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Christopher Marlowe: life of the week
00:42:54
Stephen Greenblatt sheds light on the brief life of playwright Christopher Marlowe, one of the great rivals of William Shakespeare, whose death in a Deptford tavern in 1593 still leaves a great many unanswered questions
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- [00:00]
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- [00:43]
Stephen Greenblatt
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Stephen Greenblatt
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Narrator/Host
Hello and welcome to Life of the Week where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and and significant figures. From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors to daring 20th century spies. From his possible espionage work for the Elizabethan state to his open flirtations with atheism and subversive sexual themes, the brief life of playwright Christopher Marlowe tells us much about the dark edges of 16th century England. In this episode, Stephen Greenblatt, John Kogan, University professor of the humanities at Harvard University, takes us behind the curtain of Marlowe's short but seismic career and the radical ideas that influenced his staggering rise, but which also made him a target, culminating in his death in Deptford under suspicious circumstances at the age of 29.
- [03:16]
Eleanor Evans
I'm really excited to get into Christopher Marlowe's life, and I think it's fair to say that listeners might already have a lot of preconceptions about him as a figure. They may have heard about his untimely death, his murder. They may have heard about him as a rival to William Shakespeare, this great playwright in his own right. Where would you like to begin with Christopher's story?
- [03:36]
Stephen Greenblatt
I think we could begin, Eleanor, at the beginning. This is someone born just about the same time Shakespeare was born, same year 1564, a few months earlier in Canterbury, from a very modest background. And that already is unusual in the 16th century. To be able to get out of the world that he was born into is already a surprise. This is a life full of surprises. But the surprises begin with someone who was born to a shoemaker cobbler, not particularly successful, not a native of Canterbury, but someone from a small town outside that normally didn't actually produce anyone who went to school, let alone became a great writer.
- [04:16]
Eleanor Evans
He's already defying expectations or perhaps the parameters of his life from a very early age. How much does Marlowe carry this with him throughout his life, this sense of his background, his upbringing?
- [04:28]
Stephen Greenblatt
In some sense, he doesn't carry it with him at all in the sense that he probably made some fundamental break with the family. He probably was expected, as the only son in the family, to pick up the shoemaker's tools and work with his father. That, obviously, is something that he doesn't wind up doing. He goes to grammar school and then on to Cambridge. He moves in surprisingly exalted circles in London. He describes himself on various occasions as a scholar, and he could count himself because he graduated, because he received a degree from Cambridge as a gentleman. So in some sense he makes a break. But in another sense, he does carry the world that he was born into. He's very interested in characters who come from nothing, who. So he's fascinated by that situation in his life, and he projects it, as it were, into his work.
- [05:21]
Eleanor Evans
That's great insight into the man that he's to become and the influences he's gonna bring to his work as well. You mentioned he begins to move in more exalted circles when he makes his way to university. What is it that he's being exposed to here in terms of ideas that begins to shape him and the circles he's mixing into.
- [05:40]
Stephen Greenblatt
What he's being exposed to from the beginning is training to be an Anglican priest, so that the world that he enters is a world of reading, of theology, thinking about service to the church. He seems, from our perspective, the least likely person to be a country parson. Everything about his attitude toward life pulls him in a very different direction. He gets into, first the King School in Canterbury and then he wins an Archbishop Parker scholarship to Cambridge. And that's what it's about. But education's a funny thing, Eleanor, because it brings you together with people who are not like you. And particularly in the 16th century, when class divisions are extremely sharply marked, what happens to Marlowe is this shoemaker's son begins to encounter the sons of earls and dukes, marquises when he goes to Cambridge. And that changes, obviously, radically changes the life into which he was born. This is an all male world in which the teachers are unmarried and living with the students. And the world that he enters is literally marked off with walls, and in the case of Cambridge, marked off from the rest of society. It's a strange idea. We mark off a particular space for basically teenage children where they can explore certain things, they can learn, of course, but also live in a peculiar demarcated space of experiment, intellectual experiment, social experiment, sexual experiment, perhaps, where the walls distinguish you from the rest of the world. And Marlowe enters that environment. It's a charged world in the 1570s and 80s, an intense world because of the religious divisions in England. In the 16th century, England had gone back and forth, as you know, between Catholic and Protestant in each shift, back and forth. Each shift had been accompanied by persecutions, investigations, executions. It was dangerous. And Cambridge in the 1570s is not at all insulated from these divisions. It's full of tension between the official theology and the official institution of the Anglican Church, the Church of England. And then on one side, Catholics, on the other side more radical Protestants. And everything is being tested, in effect, in that little enclosed world that Marlow enters. So as I write in my book, perhaps the first person that he meets in Corpus Christi is a man named Francis Kitt, who's a tutor in the college and, and who probably leads him around, shows him where the battery is, shows him where his rooms are. But that man will be, only a few years later when he leaves Cambridge, will be taken into a ditch up in Norfolk and burned to death for having the wrong ideas about Jesus. He turns out to be A kind of proto unitarian, as we would say, who believes that Jesus was a great man, but not God. That's unacceptable in the late 16th century. But this is a world full of unacceptable ideas, and Marlowe is. Is taking it all in.
- [08:41]
Eleanor Evans
He's a young man, then, who's been marked as someone who is thirsty for knowledge, who is taking these influences and clearly applying them in what seems to be a safe space. But also there are huge, brutal risks outside of that space as well. In this world, then becomes another layer. He becomes involved in this world of espionage. What can be known about how Marlowe becomes embroiled in this side of things?
- [09:03]
Stephen Greenblatt
In some sense, very little can be known. In some sense, quite a lot can be inferred. And it's because of a strange turn of events in Marlow's life. After he received his bachelor's degree, he applied for, and he won and accepted a continued scholarship to go on to get a master's degree. When he applied for his master's degree, he was denied it because the Cambridge authorities said he had not fulfilled the residence requirement. He'd been missing for peculiar periods of time, way too long for the official rules, where you were supposed to be in residence for. For almost the entire period of your study. And they said that it was thought or suspected that he had gone to Reims in France, where there was the English college that was training young dissident Catholic Englishmen with the idea of infiltrating them back into England to serve secret Catholic subjects and perhaps to make trouble, perhaps even to plot to assassinate the Queen. In any case, they turn down his application for the MA degree. And then a period of time passes, weeks pass, and then a letter that survives, turns out Cambridge. And that letter is signed by basically all of the important people in the Queen's Privy Council, the rulers of the kingdom, in effect. And the letter says, her Majesty would not be happy if someone who has served the State, as this young man has served, not receive his degree. Now, as you can imagine, Eleanor, letters are not sent from the Lord Treasurer and the rest of them, very often from a nobody, the son of a cobbler in Cambridge. This is wildly unlikely, and it's very clear that he's doing the State some service. He has been recruited, certainly by Francis Walsingham, who was running the Queen's secret service out of his office in Seeding Lane in London. But what Marlow was doing is not obviously not specified in the letter. It's some secret activity. And there we enter a world of speculation. And anyone who Writes about Marlow as I do, plunges into that world of speculation, either timidly or gleefully, and tries to figure out what has gone on.
- [11:23]
Eleanor Evans
Which is your approach, the gleeful approach.
- [11:26]
Stephen Greenblatt
Can I say I'm on the gleeful side? Yes. Of this I try to be careful. I'm not making it up. Or at least I'm trying not to make it up. But I'm inferring, because at a certain point, of course, there are people who say, better not to make anything up, better not to speculate at all. But then you basically give up the game. Treat this according to the very, very limited and dubious information that you have. But anyone who reads Marlowe and anyone who's reached by Marlowe is drawn, I think, into the life as well as the work. And the life is everywhere in the work, but in subtle, indirect, complicated ways. And part of the joy of thinking about Marlowe is to feel that you're in touch with this extraordinary person who is hidden, but only half hidden, behind everything that he writes.
- [12:14]
Eleanor Evans
I wonder if we can zoom out of Marlowe's life for just one second. And you can give us a sense of the brutal, the dark nature of this. He finds himself in London after his degree. I wonder if you can give us this context of knowing what we know about Tim so far, the way he has moved through life into these verified circles connected to royalty and this sense of authority. The London that he finds himself in the darkness and the bawdiness and all the rest of it.
- [12:41]
Stephen Greenblatt
I mean, in some sense, it's a mystery to us. I mean, the mystery to me, having spent my life thinking about these matters, how anyone survived for a year, let alone 10 years or a lifetime in this world. To our way of thinking now, in the 21st century, it seems impossible. For one thing, simply the level of epidemic disease seems impossible to endure. But, of course, it's the life they're all living. This is a world in which exceeding instability, exceeding riskiness in just ordinary life, lots of violence at night, there's no street lighting. There's none of the bureaucratic means that we've developed to try to protect you from the dangers around you. And this is an extremely dangerous world with a very high level of just ordinary criminal violence of the sort which we have some familiarity, but virtually none compared with what Marlowe and his world had. So we start simply with the ordinary miseries of life at a much heightened level by our standards. And then you have a world in which there's basically no idea of freedom of opinion, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, in which there are spies posted in taverns and inns, listening for what might be said that could be construed as dangerous from the perspective of the government, which is worried and to some extent legitimately paranoid about threats to the regime sodalities. So we are in a world in which there's lots of inner conflict as well as outer threat. And Marlow enters that world, and that's why young men from Oxford and Cambridge were being recruited, as Marlowe evidently was recruited, to work for the government as spies. And Marlowe, you don't have to enter that world. As far as we know, Shakespeare didn't enter that world. We know other people who didn't enter that world. But that is the world that Marlowe enters. And it means that he's associating with exciting but also exceedingly dangerous people right from the beginning. And somehow in the midst of this, he begins to write extraordinary plays and brilliant poems. And it's through those plays and poems that he makes the connections that he makes to the extraordinary people. Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, these extraordinary people who become basically his patrons in the brief life that he has.
- [15:02]
Eleanor Evans
So am I right in saying he's in his early twenties at this point when he's beginning to write?
- [15:06]
Stephen Greenblatt
He's in his very early twenties. He's just come to London from Cambridge, newly minted with his ma. He'd probably already begun to write when he was at Cambridge, probably had already come with a script of Tamburlaine with him. He had already almost certainly written an earlier play, possibly in collaboration with a classmate, Thomas Nash. So he comes to London and somehow and again, as everything with Marlowe, we just have to speculate how it might have happened. He makes the acquaintance of, in many ways, the most interesting producers now, we would say, of plays in this wild west of the early theater world. In London, the middle of the 1570s, public theaters have begun to be built. They are looking for material. They have to bring in 2 to 3,000 people into the theater in the afternoon, and they're competing with each other and they need plays. And Marlowe changes everything, in effect, by writing this astonishing play. Tamburlaine, which takes London by storm, finds an absolutely brilliant actor in the form of Edward Allen, who's the first great Tamburlaine and one of the great stars of the London stage at that point. And Marlowe, who's still a very young man, he somehow does this extraordinary thing and this Nobody writes an extraordinary play. And I say in my book. And like everything else, we could nuance it and complicate the account of it. But everything in London, everything in the English theatre, is pre and post Tamburlaine. Because with Tamburlaine, Marlowe invents, in effect, theatrical blank verse, the form of writing that becomes the dominant form of writing, not only in Shakespeare, but in the theater world of the late 16th and 17th century, the way in which we think English should sound at its most exciting, at its most intense. And it looks like a simple invention, unrhymed, iambic pentameter, but it is. And we now, we don't even hear it in our ears, but we have absorbed it. This extraordinary way that Marlowe figured out how to write, that is a kind of turning up of the intensity of the English language. It would be like going from silent movies to talkies. Suddenly everything seems more intense. The form is there, but now it's reaching us in a more powerful way.
- [17:28]
Eleanor Evans
And at what stage do you think Marlowe, did he have any sense of this importance at the time? Obviously, it was a breakthrough moment for him in terms of it taking London by storm. But was it received at the time in terms of seminal moment, and did Marlow have much of a sense of that?
- [17:42]
Stephen Greenblatt
Marlow had a very intense sense of it. I think Marlowe knew very well what he was doing. Tamburlaine begins basically by insulting all other plays that have been on the stage. It begins in an extraordinarily cheeky way from the jigging veins of mother wits. He says, you want to hear silly things before, but now I'm going to take you to the stately tents of war. So there's very much a sense that on Maro's own part, that he's doing something extraordinary, that he is, in effect, Tamburlaine conquering the rest of this world must have annoyed the bejesus out of people. We know that it did actually annoy some of his fellow writers. The interesting thing, to my way of thinking, is not simply that Marlowe excites envy and anger, though that's predictable, but he also arouses the attention of a contemporary who hears what's powerful in what Marlow has done and who can figure out how to absorb what Marlowe is doing. And that is precisely Marlowe's exact contemporary, William Shakespeare. You can watch and listen to Shakespeare paying attention, extraordinary attention to everything that Marlow is doing, and in the case of Shakespeare, figuring out how to do it and how to actually do it, even better. But it wouldn't have happened Without Marlowe. Marlowe writes Tamburlaine and Shakespeare writes the Henry VI plays. Marlowe writes the Jew of Malta. Shakespeare writes the Merchant of Venice. Marlowe writes Edward ii. Shakespeare writes Richard ii. Each of these is an act of extraordinary attention and admiration and emulation and competition on the part of Shakespeare to his contemporary, with whom he certainly knew and with whom he almost certainly worked.
- [19:30]
Eleanor Evans
I think so much has been made of that in popular cultures. I'm interested if we can stay on this a little bit longer, because I'm interested in how you would characterize it. You've just said it's an attention, it's an admiration. It's such a rich relationship to understand. But that sense of rivalry, is that maybe overly constructed by future generations, do you think?
- [19:49]
Stephen Greenblatt
I don't think so, Eleanor. I think. I mean, rivalry takes many forms. It can include friendly relations. I personally think that Shakespeare was fascinated by Marlowe, sort of gut that he was dealing with an extraordinary person. Shakespeare used everything that came near him in his life. And I think we can probably hear Marlowe in various moments in Shakespeare, in Mercutio, perhaps, in Hotspur, perhaps. But putting even those speculations aside, I think that Shakespeare clearly learned a lot from Marlowe, admired Marlowe, but also wanted not simply to imitate him. And Greene tried to imitate Marlowe and flopped totally. He's actually extremely hard to imitate that way. But Shakespeare makes fun of Marlowe in Pistol, in Henry V. He mocks the glorious way in which Marlowe had Tamburlaine, bragging about his conquering of kings. But at the same time, I think there's enormous amounts of admiration in Shakespeare from Marlowe. It's a very complicated relation, and it is a relationship based, I think, not upon deep friendship, but on deep understanding. I think it's extremely unlikely that Shakespeare and Marlowe were friends in that profound sense. I think that Marlowe was a dangerous person. I think Shakespeare got it. But at the same time he gets that he's dealing with an extraordinarily gifted character. He gets a lot from him. But I don't picture Shakespeare as opening up to Christopher Marlowe as other people did clearly open up to Christopher Marlowe, probably to their cost.
- [21:31]
Eleanor Evans
Can we go into some of those more costly moments for his circle, just in brief, perhaps, before we go on to talk about his other masterpieces as well.
- [21:39]
Stephen Greenblatt
I mean, we don't, of course, know the details of what he was actually doing. What we do know is that he's living in a world in which people are luring each other into revealing things about themselves and then springing the trap. We don't know if Marlowe is doing this. To think of people that Marlow is actually hanging out with, that Robert Poli is doing this. We could make a list of the people that Marlow clearly has some relations to. And they're, from our perspective, terrifying people. Because they're so plausible, they're so agreeable, they're so funny and wonderful to be with. But they're also ruthless. And Marlowe is on the outside of this. Perhaps we could imagine that Marlowe was somehow magically innocent of any of this. There are people who just picture Marlowe as delivering letters. Simply as an envoy for the spy service. But I think that it is unlikely that that's the only way in which he was used. I think it's also internally unlikely from his plays that he was untouched by the pitch, that he was constantly in contact with. These are really frightening people that he's with. And they're people who are involved in the Babington plot, who are involved in setting the trap for Mary, Queen of Scots that eventually leads to her execution. There are people who are planted in prisons, in jail, where they become friends with other prisoners and then report on them to the spy service. I'm not saying that Marlow was doing these things, but Marlow is clearly associated with these people. And I think it's very unlikely that Marlow was not himself involved in extremely dangerous activity.
- [23:22]
Eleanor Evans
Well, if we move forward with this supposition, then that he is involved in this dark world of shady dealings and dangerous people who are making deals. I hope it's not too much of a simplistic leap to find that in obviously, his Faustus and saying, you know, making a deal with people you perhaps shouldn't be making deals with. Can you go into some of his influences of what you found there, or your take on that?
- [23:42]
Stephen Greenblatt
I don't think it's a simplistic leap in the slightest, Eleanor. On the contrary, I think that, first of all, we understand that from the beginning, from the extraordinary plays, the two parts of Tamburlaine and then the Jew of Malta, that Marlowe is fascinated by people who are obsessed with power, who are ruthless, who are aware of the fact that they're in a world in which a trap can be opened up, into which you can fall, who are trying to stay alive in a world that is full of danger. And I think that Marlowe is not simply looking at these things from a great safe distance. And then I don't at all think it's an accident that Marlowe's greatest play is a play about an intellectual who basically makes a deal with the devil. And who has to both gets to enjoy the consequences of that deal. Take advantage of all the ways in which you can take advantage of it. And at the same time, who knows that the noose is going to be tightened around his neck? Marlowe is trying to figure out, what am I going to do with myself? And the way forward for Marlowe in the late 1570s, 1580s. Is a way forward that involves making an agreement. In effect, deciding to do something that has consequences. Consequences that follow him in all of the years that he has to live before him.
- [25:05]
Eleanor Evans
We're moving towards those consequences now. And before we turn to his final act, I wonder if you just mentioned in Dr. Faustus. Faustus obviously gets to enjoy some reward and reap some wealth. Before he obviously meets his eventual fate. And I wonder if you can take us into sort of maybe the happier times of Marlowe's life. Or meaningful relationships and that sort of thing about his life in London and beyond.
- [25:28]
Stephen Greenblatt
This is someone not only who finds. And in some ways that's the most beautiful and remarkable thing. Finds it in himself to write these extraordinary plays and poems that stay with us after centuries, but also who gets to know the most remarkable people in his. From our perspective, some of the most remarkable people in his world. And enter their circles. Most strikingly, in a way, the circle around Sir Walter Raleigh. Of scientists, of explorers, of mathematicians, of philosophers. As well as people who are living in the world of power and authority. But Marlowe, instead of spending his life in the cobbler's workshop. Is spending his life with extraordinary people. And absorbing a world that's exploding with new interests. With an awareness of what lies across the ocean. Also exploring what it means to call into question all of the assumptions, religious assumptions, political assumptions of your world. He enters a kind of fabulously exciting intellectual and social world. And I think his works reflect that. I think it must have been thrilling for him. And he's also presumably, though we have much less access to that. He is also presumably exploring a personal world, sexual world. Marlowe, he makes strikingly clear, is homosexual. And in a world in which it's extremely dangerous to acknowledge this openly. But Marlowe comes as close to acknowledging it openly. As anyone in the 16th century does.
- [27:01]
Eleanor Evans
In his work or in his personal correspondence.
- [27:04]
Stephen Greenblatt
In his work, there's no correspondence that survives. But we have both his work, especially Edward II, also Hero, and Leander, in the way Dr. Faustus in Faustus relation to Mephistopheles. But we also, of course also have and now we approach the dark moments at the end of Marlow's life. We have police reports on Marlow, a spies report that says that Marlow is going around saying that anyone who doesn't like tobacco and boy boys is a fool, or saying that Jesus and St. John were lovers, that Jesus used John after the matter of Sodom. He says if Marlow said these things, and I think there's, I think reasonable evidence that he did, these are things that you don't say if you want to live a quiet life, secure life, these are very, very dangerous things to say. And they must come, I believe, out of a life in which Marlow is exploring as he explores lots of other things, is exploring ideas and actions that in his culture are very high risk.
- [28:04]
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- [30:30]
Eleanor Evans
So turning to the darkest element of this story, he's had this near decade or so in London exposed to all these ideas, this rich seam of work. But as you've alluded to throughout this episode, he's also playing a dangerous game. What's your sense of what happens in Deptford in 1593, the night that we're going to be talking about?
- [30:51]
Stephen Greenblatt
We can go back before that to say that In May in 1593, in the wake of a very difficult period of bad weather and of plague in London, there was an upsurge of anti immigrant feeling. There's a search for scapegoating, for why things are so miserable. Rents are high, food expenses are high, everyone is unhappy. And someone nails a menacing poem to the wall of what was called the Dutch church in London. The Dutch in the sense of Deutsch, the church in which the foreigners, often German speaking foreigners who are refugees, Protestant refugees in London, are praying and it says, you're miserable people, you've raised our rents, you're causing us to suffer. We're going to cut your throats. Get out of the country. And it is signed Tamburlaine. So someone is trying to implicate. It's a very bad poem. I don't believe for a minute that Marlowe wrote it.
- [31:47]
Eleanor Evans
It feels clumsy, doesn't it?
- [31:49]
Stephen Greenblatt
Yeah, very clumsy. Trying to implicate somehow Marlowe in all of this. The authorities go in search. The Privy Council issues a very handsome reward for anyone who can identify the author of this menacing poem. They go, I think, in search of Marlow. They can't find Marlowe, but they find his former roommate, Thomas Kidding, the playwright who was the author of the Spanish tragedy. And they look around in kid's room to see if there's any evidence the authorship of this anti immigrant placard. They can't find any, but they find a document that seems to be denying the divinity of Christ. And Kidd says, this is not mine. I don't know why it's here. I don't know. This is. I didn't write this. It's not in my handwriting. They take Kidd off to prison and they torture him. And in the course of torturing him, he remembers, quote, unquote, that the document was Christopher Marlow's. And then he begins to list the things that Marlow was supposedly saying. So Marlow is already implicated in something. And then there's another police report that is filed in the same period. So it's clear that the government is interested suddenly in what Marlow has been saying. Marlow was not in London at that point. He's in Kent staying with a friend, a wealthy friend who was a relative of Francis Walsingham, a man named Thomas Walsingham. And Marlow probably was the happiest moment in Marlow's life. He's in a beautiful country house surrounded by a moat. He is writing his incredibly beautiful poem here in Leander. He's perhaps having intimate relations with Thomas Walsingham. We don't know. But into that world comes a government official, Henry Maunder, his name is, who is carrying an arrest warrant for Marlow and arrests him, takes him back to London where he's going to be questioned. But he's not imprisoned. He's left in this sort of strange, liminal space where he can't leave the area around the court. But he probably wasn't even told fully what they're investigating. But what's clear from surviving documents is that the government is collecting information about Marlow's dangerous opinions. And while he's waiting, and technically under arrest, I mean, it's a very much a situation, like Franz Kafka's novel the Trial, where he's somehow out but still under arrest. He's invited by a friend, or probably not a friend, by an acquaintance, Fritzer, to go out to Deptford and to have a day together. In fact, it's not even clear if the invitation came from Ingram Fritzer, the shady character. Marlow goes to Deptford. He encounters at Deptford two others whom he also knew, a man named Nicholas Skiers and an extremely disturbing, complicated, dangerous character named Robert Poley. And they basically spend the day together in Widow Bull's house, we would call it an inn. She prepares meals for people. They have a lunch together. And then they spend the entire afternoon together. And then they go in and have dinner together. So we're already in a strange place, Eleanor. It's not simply going out to dinner. It's a day, it's lunch, it's hours. In the afternoon, it's dinner. This is not an ordinary, should we say, social experience. There's something going on here, but we don't know what's going on. And they're very quiet. No one, evidently, in the house hears anything that they're saying, except after dinner, when suddenly the voices get high and people in the house hear shouting. And they go in and they see that there's a person lying bleeding, dead on the floor. And that's Christopher Marlowe. So that's where the story appears to end. But then, strangely, wonderfully, in the 1920s, a young scholar named Leslie Hudson discovered the document of the inquest into the killing was only discovered in the 1920s. And it turns out that there was an inquest that had been misfiled, which is why it hadn't been seen before. And it describes, according to the three people in the room who survived. It describes how the death happened through a fight about the reckoning. The bill Marlow has claimed disputed the cost of the lunch and dinner and grabbed his knife. These are all people who carry knives. And in the course of the struggle, managed to get the knife stuck in his eye and kill him. The trouble with this particular account. There are many troubles with this particular account. But the most peculiar trouble with the account is that it turns out that all three of these characters, Fritz or Skiers and above all, Poli, are also associated, connected to the Secret Service. So the chances that it's just an argument about how much it costs and how they're going to split the. The bill seems, at least to me, in the context of police reports being filed of the government collecting information. A very ominous set of documents, including saying his mouth should be stopped. It's written in one of the government documents. It seems extremely unlikely that it's just an argument about the bill. But who gave the order in whose interest this is being done? That is very unclear. And there are disputed and conflicting accounts of who might have been responsible for this. I lean toward the idea that. That it came from the very highest places, that there was a decision made at a very, very high level, that however much he had been of use before, he is not any longer of use to us. And it's better that we just eliminate him, get rid of him.
- [37:30]
Eleanor Evans
So this dangerous game that he became embroiled in when he was at college, seems to later have these consequences. Was there any outcome for poli, etc. Did anything ever happen to the men involved?
- [37:40]
Stephen Greenblatt
On the contrary, nothing ever happened to them that was disagreeable. Ingram Fritzer went on to be the house, in effect, the financial manager for Thomas Walsingham. We don't know about skiers. I think he basically disappears from the record. But Poli, the extremely disturbing, ominous Mephistopheles, like demonic Poli, goes on, as far as we know, to have a perfectly long, safe life. He makes it, as it were, through Poley is in a way, the most fascinating and disturbing of these agents of Wasingham. He's the one who infiltrated himself, became the best friend of Babington and urges him to contact Mary, Queen of Scots and get her permission to kill Elizabeth. Poley is a particularly repulsive and fascinating and impressive spy. And they're all forgiven for what is regarded as a killing in self defense against Marlow. But none of them is punished in the slightest. That also suggests to me at least, that there's a kind of understanding at a very high level, some form of sanction, yes, that this is an event that's not going to be pursued any further legally, of course. It's also possible, Eleanor, that it was just a random argument about the bill. I don't think so, and I don't think Shakespeare thought so. In as yous like it, character says, when a man's verses are not understood, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. When a man's verses are not understood. A strange allusion to Marlowe's death by Shakespeare that suggests that there's something wrong, something wrong here, not just an argument about the bill.
- [39:20]
Eleanor Evans
So we are left with these allusions, these questions, these scant documents that may give some clues, but certainly not answers. Obviously those culpable went on to their lives. Marlowe's was cut short when he was just 29. He obviously leaves such wealth behind him. And I wanted to get your take, Stephen, as we begin to wrap up this with your understanding or your characterization of Marlow's legacy.
- [39:43]
Stephen Greenblatt
I think that Marlow sensed early on that he was walking on the edge of the precipice, that he had made some kind of agreement from which he was very unlikely to escape with his life. That perhaps he felt, after all, we're all walking on the precipice. And I'll try to make what I can of the time that I have and I'll make what I can in this extremely strange way of playing life is serious. But Marlowe is a player, not a player on stage in the way that Shakespeare for part of his career was, but someone who allows his imagination to go to places that are places other people are not allowed to go or don't allow themselves to go. Marlowe takes chances and those chances take the form of a succession. I'm still astonished by them when I think about them. Coming out of this person in his 20s, when everything else was going on. Takes the form of succession of extraordinary works of art. Works of art that take us into Central Asia, into Malta and the world of Jews and Muslims, Christians warring with each other. Take us into the life of a homosexual king in the Middle Ages and most famously of all, take us into the study of a man who, who makes agreement with the devil. Think about what this means. If Shakespeare had died at 29, we would have almost nothing to hold onto. But Marlowe does this all in a tremendous rush of spectacular creative playfulness in his 20s as he's walking at the edge of this precipice. And he pays the price. We can't say, I think at this point whether he would have accepted the price he was paying. I mean, it's how it ended. Perhaps he thought he was going to go on, but he does something extraordinary, this tremendous blazing of his imaginative life. And one thing that fascinates me, Eleanor, is that in some sense it's not just that the theatre was enriched by what Marlowe had created in these extraordinary plays. It's in some sense the whole imaginative life of England is enriched by what he had done. Because I don't want to say that Shakespeare's career entirely depends upon Marlowe. But Shakespeare walks through, let's put it this way, walks through the crack that Marlowe managed to make in the thick wall of repression that was around the imaginative world of England in the 16th century. Marlowe was born into a world in which people are frightened and with good reason. Frightened to let their mind, to let their fantasies go anywhere for fear of where it might lead you. And crazy Marlowe smashes it and makes a huge opening in that thick, oppressive world. And it leaves room for Shakespeare and for others, but supremely for Shakespeare to walk through into a much brighter, more vivid, less frightened world. And it required a dangerous life, a risk taking life like Marlowe's, I think, to do it.
- [42:59]
Narrator/Host
That was Stephen Greenblatt speaking to Eleanor Evans. Stephen is John Kogan University professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. And he was talking about his latest book, Dark Renaissance, the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival. Thanks for listening to TODAY Life of the Week. Be sure to join us again next time to learn about another fascinating figure from the past.
- [43:44]
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