Episode 149: The Mysterious life and death of Christopher Marlowe

Who was Kit Marlowe? Spy? Genius? Scholar? All of the above? Let’s dive deep into Marlowe’s life.

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Episode transcript:

“Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease and midnight never come! Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent, and save his soul. O lente lente currite noctis equi! The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.“

Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.

This is Episode 149. We’re only one away from 150, isn’t that amazing? So 149 and it is on Kit Marlowe. If you didn’t know that opening monologue that was from Doctor Faustus, one of Christopher Marlowe’s most famous plays. We’re going to talk about Kit Marlowe because he was a really interesting character. And there’s a lot of conspiracy theories around his death, and I love nothing more than a good conspiracy theory. So we’re going to talk about that.

So a lot of people have heard of Kit Marlowe in the context of studying Shakespeare, but he is well worth studying on his own, never mind Shakespeare. He was born in Canterbury in 1564. He was actually born in the same year as Shakespeare and came from a very similar social class. His father was a shoemaker, and that sounds very kind of lowly and lower class, but he was very active in his guild and in local government. So he was actually upper middle class.

Living in Canterbury, Marlowe would have grown up being very, very aware of religion and the power of church and religion. Canterbury was a huge area, or was the biggest shrine in England really, where people would come from all over England and all over the world really, to pay their respects and pray at the tomb of Thomas Becket, who was killed by Henry II several hundred years beforehand. Well, okay, so somebody is going to write to me and say Henry II didn’t kill him. Some knights who heard Henry II being upset about going against royal power, went and did it thinking they were going to get on Henry’s good side. So how much of a role Henry had? Nobody knows.

Henry had to do penance. He had to go on his knees up to the altar and pray for forgiveness and all of that kind of stuff. So no, Henry did not kill Thomas Becket, but Thomas Becket wound up dead. And by this point, at the end of the 16th century, people were going to Canterbury to pray and to go on pilgrimage. It was a very old pilgrimage spot, even all the way back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that was about pilgrims going on pilgrimage to pray to Thomas a Becket.

So Kit Marlowe is growing up in this area, in this place that has a mixture of a lot of different nationalities and people who are very passionate about their religion. And seeing the power that religion had over people, it would have made him question religion, probably, at a very young age. Canterbury had the largest number of immigrants in England, second only to London. So there were a lot of people, Protestant refugees coming, especially from the Netherlands, and so he would have been very aware of religion and the issues around religion from a very young age.

Now, he went to a good grammar school in Canterbury, and then people noticed how intelligent he was and he won a scholarship to go to Corpus Christi in Cambridge. He was very lucky early in his life to be spotted by those who could offer him scholarships and who could offer him advancements, who could be patrons of him. That’s something that Shakespeare did not have.

So Christopher Marlowe goes away to Cambridge. Cambridge at this time was, of course, another very vibrant place all the way back in the 1530s. It was already a hub of Protestantism, of rebellion, and of people being rowdy and questioning things, it was very much of this kind of what you would think of with a college town, where nowadays we might have things like protests and a lot of social justice and things like that in colleges. This was the same then as well.

So he goes to Cambridge, he’s part of this community of what nowadays we would term maybe the literary elite and people who were writing and who were making culture and who were part of the cultural movements of the time. And he became friends with a number of different people who he stayed friends with throughout his life. Robert Greene, who was a playwright and a poet was a friend of his. He was always kind of getting into trouble with this group of young men that he was with. And it was in Cambridge that he first began his literary career. He wrote a play called Dido, Queen of Carthage that was based on Virgil and he also translated Ovid.

There are stories about Kit Marlowe, and this is what makes him so interesting, that he was the first Cambridge spy. So the reason why people think that he is a spy is, and especially even at this young age, is that there is a mess hall book, this is how students would pay for their meals on campus when they were studying. Just like now you pay your room and board fees. So there was something called the buttery book. This is where the payments for room and board retracked. And there are several places in the buttery book for the time that Marlowe was there where he wasn’t paying for his meals at school. And so that shows that he was probably away during that time.

So there are these big gaps and big absences where he’s not paying for any kind of food, any kind of meals at school. So he was probably away, doing who knows what. But then after several years, of course it became time for him to graduate and to get his degree. But there was a rumor that sprang up, and a number of people were against him graduating and getting his degree because they said he wanted to go to Rheims.

Now in Rheims, there was a Catholic seminary. It was actually the leading Catholic seminary that taught English priests and had them coming back to England. Of course, this is the period we’ve talked about a lot in this podcast of the experience of Catholics in England. And there were this whole movement to send priests abroad, to learn how to be missionaries to come back into England and become missionaries and convert people back to Catholicism. Of course, this was a worry for the government because they were afraid that when Spain and other Catholic countries invaded, this was once Elizabeth was excommunicated, they were afraid that as other countries were going to invade England, this insider Catholic army was going to spring up and start massacring Protestants in their homes throughout England.

So there was a lot of suspicions and I would refer you back to the episode I did on the Catholic experience in Elizabethan England several, several, maybe five years ago. Anyway, I’ll link to in the show notes. Oh, and show notes, you can get show notes at Englandcast.com/Marlowe.

So we’ve got a rumor springing up around Marlowe, that he should not get his degree, that Cambridge should not graduate him because he’s going to go to Rheim and be in this headquarters of English Catholics. And of course, the suggestion was that he had Catholic sympathies. Now, this would be really interesting, because later on in his life, there was the suggestion that he was a complete atheist. So who knows, right?

But this rumor got as far as the highest levels of government, went all the way to the Privy Council, and the Privy Council sent a message back to Cambridge saying that he had to get his degree, because when he went to Rheims, he was doing good service to her majesty. Now that term “good service” was generally used as a word for spying. So he was in her majesty’s service, he was doing “good service” in Rheims. So the idea is that he went to Rheims to go as a spy possibly to disrupt some Catholic plots against Elizabeth. And the reason why people are very much convinced that he was a spy at this point is twofold, that phrase “good service”, but also why on earth would the Privy Council have gotten involved in the degree requirements and all of that of a school anyway?

That seems so far-fetched that a rumor would stretch all the way up to the Privy Council, and then they would get involved. So he was doing something. And that phrase that he was being of “good service”. Generally, the idea is that he was already a spy at this point.

The next time he reappears in the context of being a spy is in the Netherlands. This is the period where the Netherlands are in the midst of war. They are Protestant, the Protestant Netherlands, but they are under the control of Catholic Spain, and so they are rebelling and Elizabeth sent troops. This is the same place where Philip Sidney the poet died in the war in the Netherlands. So English troops were in the Netherlands fighting during this time. And Marlowe appears in the Netherlands being involved in this war between the Catholics and the Protestants.

While he’s in the Netherlands, he’s accused of counterfeiting coins in 1592. And again, a message comes from the Privy Council telling the people who were in charge in the Netherlands to not prosecute Marlowe for this crime. He was brought back and he even received an audience with Lord Burghley, and nothing happened to him at all. So it appears that he had people protecting him. Why were they protecting him? The idea again, is that he was trying to infiltrate a plot against Elizabeth’s life that he was involved somehow, in this war as somebody who was gathering intelligence, as somebody who was engaging in espionage. Either way, he had people who were protecting him.

After Cambridge, he came to London. He was in London by 1587, when his first play, Tamburlaine came out. He was kind of part of, again, this literary circle of people who came from Cambridge, who were in London now getting involved in the theater, which was a really popular place to be involved. So the plot of Tamburlaine is that he is a ruler, he was born very lowly, he was a shepherd, but he has ambition, and he rises up.

And the play is about these conquests he had from Persia through Turkey, and through Europe. And it’s almost a play that looks like it’s going to end in his downfall. There are these ideas around ambition and can you be born so lowly and still be so ambitious? But in the end, it ends with him being successful. He marries somebody that he loves, and it all goes well. And the play itself also went very well.

There was a sequel, and Tamburlaine went on to be in popular usage the name Tamburlaine. Thomas Dekker actually calls the plague, when the plague came back, he referred to it as a “stalking Tamburlaine”. And Tamburlaine was also a role for the very famous actor Edward Alleyn who played Tamburlaine.

Then in 1588, we have another play, called The Jew of Malta, which is another Marlowe play. Now this is a play that a lot of people do compare to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, because of the story around prejudices and anti-Semitism around Jewish people. So the main figure is around Barabas, a Jewish person. It’s based in Malta, and at this point, Malta is being fought over by Turks, Christians, and Jews. I will refer you to another episode I did on Lepanto and Elizabeth’s relationship with the Middle East because we actually talked about the siege of Malta and the different wars that were going on around there. So Barabas is based in Malta.

He feels wronged because all of the money that he had, he was a merchant, and all of the money that he made was taken away from him to pay tribute. Now he feels very wronged and he’s spending all the money that he has left taking revenge on the people who wronged him. He also has a daughter similar to Shylock in Merchant of Venice, who has Jessica, Barabas has Abigail. Now Abigail became a Christian and in the end, she is killed so Barabas loses his money and his daughter, and he decides to plan revenge on both Christians and Turks. But in the end, Barabas is unable to take his revenge, and he’s tricked, and dropped into a boiling cauldron, and dies horribly.

That’s interesting because Marlowe’s plays rely heavily on scenery, and on these special effects and the Lord Admiral’s men did have in their inventory the cauldron to drop Barabas into and you can just imagine how they would have staged that. It’s a really interesting thing to think about and what it would have been like to be in the audience and to see this person being dropped into a boiling cauldron to die. Would have been really something, really a spectacle.

We don’t know very much about whether Marlowe and Shakespeare knew each other. It’s probable that Marlowe knew Shakespeare as an actor because Shakespeare was an actor before he became a playwright. And Marlowe is the only contemporary writer that Shakespeare quotes in the line “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight.” So they must have been in the same circles, they must have known each other. Shakespeare and Marlowe were both attacked in a book that came out, supposedly by the work of Robert Greene, who, of course, was a friend of Marlowe’s when he was back in university.

And it’s a pamphlet that came out that was sort of this moralistic story, but it attacked both Shakespeare and Marlowe and Marlowe was attacked as an atheist; and Shakespeare, they said that he was just this upstart writer and had no background. And Shakespeare responded to this insult. The next thing he wrote was Venus and Adonis showing that he actually did have scholarly understandings and he wasn’t just some kind of upstart who had no knowledge.

And then things started to go bad for Marlowe. That autumn there was a pamphlet pinned up on the church associated with the Dutch refugees. And it was signed Tamburlaine. So it definitely referred back to Marlowe. And the authorities were really worried that there were going to be riots around immigrants, and they were again worried about Catholic plots, and atheists and they started to round up suspects in these plots and these riots that they suspect were going to happen.

They go to Marlowe’s rooms, and they arrested his roommate Thomas Kyd. Kyd was tortured and under torture, Kyd revealed that a piece of paper found in their rooms contained scandalous allegations written by Marlowe. There were things that he said like Jesus had a homosexual relationship with John the Evangelist. So it was stuff that you weren’t allowed to think, much less write down. And so Marlowe is suspected of having dangerous views.

Then a spy named Richard Baines hands in a document, a similar document that has the same kinds of allegations. So on May 20th, Marlowe is arrested, but he’s bailed out and he has to report daily to the authorities. 10 days later, he’s in a room in Deptford in a tavern, but we’ll talk more about that tavern in a second, and there are three people that he’s with. There’s Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley, and Nicholas Skeres. And all of these people are associated with the Secret Service in some way. And we don’t know why they went there. But they were drinking, they spent the whole day drinking, and at the end, there was supposedly some kind of quarrel around the bill, and Marlowe is stabbed above the eye with Frizer’s blade, two inches above the eye, and it apparently went straight into the brain, and he dies.

There’s an inquest. We’ll talk about that in a second too, and Frizer gets off on the grounds of self-defense. Now, that’s what we know. The inquest documents say that Frizer was sitting between Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres, and it says that Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s knife, and Frizer turned and wrestled his knife back and stabbed Marlowe right above the eye.

There are three main ideas. The first is that it really was just a drunken brawl, and it was all exactly as they said. The second is that he was assassinated. And the third is that he faked his own death. So we’re going to talk about all of them. The first, the most obvious is just that it happened as they said it was. They had been drinking all day. People tend to get belligerent when they’re drinking. Frizer and some of the others did have a history of getting into bar fights and getting into brawls. So it’s very possible that it happened just the way they said.

Now, when the inquest document was found in 1925, right away a doctor said that it was impossible that he would have died instantly from a wound like that. And also, the inquest relied on the testimony of people who were proven liars. Poley himself was known as a liar. He once said, “I will swear and forswear myself rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm.” And he was also known as the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld. So it is very possible that the men just got in a fight with each other and he wound up dead.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the other conspiracy theories because they’re more fun. One thing is that because the killing took place within a 12-mile radius of the monarch, the Queen’s coroner, William Danby took charge. But in Elizabethan England, Deptford was part of Kent and the County of Kent coroner should also have been present but he was not. Danby did not allow that and he conducted it completely on his own. So all of the people involved in this inquest had links to the government. So about this tavern that he was at, there’s this idea that he may have been trying to leave the country because the house that he was at Eleanor Bull’s tavern wasn’t just a tavern. It was a stopping-off point for agents who were going to and from the continent.

Eleanor Bull was also a distant cousin of Lord Burghley. And her home, had a really nice garden in the back where the four men were reportedly talking to each other for hours during the day. Some people say that her home was a safe house for agents crossing the sea to Europe and returning. So it’s possible that somebody in the government told these three people to stop Marlowe and ask him some questions that maybe he was on his way somewhere trying to leave the country and he got stopped.

Now when Baines brought the allegations that he was an atheist and all of this sensational stuff that he believed, the allegations were actually shown all the way up to Queen Elizabeth herself. And she said that with these vile opinions, he deserved to die, and Elizabeth said to prosecute the matter to the full. So there’s now the question, did she order his assassination? Who knows?

And now we get to the third idea that he may have actually faked his death. Because of the involvement of Eleanor Bull who was close to Lord Burghley, the idea is that she may have been involved in helping him fake his own death, and then he went away. And some people actually even believe that he possibly came back and continued publishing his plays, but did it as Shakespeare or gave his plays to Shakespeare for him to publish. There are a lot of differences between Shakespeare and Marlowe. So I’ll let Shakespeare scholars work that part out. But that is one of the ideas, it’s called the Marlovian Theory of Shakespeare.

Officially, Marlowe is buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in Deptford. There had to have been a body to bury, so if Marlowe isn’t buried there, who is? Now we get into conspiracy stuff. There was a Welsh Protestant martyr called John Penry. He was executed very, very quickly on the 29th of May. He was executed for treason on the day before Marlowe’s death, and nobody knows what happened to his body. It was never ever returned to his family. But the body was under the care of the Queen’s coroner, the aforementioned William Danby. Penry was actually taken away from his supper at five o’clock, and he was hanged. Nobody knows where his body is.

Now the coroner Danby was a close friend of Lord Burghley. Lord Burghley was one of the people who employed Marlowe on several occasions as a spy. So could Marlowe have used this body to trick people into thinking that he was dead? Now there are people who could have identified Marlowe, but the jury who had to look at the body to confirm that it was dead wouldn’t have known him. However, they would have known. They would have noticed a hanging because there would have been marks around the neck versus a stab above the eye. So this theory kind of gets shot down because a jury would have had to have identified the body and surely they would have been able to see whether or not someone had been hanged or whether they had been stabbed. But then there’s the idea that maybe they were paid off. Maybe they were involved in this conspiracy and they were paid off there.

Another character who comes into play here who’s famous, Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh and Marlowe were friends. They actually wrote poems to each other. Now, it’s very possible that Raleigh was involved in some of these same activities that Marlowe was, and Raleigh might have had him assassinated, because his own ideas would have been exposed if Marlowe had confessed anything or if Marlowe had been tortured and confessed under torture. Raleigh had been accused, there have been rumors that Raleigh was an atheist, which was punishable by death in Elizabethan England. So it’s very possible that Raleigh was actually involved in some way in Marlowe’s death as well.

Now, people have been arguing about this for years and years and years, it’s right up there with who killed Amy Robsart, Robert Dudley’s wife, and who killed the princes in the tower. What happened to Christopher Marlowe is one of these history’s mysteries that will never be fully answered unless something brand new comes to light like a letter from Elizabeth saying, “Yes, please murder him.” or, or something like that. My own thought is I tend to not believe conspiracy theories, because there have to be a lot of people involved. And the idea that he faked his death, the number of people who would have been involved in that, you would have had to have had 20, 25 people involved and surely one of those people is going to say something throughout the rest of their lives. Somebody is going to talk, I would think.

Now, the idea that he was assassinated is kind of interesting, because the timing seems really bizarre that he was arrested. And then 10 days later, he just happens to see these people. What was he doing in this place to start with? What was he doing talking to these people, and then they get into this fight and he’s killed. That seems a little shady to me. And it seems like there might be fewer people that have to be involved in something like that. There could have been just one person who gave the order. And perhaps he was assassinated that way. And maybe it did happen, just the way the inquest says.

Now, I’m inclined to believe there was something going on. But I don’t think he faked his own death. I’m not sure that Elizabeth would have officially had him assassinated but it seems like there was something sketchy going on.

Now, we’re never gonna know for sure what happened to Christopher Marlowe. Either way, it is a tragedy that he left us so young, because of all of the amazing work that he could have put out as he got older, and the growth that he would have had as a writer, and as an artist.

So what do you think happened to Christopher Marlowe? I would love to know. You can get in touch with me on the listener support line, which is 8016TEYSKO. You can also check out I’ve got a brand new online community because I am doing my best to get off of Facebook. I think it’s just a toxic place. And so I started this network. And you can go to www.tudorlearningcircle.com to check out this new online network that I’ve got that I’m building up. Eventually, I foresee …and all kinds of stuff like that but that’s still in my head. For right now, there’s just this lovely little group. There are about 50 people in there. So far we’re just having lovely conversations around Tudor history, and there’s no drama, and it’s really, really nice. So if you want to check that out, go to www.tudorlearningcircle.com and we would love to see you over there.

So there are a number of book recommendations. In every biography of Marlowe talks about what potentially happened to him and his death. So I will link to those in the show notes again at Englandcast.com/Marlowe. So I will be back in two weeks. I’m going to do another room of the house because that was popular. Thank you to those of you who emailed me and told me that you enjoyed that. So we’re going to do another room of the house in two weeks.

Alright, I hope you’re having a wonderful summer, you guys. I know it’s not the normal kind of summer that we all hope or expected that we would have. But however you’re doing it, I hope you’re having a good time. We personally went out and bought some camping gear and are doing a lot of camping out in the backyard, which is a lot of fun. And you still have a couple of days to see the comet. So go out and look for the comet in the evening too, if you haven’t yet. It’s worth it. All right. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Thank you so much for listening, you guys and I will talk to you soon.

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