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

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СКАЧАТЬ not so far-fetched.* Unfortunately, no further proof exists, though it is true that Kit was later involved with the Stanley family, and the French scholar Abel Lefranc makes a convincing argument that Love’s Labour’s Lost includes scenes, characters and events that only someone with intimate knowledge of Henri of Navarre’s court could have written. The Protestant Henri Bourbon was separated from his wife Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King of France, but in 1578 in an attempt at reconciliation Marguerite had returned to Navarre, where Henri held court with a learned and highly cultured male coterie. Lefranc points out the distinct parallels between real life and the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where a king (in the play called Ferdinand, the name of William Stanley’s older brother, later Kit’s friend and patron) and three courtiers devote themselves to study and self-denial (mainly of women), but are frustrated by the arrival of the Princess of France. Lefranc quotes Montégut, the French translator of the play, as saying that the conversations, witty skirmishes and even the bad taste is so totally French that it must have been written by an insider, and points out that the three courtiers are given almost their actual names: Berowne for le baron de Biron, Longaville for le duc de Longueville, and Dumain for le duc du Maine. Furthermore, the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes is modelled both on Kit’s much-hated Welsh schoolmaster in Canterbury, and on Richard Lloyd, William Stanley’s tutor and companion on the tour. Holofernes presents a pageant of the Nine Worthies in the play; Lloyd wrote a long poem on the same topic. No other source for Love’s Labour’s Lost is known. Lefranc also points out a parallel between a love story current in court, and the story of Hamlet and Ophelia. There is also the possibility of a later visit, as a ‘Mr Marlin’ is a messenger for Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador who accompanied Henry of Navarre in the wars of 1591–2. But in the absence of further evidence, we must leave Kit’s visit to Navarre dangling as an enticing possibility.

      Back in Cambridge, Kit was beginning to cut quite a dash, showing a fashionable taste for ‘gorgeous attire’, dressing like a London dandy in a doublet with ‘a collar that rose up so high and sharp as if it would have cut his throat by daylight’, voluminous breeches ‘as full and deep as the middle of winter’ and soft leather boots ‘in such artificial wrinkles, sets and plaits, as if they had been starched lately and came new from the laundress’s’. But skull caps and sombre ankle-length gowns were what the university wanted. Such insobriety fell foul of national Sumptuary Laws, which set out a strict dress code designed to curb extravagance and remind people of their station in life. Flouting these laws showed just the sort of defiance that arrivistes like Kit and other rebellious young ‘malcontents’ were notorious for, and seems to have been quite common. Fighting a losing battle against the flouncing ruff and dangling aiglet, the university authorities passed a series of injunctions during the 1570s and l580s against flashy dressing. Wearers of ‘great galligaskins’ (wide breeches) and other outrageous attire would be ‘ordered, reformed and punished … both for stuffe, fasshion and colour’. The ‘stuffe’ that courted disapproval was anything ‘in upon or about [the] doublett, coates, Jerkyn, jackett, cassock or hose, of velvet or silke’. Unseemly ‘fasshions’ included too-baggy breeches, fancy doublets, and the ruffled silks of the malcontent. Even minimalist, rather desperate gestures like allowing your gown collar to ‘fall’ rather than ‘stand’ were forbidden, and as for finer details, the authorities knew them all: nothing should be ‘embrodred, powdred, pynked, or welted … gathered, playted, garded, hacked, raced, laced or cutt’. Furthermore, ‘long lockes of Hayre uppon the heade’ gave them the horrors. Hair had to be ‘polled, notted or rounded’, and nothing else. Graduates had to forswear brightness and wear gowns made only of ‘wollen cloth of blacke, puke [a ‘dirty brown’ or the ‘camel’s colour’, eclipsed in candour only by ‘goose-turd’ – yellowish-green], London Browne, or other sad colour’. Kit, of course, favoured ‘lustie-gallant’ (light red) and primary colours that showed up well in candlelight, or the newly fashionable pale tints such as ‘cane’ and ‘milk-and-water’. Again, we hear the echo in Spencer’s speech in Edward II, ‘you must cast the scholar off,/And learn to court it like a Gentleman’, and of Dr Faustus who wants to ‘fill the public schools with silk’.

      Despite chasing fashion, getting drunk and avoiding fines, Kit was working hard. He continued with his translation of Ovid’s Amores – often quite racy love elegies. Bene’t buttery and account books show that he was in full residence for a long and studious stretch up to gaining his BA in April 1584, though both Urry and Moore-Smith point to an absence of six or seven weeks in the summer of 1583. The recent rediscovery of a curious piece of late sixteenth-century pornography, First suckes at the brestes of Venus,* throws some light on what he may have been up to.

      Erotic verse, upmarket literary pornography, was a legitimate source of sexual titillation for pent-up, post-pubescent Elizabethans sweating away at their studies. Thomas Nashe was later to pen the bawdy burlesque Lenten Stuff, and even more pithily The Choice of Valentines (also known as Nashe’s Dildo), a tremendously lascivious piece about one prematurely ejaculating Tomalin and his bawd Frances, who after taking his ‘silly worm’ in hand, ‘rolled it on her thigh … And dandled it and danc’d it up and down’, but in the end must needs resort to the services of her ‘little dildo’ that ‘bendeth not, nor foldest any deal,/But stands as stiff as he were made of steel,/And plays at peacock twixt my legs right blithe’. The fruitier bits of Kit’s translation of Ovid, and later poems such as Hero and Leander can be seen in this light, though he seems to have disapproved of masturbation, once rebuking the ‘tender churl’ who ‘mak’st waste in niggarding’ (Sonnet 1).

      First suckes seems to have been inspired by an earlier work, I modi, sixteen prints of ‘postures’ of love-making, each accompanied by an explanatory sonnet. The book was banned in Italy and though hard to come by, highly popular in England among students and lawyers at the Inns of Court. The prints in I modi are by ‘that rare Italian master’ Giulio Romano, the poems by Pietro Aretino, whom Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller called ‘one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made’. When it was first published, I modi enjoyed extensive circulation among the upper clergy and was furiously suppressed by Pope Clement VII – to the extent that almost every trace of it was eliminated. By the mid-1850s, Count Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck, an adventurer and amateur archaeologist, who had fought for Napoleon at Toulon and in Egypt, then escaping the English had travelled down the east coast of Africa, and later to Chile and Guatemala, came up with ink-and-wash reconstructions of I modi, based on prints he claimed to have seen in a monastery in Mexico. These tallied with fragments in the British Museum. The accompanying sonnets surfaced in a copy of I modi that was found for sale in Italy in 1928 by Walter Toscanini, son of the famous conductor. Assiduously kept from public gaze by Toscanini, it is now in the hands of another private collector. From the same source in Italy, an American collector bought First suckes (which seems to indicate that the two volumes were once owned as companion pieces). He keeps his find just as jealously guarded.

      Like I modi, First suckes comprises sixteen prints and sonnets; each one deals with the loss of virginity. In eight of the poems a maid is deflowered, and in the other eight a young man has his first sexual experience – though it must be said that in each case the focus seems primarily on male enjoyment. Also, whereas the women are sexual caricatures, the poems about men appear to be based on the true experiences of real people, probably friends of the poet. There is a further link with I modi in that a quote from one of the Aretino poems appears on a separate leaf (apparently included as a prologue), beneath a portrait of a pleasured maid:

       Che per mia fé’ questo é, miglior boccone

      Che mangiar il pan unto apresso il foco.

      (I believe this is a tastier feast

      Than eating larded bread before a fire.)

      It is not known who made the prints for First suckes, but the poems have been attributed to СКАЧАТЬ