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

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СКАЧАТЬ a degree but simply of filling in time before studying law in London, or travelling on the Continent – ‘a wild and wanton herd … of youthful and unhandled colts’ who spent their time fencing and dancing, whose behaviour resulted in an increasing number of vice-chancellor’s injunctions against playing football, going to bear-baiting and plays in the town, and whose first element of knowledge was ‘to be shown the colleges, and initiated in a tavern by the way’.* They were a Babylonical bunch with insatiable appetites, but unlike them Kit had a thirst for learning as well as revelry, and the ability to indulge all his cravings at once.

      In his first year, the rigid Cambridge curriculum officially confined his studies to Rhetoric. After that he could look forward to a year of Logic, then one of Philosophy, and later Greek, drawing and astronomy before moving on to a Masters degree. His quick mind raced beyond such limits, and he responded to academic circumscription with tangents of intellectual adventure. Cambridge allowed this. Attitudes to study underwent a radical change in the years before Kit arrived. Instead of merely lamenting the fact that lectures were so poorly attended, the authorities addressed themselves to the reason for the decline, and realised (about 100 years after the event) that the accessibility of printed books meant that students were no longer reliant on lectures for basic information. This revelation led to a new approach in which college tutors (rather than lectures) played an increasingly important role in a student’s education, and good tutors turned their charges’ minds and eyes to studies outside the curriculum, to books that brought them up to date with contemporary thought, and skills that would equip them for modern life. So Kit studied modern languages: French (in which he was already fluent) and Italian (which he became desperate to master), and read the controversial logician Ramus (who gets a brief critique, and is then gorily killed in The Massacre at Paris), Machiavelli (who delighted him) and, hot off the press, essays by Montaigne. Gabriel Harvey sourly noted the subversive course Cambridge studies were taking, complaining ‘You cannot step into a scholar’s study but (ten to one) you shall lightly find open either Bodin’s De Republica or Le Roy’s exposition upon Aristotle’s Politics or some other like French or Italian politic discourse’.

      Much to Kit’s chagrin his curriculum did not include music, as it might have done at Oxford, and he could not afford the usual recourse of a private tutor. Ever since Thomas Bull had picked him out to sing in the Canterbury cathedral choir, and all through his time at The King’s School, Kit had a passion for music. As he later put it: ‘The man that hath no music in himself,/Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/The motions of his spirit are as dull as night,/And his affections dark as Erebus./Let no such man be trusted’ (The Merchant of Venice V i 83–8). The young malcontent Kit Marlin, in some turmoil over religion, full of rage and questioning, fired by new learning and excited by new friends, found counterpoise in ‘the sweet power of music’ – on at least one occasion in the home of the great composer and organist, William Byrd.

      It is tempting to accept that the musician once dubbed as homo memorabilis is the ‘William Byrd’ who is paid 10 shillings in Bene’t College accounts, and who was a university wait. ‘Waits’ were municipal musicians – originally watchmen who played their instruments to assure citizens that all was well, but by the sixteenth century they performed at civic occasions and hired themselves out privately. Byrd’s biographer Edmund Fellowes refutes the possibility of this being the same William Byrd, pointing out that the name was a common one, and the position at this stage of his career too menial. Intriguingly, another William Byrd (alias Borne) was a close friend of the actor-manager Edward Alleyn, became a shareholder in the Admiral’s Men (the company that staged Christopher Marlowe’s plays), and was paid for his additions to Doctor Faustus. (It is thought that he used the alias Borne to disguise his identity on religious grounds.)

      But it seems Kit’s contact with the composer Byrd came through theatre and his new friend from Paris, Tom Watson. Byrd composed music for Ricardus Tertius, a play by the Master of Caius, Thomas Legge (‘an horrible papist’), which was staged a number of times in the early 1580s. Tradition has it that it was at a performance of Ricardus Tertius that Kit first met the young Earl of Essex, who was at Trinity, and that both men disliked the play. Whatever the truth of this, it is evident that Kit thought he could do better than Legge, and would use the same subject matter to much better effect in one of his very first history plays.

      Kit was already familiar with Byrd’s work – as a choirboy in Canterbury he had enjoyed singing from the composer’s Sacred Songs, which Byrd had published with his tutor Thomas Tallis in 1575, so delighting the Queen that she granted them a countrywide monopoly in printing church music. But it was at Cambridge that he first encountered Byrd’s secular music. And he liked it. He must have mentioned this to Tom Watson, because in 1582 he received an invitation, through Watson, to meet the composer (who was now approaching forty, and living in Middlesex). This may have been Tom Watson flaunting his connections, or it could quite arguably have been the Catholic net slowly closing in on Kit.

      The Bene’t accounts and buttery books for 1582 and 1583 show that Kit was away from college for between five and seven weeks during the summer of 1582. At the time, Tom Watson was temporarily back from Paris and was living in the parish where he had been born, St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in London. Seven years Kit’s senior (Kit was still just eighteen), he seems to have stepped in to the position of older friend and mentor, from which Stephen Gosson had been tumbled by his Puritanism. Tom had come down from Oxford without taking his degree, had been a law student in London without becoming a lawyer, and now lived off his wits as a poet and playwright – with, as we have seen, the odd foray into the shadier corners of diplomacy for the ‘master spyder’, Sir Francis Walsingham. And he was a Catholic, a recusant whose name occurs in the St Helen’s parish list of ‘strangers who go not to church’. Kit joined him for a summer of writing poems, reading the classics, going to plays, and not going to church.* Tom was finishing his The ’ Εϰατoμπα Θια or Passionate Centurie of Love, a series of eighteen-line poems, which he called ‘sonnets’, often based on classical, French or Italian sources. Kit was beginning a translation of Ovid’s sensual Amores, relishing the chance to improve his Italian (Tom had introduced him to the poems of Tasso), and honing his poetic skills, fascinated by the form of Watson’s sonnets, but not quite convinced he had got it right.

      In the afternoons they went to plays – not polite indoor dramas like those written by his former Canterbury neighbour John Lyly for boy companies and courtly audiences, but rollicking gallimaufreys that coupled clowns with kings, and leashed in the odd musician and a number of nifty jiggers, too; plays the authorities disapproved of, which took place beyond City jurisdiction in the open amphitheatres of the Curtain or the Theatre, where there was ‘no want of young ruffins, nor lacke of harlots, utterlie past all shame’, and where law students from the Inns of Court created much the same sort of rumpus as hooligans at modern-day football matches. Here, from the gallery, they could heckle Richard Tarlton, the dumpy man who in all likelihood gave common currency to the word ‘clown’, and whose cross-eyes and cheeky expression had the audience wetting themselves as soon as he put his head through the hangings at the back of the stage:

      Tarlton when his head was onely seene,

      The Tirehouse dore and tapestrie betweene,

      Set all the multitude in such a laughter,

      They could not hold for scarse an houre after.

      Tom and Kit were among the few who could match his banter. As the theatre historian Andrew Gurr points out, Tarlton was by the 1580s in one sense at least already a bit old-fashioned. His direct address to the audience, the gap he created between himself as clown/player and his role (a technique we would now view as distinctly post-Brechtian), was about to give way to a more illusionistic drama, where actors disappeared behind the characters they portrayed, more in the manner of cinema today. Kit, perhaps СКАЧАТЬ