed as his muse, may have also intervened on the poet’s behalf. Shortly after James succeeded to the throne, Mary Sidney reportedly wrote a letter (now lost) to her son asking him to invite James to a performance of As You Like It at the family manor in Wilton. Not only is this the play that laments Marlowe’s death, but also in her letter the countess adds that “we have the man Shakespeare with us.”98 This raises the intriguing possibility that she was referring to Kit the dramatist—her rumored lover—instead of, or in addition to, Will the actor, and that Marlowe may have been living in Wilton at the time. Rumors at court circulated that Mary invited the king to her house to secure a pardon for Ralegh, who had been arrested on dubious charges in a plot against James. A contemporary correspondent noted that “she is commended for doing her best in showing veteris vetigia flammae [‘traces of my old passion’].”99 The quotation, from Dido’s remarks to Aeneas, further suggests that the romance between the countess and the author of Dido Queen of Carthage may have been rekindled. Some critics think that the pirate scene in Hamlet was based on a similar scene in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, which was edited and completed by Mary after her brother’s death. Elizabeth nicknamed Ralegh “the Pirate,” and in Hamlet, revised about this time, the poet may have honored his old friend and col- league in the School of Night. Shakespeare’s Ghost 175

Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron at the time of the Deptford affair, and his wife also found themselves in high favor with the new monarch. In a letter written at the end of 1603, Arbella Stuart (also tem- porarily elevated under James) notes that Audrey Walsingham had permis- sion to wear Elizabeth’s best dresses to appear in masques on Christmas. On New Year’s night, she adds, the court enjoyed a play of Robin Goodfellow, a possible reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The web of relationships among Kit’s past admirers and defenders dur- ing the interregnum, including Cecil, Southampton, Field, Blount, George Carey, the Lord Admiral, the Countess of Pembroke, the Walsinghams, and Arbella Stuart, reaches into the highest political, military, artistic, and liter- ary circles.100 It strongly suggests that Marlowe’s support network remained largely in place after Burghley died and continued into the Stuart era.

The Right Harbor ueen Elizabeth survived for two more years after the Essex affair, finally concluding hostilities in Ireland at the end of 1602. When the queen wouldn’t consider terms, the Irish rebels wisely submitted unconditional- ly to her mercy. Elizabeth initially refused this magnan- imous offer and demanded their heads, but finally yielded after her Privy Council begged her to make peace and end a war that had been disastrous for both sides. As her reign ended, she pined for her onetime favorite, Essex, who in many ways was a victim of the intractable Irish campaign and the queen’s mercilessness. As she had after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth fell into “a melancholy disease,” in the words of the archbishop’s biographer, though this time she had no one to blame for signing the death warrant but herself.101 London was abuzz with the tale that after an earlier love quarrel she had given Essex a ring and promised him that he had only to return it to win her forgiveness. On the day of the execution, the tale con- tinued, she was said to be anxiously waiting delivery of the love token. From the Tower, so the story went, the earl gave the ring to a page boy to deliv- er to Lady Scrope, a friend and ally, and implored her to give it to the queen. However, the lad by mistake gave it to the wife of one of his enemies, who withheld it from Elizabeth and later, guilt-stricken and dying, confessed her deception. The queen then died of a broken heart. Like the setting of a majestic sun, Elizabeth’s light gradually extin- guished. The end came at her palace at Richmond in late March 1603. Before several of her privy councilors who had gathered by her death bed, 176 Hamlet she stated enigmatically, “I will have no rascal to succeed me; and who should succeed me but a King?” The next day, when she lapsed into speech- lessness, Robert Cecil asked her to make a sign to confirm that she would have the king of Scots succeed her, and she made the sign of a crown over her head. (The account of her acceptance of James was probably as apoc- ryphal as the story of the ring.) John Whitgift was now back in the queen’s good graces for defending the palace during the Essex affair and, though old and ailing himself, took charge of last rites. With her “little black husband” by her side, Elizabeth pressed his hand and kept him on his knees as the evening wore on, although he tried to rise several times. Only when she lapsed into unconsciousness was he able to slip away after sermonizing on heaven and the joys of the hereafter. The queen died in the wee hours of March 24. The archbishop served as chief mourner at her funeral in West- minster Abbey as most of England grieved over the only monarch it had ever known. With Machiavellian skill, Robert Cecil orchestrated an orderly succes- sion. After the Essex rebellion, he had opened communications in cipher with James, explaining, “I know it holdeth . . . even with strictest loyalty and soundest reason for faithful ministers to conceal sometime both thoughts and actions from princes when they are persuaded it is for their own greater service.”102 He asked James to “vouchsafe me in this to be your oracle, that when that day (so grievous to us) shall happen which is the tribute of all mortal creatures, your ships shall be steered into the right harbour without cross of wave or tide.”103 Recognizing that the English secretary was “king there in effect,” the Scottish monarch overcame his initial doubts and even- tually allowed Cecil to draft all his own correspondence to the queen. His relation with Elizabeth, which had always been chilly and condescending before, turned warm and harmonious. The morning she died, Cecil’s procla- mation of James’s accession was read, as Sir Robert Carey (Hunsdon’s brother) hastened on horseback to Holyrood House in Edinburgh to be the first to deliver the news to an anxious James. Several months later, Archbishop Whitgift crowned James and Anne as England’s new king and queen and received assurance that the monarch would forego Scottish presbyterianism and recognize the supremacy of the Church of England. But following the queen’s death, long pent up public frustrations and hostilities surfaced, and civic hopes rose that James would right past wrongs. Foremost among these injustices was the Religious Settlement, and Puritans wasted little time in mourning the departed monarch. Sensitive to seismic rumblings of discontent among his new sub- jects, King James agreed to a convocation with the Puritans “for the refor- mation of some things amiss in ecclesiastical matters.”104 Aghast at the Shakespeare’s Ghost 177 king’s determination to parley with the zealots, the bishops managed to limit the Puritans to only four delegates in comparison to their nineteen. As the embodiment of the old order, Whitgift attended the conclave, held at Hampton Court in January 1604. But he was a shell of his former self, and he let Richard Bancroft, bishop of London, defend orthodoxy. Bancroft seized the opportunity to further his own advancement. Comparing James to Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, he argued for a via media between the papists and the Puritans and portrayed both as extrem- ists bent on destroying royal authority and the uniformity of the church. James opened the proceedings adroitly, assuring the participants that he intended no “innovation.” But just as in an imperfect world the body of man inevitably corrupts, so too “we have received many complaints, since our first entrance into this kingdom, of many disorders, and much disobe- dience to the laws.” Like a “good physician,” he proposed “to examine and try the complaints, and fully to remove the occasions thereof, if scandalous; cure them, if dangerous.”105 The Puritans entertained the hope that the king would sanction the use of the Geneva Bible in church. With the arch- bishop, author of its ban, appearing like a ghost of his former self, Bancroft vigorously opposed every proposed change or modification. In the end, James effected a compromise by agreeing to a Puritan proposal to create a new translation of the Bible. “If every man’s humour were followed, there would be no end of translating,” Bancroft objected, as the archbishop nod- ded sagely. But he was overruled, and the King James Version of the Bible, the fruit of this otherwise contentious gathering, appeared in 1611. A month after the Hampton Court conference, the archbishop caught cold on his barge in the Thames during a visit to Bancroft’s residence in Fulham. Several days later, on the first Sunday in Lent, he suffered a para- lytic stroke when dining at Whitehall Palace. Taken to Lord Buckhurst’s chamber and then transferred to Lambeth, he received a visit by the king, but deprived of speech he was only able to utter “pro Eccelesia Dei,” prais- ing God’s Church. He called for ink and paper to inscribe his last thoughts, but the pen fell out of his hand. John Whitgift died “like a lamb” on February 29, 1604, in his seventy-third year.106 At his funeral oration, he was compared to Jehoradah, a virtuous high priest of Israel. Since the primary aim of this account is to outline the epic struggle between Marlowe and the archbishop and the background to Hamlet, we will essentially end our historical narrative at this point. The next section examines Hamlet, which stands at the very end of Elizabeth’s reign and the start of James’s. Slightly less than half of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first performed or published in the Stuart era, including such master- pieces as Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. The same incisive social com- 178 Hamlet mentary, satirical wit, and irony were brought to bear on the stage and in print during James’s reign as during Elizabeth’s. Measure for Measure, Pericles, and some of the other plays treat critically the burning theological issues of the Stuart era, as well as increased censorship and jailing of poets and actors.107 Written in the same mischievous spirit of Martin Marprelate and Falstaff as the earlier works, the latter part of the Shakespearean canon follows in direct continuity with the former part. In 1597 Shakespeare purchased New Place, the second largest house in Stratford, and became increasingly involved in legal and property matters, dividing his time between London and Stratford from 1604 to about 1611, when the last play attributed to him was probably composed. In 1613, Will purchased a house in London near the Blackfriars theatre, the company’s winter home, probably as an investment, so he kept some kind of presence in the capital to attend openings and court performances where an authori- al presence was required. He died in 1616 shortly after preparing his will, the only truly uncontested literary document in his name. There was no mention of his passing in print, in London or elsewhere, and until the First Folio was published in 1623, he received no elegies and scant tributes. Loyal to a fault, Shakespeare stoically performed the public role that destiny had assigned to him.108

The Abstract and Brief Chronicles of the Time

Sit fas aut nefas [Be it right or wrong], till I find the stream To cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, Per Stygia, per manes vehor. [I am borne through the Stygian regions, through the shades] —Titus Andronicus (2.1.133-135)

n perhaps one final nod to Marlowe’s muse, the First F o l i o —M r . Shakespeare’s Comedies, Tragedies, & Histories—was registered at the Stationers’ Company on November 8, 1623. Edward Blount, the prime mover of the Folio’s publication, was Kit’s old friend, p u b l i s h e r, and self-styled literary executor. Blount entered the Folio along with Isaac Jaggard, whose fam- ily owned the printing company once operated by James Roberts, the sta- tioner who had originally registered Hamlet and printed the Second Quarto. William Jaggard, Isaac’s father, was officially one of the Folio’s partners. In Shakespeare’s Ghost 179

1599 he had published Shakespeare’s The Passionate Pilgrim, a brief anthol- ogy of verse containing the first printed version of Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. Nicholas Ling, who died in 1607, sold the rights to Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Taming of a Shrew to John Smethwick, a younger bookseller. Smethwick, who had been in trou- ble for publishing several pirated editions early in his career, brought out Quartos 3, 4, and 5 of Hamlet (without any substantial changes) and became a partner in the First Folio. John Heminge, co-editor of the Folio and a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had acted with Lord Strange’s Company in the early 1590s and undoubtedly knew Marlowe from that time. The volume itself was dedicated to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Pembroke, Mary Sidney’s son, was lord chamberlain at the time and hence oversaw the office of the Revels and the production of plays at court. There is speculation that he was the mysterious Mr. W. H. to whom the Shakespeare Sonnets are dedicated. As with Hamlet, the First Folio was published by a group of influential stationers with subversive roots, aristo- cratic connections, and past ties to Marlowe. Leonard Digges, Jr., who wrote the prefatory poem to the Folio, was a kinsman of Christopher Digges, Kit’s old classmate at the King’s School in Canterbury. The date of the Folio’s registration, November 8, is also highly symbol- ic. It was the anniversary of the goddess Mania, known as the Mother of Ghosts, the Roman counterpart to Hecate. On her day, the manes, or ances- tral spirits were remembered, as mentioned in Titus Andronicus. In Celtic tradition, the Lord of Faeries allowed the door of the Underworld to be opened on November 8, echoing or paralleling the ancient Roman festival. The name of the fairy king, Gywnn ap Nudd, means “Light, Son of Dark- ness,” another allusion to the goddess of the Night and a fit epithet for Christopher Marlowe. It’s appropriate that the works of England’s poet lau- reate and his collaborator, William Shakespeare, should enter the world of print on this symbolic date. As for Christopher Marlowe, that author of “vile, hereticall conceipts,” his fate remains shrouded in mystery. The ideals for which he stood, how- ever, triumphed, and in Horatio’s memorable words “purposes mistook, / [Fell] on th’inventors’ heads” (5.2.382-383). The English Civil War, a gen- eration later, resulted in the execution of Charles I (James’s son and succes- sor) and Archbishop Laud, and was viewed by many as a reaction to the excesses initiated under Elizabeth’s and Whitgift’s reign. The ex officio oath that formed the cornerstone of the archbishop’s persecution of Puritans and dissenters was declared illegal in 1641 and finally abolished along with the Star Chamber and the ecclesiastical High Commission. In 1689, a hundred years after the appearance of Martin Marprelate’s last tract, The Protestatyn, 180 Hamlet and about the time of Dr. Faustus’s debut on the stage, England adopted the Bill of Rights and the Tolerance Act, recognizing the supremacy of Parlia- ment over the sovereign and the Church. For four hundred years there was no burial stone or monument com- memorating Marlowe’s life or achievement—a paean to artistic expression, the precision of language, and the wise use of power. But regardless of his final resting place, the democratic ideals that took root in England and America and continue to spread around the world are his greatest legacy. The modern world has largely forgotten Christopher Marlowe, the clown prince of the London stage, who put on an antic disposition, selflessly wrote under Shakespeare’s name and let his colleague take the credit for his works, and vied with Church and Crown to save England’s soul. But as the origi- nator of our common tongue, a creator of the modern mind, and a prophet who voices our noblest sentiments, Marlowe has outlived all of his contem- poraries. Practically every word we speak doth breathe his name and spirit.

Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast, Yet love breaks through, and picks them all at last. —Venus and Adonis (575–576)

After four centuries, it is time to lay the Shakespeare authorship contro- versy to rest. As Hamlet soliloquizes when devising the play-within-the-play, “For murder, though it have no tongue will speak / With most miraculous organ” (2.2.544–545). Beyond a reasonable doubt, Kit Marlowe did not die in Deptford and he went on, with the indispensable aid of William Shake- speare, to bring out Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and the other immortal poems and plays. Murder will out, even if it is only staged.