If anyone knows something about Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) it is likely to be about the way he died – by being murdered. They may know less about other aspects of his life and his immense achievements. Canterbury tries to rectify this by making much of its being the place where he was born and spent his life till going to Cambridge when he was in his late teens. A theatre is named after him. A statue stands in the city centre commemorating him. There is a plaque on the church of St George’s tower where he was baptised. The rest of the church was destroyed in the Second World War bombing raids.
Marlowe is a troubling, complex figure though. As one of his more recent biographers David Riggs makes clear, as far as his work goes, the cause of celebration is straightforward enough. By the age of 29, he had created a new way of writing English verse, and his achievements were already formidable. Their range of references, and their emotional scope, were exceptional and groundbreaking. `Tamburlaine the Great’ (in two parts, circa 1587-8) embraces the world of the Middle East, a place about as remote from contemporary knowledge and points of reference as it is possible to imagine. The play enjoyed huge popular success, in the emerging world of public theatre in the Elizabethan era. `Dr Faustus’ (from around 1590) took the story of the real Faustus from earlier in the century who reportedly sold his soul to the Devil and made it into a supreme moral drama of the costs of knowledge, ambition and pride. `Edward the Second’ with its infamous account of the tragic king’s brutal final moments before his murder addressed the taboo subject of homosexuality. It was issued around the time that Marlowe’s great contemporary, and competitor, Shakespeare, was producing the earliest of his history plays, Henry the Fourth Part One. It showed that the two were aware of each other, and were influencing each other’s work.
Marlow as a person however is a much more difficult topic. His plays after all deal with incendiary issues like atheism, disloyalty, and moral deceit (Faust’s deadly pact typifies this). In his life, he was associated with propagation of atheism. His relatively humble background seemed to push him to seek patrons and supporters no matter what the costs. He has a shadowy quality, with speculation that he may have been a double agent, involved in espionage work for the creator of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, Sir Francis Walsingham, and his successor Lord Burghley, but also for Catholic groups, and those demanding an end to all religion. More prosaically, he was involved in at least one murder, and in 1592 on what might have been his last visit to the city of his birth, Marlowe was fined £5 for damages in the local court after a brawl in the Westgate area, where his father lived, with a tailor, William Corkine. This was no simple fist fight – it involved use of a stick and a dagger (David Riggs, `The World of Christopher Marlowe’, Faber and Faber, London, 2004, 295). Marlowe had been chucked in jail in London several times, and accused of being involved in counterfeiting with accomplices while in the Netherlands. No wonder he wrote so magnificently about moral quandaries and divided allegiances. He seems to have experienced this most of his life.
His father, John, moved to Canterbury in the mid-1550s, from Ospringe near Faversham. Perhaps the family had a somewhat edgy personality trait running through it. Records show that he was litigious, and also a survivor, someone who entered the shoemaking trade and despite various ups and downs managed to prosper and eventually, served as a innkeeper. He died more than a decade after his son in 1605. Ironically, the two greatest playwrights in the English language were the offspring of fathers who worked in making articles of clothing – Shakespeare’s father was a glovemaker. Marlowe’s sister was also a chip off the old block. She was accused of being `a common swearer, a blasphemer of the name of God,’ who, in her mid fifties, fought a neighbour with a sword and knife! (Riggs, 349).
The Canterbury Marlowe knew was not the one that now celebrates him – a place mostly of benign celebration of history, and Anglican spirituality. The end of the Thomas Becket cult had stopped the vast flows of pilgrims and the trade that flowed from their visits at the Dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s. in the 1560s, the place was reportedly spiritually and economically at a low ebb – something that was probably true till the arrival of the railways almost 250 years later. After marriage to a local of Dover who had also migrated to the city, Katherine Arthur in 1561, the family moved to the area around St George the Martyr in what is now the eastern part of the central city area. During their era however it was where the butchery business was concentrated, and close to Oaten Hill, the place for executions. It is likely that Marlowe was accustomed to the sight of animal and human blood and carcases from an early age!
The still extant King’s School Canterbury can claim responsibility for some of his education, though he only went there for twenty months after winning a scholarship. Before this he most probably attended a free school set up by Archbishop Parker near to the still standing Eastbridge Hospital. Aged 16, he went up to Cambridge in 1580, and stayed there, on and off, for much of the next five years. The courtyard at Corpus Christi College where he had his rooms still, exceptionally, stands – the oldest extant in the city. It was while here that he habitually shared a bed with his room mate. As Riggs delicately comments, `Bed-sharing proved beneficial in many ways. It enabled men to maintain stable, intimate relationships without the risk of illegitimate children; it provided an affective basis for working alliances in domestic households, the military trades, ecclesiastical foundations and the professions’ (Ibid, 72). In Cambridge, there were two other important changes. Marlowe started to engage with discussions of atheism, and he also somehow became involved in intelligence work (this is one explanation put forward for some of his lengthy absences in the period in which he was doing his masters, where his income on paper remained minimal, and yet the college accounts show he had access to other means).
The involvement in some kind of intelligence work remained for the rest of his life, most of it spent either in London, or Europe, with only a few visits back to this home town. He lived in an era when the pretender to the British throne Mary Queen of Scots was executed, the Spanish Armada occurred, and a host of other plots, real of imagined, were unearthed against the protestant Elizabeth the First from Catholic opponents. Hunting our traitors and heretics intensified till the time of Marlowe’s demise in the Deptford house of the widower Eleanor Bull on 29th May 1593. Those present that evening were Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skerres, and Robert Poley. All had links with the intelligence world. While never confirmed by anything else except the murder of Marlowe himself, Widow Bull’s was probably an ale house. The coroner’s statement issued after the writer’s death said that there was an argument over the payment of the bill. This resulted in Frizer stabbing his dagger in Marlowe’s face, killing him instantly. Speculation about the whole incident being a set up because of the threat that Marlowe posed to the Queen continues to this day. Frizer after all was pardoned very quickly, and lived the rest of his life relatively unscathed.
The drama of controversy over his death sometimes conceals the other side of Marlowe’s life – the body of work be produced in the form of plays, translations, and other material. His plays were successful from the time of their first production, revolutionising drama, both the writing and the staging of it. He figured at a time when the murky, disreputable world of public performances was gaining more respectable patronage. It is one of history’s great `What ifs’, to imagine what he might heave done had he lived longer. There would have been the extraordinary spectacle of Shakespeare figuring alongside the one contemporary who may have equalled his impact and achievement. As it is, the few works Marlowe wrote had a huge impact on the world of others. This, as much as anything else, is a testament to Marlowe’s spectral, shadowy existence.