Christopher Marlowe

An anonymous portrait, often believed to show Christopher Marlowe.

Christopher ("Kit") Marlowe (baptised 26 February, 1564 – 30 May, 1593) was an English dramatist, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is considered to be the only playwright of the Elizabethan period whose talents were equal to those of William Shakespeare, and were it not for his untimely death at an early age some speculate that it might be Marlowe, and not Shakespeare, whom we remember as being the single greatest writer in the English language. It was after all Marlowe, and not Shakespeare, who pioneered all of the traditions of the Elizabethan stage. Marlowe was the first writer to introduce blank verse (that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter) to the modern Englsh language, and it was by borrowing and imitating the traditions Marlowe set down that Shakespeare, Milton, and all the other great epic dramatists of England would find their own poetic voices.

Certainly, as an educated man of ideas closely connected to the court (some have speculated that Marlowe may have been a secret agent of the Queen), Marlowe was the most cerebral poet and playwright of his day. His plays can at times seem to be incredibly spare, without any of the exhaustive decorousness we expect from an Elizabethan, and in this sense he reads, like Shakespeare, as a strikingly modern writer. Marlowe is not so much interested in the conventions of classical theater so much as he is in the minds of his characters and the ideas that they run up against. In Dr. Faustus, Marlowe's greatest play, he addresses directly the issue of the rise of science and rational inquiry in an age of superstition; and we see Marlowe, mirrored in the play's main character, as he is: a restless, probing thinker with the acuity of a philosopher and the artistry of one of the greatest poets of his or any era.

Background

Born in Canterbury the son of a shoemaker, he attended The King's School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on a scholarship and received his bachelor of arts degree in 1584. In 1587 the university hesitated to award him his master's degree because of a rumour that he had converted to Catholicism and gone to the English college at Rheims to prepare for the priesthood. However, his degree was awarded on schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen. The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but their letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much sensational speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although Marlowe obviously did serve the queen in some capacity.

Literary career

The brief Dido, Queen of Carthage seems to be Marlowe's first extant dramatic work, possibly written at Cambridge with Thomas Nashe.

Marlowe's first known play to be performed on the London stage was 1587's Tamburlaine, a story of the conqueror Timur. The first English play to make effective dramatic use of blank verse, it marks the beginning of the mature phase of Elizabethan Theatre. It was a smash success, and Tamburlaine Part II soon followed. The sequence of his remaining plays is unknown. All were written on controversial themes. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, based on the recently published German Faustbuch, was the first dramatic version of the Faust legend of a scholar's dealing with the devil. The Jew of Malta, depicting a Maltese Jew's barbarous revenge against the city authorities, featured a prologue delivered by Machiavelli himself. Edward the Second was an English history play about the dethronement of Edward II by his dissatisfied barons and his French queen (the possibility that Elizabeth I might be dethroned by pro-Catholic forces was very real at the time). The Massacre at Paris was a short, sketchy play portraying the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomews Day Massacre in 1572, an event that English Protestants frequently invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery.

His other works include the first book of the minor epic Hero and Leander (published with a continuation by George Chapman in 1598), the popular lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia.

The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all his other works were published posthumously. In 1599 his translation of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive material.

Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn. He was unusually tall for the time, and the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written especially for him. Marlowe's plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.

The Marlowe Legend

As with other writers of the period, such as Shakespeare, little is known about Marlowe. Most of the evidence is legal records and other official documents that tell us little about him. This hasn't stopped writers of both fiction and non-fiction speculating about his activities and character. Marlowe has often been regarded as a spy, a brawler, a heretic, and a homosexual. The evidence for some of these claims is slight. The bare facts of Marlowe's life have been embellished by many writers into colourful, and often fanciful, narratives of the Elizabethan underworld. Unfortunately, these speculations and flights of fancy are the closest thing we have to a biography of the poet.

Marlowe the Spy

The only evidence that Marlowe worked for the government is the letter of the Privy Council mentioned above. The nature of this work is unknown. In an obscure incident in the Netherlands in 1592, Marlowe was apprehended at Flushing, then an English possession, after being accused of involvement in counterfeiting money[1]. Marlowe confessed, but was not punished on his return to England. This has suggested to some that he was working for the secret service again, but it could be that the authorities accepted the story he told the governor of Flushing, that he had only wanted "to see the goldsmith's cunning".

Marlowe the Brawler

Although the fight that resulted in his death in 1593 is the only occasion where there is evidence of Marlowe assaulting a person, he had a history of trouble with the law.

Marlowe was arrested in Norton Folgate near Shoreditch in September 1589 following a brawl in which Thomas Watson killed one William Bradley. A jury found that Marlowe had no involvement in Bradley's death and Watson was found to have acted in self-defence. In Shoreditch in May 1592, he was required to provide a guarantee that he keep the peace, the reason is unknown. In September 1592 in Canterbury he was charged with damaging property. He subsequently counter-sued the plaintiff, alleging assault. Both cases appear to have been dropped.

Marlowe the Atheist

Marlowe had a reputation for atheism. The only contemporary evidence for this is from Marlowe's accuser in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had reported that both men had accused one another of instigating the counterfeiting and of intention to go over to the Catholic side, "both as they say of malice one to another". Following Marlowe's arrest on a charge of atheism in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word"[2]. Baines attributes to Marlowe outrageously blasphemous ideas such as, "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest unchaste", "the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly" and, "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom" (cf. John 13:23-25) and "that he used him as the sinners of Sodom". He also claims that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are merely skeptical in tone: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". Similar statements were made by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture[3][4](see below); both Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh's circle of skeptics. Another document claims that Marlowe had read an "atheist lecture" before Raleigh. Baines ends his "note" with the ominous statement: "I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped".

Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists. However, plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be performed, and the censorship of publications was under the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any of Marlowe's works to be unacceptable (apart from the Amores).

Marlowe the Homosexual

Marlowe is often described today as homosexual, although the evidence for this is inconclusive. Primarily, much like other aspects of Marlowe's biography, speculation on his sex-life abounds while evidence is nowhere to be found. A number of Marlowe's enemies, most notably the aforementioned Richard Baines, made numerous lewd suggestions about Marlowe. Likewise, after his death, many hardliner Anglicans wrote fiery sermons citing Marlowe as a sinner who got his just deserts.

Marlowe as Shakespeare

Given the murky inconsistencies concerning the account of Marlowe's death, an ongoing conspiracy theory has arisen centred on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. Authors who have propounded this theory include:

• Wilbur Gleason Zeigler It Was Marlowe(1895)
• Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare(1955)[5]
• Louis Ule, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography
• AD Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell (1994)

Although it is necessary to mention Marlowe's connection with this conspiracy theory due to its ongoing popularity and marginal influence on interpretations of both Marlowe and Shakespeare, it should be made clear that no strong evidence that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same person has ever emerged, and that the evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming that one can safely conclude that this theory is entirely preposterous.

Marlowe's Death

In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel"[6], written in blank verse, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed "Tamburlaine." On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a fragment of a heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted, possibly under torture, that it had belonged to Marlowe. Two years earlier they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, and Kyd assumed that at this time, when they were sharing a workroom, the document had found its way among his papers. Marlowe's arrest was ordered on 18 May. Marlowe was not in London, but was staying with Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham. However, he duly appeared before the Privy Council on 20 May and was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary." On 30 May, Marlowe was murdered.

Various versions of what happened were current at the time. Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for his "epicurism and atheism". In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight, and this is still often stated as fact today.

The facts only came to light in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report on Marlowe's death in the Public Record Office [7]. Marlowe had spent all day in a house (not a tavern) in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, along with three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot. Frizer was a servant of Thomas Walsingham. Witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had earlier argued over the bill, exchanging "divers malicious words." Later, while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch, Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and began attacking him. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was accidentally stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The coroner concluded that Frizer acted in self-defense, and he was promptly pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, on 1 June, 1593.

Marlowe's death is considered by some to be suspicious for the following reasons:

1. The three men who were in the room with him when he died all had links to the intelligence service as well as to the London underworld. Frizer and Skeres also had a long record as loan sharks and con-men, as shown by court records.
2. Their story that they were on a day's pleasure outing to Deptford is implausible. In fact, they spent the whole day closeted together, deep in discussion. Also, Robert Poley was carrying confidential despatches to the Queen, who was at Greenwich nearby, but instead of delivering them, he spent the day with Marlowe and the other two.
3. It seems too much of a coincidence that Marlowe's death occurred only a few days after his arrest for heresy.
4. The unusual way in which his arrest for heresy was handled by the Privy Council. He was released in spite of prima facie evidence, and even though the charges implicitly connected Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Northumberland with the heresy. This strongly suggests that the Privy Council considered the heresy charge to be a set-up, and/or that it was connected with a power struggle within the Privy Council itself.

For these reasons and others, it seems likely that there was more to Marlowe's death than emerged at the inquest. However, on the basis of our current knowledge, it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions about what happened or why. There are many different theories, of varying degrees of probability, but no solid evidence.

Since we have only written documents on which to base our conclusions, and since it is probable that the most crucial information about Marlowe's death was never committed to writing at all, we are unlikely ever to know for certain the full circumstances of Marlowe's death.

Marlowe's Contemporary Reputation

Whatever the particular focus of modern critics, biographers and novelists, for his contemporaries in the literary world, Marlowe was above all an admired and influential artist. Within weeks of his death, George Peele referred to him as "Marley, the Muses' darling"; Michael Drayton noted that he "Had in him those brave translunary things/That the first poets had", and Ben Jonson wrote of "Marlowe's mighty line". Thomas Nashe wrote warmly of his friend, "poor deceased Kit Marlowe". So too did the publisher Edward Blount, in the dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham.

The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in his only reference to a contemporary writer, in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander ("Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might/'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?') but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words "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 reckoning in a little room." This is clearly a reference to the wording of the official inquest document of 1593 lost and uncovered in 1925, Shakespeare had obviously read it.

Recent Marlowe controversies

In November 2005, a production of Tamburlaine at the Barbican Arts Centre in London was accused of defering to Muslim sensibilities by amending a section of the play in which the title character burns the Qu'ran and excoriates the prophet Muhammad; the sequence was changed so that Tamburlaine instead defiles books representing all religious texts. The director (in the view of many, mendaciously) denied censoring the play, stating that the change was a "purely artistic" decision "to focus the play away from anti-Turkish pantomime to an existential epic". This however shifts a considerable degree of focus from a number of anti-theist (and specifically anti-Muslim) points within the play and changes, significantly, the tone and tenor of the work. [8] [9]

Works

The dates of composition are approximate.

Plays

• Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1583) (with Thomas Nashe)
• Tamburlaine (c.1587)
• Doctor Faustus (c.1589, revised c.1592)
• The Jew of Malta (c.1589)
• Edward II (c.1592)
• The Massacre at Paris (c.1593)

Poetry

• Translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (c.1582)
• Translation of Ovid's Elegies (c. 1582)
• 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' (1590s)
• Hero and Leander (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598)

Additional reading

• Brooke, C.F. Tucker. The Life of Marlowe and "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage." London: Methuen, 1930. (pp. 107, 114, 99, 98)
• Marlow, Christopher. Complete Works. Vol. 3: Edward II. Ed. R. Rowland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (pp. xxii-xxiii)
• Louis Ule Christopher Marlowe (1564-1607): A Biography, Carlton Press, 1996. ISBN 0806250283
• David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, OUP, 1998; ISBN 0192834452
• J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, eds., Constructing Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge 2000. ISBN 052157255X
• Constance Kuriyama,Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Cornell University Press, 2002. ISBN 0801439787
• Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Vintage, 2002 (revised edition) ISBN 0099437473
• Alan Shepard, "Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada", Ashgate, 2002. ISBN 075460229
• M. J. Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe?, Sutton, 2002; ISBN 0750929634
• Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford, Carroll & Graf, 2003. (novel about Marlowe based on the version of events in The Reckoning) ISBN 0786711523
• David Riggs, "The World of Christopher Marlowe", Henry Holt and Co., 2005 ISBN 0805080368
• Louise Walsh "Tamburlaine Must Die", novella based around the build up to Marlowe's death.
• John Passfield Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe (novel) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-1558-X
• John Passfield The Making of Water Lane (journal) Authorhouse, 2005 ISBN 1-4208-2020-6

External links

• An article on Marlowe at Encyclopaedia Britannica's Shakespeare and the Globe
• The Marlowe Society
• Marlowe Lives!
• The works of Marlowe at Perseus Project
• Christopher Marlowe Books
• Works by Christopher Marlowe. Project Gutenberg
• Peter Farey's Marlowe Page includes a factual biography and reproduces the documents concerning Marlowe as well as his complete works (but also contains material related to the Shakespearean authorship question)
• Peter Bull presents a case for Marlowe as the true author of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
• The Opposite of Showbusiness: a play by Jim Grover in which it suggested that Marlowe was killed by Edward Alleyn

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Christopher Marlowe  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Christopher Marlowe"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.