Following an accusation of heresy, likely
extracted under torture, by friend Thomas Kyd, playwright Christopher Marlowe
was arrested on May 18, 1593. Almost as quickly, he was released.
But Marlowe’s
life, marked by mystery and controversy at every turn, was bound to end the
same way. Within two weeks after his arrest, the masterful Elizabethan
playwright-poet—not to mention spy, counterfeiter, infidel, and homosexual—was
stabbed to death, under circumstances almost certainly covered up by the
government.
A prior
post of mine discussed the death—and, in necessarily brief form, the
life—of Marlowe (1564-1593). But the environment surrounding his demise remains
so complex that only one post hardly does justice to it.
Just as important, a new book—deeply accomplished in
style, if not conclusions—has brought renewed attention to the case. I don’t
buy a major underlying premise of Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers—i.e., that the
playwright did not die, but was whisked away by British intelligence, carving
out a new identity for himself as William Shakespeare.
But
Barber does a sterling job of evoking a truly dark time, and her book, like
Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, is one of
the few examples I can think of where the narrative power of a novel is
combined with evocative verse.
The glorification of Queen Elizabeth I by
courtiers in her own time and historians bent on an Anglocentric view of the
past masks a grave reality that the Marlowe case highlights: her subjects lived
in a police state.
Fears of a takeover of the nation by the Catholic monarch of
Spain, Philip II, created an atmosphere of paranoia, as well as the rise of a
massive intelligence network monitored by Sir Francis
Walsingham. Control of the theater community, perhaps the major
entertainment venue of the time, was a priority.
Go through the plays not only of Shakespeare,
Marlowe and Kyd but also of John Ford, John Webster and Thomas Middleton, and
the same pattern emerges: not one of these dramas of deceit and violence was
set in Elizabethan England.
More often than not, to be absolutely safe, the
plots occurred on the Continent, in places such as Venice, Spain or
Greece—areas where most Elizabethans had never seen, and could know only by
reputation.
When a play was set on English soil, it was best to
set it way off in the past—or use a metaphor that, in the context of a play,
could be shrugged off as expressing no more than it appeared to do on the
surface. Thus, “a rose by another name would smell as sweet,” except if the
colors referred to the rival houses of Lancaster and York in the War of the
Roses.
Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay is instructive in this
regard. I don’t accept all the ramifications of her contention that Shakespeare
was a secret Catholic, but she operates from an indisputable premise: anyone
writing plays had to communicate via coded language.
At very least, playwrights
might be interrogated by government agents, then induced to change some aspect
of a play, as when Shakespeare altered the name Sir John Oldcastle to Sir John
Falstaff to avoid offending a descendant of the knight.
Thomas
Kyd’s treatment was worse than Shakespeare’s. Being the author of The Spanish Tragedy, one of the most
performed plays of the Elizabethan Age, as well as in the employ of a prominent
English earl, did him no good with Walsingham’s men.
Somehow, his name became associated with an
offensive, anti-immigrant sign posted on the door of an English church. The
authorities raided Kyd’s room, where they discovered a number of blasphemous
papers.
After a week of interrogation, a prolonged period in
which torture was likely employed, Kyd claimed that the materials were not his
but Marlowe’s.
Marlowe, released on bail following his arrest, was still
required by the Privy Council to report daily to the Palace of Westminster. He
was due to appear before the Star Chamber Court, where a fate similar to Kyd’s (at
best, shunning by his patron; at worst, judicial murder) might await him.
Within a few years after his death, rumors
(conveniently allowed by the government) circulated that Marlowe had died in a
barroom brawl. It wasn’t until the 20th century that a scholar,
performing like a literary Philip
Marlowe, uncovered some salient facts about the death that contradicted this
version.
First, the death had not occurred in the bar but in
a room. Second, the room was in the
house of Eleanor Bull, a bailiff’s widow with court connections. Third,
Mrs. Bull’s house was no ordinary lodging establishment, but one with
connections to Walsingham’s spy network. Fourth, the four men in the room that
night all knew each other; Marlowe; the man who stabbed him in an alleged quarrel
over the “reckoning” for the food and drink that day, Ingram Frizer; and two
others who served as eyewitnesses at the subsequent inquest.
In 20th-century private-eye parlance,
Christopher Marlowe made for an ideal fall guy. He had already been involved in
a street brawl in which his friend, Thomas Watson, had come to his aid. Watson
had ended up killing the man with whom Marlowe was fighting, an innkeeper’s son
named William Bradley.
Whatever services Marlowe had performed for Her
Majesty, the last thing the spy network could afford was someone indiscreet. It
would be better for Marlowe to be removed from the scene, and even better yet
if it could be made to seem a result of his own doing. Thus, the word went out
that Marlowe had died in an argument over the “reckoning,” or bill, at the
Widow Bull’s. In fact, all the circumstances now known make it quite possible
that he was "terminated" in a government safe house by agents known
to him and to Her Majesty's spymaster.
Frizer’s subsequent argument—that he had acted in
self-defense—was readily accepted, all the more so as it came from a personal
employee of Walsingham’s who actually lived on his estate. Frizer was pardoned
within a month—extraordinarily fast for such a case.
The life of Shakespeare has struck many as being
extraordinarily quiet and bourgeois. The example of his principal stage rival,
Marlowe—dead before the age of 30—would have served as sufficient warning about
the dangers of a reckless life.
In the typical coded language of the Time, The
Bard alluded to his fallen contemporary in As
You Like It: “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.”
.jpg)
Dr.
Frasier Crane (played
by Kelsey Grammer): “I've been taking stock of myself.”.jpg)
Following an accusation of heresy, likely
extracted under torture, by friend Thomas Kyd, playwright Christopher Marlowe
was arrested on May 18, 1593. Almost as quickly, he was released. 
“The truth is that because both parties are in the
tank with these huge (campaign) contributions, no matter who wins our public
policy is being bought off after the election. It has even happened literally
in the halls of Congress. That kind of thing happened in the 1990s, before John
McCain and I were able to stop party soft money. We had votes of, for example,
85–15, 90–10, where both parties were bought off on things like trade
agreements, telecommunications, and, of course, the outrageous repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act, which had more to do with our economic collapse than
anything else. It’s happening again, maybe worse than before. To me, you have
to broaden the frame to see that in the long run, this will be crushing to our
democracy.”—Russell Feingold, former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, interviewed
by Francis Fukuyuma, “A Senator's Lament,”
The American Interest, March/April
2013
