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

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СКАЧАТЬ were among the first to be different. Tamburlaine would edge Tarlton into the wings, as poetic tragedy supplanted knockabout. This was where he wanted to make his theatre, appealing to an amphitheatre audience, but he would draw its focus in a new direction. In the prologue to the first Tamburlaine the Great he promised to lead the audience away ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.’ The urbane fool Touchstone in As You Like It stands in direct contrast to knockabout Arden rustics, and of course there is the writer’s cri de coeur in Hamlet’s ‘And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them …’ (Hamlet III ii 36).

      A rough new theatre was emerging from a turbulent world. It needed a figure of genius to give it fresh language and direction. Kit knew that he could do that. It is he, in the blank verse of Tamburlaine, his first solo effort, who would give Elizabethan drama its rhythm.

      Tom had also introduced Kit to his London circle – a brood of poets and pamphleteers that burgeoned through the 1580s and 1590s, and who centuries later would be dubbed the ‘University Wits’ (by the wine connoisseur and doyen of Victorian literary taste, George Saintsbury). If any remnant of Puritanism still clung to Kit, it was dispelled by parley over the tavern table with Thomas Lodge, whose Defence of Poetry Music and Stage Plays had just unsheathed daggers against Stephen Gosson’s ranting Schoole of Abuse. Like the others, Kit frequented St Paul’s Churchyard, the centre of the printing (which then also meant publishing) and bookselling, where there were already over twenty ‘stationers’ at trade (the modern word has its origin in these licensed booksellers who traded from ‘stations’, rather than being itinerant). Kit’s childhood friend, Oliver Laurens, was unhappily apprenticed here to the epitome of Sloth, so vividly described by Thomas Nashe as:

      . . . a Stationer that I knowe, with his thumb under his girdle, who if a man come to his stall and aske him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, and speakes not a word: onely with his little finger points backwards to his boy, who must be his interpreter, and so all the day gaping like a dumbe image he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then he is as quick as other three, eating six times every day.

      Oliver was later to enter into a more fruitful arrangement with the publisher Thomas Thorpe, with whom he was to work for years to come. It was with Oliver that Kit went to see the premier tourist attraction of the time, Sir Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, moored down river at Deptford. The adventurer had returned from his circumnavigation of the globe, his ship stuffed with treasure, on a Sunday in September 1580, causing such a stir that nobody went to church that day. In the summer of 1581 the Queen visited him on board, handed a sword to the ambassador of her suitor, the Duke of Anjou, to knight him, and declared the ship a national monument. For the past year, hordes of visitors had swarmed over the ship, chipping off bits as souvenirs. Over eleven years later, when Kit was sipping ale at Eleanor Bull’s house on Deptford Strand, nothing was left of the Golden Hind but a few skeletal timbers, sticking up from the dry dock like a rotting ribcage.

      Though Kit could range around London with Oliver, he was not able to see his other old friend, Sam Kennet. The one-time ‘terrible Puritan’, scourge of Roman Catholic prisoners in the Tower, had himself become a convert, and by the summer of 1582 was a seminarist at Rheims. Was Kit also already a Catholic? It is hard to tell. Charles Nicholl makes the point that there was at that time something seductive about Catholicism, something forbidden that made becoming a Catholic a gesture of defiance, especially attractive to those who deplored the spread of Puritanism, and among the young literary set. Thomas Lodge would one day convert, as would the philosophically fickle Stephen Gosson, who after writing plays, then puritanically ranting against them, went off to Rheims – though he later relented and returned to England to become an Anglican vicar. Tom Watson was of course a Catholic, and when he took Kit to stay at Harlington, William Byrd’s house in Middlesex, he was transporting the young man to an anteroom of Rome. Byrd’s home was a resort for Catholics; it is included in a list now housed at the Public Record Office of ‘places where certaine Recusantes remaine in and about the city of London: or are to be com by uppon warninge’. Though himself loyal, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and (it seems) enjoying special protection from the Privy Council, Byrd was a close friend of the staunch Catholic Charles Paget, and had possibly also known the plotter Anthony Babington and the recent Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. Hovering on the edge of this circle was Robert Poley – ‘Sweet Robyn’ – who was to be so charming to Eleanor Bull, and who earlier that year had married Tom Watson’s sister. Even more curiously, both Poley and Tom Watson were by then in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham.

      The purpose of Tom and Kit’s visit to Harlington was ‘to make good pastime’, and was apparently innocent. Although such gatherings were not uncommon, it is not entirely true that music filtered through every aspect of Elizabethan life, as a sort of merrie muzak with citizens singing at their work, madrigals after dinner and everyone as adept as their Queen at a range of instruments; at one end of the scale (as it were) there was church music, and at the other ‘that lascivious, amorous, effeminate, voluptuous music’ in theatres. While perhaps many houses did have viols hanging up for guests to use, and a ‘lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber’s shop’, the much-quoted passage from Thomas Morley’s Plain and Easy Introduction to Music is something of an exaggeration. Morley wrote:

      But supper being ended and music books (according to custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up …

      Morley, however, had a vested interest in presenting lack of musical knowledge as a social faux pas. Not only was he author of a teach-yourself music textbook, but also a composer of popular songs. After-dinner music was more likely to be presented by professionals, or talented members of the household. Yet Byrd himself had also made a famous appeal to everyone to sing, maintaining that not only did it ‘strengthen all the parts of the brest’ and ‘open the pipes’, but that the ‘exercise of singing is delightful to Nature & good to preserve the health of Man’, ending his uplifting evocation with the jingle ‘Since singing is so good a thing/I wish all men would learne to sing’. As the syllables of the couplet make a perfect sol-fa ditty, one can imagine hapless students of Byrd forever singing these words as they practised vocal scales. Fortunately for posterity, Byrd seldom wrote his own words in his secular work, rather using poetry by the likes of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Oxford, and later Kit himself, for his songs.

      The gatherings at Harlington were different from the after-dinner norm; these were masters coming together to make music. That summer they sang madrigals. It was a form that was becoming increasingly fashionable in England – Tom Watson had already translated a few. The first sett, of Italian madrigalls Englished would be published in 1590, and dedicated to the Earl of Essex, who was also briefly of the party that summer. According to a note, which appears to have been written by an informer sent to report goings-on at Harlington, they sang the madrigal ‘Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?’, which had been written the year before by Henry Walpole, after a spot of Edmund Campion’s blood splattered onto his coat during the execution, and which Byrd set to music. Thanks to this singing spy, we know that Byrd also set two of Kit’s songs during the visit: O mistress mine and It was a lover and his lass.* Eventually, Kit would use somewhat altered versions of these songs in plays, but the score Byrd later published is the original one written that summer. Kit left Harlington with two successful songs to his credit, and if not a convert to Catholicism, he did at least become a devotee of the madrigal.

      There is a theory that Kit did not go directly back to Cambridge after Harlington, but was the ‘Christoffer Marron’ who accompanied William Stanley (then twenty-one, later to be the sixth Earl of Derby) to the Court of Navarre, and perhaps further on to Spain. The letter in which the name is mentioned survives not СКАЧАТЬ