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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ would be the toppling of Elizabeth and the raising of Mary Queen of Scots to her rightful position. Kit, at the age of twenty-one, was brazenly celebrating his arrival in society, and hinting perhaps that he was in the secret service. He posed with his arms folded, not a common posture in Elizabethan portraits. Sir Roy Strong interprets this as indicating a fashionable melancholy, the humour of the disappointed lover and those of artistic temperament. But it can also indicate that the sitter has something to hide. A. D. Wraight suggests that the pose imparts the message ‘I am one who is entrusted to keep secrets.’ And Charles Nicholl goes so far as to wonder whether he has a dagger up his sleeve, no doubt to ‘stab, as occasion serves’. An ideal posture, then, for the dreamy young poet who has entered the world of espionage.

      Two inscriptions appear in the top left-hand corner of the Corpus portrait. The one, ‘ætatis suae 21 1585’ gives Kit’s age when the picture was painted. The other is a motto that reads ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit’ – ‘That which nourishes me destroys me’. Some take this as a statement of the consuming passion of unrequited love. Others see it as a confession of Kit’s predicament at Cambridge – he is under obligation to the Parker Scholarship, which is paying his way, to take holy orders, while the thought of life as an Anglican priest appals him. But the motto is also eerily prescient. It reflects the paradox of Christopher’s new world, a life (as we have seen) simultaneously fuelled and consumed by deception. He is beginning a brilliant new career, but one that by definition is infected with the germ of his downfall. As he moves deeper into the world of espionage, he comes closer to the moment where someone wants him dead, a step nearer to Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford. He seems to have a disturbing premonition of what he is letting himself in for. The motto recurs decades later, in a sonnet Kit wrote not long before he died, in which he seems to regret the youthful fury that, if it did not cause his death, very nearly destroyed his life:

      In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

      That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

      As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,

      Consum’d with that which it is nourish’d by [my italics].

      (Sonnet 73)

      Kit stares out of the painting with eyes rather darker than in later portraits and an insolent, supercilious expression, matched by a half-curled smile. It is just a twitch short of a sneer. He is pale, almost pallid, but with a touch of youthful colour (or is it the flush of temper?) in his cheeks. A downy moustache tops a wispy ‘mouse-eaten’ beard that ‘groweth but here a tuft and there a tuft’, softly following his jaw line. His folded arms give him a slightly defensive look, but a full lower lip adds an air of sullen defiance, an edge of spoilt child, of someone who knows he can offend and has the protection of people more powerful than the viewer.

      And he certainly was transgressing. He is blatantly defying both university dress regulations and the Sumptuary Laws. His bouffant hair is nowhere near the ‘polled, notted or rounded’ style that university authorities required. The open-throated shirt he wears, with its flopping collar of gossamer-fine linen, ‘a falling band of cobweb lawn’, is at the absolute peak of fashion in 1585. So is his magnificent doublet – close-fitting with prominent ‘wings’ on the shoulders and big padded sleeves, narrowing ‘bishop-style’ to a tight wrist. It is made of black fabric slashed to reveal a reddish velvet lining, and adorned with a dazzling set of huge, decorative gold buttons, up each sleeve as well as down the front – in substance, style and splendour contravening every rule of sober dressing. Here is a young man who is not only breaking the law, but has the defiance to have himself painted while doing so. A young man who goes even further and publicly hands over this evidence to the very authority who should discipline him. A young man who is certain of the protection of very powerful friends.

      He is also a young man on a spree.* His spending in the buttery in 1585 spiralled from a few paltry pennies a week to a heady 18d and 21d extravagances. The portrait is a flash of prestige, its very existence a boast; it is painted on high-quality oak, sawn radially on the tree – better than most other paintings of the period in the college. His doublet, Charles Nicholl estimates, even second-hand would have cost thirty shillings or more (about £750 by today’s reckoning). Perhaps the only reason for the folded arms is to show off as many as possible of its forty oversized gold buttons.

      Once again all is not what it seems. Kit had borrowed the doublet from a fellow novice spy, Roger Walton, who had been a page to the old Earl of Northumberland, and like Kit moved in the circle of Henry Percy, the young ‘Wizard Earl’. By 1586 Walton was working in France for Sir Francis Walsingham, and a short while later the doublet (no longer quite so fashionable, but still worthy of remark) would again be captured for posterity when the English ambassador in Paris complained to Sir Francis of a young man who sounds remarkably like Kit himself, but whom the ambassador thinks is Roger Walton. This young disrupter ‘to some … showeth himself a great Papist, to others a Protestant, but as they take him that haunt him most, he hath neither God nor religion, a very evil condition, a swearer without measure and tearer of God, a notable whoremaster … a little above twenty, lean-faced and slender, somewhat tall, complexion a little sallowish, most goeth appareled in a doublet of black carke, cut upon a dark reddish velvet’.

      We know Kit himself was in France during his second long absence from college in 1585, in the late summer. He appears momentarily at the baths at Plombières, which suggests he had again been at Rheims or possibly in Strasbourg, where Walsingham also ran agents and which was a popular destination for troupes of English comedians.* This is the first hint we have of what was to become a lifelong predilection for public bathing. At times the reason for this may have been plain lust – the vapour baths or ‘stews’ of London were notorious brothels for both sexes – but house rules at Plombières stated quite clearly that: ‘All prostitutes and immodest girls are forbidden to enter the said baths, or to approach the same within five hundred paces, under penalty of being whipped at the four corners of the said baths …’. It seems more likely that one of the ‘untold virgins’ that followed Bradstriet’s players had not been so virginal after all, and that despite the protection of the olive-pip rosary so carefully made for him some years before by Bianca, the Venetian courtesan, Christopher had a dose of the clap – or in Elizabethan parlance, he had been ‘burned’. Hot baths were considered an effective cure for the searing pains of gonorrhoea. In Sonnet 153 Kit plays with the idea of Love’s ‘burning’. He has been ‘burned’ but a ‘maid of Dian’s’ steals Cupid’s brand and (in an apparent early form of inoculation) plunges it into a fountain, creating ‘a seething bath, which yet men prove/Against strange maladies a sovereign cure … I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,/And thither hied, a sad distempered guest,/But found no cure.’ In Sonnet 154 he once again goes for a cure to a bath that is ‘a healthful remedy/For men diseased’, but finds that neither treatment nor disease diminishes his ardour: ‘Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love’. Was he suffering from the more dangerous, often fatal, syphilis? In later life he shows a good knowledge of the disease and supposed cures, such as ‘villainous saffron’ in All’s Well That Ends Well; or mercury fumigation, as Doll Tearsheet undergoes in Henry V. Timon displays a detailed awareness of such symptoms as baldness and disintegration of the nose when he berates Phrynia and Timandra in Timon of Athens; and Lucio in Measure for Measure makes one of the earliest references in English literature to the disease being transmitted by a drinking vessel.

      The glimpse we are given of Kit’s visit to Plombières is through a document written by an unnamed secretary of the essayist Montaigne, noting a conversation held in the seething waters between ‘an Englishman T. Larkkin’ and his master. The same secretary had, during an earlier visit, helped Montaigne write up his journal when the essayist was too ill to do so himself. That document survives, but the fragment mentioning Larkin appears to be part of a second journal, now lost.* СКАЧАТЬ