OUP £25 pp437
Christopher Marlowe is a difficult figure for the biographer. A sense of elusiveness and ambiguity is fundamental to him: “That like I best that flies beyond my reach,” he wrote. His documented career is lurid with street fights, arrests, espionage, dire accusations of heresy, sedition and homosexuality; his death at the age of 29 was violent. His plays, which include Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta and that great Elizabethan spinechiller Doctor Faustus, oscillate between lush poetry — his “high astounding terms”, as he put it — and bleak, sardonic humour. TS Eliot thought his true dramatic genre was not so much tragedy as a kind of serious, “even savage” farce. Disreputable and charismatic, Marlowe’s brief life offers plenty of good biographical copy, but to recover a sense of the man himself is not so easy.
Park Honan is as qualified as any to grapple with these difficulties. His biography of Shakespeare, published seven years ago, has remained a benchmark of excellence, dense with scholarly information but open also to a more fluid play of insight and intuition. Marlowe and Shakespeare were almost exact contemporaries, born in early 1564, and emerged from the same provincial, artisan middle class (the shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, the glover’s son from Stratford) but they were very different characters. In his lifetime, Marlowe was the more famous, and socially superior as a graduate from Cambridge, a Master of Arts and a “university wit”, while Shakespeare was a mere actor who had branched — trespassed, as some saw it — into authorship: “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”, as Robert Greene, another Cambridge- educated writer, contemptuously called him.
Honan is subtle on their relationship. It is one of the most important in English literary history, yet there remains no documentary or even anecdotal evidence of it. That they knew one another is inevitable; that Shakespeare learnt from his more intellectually advanced colleague is demonstrable from the borrowings that litter his early plays, and which echo on in the form of comic pastiche, long after Marlowe’s death, as in Pistol’s “hollow pampered jades”, which garbles a famously cruel line from Tamburlaine, where captive princes are harnessed to the warlord’s chariot, and driven along with the words, “Holla! Ye pampered jades of Asia.” But Honan shows how the influence also ran the other way, especially in Marlowe’s last play, Edward II. It was, he concludes carefully, a “nearly collusive relationship”.
Honan explores an interesting possibility, first canvassed by the maverick Marlowe scholar John C Baker, that Marlowe was the author of an early play about the Athenean misanthrope Timon (later a subject for Shakespeare). The play survives in a partly corrupt manuscript copy in the Dyce collection at the V&A. It has Kentish references, and its chief source is the classical author Lucan, whose work Marlowe is known to have translated. Its somewhat scoffing allusions to Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation suggest it was written not long after Drake’s return in late 1580. If this is right, the play would be the earliest work of Marlowe’s we know — predating his first certain play, Dido Queen of Carthage, and his translations of Ovid and Lucan, all generally ascribed to the mid-1580s.
One of the many cruxes of Marlowe biography concerns the supposed portrait of him, discovered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. There is no name on the portrait, but Corpus was Marlowe’s own college, and the dating inscription (1585, Aetatis suae 21) is right for him, and many believe this handsome, brown-haired young man with the quizzical gaze and snazzy velvet doublet is indeed Marlowe. Honan provides some fascinating new material on this puzzle. It seems the painting was not found, as hitherto reported, in the Master’s Lodge at Corpus. In a letter of May 2000, a former undergraduate, Peter Hall, described how the panel was discovered in his rooms in 1952, by workmen stripping out an old gas fire. His rooms stood on the southeast corner of Old Court — precisely where the “Parker Scholars”, of whom Marlowe was one, had their quarters. This adds another touch of plausibility to the identification. That Marlowe was a bit of a dandy is readily inferred from his plays, which as Honan says, dwell lovingly on “looks, textures, plumes, crests, colours and clothes”.
On May 30, 1593, Marlowe was stabbed to death at a lodging house near the Thames in Deptford. His killer, Ingram Frizer, was acquitted on a plea of self-defence, but nothing about Marlowe is simple. Frizer was a dodgy character, something of a con man; the two witnesses to the killing, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres, are amply documented as spies and swindlers. Marlowe himself was under surveillance, having been examined by the Privy Council 10 days previously on charges of blasphemy and sedition. Did he really die, as the inquest states, in an argument over the bill or “recknynge”, or was his death another episode in the shadowy annals of Elizabethan espionage?
Honan negotiates his way shrewdly through this minefield, though the extent to which he provides “new material” on it (as promised on the jacket) is doubtful. He does come up with one new document, unearthed in the archives of the Yorkshire Archeological Society, which shows Marlowe’s killer Frizer receiving lands from Lady Audrey Walsingham (wife of Marlowe’s former patron, Thomas). But this dates from 1605, 12 years after the killing, and is anyway part of a long and well-attested business relationship between Frizer and Lady Audrey. It adds to our knowledge but does not change it.
Honan underestimates, as others have done, the role played in the final scenes of Marlowe’s life by that dreadful old meddler, the spy and tale-teller Thomas Drury, and repeats the inaccurate assertions of the American academic Constance Kuriyama on the subject. (For the record, there is no discernible difference in style between Drury’s signed letter of August 1, 1593, which contains important data about Marlowe’s prosecution, and the unsigned report about Marlowe and others that he delivered to the authorities a couple of months earlier; the difference is only in handwriting, because the report was copied up by a government clerk, whose hand can be seen in similar documents of the period.)
This is a splendid book, which in many ways complements David Rigg’s richly contextual biography published last year. Honan reaches beyond the high-octane legend to celebrate this disaffected, courageous, “tough minded” young writer. “His morality as a playwright exists in his clarity, and in his trust in our ability to think for ourselves. He is enormously refreshing, and lightens our lives because he tests any ‘truth’ that belittles us.”
THE REAL THING?
If Shakespeare scholarship is dogged by questions of attribution, so too are Marlowe studies. His Doctor Faustus, for instance, written when he was just 25, exists in two very different printed versions, both of which contain writing that is identifiably not his. The play was the victim of so much reworking, in fact, that the second, later version, published in 1616, is 40% longer, with about 600 more lines than the first; it features completely new characters and turns Faustus into an anti-Catholic hero.
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websites:
www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html
The text of his complete works
