Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the year of William
Shakespeare's birth. His father worked in Canterbury, England, as a cobbler,
and Christopher was one of many children to be born into their middle-class
household (Bakeless 3-30.) After attending the King's School on a scholarship,
he won another scholarship to attend Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Marlowe
completed his BA degree in four years and then stayed on at Cambridge to work
towards an MA. Students who did so were granted an extended scholarship-and
were expected to take Holy Orders.
During the following three years, Marlowe began to absent himself
from the college for weeks on end. Although such absences were not uncommon
among BA students, Marlowe's spotty attendance seems to have earned the ire of
the college administration. Rumors arose that Marlowe planned to defect to the
Catholic seminary of Rheims, France. Amidst such rumors, it became a matter of
the Queen's Council that Marlowe should receive his degree at graduation--the
Privy Council conveyed to the college that Marlowe had been in government
service all along. The evidence suggests that he had been serving England as a
spy in Rheims.
When Marlowe left Cambridge in 1587, it was to write for the
stage. Before the end of the year, both parts of his Tamburlaine were
produced in London. The plays basked in a decidedly popular and vernacular
spirit. Renaissance scholar David Riggs notes that the chaotic stage of Tamburlaine,
featuring a blasphemer and murderer protagonist, "challenged the limits of
public behavior" (220). In any case, Marlowe's debut earned him an
excellent standing among contemporary playwrights. His plays, of a quality
astonishing for a man in his twenties, constantly produced crowd-pleasing spectacles.
In the following six years before his early death, Marlowe continued to achieve
success through such works as Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and The
Massacre at Paris.
The last part of Marlowe's life was violent and contains some
suspicious coincidences. While living near London in 1592, a year before his
death, scholar Lisa Hopkins reports that Marlowe appeared so threatening and
was thought so dangerous by two constables of the town of Shoreditch (the
suburb in which Marlowe lived and where the theatres for which he wrote were
located) that they formally appealed for protection from him. As many
researchers of Marlowe's life have noted, it is puzzling what a person must do
in order to make the police afraid of him. In September of that same year
Marlowe was involved in a fight in his native Canterbury, attacking Williame
Corkine with a sword and dagger. This year, too, was the one in which Marlowe's
good friend Thomas Watson died. There is the possibility that during this time
Marlowe had a relationship with Thomas Walsingham, nephew of the Sir Thomas
Walsingham who was the head of the spies in Queen Elizabeth's service. However,
the relationship is by no means proved. It is a matter of record, however, that
Marlowe was staying at Walsingham's country house in Scadbury at the time he
was killed.
The circumstances of Marlowe's death provide much for speculation.
On May 30, 1593, when Marlowe was only twenty-nine, he was feasting in a rented
private room in a Deptford house (the home of Dame Eleanor Bull, not a tavern
as is often recounted) with a group of four men. He reportedly quarreled with
Ingram Friser (the personal servant of Sir Thomas Walsingham), who killed
Marlowe on the spot by stabbing him above the right eye. Friser claimed
self-defense and was pardoned shortly thereafter, despite the mysterious
circumstances. David Riggs points out that the Queen herself had ordered
Marlowe's death four days before (334). Was the Friser incident merely a
coincidence? And how had Marlowe earned the anger of the Queen?
Two days after Marlowe's death, a man named Richard Baines sent a
document to the police accusing Marlowe of blasphemy and homosexuality. Among
other things, the document recounts Marlowe's barely concealed atheism, his
public denouncement of faith, and his sacrilegious speech against Jesus
himself. The document also notes that Marlowe was not content merely to keep
these opinions to himself; at every opportunity, he supposedly tried to win men
over to his views. His allegedly heretical views were in fact already known to
the government. When the famous playwright Thomas Kyd-Marlowe's former
roommate-was arrested in possession of blasphemous papers, Kyd confessed that
he had received the documents from Marlowe. Seen in this light, the Queen's
order and Marlowe's consequent death seem to be of a piece. Harold Bloom is
convinced that Marlowe was "eliminated with maximum prejudice by
Walsingham's Elizabethan Secret Service" (10.)
If these events are linked, the details remain obscure.
Allegations abound. Men reported that Marlowe was cruel, violent, homosexual,
and foul-mouthed, cursing all the way to his last breath. Although these
reports cannot be discounted easily, little conclusive evidence supports any of
these allegations. As J. B. Steane puts it, "as for Marlowe the man,
atheist and rebel or not, we have to acknowledge that there is no single piece
of evidence that is not hearsay-only that there is a good deal of it, that it
is reasonably consistent, and that on the other side there is no single fact or
piece of hearsay known to us" (16). Who was Marlowe, really?
Further complicating our picture of Marlowe is the relationship
between author and work. Marlowe's works have been interpreted as atheistic and
blasphemous; they also have been understood as traditional and Christian. The
two sides stand apart in their proximity to any picture of Marlowe's personal
life. To be sure, an author does not necessarily (if ever) write through autobiography
or self-expression, or to communicate an ideological position. Yet, it is
significant that the young poet, dead before his thirties, is a man who studied
to take Holy Orders, who likely served his country in espionage missions, and
who died violently under the taint of scandal. Such a colorful and ambiguous
character cannot help but loom behind Marlowe's work. Where biography has
relevance for literary interpretation, readers can profit from meeting the
challenge of seeing Marlowe's plays from the perspective of his life; at the
same time, one should remember that his works were intended for English
audiences who did not know as much about his life.
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