Marlowe’s Ghost: The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus

Robert W. Maslen

1. Afterlives in Fact and Fiction

Our story begins with two bad deaths. In September 1592 the poet, author and playwright Robert Greene succumbed to a sickness brought on by a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine—or so his enemy Gabriel Harvey asserted. Eight months later, in May 1593, the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was murdered by Ingram Frizer at a boarding house in Deptford, stabbed through the eye in a quarrel over a bill or ‘reckoning’. Greene and Marlowe were hostile to each other; Greene, at least, did his best to make them so. But they had much in common, from their rela- tively humble origins to a university education and a life of mixing with, but never quite profiting by, some of the most powerful men and women in England.1 They shared, too, a fascination with magic, metamorphoses and desire, as well as a mutual obsession with bad death and the pos- sibility of averting it or putting it off. And immediately after Marlowe’s death their fates became entwined to an extent that neither could have predicted. From tellers of stories they found themselves transformed into the stories’ protagonists, and their ghosts continued to haunt the stage, the bookstalls and the streets of late Elizabethan London as if linked in a diabolic pact. This essay concerns the ghost of Marlowe; but ghosts are notoriously difficult to see clearly, and Greene’s frequent and prominent posthumous appearances will help bring Marlowe’s more elusive spirit into better focus. The details of Greene’s afterlife have long been familiar to us.2 Besides the posthumous, quasi-autobiographical pamphlets attributed to Greene himself, such as The Repentance of Robert Greene and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (both 1592), he returns from the grave in Greene’s News Both from

1 See Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford, 2005), and Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Robert Greene’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11418, accessed 2.8.2011). 2 See e.g. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘Ghosts’, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York, 2002), pp. 70–76. 2 robert w. maslen

Heaven and Hell (1593), by Barnaby Rich, which contains tales purport- edly collected by Greene’s spirit on a trip to Purgatory; Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream (1593), where Greene’s ghost urges the satirist Thomas Nashe to avenge him on his detractor, Harvey; and John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceit, New Raised from His Grave to Write the Tragic History of Valeria (1598), whose title page shows him vigorously scribbling fiction in his grave-clothes. Until recently, by contrast, the afterlife of Marlowe has been confined to some passing allusions, such as Peele’s proto-Dickensian reference to him as ‘Marley, the Muses darling for thy verse, / Fit to write passions for the souls below, / If any wretched souls in passion speak’ in his poem The Honour of the Garter, published only a month after his death;3 William Webbe’s critical assessment of him in 1598 as ‘our best for Tragedie’; and Nashe’s eulogy in Lenten Stuff (1599), where he is a ‘rarer muse’ than the mythic poet Musaeus, whose tale of Hero and Leander he made his own.4 On the stage, of course, he lived on in his plays, and could be said to have gone on writing well into the seventeenth century, as new scenes for Doctor Faustus kept appearing as if by magic in new produc- tions of the tragedy.5 In this essay, however, I shall suggest that Marlowe’s ghost also achieved a substantial presence (so to speak) on paper, in the form of an anonymous narrative printed less than a year after his mur- der, The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus (1594).6 The publication of this pamphlet coincided with a revival of his most popular plays on the London stage.7 It would seem that some of the details in it got mixed up with the theatrical legends surrounding his most scandalous play, Doctor Faustus, so that boundaries between truth and fiction, the theatre and the written page became blurred in a way that the author of the Second Report would no doubt have found deeply satisfying. To return for a while, though, to the relationship between Greene and Marlowe, the story of their lifetime enmity comes to us largely through Greene’s references to it in print. Soon after the success of Marlowe’s first play for the public theatre, Tamburlaine the Great (1587), and the failure of Greene’s clumsy imitation of it, Alphonsus King of Aragon,

3 The Works of George Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1888), 2.320. 4 For literary responses to Marlowe’s death, see Honan, Christopher Marlowe (see above, n. 1), pp. 355–67. 5 See David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts, The Revels Plays (Manchester and New York, 1993), ‘The B-text’, pp. 72–77. All references to Doctor Faustus are to this edition. 6 STC 10715; 2nd ed. STC 10715.3 (online available through EEBO). 7 See Honan, Christopher Marlowe, p. 361.