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

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘in the defence and saving of his own life, against the peace of our said lady the Queen, her now crown & dignity’. Frizer was briefly imprisoned but quickly received a royal pardon. The body was carried that day along the Common to St Nicholas’s church, and buried in an unmarked grave.

      If Eleanor Bull wondered why Ingram Frizer’s dagger was so easy to get at, why the argument with Marlowe reached such a pitch without Frizer turning to face him, why the other men appeared not to intervene, or how in the struggle Frizer had managed to dispatch the poet with such apparent neatness and efficiency, she wisely said nothing. William Danby was an experienced and high-ranking official, a friend of her kinsman Lord Burghley from their days together at the Inns of Court. Perhaps she scented the hand of Sir Robert Cecil in this. But Eleanor Bull never made a fuss and, as ever, Robert Poley paid her handsomely. With a little extra for the inconvenience. We can only imagine her displeasure with the world of spies as she cleaned away the blood and set her room to rights. Assignations are one thing, assassinations quite another.

      There we could leave Widow Bull (she died peacefully three years later), were it not for something that not even she suspected.

      The body on the bed that May evening was not that of Christopher Marlowe.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

       Prefaces to Shakespeare

      In the year that Calvin died and Galileo was born, when the world was racked by religion and beginning to dream of science, two babies were baptised whose lives fortune’s fingers would entwine in a knot that we still cannot completely untie. In the parish of St George, near the great cathedral in Canterbury, Christopher Marlowe, the newborn son of a local shoemaker, was carried howling to the font on Saturday, 26 February 1564. Exactly two months later, on 26 April, in the country town of Stratford, William Shakespere, mewling son of a glovemaker, was entered in the parish register. By the late 1580s they would both be living in London and working for the same company of players, their affairs becoming increasingly entangled. Then in 1593, Marlowe would disappear from view and Shakespere would publish Venus and Adonis, calling it ‘the first heir of my invention’. The two events were not unconnected. We have learned that the incident in Widow Bull’s house in Deptford was not all we perhaps thought it was – or rather, that it was a little more than we thought it was. To reconstruct what happened up to that point, we begin with the story of baby Marlowe.

      The infant that Goodwife Roose, the local midwife, pronounced ‘lusty and like to live’ was John and Katherine Marlowe’s second child in a string of nine, and by far the brightest. Perhaps he owed that to his father, who – fairly uncommonly for a shoemaker at the time – could read. Perhaps it was from his father too that little Christopher inherited a venturesome curiosity, which at times could be insatiable. No-one knows from whom he got his beautiful singing voice. For his infant howls soon transmuted into a tinkling treble, far superior to the singing of any of his siblings, and he was taken up by Thomas Bull, the cathedral organist and master of the choir, who lived almost next door to the Marlowes near St George’s church.*

      John Marlowe (or Marloe, or Marley, or Marlyn, as he was also known in that lackadaisical way Elizabethans had with spelling in general and surnames in particular) was an immigrant to Canterbury. In the mid-1550s, when he was about twenty, he had walked there from Ospringe, near Faversham in Kent. Soon after arriving he took up an apprenticeship with one Gerard Richardson, a shoemaker, and by the end of April 1564 was already a freeman of the city. This would suggest that he was at least part-qualified when he arrived in Canterbury, and that his apprenticeship was something of a ruse as a short cut to citizenship (apprenticeships usually lasted seven years and began at the age of fifteen). Being a freeman was a coveted position that raised a man a notch above his fellow artisans, enabling him to have his own shop (‘hold craft and opyn windowes withoute leve’), take on apprentices and participate in city council meetings. Marlowe married Katherine Arthur, whose family came from Dover, and they settled in the parish of St George.

      Leafing through the Canterbury borough plea books, we find John Marlowe to be belligerent and litigious, setting himself terrier-like against everyone from fellow shoemakers to the local gentry. In return, there were various suits launched against him, once for assaulting his apprentice and drawing blood, but mostly for debt. He did not pay his rent, he did not pay his rates, and his business finances were generally in a state of chaos. This lack of business sense was something else his son was to inherit. That and a sharp temper. Life in the little house behind the cobbler’s shop was not calm. At least one other of the Marlowe brood, Christopher’s younger sister Anne, showed the characteristic family quarrelsomeness. Later in life she was publicly criticised for being ‘a scowlde, comon swearer, a blasphemer of the name of god’, and as a fifty-five-year-old widow laid into one William Prowde with ‘staff and dagger’, and the following year with ‘sword and knife’. Nor was the family home in a particularly reposeful part of town. St George’s parish, though close to the cathedral, lay between the cattle market and the butchers’ shambles. This may have been convenient for the leather that was the material of John Marlowe’s trade, but it wasn’t terribly salubrious. Just yards away, animals would bellow and scream as they were herded to slaughter. Barrows of blood and stinking entrails were trundled past the Marlowe front door (cf. ‘Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher’s offal?’ Merry Wives III v). The acrid smell of crowded cattle and the earthy pungency of manure hung in the air and clung to clothes. We may imagine that the young Marlowe whiffed. He certainly knew his blood and butchery. The knowledge he shows in his plays of how blood spurts ‘like a fountain’, how it darkens as it coagulates, forms black clots, and follows a withdrawn knife, is impressive; and his haunting recollection of a slaughterhouse quite moving:

      And as the butcher takes away the calf

      And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays,

      Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house …

      And as the dam runs lowing up and down,

      Looking the way her harmless young one went,

      And can do naught but wail her darling’s loss …

      (2 Henry VI III i 210–16)

      He also, incidentally, shows a fine knowledge of leather, no doubt gleaned from his father’s workshop. He knows, for example, that cow’s leather was used for shoes, sheep’s leather for bridles, and how far cheverel will stretch.

      As if the screams of cattle and cantankerous sisters were not enough, the sturdy steeple of St George’s housed the great waking bell, which was rung at 4 o’clock every morning and was loud enough to get the whole town out of bed. Just across the way from the church tower was Newingate, the medieval gate that was the highest point in the city wall. Scholars have argued that these two looming structures inspired the ‘Two lofty Turrets that command the Towne’ mentioned in The Jew of Malta.

      The town that these turrets commanded was not a large one. A point of pilgrimage ever since the assassination of Thomas à Becket in 1170, Canterbury was also renowned for its cloth market and the quality of its fish, and in the late sixteenth century had a population of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000. It was, as the Marlowe biographer William Urry points out, a city close to the countryside: ‘Cows grazed within a hundred yards of John Marlowe’s shop and local women went milking every morning. Gleaning went on at harvest-time in Barton Fields, stretching into St George’s parish. Fifteen minutes’ walk would have taken the young Marlowe far out СКАЧАТЬ