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

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СКАЧАТЬ of fashion, this was no unwelcome news. He would be rewarded not only for his intelligencing, but also well paid for his cover. The benefit was not all on his side. He was a profitable addition to a travelling troupe. A poet alone would be dead wood, but although Kit ‘lacked voice’ as a player, he could cope with smaller parts and could sing well – and his ability with French and Dutch was a decided benefit in the Low Countries. The Bene’t accounts and buttery books show that Kit’s absences from college increase dramatically from 1585. He was away for eight weeks between April and June in 1585 and for nine weeks to the end of September, then again for nine weeks from April to June of 1586. These absences coincide perfectly with the spring and late-summer touring seasons of the English players.

      We owe what knowledge we have of Kit’s first foray as a player/ spy, in April and May of 1585, to material uncovered by the theatre historian Joseph Keaton.* Using the alias Timothie Larkin, Kit travelled to the Low Countries with John Bradstriet’s players. ‘Tim Larkin’, as Keaton points out, is an anagram of Kit Marlin. Spies seeking aliases sometimes succumbed to the Elizabethan delight in wordplay, in which anagrams were a particular obsession. Bad auguries, for example, were seen in that the name of the king of France, Henry (or Henri) de Valois could be rearranged as Vilain Herodas, or O crudelis hyena. The name John Bradstriet (sometimes written as Bradstreet or Breadstreet) also smacks of alias: Bread Street was the location of the Mermaid Tavern, the great literary watering hole of the time. Breadstreet appears on lists of players all over the Continent, but there is no record of his existence as one in England.

      The troupe seems to have had some connection with Charles Howard, who had a personal company of players, and who became Lord Admiral in 1585. John Bradstriet’s name occurs a few years later on a passport for a number of players, led by one Robert Browne, which is signed by Lord Howard. Robert Browne, the actor who again and again comes up in the records as the leader of a troupe of English players, was a member of the Admiral’s Men (as Lord Howard’s Men became known after 1585), the company that was first to stage Kit’s plays in London.

      Kit’s introduction to Bradstriet was made through Thomas Walsingham, which indicates that Bradstriet himself might have been an intelligencer, and that Kit perhaps was still on probation. The mission was a simple one. In the months running up to the Treaty of Nonsuch, as it became increasingly evident that England was going to be militarily involved in the Low Countries, the government needed as much information as possible about troop movements and numbers on the ground. A group of strolling players had some mobility even through Spanish-held territory. Travellers of the time seemed anyway somewhat nonchalant about moving through war zones, apparently seeing battles as nothing more than a bit of localised bother: Richard Lassels, the gentleman traveller, on the road to Italy some decades later, ‘chose to steer towards Genoa by the low way’ in order to avoid two armies ‘which lay in the way’. William Lithgow in his Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations similarly mentions ‘leaving both armies barking at each other like wolves’ and happily treading off in another direction. Bradstriet and his troupe were probably in more danger from deserters and brigands than from soldiers, who frequently escorted convoys of merchants’ wagons to ensure safe passage. Like one Wychegerde, a grain and sundries merchant sent by Sir Francis Walsingham a few years later to spy on Spanish-held towns and enemy garrisons, Kit probably had to climb through ditches and plod across soggy polders secretly to count Spaniards in their camps.

      But he did also have some fun. The English players were not only innovative, spontaneous and acrobatic, they were sexy. Keaton mentions an account of ‘untold young virgines, enamoured of the players that followed them from citty to citty till the magistrates forbad them to play’ (the traveller Fynes Moryson noted a similar phenomenon in his Itinerary in 1592). A poem published in 1597 in Frankfurt, where the September book fair was a favourite players’ destination, lets us in on some of the excitement:

      The tumbler also did us please,

      He sprang high in the air with ease …

      His hose they fitted him so tight,

      His codpiece was a lovely sight.

      Nubile maids and lecherous dames

      He kindled into lustful flames …

      For, know that those who paid their fee

      To witness a bright comedy,

      Or hear the tunes of fine musicians

      Were more entranced by the additions

      Of bawdy jests and comic strokes,

      Of antics and salacious jokes,

      And what, with his tight-fitting hose

      The well-bred tumbler did disclose.

      At the more serious end of the players’ activity, Kit was writing. His play Pyramus and Thisbe was first performed by Bradstriet’s men, and was still in English comedians’ repertoires in 1604. Tamburlaine was formed, not in the isolation of a Cambridge college (the solitary author in a garret is a creation of Romanticism), but in the rough and tumble of working with a real theatre company. Kit also translated and adapted Plautus’s Menaechmi, which sparked his fascination with twins and mistaken identity, and was later to form the basis of The Comedy of Errors. It was around this time too that he marked his transition into a new phase of life with another name change. As Moore-Smith points out, after 1585 the Marlin, Marlen, Malyn or Marlyn in college records becomes Marly, Marlye, Marley or Morley. Even given the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling, these two clusters of variance are different enough to be significant. Kit Marlin was a new man, and now styled himself Kit, or more often Christopher, Marley.

      ‘Marley’ returned to Cambridge in the early summer of 1585 buoyed by his new position and with his pockets (or to be exact, his sleeves and codpiece, which served as pockets in Elizabethan dress) filled with gold. Never was there cobbler’s son so full of pride. Immediately he did something that no-one in his family had ever dreamed of doing, something that at once showed soaring insolence, announced his arrival in society, and cryptically boasted about what he was up to. He had his portrait painted.

      The old Master’s Lodge at Bene’t College housed a wood-panelled gallery dedicated to the display of paintings depicting important national figures, notable college academics and other worthy alumni. With astonishing hubris for someone of such youth and humble origins, when he left the college in 1587 Christopher gifted his picture to the Master – and indeed in the years that immediately followed, his success in London made him arguably one of Bene’t’s living luminaries, perhaps warranting a portrait prominently on show. After the incident at Deptford in 1593 and his public disgrace, Christopher Marley’s painting suddenly disappeared. It resurfaced at Cambridge only in 1953 (a numerical anagram that some scholars find intriguing in itself). A passing student noticed two panels of wood sticking up out of a pile of builders’ rubble when the Master’s Lodge was being renovated. Though faded, scratched and splattered by rain, they bore the shadow of a Tudor portrait. This fact was later confirmed by the National Portrait Gallery, and restoration work began. The Canadian scholar Calvin Hoffman was the first to suggest, in 1955, that the portrait was of Marlowe, and subsequent research using a computer programme that ages faces, convincingly connects the subject of this portrait with that of the painting (known as the Chandos portrait) made of him in his forties (see Appendix II).

      Poets and players of the period did sometimes hire painters to record their likenesses for posterity – or rather to contrive an image of themselves and project it into the world, showing them in the way they wanted to be seen. Like successful merchants, they commissioned portraits to show that they had arrived in their particular profession. Even people involved in seamier activities had paintings made as mementoes СКАЧАТЬ