Nine Lives (of the Poets): Marlowe!

Our book today is John Bakeless' wonderful 1937 classic, Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time which stands in my mind as the best biography ever written of this much-biographied young man.

Oddly much-biographied. Marlowe cut a huge swath through the London literary scene of his day, true, but by the standards of the Elizabethan writing-market, he produced very little work, and he died before he was thirty. The oblivion of footnotes seems the more likely fate for such a figure than the bright measure of fame posthumous fame he's enjoyed instead, and the discrepancy can only be chalked up to spicey rumor and innuendo. Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and got his B.A. from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, despite being often enough missing from college that he needed a written excuse from Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council to graduate - and that waiver has led to four centuries of speculation as to what he did to earn it: 'begging and pleading with any family connection who'd listen' has never been romantic enough, so Marlowe has been given a Batman-style second career as an espionage agent in the employ of the implacable Thomas Walsingham.

From 1587 to 1593, his plays - Tamburlaine 1 & 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, and Dido - were produced and rapturously attended and idolized (a fact reflected in the pamphlets of the day and funnily sent up in the movie "Shakespeare in Love"). They gave to English letters and the English stage something almost thoroughly new, a "mighty line" that buried its own subtleties in a tidal wave of primary-color images and devastatingly powerful verse. Even now, in all of Western literature, there's no experience quite like reading Marlowe for any stretch of pages - the room starts to spin, and all things begin to seem possible.

Marlowe's posthumous reputation has benefited immeasurably from two things that have nothing to do with his work: the first is the portrait found at Corpus Christi College in 1953 and forever afterward taken to be the image of Marlowe as a handsome, proud, wastrel college student - it looks just exactly as we want Marlowe the literary rebel to look - and the second is the manner of his death, not only young but violent: stabbed in the forehead in May of 1593 by Ingram Frizer, one of the three men with whom he'd spent the day at an inn in Deptford. As Charles Nicoll demonstrates in his brilliant book The Reckoning, all three of the men in that room with Marlowe had connections with Thomas Walsingham and his equally enigmatic brother Francis, and inferences have been rife ever since that Marlowe's death was state-sanctioned, or even state-ordered. The fact that we'll almost certainly never know the truth of the matter only adds to the spice.

One of the many charms of this book is that Bakeless, despite being a Harvard-educated egghead, is also an unapologetically opinionated crank who has a fiercely-researched and often openly-irritated take on every aspect of his young subject's life and world. Spice doesn't deter him (although his book is something of a product of its time, in that Marlowe's fondness for tobacco gets a lot more attention than his fondness for teenage boys), nor does controversy, nor does the prospect of seeming like a crackpot. As a result, his irritated asides are often more entertaining than the subjects that inspired them, as with this little digression on the shoddy printing standards of today:

Our modern abomination of cheap wood-pulp paper was unknown in those happy days, and consequently the fugitive pamphlets in which Marlowe's plays and poems appeared, cheap as they were, had to be printed on good rag paper, which has endured the centuries unharmed. If cheaper paper had existed the early printers would undoubtedly have used it for little books like these, which were not in their day regarded as especially valuable. Practically all of Elizabethan literature would have crumbled into a fine yellow powder not later than the middle of the seventeenth century, the only exceptions being stray lyrics preserved in the manuscript commonplace books and the fortunate poets who, like Shakespeare, appeared in expensive printed folios. Without the good rag paper that went to make these queer old books, most of the great Elizabethan writers and all the lesser ones would have remained mere names. On such mechanical accidents do reputations in literature depend.

But Bakeless does have a big soft spot, and it's right where it should be: he's very partial to his chosen subject. He sees Marlowe's work - the whole spectrum of it - with a clarity that's often muddled or missing from later biographers, and he's perfectly willing to address the flaws of that work, but always in the context of the general genius of the man:

Of the gentleness of Shakespeare's humour - that humour which, seeing folly and being diverted with it, yet keeps a certain tenderness and tolerance for the fool - Marlowe had none whatever. Humour for Marlowe did not represent a saving sense of proportion. Humour could never enable this fiery spirit to laugh at the evils and injustices surrounding it. That is why those evils and injustices so galled and fretted this impassionate soul, drove it to wild, perilous freedom and forbidden speculation, to a philosophy of revolt against the state, against morals, against God himself.

Despite the brevity and murkiness of his life, Marlowe's going to keep generating books, and some very good ones have appeared since Bakeless (Park Honan's in particular stands out in my mind). The statistics-crawling exercise known as "Shakespearean studies" has yielded a few more likely instances where the Bard was paying sly tribute to the greatest of his contemporaries, and of course sociological studies proceed apace. And it's worth remembering that despite the brilliance of Bakeless' treatment of Marlowe's plays, we'd still be studying this young man even if those plays didn't survive, on the basis of his strengths as a poet alone, strengths that, after all, earned him his place in this series (Nine Lives of the Dramatists being reserved for another date, naturally). So it's fitting we close with one of those poems, a bit from one of his taut, dancing translations of Ovid:

Rude man, 'tis vain thy damsel to commend

To keeper's trust: their wits should them defend.

Who, without fear, is chaste, is chaste in sooth:

Who, because means want, doeth not, she doth.

Though thou her body guard, her mind is stained:

Nor, lest she will, can any be restrained.

Nor canst by watching keep her mind from sin;

All being shut out, th' adulterer is within.

Who may offend, sins least; power to do ill

The fainting seeds of naughtiness doth kill.

Forbear to kindle vice by prohibition,

Sooner shall kindness gain thy will's fruition.

tamburlaine must die!

Our book today is Louise Welsh's 2004 novella Tamburlaine Must Die, which takes the form of a frenzied account of Christopher Marlowe's last few days on Earth, as narrated by the famous playwright himself in an easy quasi-modern idiom Welsh has here perfected. The book is as beautiful and intense as a snow-squall, and in that it joins its only two competitors for the title of the best Christopher Marlowe novel of them all - those being Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford and George Garrett's Entered from the Sun.

When this novella opens, Marlowe is spending his days at the country estate of his patron, Francis Walsingham (plague has shut the theaters in London and driven away everyone who can get away), when word comes from London that somebody has posted a scurrilous attack on recent Dutch immigrants and signed it with the name of Marlowe's most famous stage-creation, Tamburlaine. Suspicion naturally falls on Marlowe himself, and a messenger is sent to fetch him before Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council. Such a meeting is no minor thing, as Marlowe knows quite well:

This was the Privy Council. Ministers who cared enough for high office to profit from death. Who had committed men they knew well and men they had met only once to torture and death. Dangerous men, each with a ruthless core, who had played chess with their own lives and still lived, though some had sat in prison cells and listened to the hollow sound of nails splitting wood as their own gallows grew in the yard.

They don't arrest him, but they do require that he present himself to them every day while they decide his fate - in the troubled final years of Elizabeth's reign, that was as close as you could come to walking around with a death sentence hanging over you, and Marlowe knows this too. Welsh's Marlowe is made of all the familiar, comfortable conjectures about him, including the two most popular ones: that he was happy to roger men, and that he was from an early age involved in the cloak-and-dagger world of Elizabethan spying and counter-spying. Her Marlowe has seen it all and is no stranger to life and death situations and the odd things they do to your mind:

Death makes the world a brighter place. I've seen the shape danger gives to things, an edge so sharp that if you like your head atop your shoulders and your entrails tucked safe in your belly it's best not to stop and admire the view. Yet the prospect of death renders everything lovely. Colours shine stronger. Strangers' faces fascinate and your sex calls you to business you must not attend.

Tamburlaine Must Die is constructed around the tried and true 'secret memoir' 'I'm writing this down and hiding it away for future generations to find' formula (a formula given its apotheosis in Robert Graves' I, Claudius), and it works perfectly. This skinny little book came and went in 2004 with barely a ripple, but it's vivid and fast-paced and entirely worth your time, should you ever run across it. I ordered a copy from London back then, read it and loved it, then somehow lost track of it (I'm convinced a mysterious stranger periodically enters my apartment, somehow bypasses the razor-sharp vigilance of my basset hound, bags up books at random, and sells them to faraway bookstores). I recently found a copy and re-read it - and I'm glad I did. Marlowe still hasn't had his ultimate novel ... but Tamburlaine Must Die joins the ranks of great partial versions!

Penny Press! Spies in the London Review!

Several interesting items in the latest London Review of Books, as the year winds down and we all slow to a stop under the Christmas tree.

First up is a tiny thing, a small fraction of a long poem by Tom Lowenstein called 'Conversation with Murasaki' (the poem itself is flaccid and largely misfired ... which is annoying, since a very good poem with that same title COULD be written). The poem itself isn't worth quoting, but here's the line that caught my eye:

"You would be astonished
at the squalor of European history.
But you would have liked Jane Austen."

Trite, perhaps, but I liked the moment's pondering it afforded me, wondering either of the two great novelists would have thought of each other (two great women novelists from a depressingly long list ...).

Also in this issue is Stefan Collini's review of the new Kingsley Amis biography by Zachary Leader, a long, detailed, extremely satisfying review that completely eleminiates any desire one might have to go out and read the book.

Leader comes across as a faithful chronicler, and Amis comes across as a hopeless, helpless alcoholic who devoted as much of his life as possible to being unpleasant.

The thing that strikes you about this account of Amis' life is the same thing that strikes you about so many 20th century British writers (Anthony Burgess comes to mind): the staggering sheer AMOUNT they drank - amounts so regular and titanic that you inevitably wonder how they ever got ANY work done, much less the large amounts they did (not to mention how they managed to LIVE even as long as they did).

But the most interesting (albeit frustrating) piece in this issue is John Bossy's review of "Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy" by Park Honan.

Bossy is stern headmaster, and he starts off his review with a laundry list of Honan's factual errors. Well and good, this is a reviewer's office (and factual errors are what have always bugged us most about Honan's books). But Bossy seems determined not only to revoke Honan's credentials but also to destroy the printing press on which they were made. One wonders if he was tetchy when he wrote his review.

The crux of it all is that 'poet and spy' part of Honan's title. Bossy takes issue with it all throughout his review, saying there's no 'proper evidence' at all that Marlowe was ever any kind of spy. "It is virtually certain that he had not been to Rheims," Bossy writes, "and reasonably certin that he had not been doing any spying anywhere, since espionage tends to leave records."

That last assertion is a trifle dubious, but even if we grant it, we're driven to conclude that Bossy is being just a bit fussy about what constitutes historical evidence. Marlowe never stood on a crate in Cheapside and yelled 'I am a spy!' But then, more famously, Shakespeare never signed a single play.

I doubt severely that Bossy would fail to credit Shakespeare with the authorship of the plays known by his name, but for some reason he's unwilling to make that leap with Marlowe and espionage.

First there's the letter. In 1587, the Queen's Council sent a letter to Cambridge, summarily ordering the college to award Marlowe his degree - even though he'd been absent for nearly the whole of his last term. In the letter, Marlowe's Cambridge masters are told that he was engaged in 'matters touching the benefit of the country.' Bossy dismisses the Cambridge speculation at the time - that Marlowe was spying on the Catholic seminary at Reims - and suggests that he was in the Netherlands on a diplomatic mission.

And that's just fine - he can offer any alternate theory he likes. Since espionage usually DOESN'T leave records (um, duh), we'll never have the documents we need to say for sure. What we're left with is inference, and that's a shame, because Bossy seems to have had his inference gland removed.

Marlowe had a long connection with Thomas Walsingham, whose cousin Francis was the head of Queen Elizabeth's spy service. Bossy gets around this by rather pedantically pointing out that there's no evidence Thomas ever took up the family business. This again begs the question of what constitutes evidence.

Thomas was placed in charge of his cousin's London home in Seething Lane. We have no records of what he did there (Bossy renders him as some kind of groundskeeper), but when he left he was replaced by Walter William, and we have plenty of records of what HE did there: he worked as a spy for Francis. It's on occasions such as this that a bit of inference is the moral duty of anybody with a brain in his head.

But OK, let's say Thomas really was just a groundskeeper and had nothing to do with the dark underworld his cousin navigated so adroitly. We should then expect to find his record clear of ... ooops! Nope! Even Bossy is forced to admit that he had dealings with "the actual spy Robert Poley," who was often an operative of Francis. The Elizabethan record books are full of harmless Kentish landowners who had no dealings whatsoever with spies. Again, a little inference is called for.

But the real corker here, the part of Bossy's review that tips from stubborn to deceitful, is this:

"...there is no proper evidence at all to show that Marlowe was ever part of what is foolishly called the Elizabethan secret service. This conclusion ought to guide inquirers into what has become another cause of speculation, Marlowe's death in a hostelry in Deptford on 30 May 1593. The coroner's report, that it was the result of a dispute between Marlowe and one Ingram Frizer about paying the bill for their dinner, has been treated as a cover-up by several writers convinced that the government of Elizabeth practised a 'culture of surveillance' and maintained itself in power by dirty tricks."

Just look at the pristine neatness of that little summary: Marlowe and another man quarrel over the bill for dinner, the quarrel gets out of hand, and Marlowe gets stabbed to death. Sort of thing happens all the time.

Except for the truckload of stuff Bossy is leaving out or glossing over. My personal favorite is that 'one Ingram Frizer,' as though he were a name plucked from the Deptford phone book. In fact Ingram Frizer had a long and well-documented history as a ... wait for it ... spy. But there's also the fact that the fight took place after a whole DAY spent at this 'hostelry' - not just for a meal, but for many hours of quiet, intense conversation. Or the most interesting tidbit of all, something Bossy must have found too inconsequential to mention: that there were two other man with Marlowe that day, two other men present during the fight that ended Marlowe's life ... and one of those men was Robert Poley, who we've already established was a ... wait for it ... spy.

There's no evidence at all that Marlowe was a spy, says Bossy. And on one level, he's right: we don't have stamped W2 forms. But that doesn't mean all the historians who've speculated he was are gullible scandal-mongers. Hell, Bossy would probably raise doubts that I'm actually typing any of this ... is there any evidence that I am, after all? Sure, the words appear, but ANYBODY could be typing them!

Guess you'll all just have to do some inferring!

a book-list!

Sooner or later, I'll get around to posting a sooper-dooper ultra-definitive historical fiction list, one that will guide you all in every time-period and every seeking mood. But in the meantime, I thought I'd fire off a quick sub-list of baubles to tempt the mind's eye!

1. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault - certainly all her historical novels (except Funeral Games alas) would be on my sooper-dooper list, but I thought I'd plug this particular book, about the pre-Great years of Alexander ... it's crammed with very fine, very delicate, very KNOWING prose that only gets deeper the more you know about Alexander.

2. Clodia by Robert DeMaria - a very good evocation of Republican Rome and the passions of young love-smitten Catullus.

3. The Right Line of Cerdic by Alfred Duggan - a meticulous and ultimately stirring novel of Alfred the Great (the only British monarch to retain that 'the Great,' although I can think of four others who deserved it entirely more)

4. The Physician by Noah Gordon - a rattling good yarn about a boy who grows into the medical profession (such as it was) in 11th century England ... no great writing, but enough potboilery to fill the rainiest afternoon

5. The Emperor's Virgin by Sylvia Fraser - a surprisingly deep and well-written book set against the backdrop of the reign of Domitian, a genuine little find of a book (the operative word being 'find' in the verbal sense, since even the Internet has its limits)

6. The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric - set in 15th century Venice (which is VERY accurately evoked, wonderfully so - when I get around to it, I'll also be posting a 'Venetian fiction' list too), but revolving around a precious manuscript of the aforementioned Catullus. The prose is a little on the purple side, but the book is a delight.

7. Bloody Season by Loren Estleman - here we have writing of the very first order, in a novel about the OK Corral gunfight and its aftermath. Estleman is fantastic, most of his book are hugely worth reading, but this one just might be the best one.

8. Germanicus by David Wishart - a smart, sassy take on the events surrounding the death of Germanicus - events so well covered in Robert Graves' I, Claudius that you'd think the mine was played out ... and you'd be wrong! Wishart is funny and gleefully anachronistic, and somehow it all works ... snap him up before his American importer loses heart and decides to pull him from your Barnes & Noble shelves.

9. Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo - a huge, ample historical novel about the title character that manages to be hugely moving if you stick it out to the end ...

10. Well, I started with a book that needs no trumping, one that would be on my sooper-dooper list anyway, and I'll end with one the same: George Garrett's Entered from the Sun, which desperate publisher flacks have always said is a novel about Christopher Marlowe. In reality the novel - stirring, intelligent, hugely beautiful - is about a handful of lives for one reason or another torn apart by the DEATH of Marlowe (who never appears in the book). It's (of course) out of print, but it's well worth your attention.


And there you have it! A quick run-down of 10 really good historical novels! I WILL write up the sooper-dooper list sometime soon, but in the meantime, these will have to satisfy you, thou legion of hungry jackals!

More lists to follow!