History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt

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СКАЧАТЬ to getting the best education he could. However it was not unknown for other young men in similar situations to change their minds about religion. Stephen Gosson had abandoned playwriting in favour of railing against the sins of the theatre, and later entered the church; his friend Sam Kennet, who was already terrorising Catholic prisoners as yeoman warder in the Tower of London, would before Kit had finished his degree be converted to Rome. And Kit soon discovered that at Cambridge, in addition to ‘minds of the pure religion’, there was a knot of rebellious, rather clever young men who deplored what the poet John Donne (whose time there overlapped in part with Kit’s) called the ‘plain, simple, sullen, young, contemptuous’ features of Puritanism. One of this clutch of rebels was Thomas Nashe, a bright, skinny, boyish student who came up to St John’s College within a couple years of Kit entering Bene’t; he would soon become his close friend and collaborator. But even before he met Thomas Nashe, Kit’s perspectives were shifting.

      Ours is not the only era in which young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty are ambitious, kick against fortune and convention, question their lot, and reinvent themselves a thousandfold. It is clear that Kit Marlin, at the tumultuous age of seventeen, was developing his own style, and a bit of a swagger – according to Gosson, the cobbler’s eldest son was becoming a ‘malapert [impudent] full-mouth, breathing defiance’.* And there are hints that, during his first months at Bene’t, Kit was rudderless and malcontent. Part of the reason for this had to do with his status. Even more than at that ‘seminary for gentlemen’, The King’s School, he now found himself exposed to the nobility and upper classes. Archbishop Cranmer had argued when re-founding The King’s School that it was ‘through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge, for that most part, [that] all gentle [men] ascend to their estate’. Tudor humanists, the historian John Adamson points out, had for some time been arguing that learning, manners and deportment were no less conferrers of gentlemanly virtues than noble lineage. Kit felt this keenly, but at Cambridge social rank was structured and glaring. The sons of the nobility and gentry were counselled to ‘Consort yourself with gentlemen of your own rank and quality.’ Though some students ostentatiously glittered, others were dismally poor. On the one hand were rich young blades such as Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who spent a mighty £7 on refurbishing his room at Trinity College, putting extra glass in the windows and buying wall hangings for his study; on the other were those like the wretched youth who owned little more than ‘a thinne Chest’, a hat, a hooded gown, a chair, one pair of hose, an old shirt, a meatknife, eight books, a lute, three sheets, and ‘a very old Blankett’. Kit fell somewhere in between. College records place the new scholar ‘Marlin’ in the convictus secundus, the ‘second list’ of students who were neither poor ‘sizars’, who had to perform menial tasks for other students (such as cleaning and waiting at table) to pay their way – the fate of a cobbler’s son, had it not been for the Parker Scholarship – nor ‘fellow-commoners’, rich boys like Essex, whose parents filled pockets and college coffers with gold, who dined at the Fellows’ table, and who were generally allowed to proceed to their degrees without the bothersome intervention of examinations.

      For Kit, certain of his intellectual superiority, this social inferiority smarted. John Bakeless reads this resentment into lines from Hero and Leander. ‘And to this day is every scholar poor,/Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor’, and you can hear Kit’s frustration in the lament: ‘Alas, I am a scholar!/How should I have gold?/All that I have is but my stipend … /Which is no sooner receiv’d but it is spent’ (The Massacre at Paris I vii 18–20). At first, it would seem, he tried rather foolishly to buy himself into favour. Urry notes that ‘Marlin’s’ expenditure in his second week at college was a lavish 3s 1½d, an amount he never again equalled, not even in his heady final years, and a huge extravagance for someone who was supposed to be getting by on a shilling a week. But Kit soon realised that conspicuous consumption or headlong hospitality (whatever it was that demanded such spending) was pointless, and instead fell back on a more sustainable resource: his ‘ingenuity’. He reacted to this world of gentlemen who demanded deference and respect, with pride, rebellion and a deployment of ready wit – a response he would recall years later when he wrote Edward II:

      . . . you must cast the scholar off,

      And learn to court it like a gentleman.

      ’Tis not a black coat and a little band,

      A velvet-cap’d cloak, fac’d before with serge,

      And smelling to a nosegay all the day,

      Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

      Or saying long grace at table’s end,

      Or making low legs to a nobleman,

      Or looking downward with your eyelids close,

      And saying ‘Truly, an’t may please your honour,’

      Can you get any favour with great men.

      You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

      And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

      (Edward II II i 30–42)

      It was not deference that would get you high friends and favour, it was spark. Not for Kit the making of low legs to noblemen, the downcast eyes and ‘May it please your honour’. He was proud and resolutely cocky, but a charmer. The lanky lad with a sharp wit and a ready retort made friends easily, even, it soon became clear, across social barriers that were not usually breached. The stabbing part (‘now and then stab’) was to come later.

      At the same time Kit shed his Puritanism. What replaced it? A curious and previously unnoted interlude in his first year at Bene’t gives us a clue. Urry hints at it when he reveals that: ‘In 1581 one William Peeters, during Marlowe’s absence, was granted Marlowe’s food, which was charged against him in his absence …’. Other biographers have simply let this pass, but what young Kit got up to in those weeks has a curious link with the murder in Deptford twelve years later, and casts some light on the course his life was taking. People he met during this short absence from Cambridge were one day completely to redirect his life. The evidence lies in two unexpected places: an archive in Belgium, and the Vatican.*

      William (or Willem) Peeters was from Flanders. An erstwhile student of the University of Leiden, he arrived in Cambridge as an ‘instrumentalist’ with a group of travelling players. This is not unprecedented. Strolling troupes did pass through the town, and foreign musicians were not uncommon. Two broad types of theatre were performed at the university in Kit’s time. The colleges staged performances as instructive academic exercises, mostly in Latin, sometimes in Greek, and occasionally venturing lighter fare in English; wilder, wickeder and more exciting drama came in the form of comedies and satires performed by commercial players. The authorities frequently tried to discourage such wanton revels. Lord Leicester’s Men, whom Kit had already seen perform in Canterbury, had been prevented from performing in Cambridge in 1579. The following year, Lord Burghley, who was chancellor of the university, recommended that his son-in-law the Earl of Oxford’s men come to Cambridge. Though the company had just performed for the Queen, the vice-chancellor politely scotched Burghley’s request, pleading the dangers of plague at public assemblies, and sniffily stating that commencement (the time of conferring degrees) was upon them and this ‘requireth rather diligence in stodie than dissoluteness in playes’. Even the Queen’s Men, three years later, were sent off with a payment of 50 shillings for not performing, ‘forbidding theim to playe in the towne & so ridd theim cleane away’.

      But other troupes did perform, and English plays were becoming wildly popular with student actors too. We know that Gammer Gurton’s Needle was performed at Christ’s СКАЧАТЬ