#christophermarlowe

Christopher Marlowe: Poet, Playwright, Spy

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), or Kit Marlowe, was a poet and playwright of the English Renaissance who wrote during the Elizabethan Era (1558-1603). His mastery of the blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter – transformed the way plays were written for Elizabethan theatre and influenced many other dramatists, including William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Marlowe's plays were known for their overambitious and morally ambiguous protagonists, realistic portrayals of emotion, and their use of crowd-pleasing violence; his most significant works include Tamburlaine the Great (circa 1587), Doctor Faustus (circa 1592), and Edward II (circa 1592), as well as the narrative poem Hero and Leander. His personal life was as dramatic as his work – an alleged atheist and homosexual man with ties to the queen's secret service, Marlowe was killed in a mysterious tavern brawl in May 1593.

Early Life & Education

Marlowe was born in Canterbury, England, sometime in February 1564, and was baptized there on 26 February, exactly two months before Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, had come to Canterbury in the mid-1550s in search of work. In 1561, John Marlowe married Katherine Arthur, the daughter of a peasant family from Dover. The marriage produced nine children, of whom Christopher was the second – tragically, four of these children would die before reaching adulthood, including the eldest, Mary. To compound the difficulty of these losses, the Marlowes were a poor family who constantly had to rely on welfare assistance from local charities.

At the age of 8, Marlowe entered grammar school – this was an unusual trajectory, since the sons of tradesmen often abandoned their formal educations around that age to begin apprenticeships. He attended King's School in Canterbury, where he studied Latin, classical literature, rhetoric, and oratory, as well as the hexametric verses of the ancient Roman literature by poets Ovid and Virgil. As scholar David Riggs explains, Marlowe "internalized the basic principles of Latin prosody (figures of speech, metrical resolution rules, relative stress) that underlaid his great contributions to the art of English poetry" (Cheney, 27). In 1580, 16-year-old Marlowe won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge – this scholarship was awarded to students of lower-class status who had proven adept at writing in verse, with the expectation that they would go on to become Anglican clergymen. Marlowe arrived on campus in December to find a student body that included a mix of "fee-paying gentlemen" and "baseborn scholars" like himself; the division between these two groups, according to Riggs, would lay "the groundwork for many scenes of social conflict that arise in Marlowe's works" (ibid).

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The Violent and Mysterious Death of Christopher Marlowe

On the evening of 30 May 1593, the sounds of a heated argument could be heard emanating from a boarding house in Deptford, a district of London on the south bank of the River Thames. Two of the boarders were quarreling over which of them should pay the bill – or ‘the reckoning’ – for the supper they had just finished. As the argument escalated, a dagger was suddenly and “maliciously” drawn and one of the men attacked the other, inflicting “two wounds on his head of the length of two inches, and of the depth of a quarter inch” (quoted in Wells, 99). The wound, though deep, was not fatal, but the wounded man now feared for his life. After a desperate struggle, he wrenched the dagger free from his attacker’s hands and gave his opponent “a mortal wound over his right eye” (ibid, 100). The attacker died instantly, according to the coroner’s report, although modern medical opinion holds that he likely lived for several minutes before succumbing to his injury.

The man who had lost his life in this apparently meaningless struggle was none other than Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe, the 29-year-old darling of Elizabethan theatre and poetry. Marlowe – who was about the same age as his great contemporary William Shakespeare, both born c. 1564 – had a polarizing reputation, one that led to varied reactions when news of his death spread throughout the city of London. Fellow poet George Peele lamented the loss of a literary genius, referring to Marlowe as “the darling of the muses” while Thomas Dekker imagined his soul in the Elysian Fields, resting in the shade of a large grapevine. Other contemporaries were not so sorry to hear about the loss of a man who was a notorious street brawler, atheist, and sodomite. Thomas Beard, referring to the blasphemous comments Marlowe was alleged to have made shortly before his death, was glad to “see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dog” (Cheney, 24). For Beard, it was hardly surprising that an unscrupulous fellow like Marlowe should meet his inglorious end in a barroom brawl.

Frizer’s Testimony

But was that truly the whole of the story? For centuries, the circumstances surrounding Marlowe’s death were shrouded in myth. Various stories abounded – from the implausible idea that he faked his own death and went on to write the plays of Shakespeare, to the more scandalous tale told by writer Francis Meres (l. 1565-1647), who alleges that Marlowe was “stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his lewd love”, with ‘lewd love’ here referring to a prostitute (quoted in Wells, 62). The story recounted at the beginning of this article did not surface until 1925, when several legal documents relating to the killing were discovered by Elizabethan scholar Leslie Hotson. The documents were from a coroner’s inquiry conducted on 1 June 1593, only two days after the incident, and contain the detailed testimony of Ingram Frizer, the man who had quarreled with, and ultimately killed, Marlowe. According to Frizer, there had been four of them staying at the Deptford boarding house run by a widow named Eleanor Bull: these four guests included Frizer, Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Marlowe himself.

If Frizer’s testimony can be believed, the four men met at 10 am on the day of Marlowe’s death. They enjoyed a midday meal, during which they were “in quiet sort with one another” – presumed to mean they were getting along well – before taking a garden walk until 6 pm. After this walk came supper; according to the coroner’s inquiry, Marlowe was lying “on a bed in the room where they supped” while the other three men were sitting together, their backs toward the bed, Frizer sandwiched tightly between Poley and Skeres. Marlowe and Frizer argued over which of them would pay the bill before the poet became violent, seizing Frizer’s own dagger and attacking him. Frizer, stuck between the two other men, found that he “in no wise could take flight” and was forced to defend himself (quoted in Wells, 99). Frizer therefore claimed he had killed Marlowe purely in self-defense, a finding that the coroner’s inquiry agreed with, deciding that Frizer had indeed acted “in the defense and saving of his own life”. Marlowe was buried in a mass grave, and Frizer was granted a full royal pardon less than a month later. The case had been open-and-shut, a regrettable instance of a fight taken too far.

Or so it would seem. In fact, there are reasons to doubt that Frizer and his companions were being entirely truthful in their account of what happened. Frizer, Poley, and Skeres were all connected to the queen’s secret service – Frizer was the personal servant of the nephew of the queen’s spymaster, while Poley and Skeres were experienced agents who had helped uncover the 1586 Babington Plot to assassinate the queen. All three were known to be men of dubious character; Skeres, for instance, had a history of luring unsuspecting young men into money-lending schemes, while Poley had various connections to the criminals of London’s underworld and had once said he would rather perjure himself than say anything that would harm him. Frizer, of course, had every reason to lie, since he would be sentenced to death if convicted of murder. Thus, the testimony of this “profoundly slippery trio” – as Charles Nicholl calls them – should probably be taken with a grain of salt. What these men were doing meeting with Marlowe in the first place is unclear, although it may have had something to do with the poet’s own history – for Marlowe himself had worked for the queen’s secret service and may have even been a double agent.

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