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

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СКАЧАТЬ print bears a striking resemblance to the Kit of the Corpus portrait, and he is punningly referred to as ‘Merlin’ (cf. Robert Greene in Epistle to Perimedes, ‘. . . mad and scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race’). The sonnet tells how young Merlin is most capably projected into the realm of the sexually experienced by one Bianca, ‘a cunning whore of Venice’, and how she feeds him fat black olives, takes the pips from his lips, sucks them quite clean and threads them into a rosary, for protection against the pox. The young man is ‘not yet two score’, which, if he is Kit, would make the year 1583. ‘Bianca’ is quite possibly the same ‘La signora Bianca’ who is twice mentioned on a list of ‘public whores condemned for transgression of the laws’, and fined ten and then thirty ducats. Venice was famous for its courtesans – they had their own ghetto, the Carampane, where they paraded on the Ponte delle Tette (literally ‘Bridge of Tits’) naked from the waist up (the authorities thought the sight of bare breasts would help prevent sodomy). This was in singular contrast to conservative English attitudes. Contemporary English manuals such as Thomas Cogan’s The Haven of Health advised frisky young men to control their ardour by sitting on cold stone, plunging themselves into icy water, or dousing their genitals in vinegar. Yet in Venice there were catalogues and guides to pleasures and prices, and many a young Englishman’s first carnal thrash occurred between the canals. Sir Philip Sidney cavorted in Venice when he was twenty, though a young Sir Henry Wotton (one day to be British ambassador there), ‘not being made of stone’ fled the wicked ladies to the safety of academic Padua.

      If Kit was busy losing his virginity in Venice in 1583, he would have had to have been quick about it. He was away from Cambridge for a maximum of seven weeks. Andrew Badoer, an envoy in a hurry in the early sixteenth century, made it from Venice to London in twenty-six days, riding ‘incessantly, day and night’ – though he was in his sixties, and grizzled ‘nor do I know what more could have been expected of a man at my age’. Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, called the Queen of Hungary ‘a virago’ because she rode from Augsburg to Flanders (part of a possible route between England and Venice) in thirteen days, ‘a distance a man could scarce do in 17’. In 1589 Henry Cavendish, admittedly travelling a long and leisurely route via Hamburg and down through ‘Jarmany’, took nearly a month to get to Venice. It could be that Nashe sets the event in Venice because of the racy, romantic image the city enjoyed, and that it in fact took place in the stews of London. On the other hand, Richard Lassels, a tutor who had been five times to Italy, lamented that the courtesans of Venice were such an attraction that some young men would ‘travel one month for a night’s lodging with an impudent woman’. Kit did have a rosary made of olive pits. He kept it for years, though it eventually ended up among the possessions of the enigmatic Elizabethan astrologer Dr John Dee, and was discovered in 1662 in a secret drawer of a cedar chest, by a confectioner called Robert Jones.

      Fast travel and expensive living could only mean one thing: Kit had another source of income. The evidence is elusive and needs careful sifting, but it would seem that by 1583 he was already in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham, at first (in modern-day spy parlance) as an ‘irregular’ – used only occasionally, while his worth was being tested – but after 1584 as an active member of the network. His links with Sir Francis Walsingham could even have begun as early as 1581, when he was befriended by Thomas Watson and Thomas Walsingham in Paris. Also in Paris at the time was one Nicholas Faunt, who like the two Thomases was working for Sir Francis, and was a Bene’t man. Though his time at college pre-dated Kit’s, it is very possibly Faunt who made the first introduction to the Walsinghams. Recruitment in 1581 might explain Kit’s presence in Rheims that year, and would make more sense of that curious visit to Navarre. The English would have been interested in intelligence from Henri’s court. After the Duke of Anjou, Henri was next in line to the French throne, and though the champion of the Huguenots, he had briefly converted to Catholicism after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and was now being courted again by Catholics. We know that the agent Anthony Bacon was gathering information about developments concerning Henri, and passing it on to Walsingham in 1584. Kit’s nascent Catholicism would not have been a barrier to his recruitment. Indeed, Walsingham made something of a speciality of ‘turning’ Catholics, and had a number of supposedly Catholic agents spying for him. With all the trappings of a new convert, Kit was ideally placed to inform on the activities of the Jesuit missionaries who had newly arrived at Cambridge in 1581. Perhaps, also, it was Kit who was reporting back on Byrd’s circle at Harling-ton in the summer of 1582.

      Kit had entered an uneasy world of duplicity and betrayal, a realm of cold falsehood and calculated hypocrisy, where trust had been sucked hollow by cynicism. Information was its currency, and worth was judged by tangible results. Just what moved him to such an existence? To some extent it was the sheer pressure of necessity: he needed the money. When his time at Cambridge came to an end, the cobbler’s son from Canterbury would have had few options (given that he already seemed intent on reneging on his scholarship obligation to enter the Anglican church). He could become a tutor perhaps, a secretary to some notable, or even a poet in an aristocrat’s retinue, traipsing along forever in the train of high society. But this was not Kit’s style. For a young man of ‘vaulting ambition’, who like Tamburlaine felt that he had ‘an aspiring mind’ and a soul ‘whose faculties can comprehend the wondrous architecture of the world … climbing after knowledge infinite’, who was restless, rebellious, willing to live on his wits and certain of his ability, working for Walsingham offered a way forward. It may be distasteful, it would almost certainly be dangerous, but Kit knew that to take the position he wanted in the world, he had to be ‘proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,/And now and then stab, as occasion serves’. Those stabbings might be literal, or metaphorical: in the back. Friends became enemies at a shrug. ‘To some perhaps my name is odious,’ says Machevill (Machiavelli) in the Prologue to The Jew of Malta but, ‘Admir’d am I of those that hate me most … Let me be envied and not pitied’.

      From the privileged viewpoint of posterity it is easy to raise a moral eyebrow and lament Kit’s decision to join this secret world. But, as Charles Nicholl puts it: ‘Our regret has no real claim on him. Posterity prefers poets to spies, but this young man could not be so choosy. He lived on his wits or else went hungry, and he was probably rather better rewarded for spying than he was for the poetry we remember him by.’ It is clear from his later plays, written long after he had stopped spying, that he had his own regrets, and that the evils of duplicity, ambition and betrayal ever occupied his mind: the spying servant, the spying friend, the spying husband, the spying courtier, the spying duke never quite leave the stage.

      Deception simultaneously fuelled and consumed the secret service. ‘Treason begets spies and spies treason,’ noted Queen Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, wearily. Or as John le Carré put it centuries later: ‘You teach them to cheat, to cover their tracks, and they cheat on you as well.’ The dour Sir Francis watched over his web with care. Gathered close around him was a small core of men operating more or less permanently as controllers; beyond that was a haphazard, freelance band whose motivation was as likely to be money as politics – patriots and ne’er-do-wells, former pages and would-be ambassadors, the desperate, the greedy, men he had blackmailed, gamblers who had bankrupted themselves, vain adventurers, bored gentlemen, turncoats and zealots. Walsingham’s favourite maxim was: ‘There is less danger in fearing too much than too little, and there is nothing more dangerous than security.’ He checked and he double-checked. He sent out spies to confirm other spies’ information, spies to check on the other spies themselves, then another to inform on them all; he placed moles in Catholic organisations and set agents provocateurs among conspirators, ran double-agents, and was himself the victim of treachery. He had men pretend to be spies to discredit the opposite side, and found his agents snooped on by rival factions from his own side. He infiltrated conspiracies, undermined intrigue, and sometimes even made up plots from scratch to snare unsuspecting traitors.

      Spanish invasion and Catholic conspiracy were the twin bugbears. Subtle, dedicated Sir Francis gathered intelligence from abroad and effected counter-espionage at home all to serve his queen, but this was by no means a national organisation. The Elizabethan secret service was a privately run affair. Lord Burghley СКАЧАТЬ