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

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СКАЧАТЬ which scoffed at the Puritan Gabriel Harvey, who was a Fellow of Trinity Hall and a mutual enemy of theirs. The players mimicked Harvey’s mannerisms perfectly and, said Nashe, ‘delineated [him] from the soale of the foote to the crowne of head’. Another play, Duns Furens so lambasted ‘the little Minnow his Brother’ Richard Harvey that, according to Nashe, ‘Dick came and broke the Colledge glasse windows’, and was put in the stocks till the show was over, and for most of the next night too. Furious fenestraclasm seems to have been a favourite mode of dramatic critique. In 1583 Trinity paid ‘for lv foot of newe glasse in the hall after the playes’, and subsequent to that took the precaution of ‘taking downe and setting vp the glasse wyndowes’ for the duration, while St John’s paid for ‘nettes to hange before the windowes of ye Halle’, before giving up on such flimsy protection and following Trinity’s lead. ‘Stage-keepers’, sometimes armed and often equipped with visors and steel caps, were employed to try to keep order. But audience participation remained energetic. Sir John Harington, who was a ‘truantly scholar’ at King’s around 1580, noted that the antics of the stage-keepers often made matters worse, as they went up and down ‘with vizors and lights, puffing and thrusting, and keeping out all men so precisely, till all the town is drawn by this revel to the place; and at last, tag and rag, fresh men and sub-sizers, and all be packed in together so thick, as now is scant left room for the prologue to come upon the stage’.

      In the Bene’t college accounts for 1581, we find a payment of 10d ‘made to one Lamb and Porter’ ‘for making houses at the Comaedie’ and another ‘In Largeis to the Actors for a Beaver [visor]’. Was this perhaps the company William Peeters was with, unused to rumbustious Cambridge audiences, and having to provide themselves with a ‘stagekeeper’? Certainly Peeters joined a company of English players in Leiden early in 1581, and was back at the university in late 1582.* Printed bills announcing English players are mentioned in a Dutch document from 1565, and organised groups of professional players from England became increasingly common on the Continent from the 1580s onwards. The troupes managed to travel through war zones, and indeed accompanied military leaders, sometimes appearing to perform for soldiers and citizens on both sides of the conflict. Such troupes would play an important part in Kit’s life over the next few years.

      Just how Kit made contact with William Peeters is uncertain, though it is conceivable that his prowess with the Dutch language, picked up in Canterbury, provided the introduction, or possibly it was his interest in drama. It would certainly seem that despite the implicit reprimand he had received reading his friend Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, Kit’s enthusiasm for the theatre was very much alive. He was quickly giving up on Stephen’s Puritanism. ‘Will not a filthy play,’ ranted a Puritan preacher, ‘with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred?’ That, for the future playwright, was precisely the attraction.

      Obscurity surrounds the arrangement Kit made with Peeters, but whatever it was, it would appear to have had the blessing of the college authorities. Students were supposed to stay up at university full time, though with permission they could absent themselves for four weeks a year. The malapert Marlin appears to have persuaded the college to allow a similar arrangement to that practised by students at the Inns of Court, who would pay someone else to be at the meals that were a compulsory part of attendance requirements.† Perhaps he convinced them that he could benefit from a period of study at Leiden, temporarily taking Peeters’s vacated place, and thus effecting one of the world’s first ever student exchanges. Certainly the famous university at Padua welcomed a great many foreign students, often from middling or lower ranks, who did not register officially for the ‘studium’, but followed courses of study on an informal basis for a short period of time. Perhaps Marlin convinced the authorities that he was going to do the same at Leiden. In any event, the college tolerated his absence, and charged him for Peeters’s meals. But Leiden was not his destination. In the late summer of 1581, he was in France.

      We get glimpses only of Kit on his first journey abroad. It would seem that he travelled with the players as a musician – most likely a ‘singing-man’ – and under Peeters’s name. This was daring, but would have obviated the need for a passport. The English, unless they were merchants, had to obtain a licence to travel to foreign countries. This was issued by a court official or nobleman, and often had conditions attached, such as strictures on visiting Rome or other places where there were Catholic seminaries. A similar arrangement existed for troupes of players moving around the Continent, where local notables or city fathers would provide them with written permission to proceed, and sometimes a promise of protection along the way. The passport issued to Will Ireland and his troupe still included Peeters’s name at the time when he was eating Marlin’s meals in Bene’t (see Appendix I). In an age with no photographs, it was simple enough for Kit, an accomplished linguist, to assume the persona of the Fleming, and head off on an expenses-paid adventure. Such flits happened. The players that ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ of the King’s School ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’, lured them with promises of good earnings. A letter from one J. Beaulieu to William Trumbull, the English envoy at the court at Brussels, requested: ‘I send you a note of my Lord Deny for the finding of a certain youth of his, who hath been debauched from him by certain players, and is now with them at Brussels’. Kit, obviously, did not want to relinquish his scholarship, nor to travel with the players forever – hence his contrivance with Peeters and dissembling of college authorities – but it is clear that the twin lures of theatre and travel were irresistible to him, even at this stage.

      The players were heading for Paris, in all likelihood following in the train of a diplomatic mission sent to discuss the marriage between Queen Elizabeth and François, Duke of Alençon (later Duke of Anjou), the Queen having just announced her intention of marrying the French prince. Whether or not she meant this is unclear, but she sent a reluctant representative, Sir Francis Walsingham, to Paris to negotiate the match. He was also charged with carefully putting together an Anglo-French treaty intended to muzzle Spanish aggression (this was the whole point of the proposed nuptials), and to divine the attitude of Anjou’s brother King Henri, without whose support the scheme would be worthless. Sir Francis was accompanied by his young second cousin Thomas, who was just a year older than Kit and was acting as a courier. Thomas Walsingham had in his company an Englishman called ‘Skeggs’, who Charles Nicholl convincingly surmises is none other than Nicholas Skeres, one of the fateful four who were in Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford that day in May 1593. Also in the party was Thomas Watson, a young Catholic poet who had once been resident in Douai and who was also carrying messages for Sir Francis. Tom Watson and Kit were to become close friends and one day to end up in jail together. Kit and Tom Walsingham would become even closer. Many years later, when he was writing Meliboeus as an elegy to Sir Francis, Tom Watson would dedicate the poem to Thomas Walsingham, and recall with affection these days in Paris, when they were living ‘by the banks of the Seine’.

      Espionage historian Gertrud Zelle has uncovered an account that gives us one brief flash of Kit and the two Thomases on their evening revels around town, consuming large quantities of wine, tucking in to wild boar (cheaper and more readily available than in England), capons with oranges (to them a novel combination) and mounds of bread (far more than was the customary back home), all the time Kit’s dazzling wit and facility with French easing the way.* The only other evidence indicating that Kit may have been in Paris is circumstantial: a story about an affair in the upper echelons of Parisian society was doing the rounds in the city’s taverns at the time, and it emerged many years later as the plot for Measure for Measure. The French scholar Georges Lambin uncovered the Parisian tale, and found that it is used in the play with barely disguised names: Angelo for Angenoust, Claudio for Claude Tonard, Varrius for de Vaux, and so on all the way down to one Ragosin, who appears as Ragozine the pirate.

      After Kit had been in Paris just a few days, somebody – most likely Thomas Walsingham, but maybe Sir Francis himself – gave him the task СКАЧАТЬ