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SUSPICIOUS: Biographer Riggs
says Marlowe's inquest doesn't make sense.
Glenn Matsumura |
On may 31, 1593, England’s
greatest playwright lay dead on a tavern floor in Deptford,
stabbed through the eye in a brawl about the tab. He
was 29.
The inquest was hurried, confused and largely disregarded.
Within a few years, the dead man’s reputation
would be eclipsed by the up-and-coming William Shakespeare.
Christopher Marlowe’s plays waited centuries for
reappraisal.
His life awaited reappraisal, too. Since Marlowe’s
rediscovery in the 19th century, biographers have tended
to put him in the best possible light. The myth that
a good poet is a good man dies hard.
Enter Stanford English professor David Riggs, author
of The World of Christopher Marlowe (Faber
& Faber, 2004). With his portrait of an “intellectual
radical and social dissident,” he is out to rock
the boat.
“At the time of his death, Marlowe was a more
prominent playwright than Shakespeare,” Riggs
notes. By then, “Shakespeare had written Henry
VI and Titus Andronicus, and they aren’t
as good as Tambourlaine or Doctor Faustus.”
In addition to being a revolutionary playwright, Marlowe
was a blasphemer, a homosexual, a secret agent, “someone
involved with a wide range of criminal activities,”
Riggs says. In all probability, he wasn’t killed
in a brawl but in a political hit, very likely on orders
of Queen Elizabeth.
The poet pushed the envelope in his plays as well as
his life, always testing how much gore, satire, moral
and sexual ambiguity, as well as glorious poetry, his
audiences could bear in plays like The Jew of Malta
and Edward II. According to International
Herald Tribune drama critic Sheridan Morley, “Marlowe
makes Joe Orton—another radical, bleakly comic
gay playwright who was untimely murdered almost four
centuries later—look about as threatening as Winnie
the Pooh. . . . What makes Marlowe interesting is his
readiness to offend everyone and anyone.”
Sounds like a man for our times, and revivals of Marlowe’s
plays are on the rise. “Marlowe has found his
way back into the repertory,” says Riggs, who
also wrote Ben Jonson: A Life. “I think
part of the reason is that in the last 40 or 50 years,
it has become possible to stage plays that earlier audiences
would have found too shocking,” especially given
contemporary “fascination with over-the-top violence.”
The fascination extends to the playwright. A rock musical
was created about Marlowe’s life, as well as a
New York play or two. He makes a historically inaccurate
appearance in the film Shakespeare in Love. Clearly,
it’s time for someone to puncture some of the
myths.
Marlowe was a shoemaker’s son; Shakespeare a glover’s
son. They had in common an unusual window of opportunity:
boys from the bourgeois classes got an unprecedented
crack at a top-notch classical and literary education
during Elizabeth’s reign. With scholarships, Marlowe
earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from
Cambridge.
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Christopher Marlowe
Hulton Archive/Getty Images |
But it was a case of all dressed up and nowhere to
go. Although educated young men could have academic
careers, they depended on very competitive scholarships.
They could enter the Church, but the system was rigged
in favor of the rich. Poor boys didn’t get the
good jobs.
What could the overeducated do? “They found an
outlet on the stage—it was a real growth industry,”
Riggs says. The Reformation had destroyed passion plays
and touring miracle plays, but in 1576, “The Theatre”
opened—the first successful commercial theater
since the Romans. From the mid-1580s until the death
of Jonson in 1637, English theater made a “fantastic
leap forward—from being uninteresting and undistinguished
to becoming very good,” Riggs says.
Another boom industry was spying. Catholicism was outlawed
under Elizabeth; and Catholics were suspected, sometimes
rightly, of plotting against the palace. Of the playwrights
who came to the fore in the 1570s and 1580s, George
Gascoigne, Thomas Watson, Anthony Munday and Marlowe
“all combined the trades of intelligence gatherer
and playwright,” Riggs writes. Others, such as
Jonson and Samuel Daniel, were known to have carried
messages for the government. Did they do more? In the
squishy, gray world of Elizabethan intelligence networks,
the lines between spy and counterspy, informant and
messenger, were blurred.
Inevitably, espionage washed over into playwriting:
“The question of what was inside a person and
how to discover it bridged the novel professions of
secret service agent and playwright,” Riggs writes.
“Elizabethan plays taught their audiences to look
for the inward truth beneath the outward show of theatrical
presentation. . . . The plots and counterplots of this
era taught Marlowe that spies and scriptwriters had
a lot in common.”
Even in this unusual company, Marlowe stood out and
was himself a subject for surveillance. He was a notorious
brawler—in one case, the brawl resulted in a murder.
Marlowe was held in Newgate, a “gloomy, rat-infested
hold” for part of the time before he was discharged
at trial.
Newgate was an excellent place to form contacts with
the Catholic underground—and to extend job skills.
He met an activist who was an expert counterfeiter.
Counterfeiting was punishable by death but attractive
to inventive men who were perennially hard up for cash,
like Marlowe.
A brief counterfeiting collaboration in the Netherlands
ended when the authorities apprehended Marlowe in 1592.
He wriggled out of the charge, claiming his sole interest
was “to see the goldsmith’s cunning.”
Returning to England under guard, he was released by
Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Lord Burghley, without
punishment or pardon.
“People like Burghley didn’t hang out with
sons of shoemakers because they thought they were clever
poets,” Riggs says. Marlowe “was being protected.
Why was he being protected? Because he had information.”
Marlowe got into trouble again a year later, this time
over a clumsy conspiracy against the queen headed by
Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Marlowe’s theatrical
patron. The plot was so inept that Riggs suggests it
might have been a government sting to entrap disloyal
subjects. The mercurial Marlowe, as always, was suspect.
“All we know is that this guy is in the middle—and
the middle was a very dangerous play to be,” Riggs
says.
In the climate of suspicion and treachery, rumor had
it that Catholics and atheists, adherents to that “sin
of sins,” were joining forces against the government.
On May 20, 1593, Marlowe was ordered to report to the
Privy Council every day.
Informants, rogue agents and loan sharks in Marlowe’s
circle told officials that he “saieth & verily
believeth that one Marlowe is able to show more sound
reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able
to give to prove divinity.” Marlowe also was said
to have quipped “that Jesus Christ was a bastard,
St. Mary a whore and the Angel Gabriel a Bawd to the
Holy Ghost and that Christ was justly persecuted by
the Jews for his own foolishness.” Another informant
claimed: “Into every Company he Cometh he persuades
men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears
and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his
ministers.”
The queen’s command on seeing these reports was
to “prosecute it to the full.” Elizabeth
was “a hands-on queen,” Riggs says. Within
days, Marlowe was dead.
Let’s go back to that scene in Deptford, as Riggs
sees it. It wasn’t a tavern, but the home of Eleanor
Bull, a kinswoman of the queen’s governess, Blanche
Parry. There is no evidence the premises were ever rented
out. The three witnesses to the crime included Robert
Poley, Nicholas Skeres and Ingram Frizer, the murderer.
Poley was Lord Burghley’s man and chief of the
queen’s security apparatus. Frizer was a swindler
and Skeres his accomplice who also had done intelligence
work.
“Poley, Skeres and Frizer had worked with one
another before,” Riggs writes. “They had
practical experience in manipulating the law; they knew
how to fabricate a trial narrative and maintain it under
interrogation.”
According to these questionable witnesses, the eating,
drinking and conversation went on for about eight hours.
Frizer said that when he insisted Marlowe pay the bill,
Marlowe attacked him and he killed Marlowe in self-defense.
But would Marlowe attack his higher-up’s thugs?
If Frizer couldn’t get away from the attack, as
he claimed, how could he turn the dagger against Marlowe?
And how could Marlowe’s hand be turned against
Frizer if it was self-defense? Why didn’t the
other two witnesses intervene?
To Riggs, the inquest doesn’t make much sense.
“I find the whole choreography not very plausible.”
No one at the time seems to have asked many questions,
and one wonders if Poley’s presence inhibited
the proceedings. The queen signed Frizer’s pardon
a month after the killing. Everything was brushed under
a royal carpet.
Marlowe’s sulphuric reputation outlived him. When
his translation of Ovid’s Elegies appeared
in print six years later, the archbishop of Canterbury
ordered all copies to be burned in St. Paul’s
Churchyard.
By the time scholars began piecing together the Marlowe
story, the trail was cold. “I don’t think
anyone ever dreamed he would be as big a deal as he
became. Nobody guessed there would be a dozen scholars
in the last century trying to figure out what happened,”
Riggs says. But there’s still a staggering amount
of archival evidence. “To simply say we can’t
know—that’s a cop-out.”
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