Late Tudor England suffered from many maladies: the weather of the Little Ice Age, filthy streets, plague, entertainment featuring animal fights, religious conflict, and endless real and perceived conspiracies against the Queen—it was a cultural wasteland governed by a somewhat delusional, self-absorbed monarch. However, in the 1580s, from England “burst forth” magnificent advances in science and intellectual growth that propelled centuries of greatness. The author posits, “In the course of his restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and stupendous achievements, Christopher Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.”
The son of a shoemaker, he was born in Canterbury in 1564. At 14, he was awarded a scholarship to the King’s School, Canterbury. “Admission was a coup. It changed Marlowe’s life decisively and forever.” How he acquired the skills to pass the admission test is unknown. Learning and speaking Latin was a requisite for success. As the classics preceded Christianity, what one studied in school did not sound similar to the preaching one heard at church. Virgil and Ovid often wrote about lust and desire. “The books to which Marlowe was introduced in school offered an escape from the confining orthodoxies with which he and virtually everyone was hemmed in.” Three years later, he was off to Cambridge, where he was exposed to a rigorous academic life at a time of ongoing religious conflict in England. He brilliantly translated Ovid’s Amores, introducing a new style followed for centuries, and is believed to have indulged in proscribed sexual activities. He spent time in the library, hunched over a four-hundred-year-old atlas featuring the name of Tamburlaine, the title of his first play. After receiving his BA, he stayed on for another three years, declaring, as his scholarship required, his intention to become an Anglican prelate. He had no such intention, spent a considerable amount of time away from Cambridge, and consequently was denied the degree. When a letter from the Queen’s office arrived stating he had been in the service of the Crown, his degree was immediately granted.
Marlowe had been engaged and sent overseas to spy by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary and spymaster, whose primary mission was to protect the Crown from Catholic assassins. It was an opaque world in which one was uncertain who was a friend and whom one could trust. In 1587, Marlowe moved to London and rented rooms near the two existing theaters. With the construction of the Rose on the south side of the river, written material to perform was needed to entertain the burgeoning crowds. Into this world, where plays lasted a few weeks, maybe a month, Marlowe introduced to the owner of the Rose Tamburlaine the Great. “Virtually everything in Elizabethan theater is pre- and post-Tamburlaine. No one in English poetry had ever spoken with the grandeur and magnificent self-confidence of Marlowe’s Scythian hero.” The play had not a scintilla of the era’s morality and was a vastly popular success. Henslowe, the theater owner, asked for, and Marlowe cranked out, the sequel. Both were written in unrhymed iambic pentameter—blank verse. It changed everything, not unlike the arrival of talkies. As popular as the two plays were, some thought them blasphemous.
Henslowe suggested a series of plays on the Wars of the Roses, with Kit Marlowe collaborating with Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare. Shakespeare did most of the work and is heralded as the author. He admired and emulated Marlowe’s writing but was wary of risk-taking. Marlowe’s next solo success was The Jew of Malta, fiendishly plotted and unlike anything before. The play was a Machiavellian portrayal of the rise of the Stanley family, the sponsor of the theater and the playwright, in Tudor England. In 1593, Lord Strange became the Earl of Derby, and because of his family’s loyalty to Catholicism and rebellious relatives in France, he was highly suspect in the hyper-paranoid world of Elizabeth’s court. A year later, he died of poisoning. For Marlowe, the taint could easily spread to him, particularly as he was indifferent and skeptical about religion and inclined toward homosexuality. He spent time in Sir Walter Raleigh’s circle and was thought to be sympathetic to the ideas of a scientist, believed by the authorities to be an atheist, who worked for Raleigh.
“It seems entirely possible that the peculiar atmosphere of liberty among those who assembled in Raleigh’s Durham House triggered in Marlowe his most transgressive and risk-taking impulse. Sometime in 1592, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was performed—Marlowe understood that he had struck theatrical gold. He had unearthed a deep vein of popular fear and fascination." The play is considered a “tragic vision of a looming catastrophe.” Faustus is Marlowe’s most autobiographical and riskiest work. Faustus celebrates a Black Mass, in Latin—a language banned in England since 1559. It is imbued with Calvinist doctrine and features Faustus making a pact with the Devil. It stood in complete opposition to the evangelicals of his era.
While plague killed one in six in London, Marlowe was away in the country, lounging with a wealthy friend and working on The Massacre at Paris. In May of 1593, Marlowe was arrested and summoned back to the capital. Although no charges were pressed, the reason for his arrest were documents in the possession of his friend Thomas Kyd, who may have implicated Marlowe as an atheist while he was tortured. Another supposed friend supplied the Privy Council with endless purported scandalous statements attributable to Marlowe. He clearly was in trouble—trouble that could only end in hanging. Nonetheless, nothing happened after he returned to London. On May 30, he spent the day in a bar with three friends. Around six in the evening, there was noise in their private room, and Marlowe was dead. All three men told the police that Marlowe had attacked one of them, who killed him in self-defense. Theories abound about what happened and why. As all four men had at one time, or would in the future, be in the service of the state, many believe he was assassinated for his atheism by officers of the state.
“The medieval worldview was still intact in Elizabethan England. The structure of society was ordered as it was by God. For the cultural life of England to move forward, someone had to come along and break through the suffocating carapace of inherited dogma.” That person was the reckless cobbler’s son from Canterbury. “Through the fissures Marlowe had made, the light began to flow. Shakespeare saw that he could now enter territory into which no one before Marlowe had dared to venture.”
I’ve found this to be an extraordinary book. The author is a brilliant writer, and Marlowe is beyond fascinating. The most profound contribution in this book is its depiction of the totalitarian and paranoid views of Elizabeth and her advisors. Perhaps that was simply the nature of the era—but it feels closer to a 20th-century dictatorship.
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