Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE RECKONING” by Charles Nicholl (first
published 1992; revised edition 2002)
About fourteen
years ago, my wife and I were visiting one of our sons, who was then a student
at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. We were having breakfast with him and a bunch
of other students in the college’s ancient and august dining hall, when a
cleaner walked past our table with a cleaning rag over one arm, and a framed
portrait under the other. I did a double take. The portrait was the famous
Elizabethan image (dated 1585) of a young gentleman, who has often been
identified with one of Corpus Christi’s most famous (or notorious) alumni, Christopher
Marlowe (1564-93). It’s the image that most often appears on collected editions
of Marlowe’s plays.
“Surely that isn’t the original?” I said
to my son.
“Of course it is,” he replied, and
explained that it was often taken down for its frame to be wiped.
To me, seeing it
carried along as casually as this created about the same effect as I would have
felt had it been van Gogh’s sunflowers or the Mona Lisa. Here’s a
world-renowned, and obviously very valuable, work of art being carried as
casually as if it were a cheap household article.
I am not an
obsessive about Christopher Marlowe. Comparing Marlowe with
Shakespeare and
Jonson is a bit like comparing Dylan Thomas with Eliot and Yeats. On the one
side there’s a young man who can come up with compelling and memorable phrases,
but whose range is very limited and his outlook un-nuanced – on the other, two
mature literary geniuses who, for all their own shortcomings, had a vaster
range, more mature vision and greater depth of feeling. Marlowe (dead at 29) is
the enfant terrible. Of course with
his best lines and phrases, you thank him for liberating drama “from jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits /
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay” and you have heard all the
stuff about “Marlowe’s mighty line”.
But when all is done, you end up with a young guy who left us great promise
unfulfilled and a heap of fragments.
I turn to the volume
of his collected poems, and find what he left of Hero and Leander is shorter than the “completions” by George
Chapman and Henry Petowe. I go to his collected plays and recall fondly reading
them all as an undergraduate. Easy enough to do, as there are only seven of
them. My score card goes thus: Dido,
Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at
Paris are clearly unpolished, incomplete fragments, though there is some
fun in the latter when Marlowe inserts lots of sick humour into what should be
straightforward anti-Catholic propaganda. Yes, the two parts of Tamburlaine did introduce the “mighty
line”, and you are happy to parade along with it for a while – but, my God, it
does go on and on and on as tediously as The
Lord of the Rings movies, being more a spectacle, pageant or Elizabethan
“progress” than a play. For structure and design his two most finished plays
are Edward II, a pretty good royal
tragedy, and The Jew of Malta. But
the latter has to be forbidden territory. I know most of the commentators are
eager to tell us that the Christian characters are as nasty a lot as the Jewish
villain is, and that Marlowe is playing with Machiavelli. I know Barabas has
been designed with the same sort of sick humour as Shakespeare’s Richard III or
Dickens’ Quilp – he is a demonic character along with whom we gloat and laugh
as often as we deplore him. But the play is still irredeemably anti-Semitic.
And so we are left with what should be Marlowe’s masterpiece, Doctor Faustus. But (in either of the
two very different surviving versions) even here there are problems – the
brilliant scenes, especially as Faustus approaches his end, jostling with the
overlong, irrelevant and unfunny knockabout. I prefer the shorter version, but
it’s still fiery flashes in a bucket of mud rather than a full tragic drama.
So I look at
Marlowe’s career and I say “Such brilliance (in the literal sense of the word)!
Such talent! So clearly a young man who could have written more. What a pity he
died so young.”
Which brings me
at last to Charles Nicholl’s The
Reckoning, subtitled The Murder of
Christopher Marlowe. Nicholl is fond of literary mysteries [look up the index at right for my take on
his Somebody Else, a book about the
post-poetic life of Arthur Rimbaud].
The Reckoning is one of,
by now, many, many attempts to reconstruct what “really” happened when
Christopher Marlowe died, and why it happened; but it is probably the most detailed
and (given that it inevitably contains much speculation) it is also the most
plausible.
In
1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe was killed in a fight in a room in Deptford by a
nondescript thug called Ingram Frizer. At least that was the official story. Frizer
said he drew his blade in self-defence when Marlowe attacked him in a quarrel
over the “reckoning” (bill) for a meal they had shared. The coroner accepted this
version of events, which was corroborated by the other two men who were in the small
room at the time, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. Frizer was acquitted of
murder and there the matter should have ended.
The
trouble was, though, that this tale was just a little too convenient,
especially for some in high places who had a short time earlier arrested and
interrogated Marlowe about his blasphemous views. They weren’t at all
displeased to have the budding young literary genius out of the way. Even more
suspiciously, Frizer, Skeres and Poley were all low-level operatives in
England’s early spy service, directed by Robert Cecil and others. They were
mainly involved in the business of entrapping Catholics for not conforming to
the newly-invented state church, the Church of England, or, as agents provocateurs, devising treasonous
plots that could be blamed on Catholics.
It seems that
Marlowe too was part of this grubby business.
Though he came
from a financially humble background (his father was a shoemaker), Marlowe had
been to Cambridge and had studied for an MA. But rumours of his unorthodox
beliefs – and possibly rumours that he himself was going to cross to a seminary
in France and train as a Catholic priest – meant that there was a dispute over
whether he should be awarded his degree. This was solved for him when
high-ranking government officials signed a document – which still survives –
refuting such rumours and declaring that Marlowe had actually been about
official business. He was duly awarded his MA. There is the strong implication
that, under Robert Cecil’s orders, he had been infiltrating Catholic groups in
order to spy on them and to dob them in.
Since
the coroner’s report on Marlowe’s death was first discovered (by Leslie Hotson)
among official records in the 1920s, there has been speculation about what
really happened in that small and private room in Deptford (often wrongly
assumed to be a tavern and therefore giving rise to stories of Marlowe’s death
in a “tavern brawl”). Given the personnel involved, given that Marlowe was in
the company of three fellow spies, it is at least possible that Marlowe’s death
was more a deliberate “hit” than the outcome of an impulsive fight.
The Reckoning trawls carefully through
such documents as survive, Nicholl’s 500-odd pages draw out the networks of
influence that existed between the spies, the playwrights, the propagandists
and the politicians of the day. His case is that Marlowe’s death was incidental
to a larger plan to entrap and discredit Sir Walter Raleigh. A gadfly in parliament,
a man accused of unorthodox beliefs, and an enemy of other powerful people,
Raleigh was often called an atheist. In some of his most illuminating passages,
Nicholl argues that “atheism” in late Elizabethan England did not mean what it
means now. The term was used for any religious view that was not clearly
Catholic, Anglican or Puritan-Protestant, including the type of Arianism (the
belief that Christ was less than God but more than human), which Marlowe and
Raleigh might both have espoused. We
have to remember that “evidence” that Marlowe was guilty of even more
blasphemous beliefs was mainly drawn out of “witnesses” under torture. “Evidence”
that Marlowe was homosexual also has to be treated with some caution. Here is
the poet who writes of Jove and Ganymede; the playwright who gives the most
overt depiction of a homosexual relationship in Edward II – yet again, direct evidence for Marlowe’s sexual life is
ambiguous and was mainly extorted (from Thomas Kyd and others) under duress.
Like his “atheism”, Marlowe’s homosexuality
could have been something manufactured to discredit him and, by association, to
discredit Walter Raleigh.
The world
depicted in The Reckoning is a sordid
and dangerous one. Late Elizabethan England is aptly described as a police
state, not as some Hollywood fantasy of “Merrie England”, and the espionage
game here is as ruthless as its modern equivalent. Reviewing this book some
years ago I described it as “a wonderful
piece of historical detection and a riveting read”, and I still hold this
view. Yet here I must add some words of caution.
First, Charles
Nicholl is aware that many of his conclusions have to be speculative, but he
does play fair with the reader, signalling what is verifiable fact and what is
informed guesswork. Even so, there are holes in his case. The inference that
Marlowe was murdered on some authoritative person’s word seems a good one,
given that the meeting of four spies is unlikely to have been merely a social
gathering. But how Nicholl connects this with moves against Sir Walter Raleigh
is a lot more tenuous.
Second, it
should be noted that, after doing more research, Nicholl changed his mind about
one key matter between the first (1992) and the second (2002) editions of this
book. The earlier version fingers Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as the chief
mover against Sir Walter Raleigh. The second edition fingers the Secretary of
State, Sir Robert Cecil
The second
edition also has an added chapter on the modus operandi of the Elizabethan spy
Thomas Drury, and a thirty-page appendix answering some objections that
historians had raised to his earlier edition.
Dyspeptic
footnote: Like Shakespeare, Marlowe has been the
subject of much fiction as well as of much factual research. Anthony Burgess’s
last completed novel A Dead Man in
Deptford (published in 1993 on the 400th anniversary of
Marlowe’s death) assumes that Marlowe really was both homosexual and atheist in
the modern sense, and has him coping with this in an angsty manner before he is
murdered. More irritatingly, there are those nitwits who wish to reassign
Shakespeare’s works to somebody else. Some of them – with absolutely no
documentary evidence to back their claim – would like to believe that Marlowe’s
death was only faked in 1593, and that Marlowe then went off into exile where
he spent his time writing those plays that were attributed to the talentless
frontman Shakespeare. The trigger for this absurdity is the observation (not
entirely accurate) that Shakespeare’s first good plays began to appear shortly
after Marlowe died. Essentially this theory is just more evidence of the old
snobbery that refuses to believe a non-university-educated chap like
Shakespeare could have had any genius, and that therefore wishes to hand over
his plays to somebody like Cambridge-graduate Marlowe. Most recent advocate of
this fantasy is Ros Barber, though in fairness her verse-novel on the subject, The Marlowe Papers, is avowedly a work
of fiction. Nevertheless it is an unpleasant experience to hear her – as you
can on line - arguing with Charles Nicholl at the Cheltenham literary festival
in 2013, shouting over him as he attempts to make his case, and generally
speaking in a fashion bordering on the bloody rude as she drowns out his
measured comments.
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