Christopher Marlowe

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Marlowe was baptised on the 26th of February 1564 at St George's Church in Canterbury, just two months before William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon. Both men would define English drama for generations. Only one of them would live to see thirty. Marlowe died on the 30th of May 1593, in a house in Deptford owned by a widow named Eleanor Bull, and his burial took place the very next day in an unmarked grave. He was twenty-nine years old.

  Before his death, Marlowe had been the foremost dramatist in London, the first English playwright to achieve critical recognition for writing in blank verse, and probably a government spy. The coroner's inquest into his death was discovered only in 1925, and it raised as many questions as it answered. The three men present in that Deptford house that day all had connections to the Elizabethan intelligence world. None of them were reliable witnesses to anything.

  What this documentary will ask is not merely how Marlowe died, but who he actually was: the Canterbury shoemaker's son who translated Ovid in Latin, wrote plays about overreaching men who bargain away their souls, argued for atheism in company, and somehow attracted the attention of the Privy Council of Elizabeth I before he had turned twenty-four.

• 2. Canterbury to Cambridge

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  John Marlowe, Christopher's father, was a shoemaker in Canterbury. Christopher was the second of nine children, and after his older sister Mary died in 1568, he became the eldest surviving child in the family. By the time he was fourteen, he had earned a scholarship to The King's School in Canterbury. Two years later he was at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on another scholarship, with the understanding that he would become an Anglican clergyman.

  He did not become a clergyman. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1584 and mastered Latin along the way, reading and translating Ovid's Amores. When 1587 arrived and the university was ready to award his Master of Arts, the degree nearly went unissued. A rumour had spread that Marlowe intended to travel to the English Catholic seminary at Rheims in northern France, presumably to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. Under a royal edict Queen Elizabeth I had issued in 1585, any English citizen seeking Catholic ordination was committing a criminal act.

  Then something unusual happened. The Privy Council of Elizabeth I wrote directly to Cambridge on Marlowe's behalf, praising his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen. The degree was awarded on schedule. The nature of the service was never specified, and the original letter from the council was eventually lost. Only the summary in the council's minutes survived, and it was vague, stating that it was not "Her Majesties pleasure" that persons employed as Marlowe had been in "matters touching the benefit of his country" should be defamed. Scholars agree that this phrasing was typically used to protect government agents. Marlowe was twenty-three years old when his literary career in London began in 1587.

• 3. Spy and Suspect

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  Park Honan and Charles Nicholl, among the scholars who have examined the espionage question most closely, believe Marlowe's recruitment into government service happened while he was still at Cambridge. The buttery accounts from Corpus Christi, which tracked student purchases of food and drink, show Marlowe spending well beyond what his scholarship income could have covered during periods when he was actually in residence. During other periods, he was absent from the university for stretches that violated university regulations.

  In 1589, Marlowe was party to a fatal street quarrel involving his neighbours and the poet Thomas Watson in Norton Folgate. He was held in Newgate Prison for a fortnight, released on bail on the 1st of October, and acquitted in court on the 3rd of December. What he did in the two months between bail and acquittal is unrecorded.

  In 1592, Marlowe was arrested in the English garrison town of Flushing, in the Netherlands, on suspicion of counterfeiting coins, an activity believed to be connected to networks of seditious Catholics. He was sent to Lord Treasurer Burghley but faced no charges and served no prison time. According to one line of interpretation, he had been assigned to infiltrate the following of the Catholic plotter William Stanley and was reporting back to Burghley when the arrest occurred, possibly blowing the operation.

  Then in May 1593, bills threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands were posted around London. One of them, the "Dutch church libel", was written in rhymed iambic pentameter and signed "Tamburlaine", the name of Marlowe's most famous dramatic hero. When Thomas Kyd was arrested and his rooms were searched, a heretical document was found. Under torture, Kyd attributed it to Marlowe and described the playwright as "intemperate and of a cruel hart". A warrant for Marlowe's arrest followed on the 18th of May 1593.

• 4. Atheism and Accusation

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  Richard Baines was an informer who had also been present in Flushing, and the governor there had noted that Baines and Marlowe had each, "of malice", accused the other of instigating the counterfeiting. Following Marlowe's arrest in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a document he called a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word". It listed eighteen charges.

  The charges attributed to Marlowe by Baines included the assertions that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest," that St John the Evangelist "was bedfellow to Christ," and that Moses was a conjuror. Other passages were more broadly sceptical: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". Baines concluded that "the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped."

  Thomas Kyd, after his own imprisonment and probable torture, gave similar testimony and linked Marlowe to the circle of mathematician Thomas Harriot and Sir Walter Raleigh. Another document from around the same period claimed that Marlowe could show "more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity" and that he "hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others."

  In Elizabethan England, public accusation of atheism carried the implication of being an enemy of God and, by extension, of the Protestant monarchy. With fear growing around what contemporaries called the "School of Atheism" or the "School of Night" in the late sixteenth century, the charge was deeply dangerous. Some modern historians believe Marlowe's professed atheism, like his supposed Catholicism, may have been part of a spy's cover. Whatever the truth, the accusations were converging on him rapidly in the spring of 1593. On the 20th of May, he appeared before the Privy Council, was told to give his "daily attendance" on their Lordships, and was released. Ten days later he was dead.

• 5. The Reckoning at Deptford

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  Marlowe spent the 30th of May 1593 at the house of Eleanor Bull in Deptford. He was there with three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. All three had connections to one or both of the Walsinghams. Poley and Skeres had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot against Queen Elizabeth. Frizer was a servant to Thomas Walsingham and acted as a financial agent on his behalf.

  The coroner's report, as later uncovered by the scholar Leslie Hotson in 1925, described an argument that erupted between Marlowe and Frizer over the payment of the bill, known as the "Reckoning." Frizer was seated at a table between Skeres and Poley, with Marlowe lying behind him on a couch. Marlowe, according to the testimony, grabbed Frizer's dagger and wounded him on the head. In the struggle, Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye and died instantly. The jury found that Frizer had acted in self-defence. Within a month, Frizer was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford, on the 1st of June 1593, the same day as the inquest.

  Hotson's publication of the full inquest text prompted Professor George Lyman Kittredge to declare the mystery "cleared up for good and all." That confidence did not last. Eugenie de Kalb wrote to the Times Literary Supplement to argue that the struggle as described was physically impossible. Samuel A. Tannenbaum insisted the following year that a wound of that kind could not have caused instant death. Marlowe's biographer John Bakeless acknowledged "there is something queer about the whole episode". It was later discovered that the apparent absence of a local county coroner would, if noticed, have made the inquest legally null and void.

  The witnesses themselves were hardly reassuring. Poley was on record as saying "I will swear and forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm." Skeres had for years acted as a confidence trickster, drawing young men into money-lending schemes run by Frizer, Marlowe's apparent killer. The theories that have accumulated since include murder ordered by Audrey Walsingham, by Sir Walter Raleigh, by the Earl of Essex, by Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, and even by the Queen herself. One theory holds that the death was staged to save Marlowe from trial. The truth, resting on documents that only partially survive, is unlikely ever to be known.

• 6. Blank Verse and Bold Protagonists

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  Tamburlaine was the first English play written in blank verse for the commercial stage, performed in London in 1587 by the Admiral's Men. Its impact was immediate. Modern scholars cite the "many imitations" of Tamburlaine as evidence of Marlowe's standing as London's leading dramatist in the years before his death. It established with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy what scholars consider the mature phase of Elizabethan theatre.

  Edward Alleyn, the lead actor of the Admiral's Men, was unusually tall for the period, and Marlowe appears to have written the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas with Alleyn's imposing physical presence in mind. Marlowe's plays formed the foundation of the Admiral's Men's repertoire throughout the 1590s. The Jew of Malta, first performed on the 26th of February 1592 by Lord Strange's acting company, remained popular for fifty years.

  Doctor Faustus was the first dramatised version of the legend of a scholar who bargains with the devil. In Marlowe's handling, the protagonist is unable to burn his books or repent and seek mercy; he is carried off by demons. In the 1616 quarto, his mangled corpse is discovered by the other scholars in the play. The Massacre at Paris, first recorded in performance on the 26th of January 1593 by Lord Strange's Men at Henslowe's Rose Theatre, was the highest-grossing play for that company in that year.

  Edward the Second, entered into the Stationers' Register on the 6th of July 1593, five weeks after Marlowe's death, is considered by recent scholars to be his most modern play for its probing treatment of a king's private life. In 2016, the New Oxford Shakespeare series credited Marlowe as co-author of all three of the Henry VI plays. Tamburlaine's first two parts were published together in 1590 without naming an author. Attribution to Marlowe rests on comparison with his other verified works.

• 7. Shakespeare and the Successors

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  Shakespeare paid Marlowe the most famous tribute of any contemporary. In As You Like It, the line "Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight" is a direct quotation from Hero and Leander, attributed in the play to a "Dead Shepherd." The clown Touchstone's remark in the same play about a man struck "more dead than a great reckoning in a little room" appears to reference both the circumstances of Marlowe's death and a line from The Jew of Malta: "Infinite riches in a little room."

  Scholars have traced Marlovian themes through Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Macbeth, drawing direct lines from Dido, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus respectively. In Hamlet, Hamlet's request that the Player deliver a speech about the Trojan War echoes Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage. The character Marcade in Love's Labour's Lost is read as a deliberate acknowledgement of the character Mercury in Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, both attending the King of Navarre.

  Other writers of his own time responded with warmth. George Peele, within weeks of Marlowe's death, called him "Marley, the Muses' darling." Michael Drayton wrote that Marlowe "Had in him those brave translunary things / That the first poets had." Ben Jonson praised "Marlowe's mighty line." Thomas Nashe mourned his friend as "poor deceased Kit Marlowe." The publisher Edward Blount dedicated Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham.

  A fringe theory has circulated since, arguing that Marlowe faked his death and continued writing under the name of William Shakespeare. Academic consensus rejects it. A more measurable trace of Marlowe's reach is the bronze sculpture by Edward Onslow Ford, The Muse of Poetry, erected in Buttermarket, Canterbury in 1891, which now stands outside the Marlowe Theatre, the theatre named for him in that city in 1949.