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- [00:01]
A
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The Life of Christopher Marlowe is an extraordinary and inexplicable tale of profound genius. Shakespeare's exact contemporary here was a child with an even less of a head start in life. He was born into a family of shoemakers in Canterbury to parents who could barely sign their names. He must have demonstrated something special because he somehow benefited from school scholarships to school and university and received an education that cleaved him from both his parents and the culture of orthodoxy and obedience that should have been his lot. At some point he was recruited by the Elizabethan state as a spy, but typically we don't know exactly how or what he did. And then in London, he produced over six years an outpouring of drama and poetry that unlocked the door to the Renaissance in England. His was a profoundly disturbing genius. He was someone who could write of those two 16th century verities of religion and magic, that one was but a childish toy and the other a ceremonial toy. He put Ovid's verse into iambic pentameter. He delved into the inward life of Dr. Faustus, challenging the prevailing theologies of the day, and explored queerness in Edward II and Hero and Leander. His work would blow open the cultural carapace binding Elizabethan England. But he was also arrested more than once, imprisoned an accomplice to a killing and a counterfeiting, and was murdered in an inn in Deptford. Of him we have his works and traces. No letters or diaries or drafts in his hand are known to have survived. As my guest today writes, how can we hope to reckon with the problem of Kit Marlowe and his brilliant combusting star? Well, if anyone can do so, it's my honored guest today, the acclaimed literary critic Professor Stephen Greenblatt. Professor Greenblatt is Kogan University professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His book on Renaissance self fashioning has become a foundational text for students of the 16th century, while will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare was a New York Times bestseller. And now he returns with an equivalent on Kit Marlowe. His latest work is Dark Renaissance, the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe. And it's an absolute pleasure to have him on the podcast today to discuss it. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Professor Greenblatt. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:41]
B
Thank you very much, Susanna.
- [03:42]
A
Well, let's go back to the beginning then. Let's talk about Marlowe's family background and the social expectations and early experiences and what we do know of him.
- [03:51]
B
At the beginning, we really know very little. We know something about his father and mother, but in this case, how should we say, appropriately, relatively little. We note that because we're talking about a cobbler and a wife from a peasant farmer background, both actually born outside of Canterbury, in that sense, strangers, as they would have been called, even though they were in Kent, not that far from the city, but they weren't born into the city. And so we have a relatively modest number of records. So even there, because the Elizabethans or Tudors in general were so incredibly litigious then, even with this very modest working class background, we have the records of a certain number of lawsuits, complaints, crazy things. One of Marlow's sisters apparently attacked someone in the street with a stick and a sword. They were quite a family. Marlow's father was arraigned, I think, for drawing blood from his apprentice on one occasion, though that's the kind of thing that shows up in the records. England was a record keeping society. And so even at the social class level that we're talking about with Marlowe, there's something, but there's a mystery, and you've already alluded to it in your introduction, which is how did Kit Marlow, the only son of this family that was barely literate, the father possibly, as I say, a little bit of literacy, the mother and sisters, little or nothing. How did he gain admission to the King School in Canterbury, which was conducted in Latin and was accessible only by examination? And he got in just before the cutoff point for his age group, but there had been children in the school from the age of nine. He got in just before his 50th birthday, I think it was. We don't know how it happened, but it made Every difference in his life, he crossed a bridge, as it were, at that moment that separated him, as happens with working class families, a bridge that separated them even more dramatically than it would now, because, after all, the education was conducted in the language, a different language. And we don't know how that happened any more than we know how a whole set of moves in Marilla's life were made. We'd love to know, but we can only imagine, in my case, I imagine, that in the access to the school that someone highly educated must have noticed and thought, this is a remarkable kid and we shouldn't let his remarkable quickness go for nothing. I imagine, in fact, it was probably not his local priest, because we know that the local one in his parish was cited for being incapable of writing a sermon. So I doubt that he was the one. But Canterbury, of course, has the cathedral, and there were many highly educated priests who were still associated with the cathedral even after the end of Catholicism. And so I think someone noticed and.
- [07:06]
A
Took him on, as you've pointed out. And I think it's a brilliant point that he has now got this unbridgeable distance between him and his family, because his schooling is in Latin. All of this education is conducted in Latin. And you say that there's a secret at the heart of the educational system of Elizabethan England. Let us in on it.
- [07:30]
B
The secret. But it's a kind of open secret, Susanna. The secret is that there's a disconnect between what is actually being taught in the curriculum, if you actually understand what's being taught in the curriculum, and what everyone is told that they're supposed to believe. This is a profoundly Christian culture that has a set of values, let's say encapsulated by the homily on obedience, by various principles of belief that were endlessly reiterated on Sunday and also weekdays. But if you went to school, the education really starting because of educational reform under the time of Henry viii, the curriculum centered on pagan classics, on Ovid, on Virgil, on Catullus. Catullus, who wrote tremendously sexy poems, Ovid, who wrote about metamorphosis, rape, the gods doing unspeakable things to one another, and also to humans. What were we to make of these things? And this is of course, not. It's not just that we notice in the 21st century, they noticed, at least some people noticed, that there was a strange disconnect. And not just a disconnect, but a conflict, to use our language. The people who are most woke in this period thought, get rid of this stuff. This is horrible. We mustn't teach these things. But they were outflanked by schoolmasters who thought, these are the most beautiful works in the language that we teach in. These are the most beautiful works that we've inherited from the ancient world. We love these works even though we know that their values are not ours. And that was the world in which Merlot was taken. And I think probably for most students, they shrugged it off the way most students shrug off whatever they're taught. But I think it's pretty clear that the content of these works, which are full of transgressive sex, violence, crazy doubts about the gods, this hit Marlowe very hard.
- [09:31]
A
You create an interesting paradox between the grueling nature of the Elizabethan school day and how much joy Marlow seems to have taken in his studies. And you suggest that perhaps Marlowe's headmaster, one John Gressup, may have had a greater effect on the young kit than his biographers normally allow. Talk me through that.
- [09:55]
B
Well, first of all, Suzanne, I think most students in Elizabethan schools just tried to get through the day with as few beatings as possible. The widely shared idea in the 16th century was that the best way of teaching Latin is, as it were, through the buttocks, through just hitting people extremely hard when they make their endless numbers of mistakes. I think for most students in Elizabethan schools, it was a bit of a torment, and then with some pleasures, obviously, that could be reaped once you reach a certain point. But I think there's evidence, at least evidence that we can speculate about, that that was not true for Marlow, that Marlow, probably because of his extraordinary quickness, because of something in his personality, came alive in an extraordinarily intense way in relation to the things he was being taught. Why do we think this? Because basically, all his life he had Virgil and Ovid in his mind. Long after he had made the transition from Latin to English, he's still actually thinking about those things he read when he was in grammar school in Canterbury or when he was at university in Cambridge.
- [11:13]
A
So, as you say, he goes up to Cambridge after his grammar schooling, again on a scholarship, another and more decisive separation from his family. And in this period, you suggest that at Cambridge he found a culture that, relatively speaking, eliminated social difference in a way that was not the case elsewhere in Tudor England. Can you explain that?
- [11:41]
B
This was a world in which, for example, through those regulations known as sumptuary laws, the government tried to control what people wore so as not to allow the confusions with which we're Extremely comfortable. But that's not true for the Tudors. It's inculcated endlessly in the culture, except in certain very limited surroundings, of which the universities are in some ways the most interesting, because universities are, to use a Freudian term, latency periods, moments in which certain things are suspended. And one thing that was at least relatively suspended at Oxford and Cambridge were the hierarchical distinctions that ruled everywhere else, really. And yet at university there were regulations that said, no, you can't do that. The very small differences. And of course also everyone notices small differences, so these things don't disappear completely. But nonetheless, there's a relatively evening out, so that the son of the earl and the son of the cobbler for a brief period, sit on the same benches, take the same exams, argue with each other over the same questions. And, as they say, this was an unusual, in the context of the society as a whole, and unusual moment. And it seems to have had a very, again, remarkable effect on someone like Marlowe.
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A
While he's there, HE TRANSLATES Ovid's AMOURS how innovative and impressive is Marlowe's translation?
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B
Marlowe's translations are, to me, highly impressive, because I wish that I were a greater Latinist than I am. The best Latinists notice many mistakes that Marlowe made and they slap his wrist for them. But I'm not much affected by the wrist slapping. I'm actually much more impressed by the fact that this undergraduate sat down and translated these poems that had not been translated into English before, for good reason, because they're too sexy, they're too transgressive. And Marlowe decided wasn't an assignment. He wasn't being graded on it or given any prizes for it, but he decided to do this crazy thing which was to translate these remarkable poems, Poems on the Edge. They were poems that poor Ovid got in trouble with for centuries and centuries before, but were certainly were right at the edge of what could be acceptable in Tudor England. Poems about love affairs and adultery and abortion and quickies in the afternoon that Barlow decided would be amusing to turn into English.
- [14:30]
A
So we've got all this transgressive material. We've already got him in the context of learning about the gods and all of their activities. And you call universities at this time spaces of hidden ferment, because there's also, in the midst of all of this, a kind of slippage of ideas about faith and its absence, about atheism and Catholicism. So this obviously will become important in Marlowe's story. What do we know of his faith or lack of it and the influences on him at this time.
- [15:06]
B
One thing that we know, I think, also from our own experience, is that people between the ages, let's say, of 16 and 24, are unusually open to a range of possible identities, ideas, adventures. And that was true then, as it is now. One of the interesting things about, for those of us who have a privilege to spend time with students, is that we know that what's exciting is that everything is up for grabs at a certain point. That becomes much more controlled and settled once you get a mortgage, as it were, or you start a family. But that's not true in that world. So it's a world in which it's possible, at least imaginatively, to speculate about what you actually want in your life, and for that matter, for the world that you're living in. All of this is to say that divisions that exist everywhere else in Tudor England, tensions that exist everywhere else between Catholic and Protestant, between conservative and radical, between Anglicans and Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and a whole set of other proto radical Protestant groups, those tensions are exacerbated and experimented with in university communities. And that's why actually, the Elizabethan authorities were quite interested in what goes on at universities and who was talking to whom, because it was a way, a place in which you could try to figure out directions that people were going, young people were going. Anyway. All of this is to say that there's plenty of records, not about Marlowe's life personally at university, but about universities, about Oxford and Cambridge in the 16th century, that show how much tension there was over the most important issues of the day, which are largely confessional issues, whether you're Catholic or Protestant, what you think of the organization of the church, what you think of the deepest values in your faith community. And because this is all taking place at the time in those years also leading up to 1588, the Spanish Armada, there are foreign interests, as it were, as well, that are impacting this world. But this is not just an abstract set of choices about whether you think God is present in the bread or not present in the bread. There are also international issues having to do with possible invasion, assassination, transformation, and the government is fully aware of this. So it's quite interested in what students are saying to each other in the dining hall. And it's worth thinking about what effect that actually has on people's lives.
- [17:56]
A
Well, you suggested had quite an effect on Marlow's life and that it was actually at Cambridge that he was recruited into the equivalent of the Elizabethan secret service.
- [18:09]
B
Isn't everyone recruited into the Secret Service at Cambridge? Even now? Isn't that a tradition at Oxford too?
- [18:16]
A
I mean, probably not so much Oxford. If you want to be a spy, clearly Cambridge is the place to go. So reconstruct for us what we know and why would Marlow have been a good candidate?
- [18:25]
B
We know very little. What we know is that at the end of his six years at Cambridge, when Marlow filed the papers to get his MA degree, he had got his BA already and he had gone on to an MA degree. And this was all officially meant to be preparation basically for the Anglican priesthood. But Marlow was the least likely Anglican priest available. Anyway, when he files the papers, the university authorities say, no, you're not going to get your MA degree because you did not fulfill the residence requirement. You were missing for periods of time. And we can verify he really was missing for long periods of time because his name is absent from the buttery book in which students purchases of beer and food was recorded on a daily basis. So we were missing for long periods of time. And it was suspected that you've gone abroad to Reims in France, where there's a dissident. Young English Catholics are being trained basically to be, as the government thought to be terrorists, to be smuggled back into the country and overturn the regime. So no degree. And then a month passes and at the end of the month, a letter is sent from the Privy Council signed by virtually all the most important people in the regime on behalf of a cobbler's son from Canterbury, a nobody that says that Her Majesty would be distressed if someone who has done the State such important service were not to be given his degree. Give him his degree and lo and behold, they gave him his degree. Susanna, you can be quite confident that there are not many such letters on behalf of Elizabethan nobodies from the Privy Council, interfering in the awarding of degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. And what does this signify? It signifies, and one can confirm this from a whole set of other associations in Marla's life. It signifies that at some point in the course of his time at Cambridge, he was clearly recruited for the Secret Service. By whom? To do what, to go where. All of these are open questions and I have plenty of speculations.
- [20:50]
A
Gosh, that's fascinating. Well, okay, as you said, we get his move to London. We're in 1587 now, and soon after this, we get his great play Tamburlaine. And you say virtually everything in the Elizabethan theatre is pre and post Tambalan. Now, obviously we know that there were plays in the 1580s that don't survive. So it's hard to know for sure. But for those who say there's a bit of hyperbole there, can you justify for me how important Tamburlaine was in Elizabethan theatre?
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B
One curious fact that marks at least a little bit of the impact that the play must have had is that a few children in Tudor England, after this play was performed in London, a few parents gave their children, rather oddly, the name Tamberlaine. So that must mean something. And there's other evidence having to do with for example, Robert Greene's attack on the play. But for me, most of all, the impact of the play has to do. And we know that the play was successful that and that there was a. As happens on our. Obviously in our own entertainment industry, when something is successful, they call for an immediate follow up second season, as it were. And Marlow was called upon clearly to write Tamburlaine Part two, because Tamburane Part one was a success. But for me, most of all, the key to the impact of the play was Marlow's in effect creation of blank verse, of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Can you find earlier instances of blank verse? Sure. But Marlowe's use of blank verse in Tamburlain is decisive. It's more powerful than anyone had done before. So why is that important? It's important because the Elizabethans talked about going to hear plays, not to see plays. Because in this period people are extremely alert to the. That's why the plays are written in verse to begin with. People are taking intense pleasure in the sounds of the plays and responding to them in the way that we respond in a very sophisticated way to visual signals in film. They're responding in a very sophisticated way to verbal signals. And the shift from the 14ers, that's to say 7 beat 14 syllable lines, or poter's measure alternative lines of 12 and 14 to blank verse is the shift that basically gives us what we think of now as the Elizabethan theater, that is to say of Shakespeare's way of writing plays, but it's Marlowe's way of writing plays that paved the way. It's not that it's impossible to write things that are pleasing to the ear in 14ers. There is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun it's been the ruin of many a poor girl and me, alas was one. Those are lines in 14ers, but they don't sound like the speech that you and I are having. That's because, actually, for reasons that, in effect, Marlowe discovered the way in which our language works. Makes iambic pentameter as close to ordinary speech as possible, but turned up a notch more powerful, more intense. And so that to get from what I've just described, or another version of it, Amazing grace, how sweet a sound, which is also in 14ers. But to get from that to nature that framed us of four elements warring within our breasts for regiment, that teach us all to have aspiring minds. Now, that actually sounds like. I could almost say it to you in the conversation, except that it's better than what I would say to you in a conversation.
- [24:40]
A
So given that we're a visual people, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to say. Perhaps it's the equivalent of. Of going from black and white to Technicolor on film.
- [24:54]
B
Exactly. That's precisely what I happened to say in my book. Or to go from silent films to talkies. A moment in which there's a change in the medium. The medium exists already, but there's a swerve in the medium and suddenly it seems different and everything seems different, and you can't go back in the same way.
- [25:15]
A
And the other parallel you draw to modern movies, the first thing is that, as with many MOV movies and TV shows today, the fame for the play at the time wouldn't necessarily have been Marlowe's as the writer, but rather the main actor, Edward Allen. And also that, much like Hollywood today, as a result of this, Marlowe joins a stable of writers.
- [25:37]
B
Exactly. This is a highly competitive industry, the creation of the first great mass entertainment industry in our world. And there are multiple venues competing for each other, and they need content. And the runs actually in the Elizabethan Theatre were relatively brief by our standards, so that they have to keep producing new plays. And Marlowe was recruited as one of the people. In fact, you could make a great living, but you could make a reasonable living writing plays in this period precisely because it's a competitive situation and the producers are eager to get new material. So one day, after the success of Tamburlaine, it's, I think, reasonably clear that Marlowe found himself in a room with a fellow playwright, possibly two, but at least one fellow playwright working on a play about English history. And that fellow playwright was William Shakespeare. It's sometimes said that there's no evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe actually personally knew each other, and that's true. But it's wildly unlikely that they didn't know each other personally because they would have had to have a kind of elaborate ballet in which one went in one door at the moment the other came out the other door for them not to have met and worked together because there's very considerable evidence that they both had their hands in the plays known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 that are attributed principally to Shakespeare.
- [27:26]
C
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- [27:55]
D
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- [28:33]
A
Meanwhile, we have a number of murky incidents happening in Marlow's life. You draw attention to a friendship of his that led to imprisonment. And then we get the curious incident of Flushings in the Netherlands, which sounds a bit like a sort of Arthur Conan Doyle story. What can we make of these two incidents?
- [28:49]
B
If you want to tie them together, they take place at different times. The killing that Marlow was involved in, the actual killing done by his roommate Tom Watson, and the arrest in Flushing. Maybe the thing that's most interesting about them is that it suggests that Marlow had a taste for rather dangerous company. In the case of both Watson and Baynes, these are people that if you wanted to live a tranquil life, you wouldn't associate yourself with. In the case of Baynes, it's already crazy to associate yourself with him. He's a very dangerous character. But Watson in his way is also a dangerous character. And it's quite striking that Marlowe has, as far as we can tell, very little in the way of self protection that would go with deciding who are the people you actually should feel comfortable hanging out with and who are the people you should say supposedly the way Shakespeare was said to say, you know, I'm not a company keeper, I can't go out Tonight I have a headache or whatever. I mean that. But in the case of both Watson and Baynes, these are alarming human beings. And that's only the scratching the surface because at the end of his life, Marlowe finds himself in a room with Robert Poley, who has to be one of the scariest people in English history. And Marlowe doesn't survive that moment, but he probably knew poli already.
- [30:20]
A
You're doing a wonderful job of intriguing listeners who will have to read more about these incidents. But let's talk a bit more about the work because you have some wonderful readings of his plays. So the Dew of Malta you suggest the plot there could have served as a warning for Marlowe's patron. Why do you think that?
- [30:42]
B
Yeah, it's a bit of a leap, I confess, but I was trying to think about patronage, about why there is a moment when Marlow is arrested in Flushing and charged with counterfeiting, which was a capital offense in the period. There's a question as to why Marlow wasn't simply strung up on the nearest, I can't say, lamppost or telegraph poll, because they didn't have those. But they had plenty of high places they could have strung someone up. Why isn't he hanged at that point by Robert Sidney, who's the military governor Flushing? Because he was caught red handed, counterfeiting. He was caught because his roommate Richard Baines denounced him, said he was doing this and was going to go over to the Catholics. And instead of hanging him, Robert Sidney wrote back to London and said, this young scholar says that he's very well known to Lord Strange and to the 9th Earl of Northumberland. Those are two of the most important noblemen of the kingdom. He sent him back with a guard to London, obviously to try to verify this extravagant claim. And evidently the claim was verified because Marlow was released without punishment. So who was Lord Strange? Lord Strange has a theater company the way other noblemen did. And after Marlowe is murdered, there's a further inquiry into his relation to Lord Strange, basically through the torture of Marlowe, Erstwhile writing maid Kidd. And Kidd says that Lord Strange just knew him as a writer, but couldn't stand any of his opinions. So take a step back, Ferdinando Stanley. Lord Strange is one of the most important noblemen in the north. The state is interested in him, worried about him, because he actually is. He's related to Henry viii. And therefore not only is the state interested him, but other as the Elizabethan regime draws to a close, as Elizabeth gets old, people think that Lord Strange, he might be in line somehow to become the next ruler, and they're worrying about what he believes. Is he a Catholic? Is he a Protestant? The Earl of Darby's family was extremely good at sailing near the wind, as it were, seeming to support the Protestants, also seeming secretly to support the Catholics and so forth, so on vice versa, when Mary was queen. So Lord Strange is the object of state attention. And he happens to have a theater company. So if we're trying to imagine what a playwright who is ambitious, whether it's Shakespeare or Marlowe, might be giving to a patron in the plays, if it's not just for the general public, but also for the patron, I tried to imagine. What is this play telling you? This is a play about Machiavelli, basically, or about Machiavellianism. And it's talking about what it is to live in an extremely dangerous world, where people are looking at you, where you have to plot to remain in power to keep from being destroyed. In some ways, Jew of Malta is Marla's most brilliantly plotted play. It's a terrifying play, full of horrible things to say about Jews, about Muslims and about Christians. It's taking our prisoners, equal opportunity, loathing of all religious face, as it were. And if you're imagining, as I tried to imagine, what Marla's patron could get from this, what I think he's getting is a kind of warning. Someone is always going to be trying to scramble to get you. You have to keep watching your next move. You can't let down your guard. You have to watch, be careful. And insofar as that is the warning, it's one that Ferdinando Stanley would have been well to take. Because Ferdinando Stanley, after his father died and after he became the Earl of Derby, didn't live very long before he became quite ill. And it seems reasonably clear now that he was poisoned. And poisoned, of course, is one of the things that Marlowe is imagining and the Jew of Malta as a way of getting rid of your enemies. That discussion of Marlowe's relationship or to the Jew of Malta, is that outer edge of the game that I'm playing in trying to imagine where is Marlowe and where is his world in each of these plays? Why is he writing these things? Why did they take this form? It's clear, Susanna, that almost all of the plays are about the fantasy of either getting directly to enormous power or having access to enormous power. That's what they are all dreaming about. And that is a kind of through line of all of them, of Tamburlaine of the Jew of Malta, of Edward and the Faustus, in its way, of the Massacre at Paris as well. To come from nothing, to be nothing. And then to actually have access to the most powerful people in your world. Or to be one of them. That's what all of the plays are toying with. And that must have something to do with who this person is who's writing the plays. This cobbler's son who gets to Cambridge and then enters the circle of Sir Walter Raleigh and of the 9th Earl of Northumberland. But also thinking deeply about his own situation. And that's the deepest and most interesting aspect. Is really Marlowe's relation to Faustus. And to some extent, Edward II. But really above all, to his greatest play, Dr. Faustus. Thinking hard about what is the shape of his life? What does it mean? What are the consequences of the decisions that he made when he was a student. In this case, when he was at university. How is it going to play out?
- [36:45]
A
So that's why you see his recruitment as being an equivalent to Faustus being wooed by the devil.
- [36:54]
B
For me, it's almost impossible to imagine how that astonishing play. That doesn't really resemble anything that had been written before. That really is a remarkable achievement. Imagining what it is to be an intellectual. Who makes a faithful and fatal decision in his life. That involves the most radical betrayal of. How should we say, official belief. And a betrayal, ultimately, of yourself as well. It's almost impossible for me to imagine that without thinking. That Marlon must have gone down into himself. And drawn upon what he had done with himself. Because, look, you could tell yourself, and sometimes Marlowe's biographers have said. That, look, all this might have been as just picking up a document. And carrying it from one place to another. Just being a courier. First of all, I think that's unlikely. Because I think that the letter sent from the Privy Council Suggests rather more important service than letter delivery possible. And also because if you actually enter the world that Marlowe lives in. You realize how terrifying it actually was. When the consequences for people who fall afoul of the government. Who get into the hands of the government after they've been denounced, the consequences are horrific. We're talking about people who are imprisoned, who are tortured, who are mutilated. And ultimately, who are hanged, drawn down while still alive, castrated, cut in quarters. Insofar as Marlow is involved in some way or other in that world, we have to think that the consequences are horrific. And the question is, where? In a complex, sensitive human being, where is that involvement process. How do you think about what you've done, what you're doing, what you're doing to yourself, what you're doing to others. And I think that Marlowe did think about those issues in a very profound way in his work.
- [39:16]
D
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- [39:32]
C
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- [40:10]
A
You mentioned in that wonderful answer about the sense of betraying oneself. And of course, one of the things that we can see, at least we think we see hints of in Marlowe's work. Hints is too small a word, but we can't be definitive, is queerness. So whether we're thinking about descriptions of male and female in, you know, Helena of Troy in Faustus or Edward ii, obviously we see this kind of evidence. And you suggest in a wonderful reading of his poem Hero and Lander that there we have perhaps the most substantial or most liberated instance of that. Can you reflect a little on what we know of Marlowe and his sexuality through his work?
- [41:00]
B
One thing that we know is that officially, as it were on the books, they wouldn't have called it homosexuality or queerness. They would have called it sodomy. That sodomy is forbidden is a capital offense. The curious thing about that law from the time of Henry VIII that was renewed and in some ways intensified by law in the subsequent regimes, including Elizabeth's, is that actually no one was prosecuted under them. And that's for good reason. If you make something that many people do, if you make it a capital offense, you had better not enforce the capital offense, as there were plenty of radical Protestants who wanted to make adultery a capital offense in the 17th century. But it's rather hard to run a society if you're actually going to kill all the people who commit adultery, you're going to wind up with a much reduced population. And the same thing is true of sodomy. In a world in which there seems to have been, among other things, a perennial bed shortage, or rather, in which people love to sleep with somebody else in the bed, probably because there's no central heating. But if we can imagine the lives of men and women in this period who routinely sleep with the same sex bedfellow when they're adolescents and in their early adulthood, it doesn't take a huge leap to think that many people in society had what officially in law would have been committed, a capital offense. So that's a starting point. But then in Marlowe's case, there's actually considerable, I think considerable evidence that goes well beyond that, that actually this was his at least principal form of sexual pleasure, same sex experience. And he writes wonderfully, I think, plays with it in multiple places in his work. But often, as with Edward ii, with a sense of doom about it. And even in the case of Dr. Faustus, where Faustus sleeps with Helen of Troy, but Helen of Troy is not actually a woman, but within the thought of the play, a succubus, that's to say a demon, a male demon who's transformed into a female, but also on the stage, it's a boy actor. So Marlowe is constantly playing with this stuff, but with a considerable amount of warning or doom about it. But in the case of here in Leander, we have a much more happy, playful, relaxed, if that's the way to put it, acceptance of this form of sexuality. I think the lines from here in Leander are when the God Neptune is attracted to Leander and attempts to seduce him are the sexiest gay lines in the Elizabethan theater. They're wonderful and funny and accepting and wry about this sexual experience. So I think at that moment at least, and this is written just before Marlow is murdered at that moment in his life, I think he. There is a sign that he had found a way to be much more playfully accepting of his sexuality. And that's what, among other things, led me to speculate on something, again, speculation that maybe not all readers would accept that when it's reported by multiple spies toward the end of Marlowe's life, that Marlowe was going around saying that Jesus and John were lovers. One of the spies says Marlowe was saying that actually Marlow might have been speaking of not only, how should we say, blasphemous, maybe he is speaking blasphemously, but not only blasphemously, but actually attributing to Jesus a form of love that Marlowe himself was happy to embrace in his own life, that it's not simply a piece of wry homophobia, but Almost its opposite. A piece of transgressive homophilia, a kind of radical gay moment. Look, you want to know what the highest form of sexuality is? It's what the gods do. It's what Jupiter does with Ganymede. It's what Jesus did with John. That's, how should we say, a kind of dangerous, radical challenge. Because the way in which the system was working was a version of don't ask, don't tell. The reason that there are no charges filed against, despite the fact that the stuff is on the books, is that no one is bringing charges because everyone is basically winking at the rule but not talking about it, but Marlowe talks about it.
- [45:34]
A
So that sort of radical, blasphemous, transgressive talk is probably the stuff that is used against Marlow and leads to his arrest there. It's an odd sort of arrest because he's given freedom of action and no formal accusation is made against him. And it's in this period where he is under arrest, but also somehow free to move, that we get his murder. We do not have time to do it justice. But let's briefly kind of think, as we come towards the end of our time together, about this extraordinary moment in which this extraordinary life is cut so short. There are so many theories about why he was murdered. Which resonates most with you.
- [46:23]
B
You're right that there are many competing theories. And the most probably the safest theory is the one that says, well, what the state said is probably true, which is that Marlow had a nasty temper, that there was a fight about after a long day of meeting at 10 in the morning, of having lunch, of spending the afternoon together with his three friends, with. With having dinner together. And after dinner there was the bill and Marlow, who always had a. Is evidence that Marlow had a cruel disposition. There was an argument about the bill, about the reckoning, and Marlow attacked one of the three people in the room with the probably hilt of his dagger and wound up getting murdered in the brawl. So that's a safe explanation, that it's exactly what the State said. But what's unconvincing to me about it is, is the fact that only in the 20th century it was revealed because of discovery by a former graduate student working in the public records office and figuring out where something was misfiled, that the three people in the room with Marlowe were all in some way or other associated with the Secret Service. In the case of Poli, and less directly, but also with the other Skeers and Fraser, With a kind of murky, criminal secret world. That wouldn't preclude the idea that it was just Marlowe's nasty temper. But I find the length of that day mysterious. The fact that Marlowe was under investigation at that moment, the fact that the long list of what Marlowe supposedly was saying, the outrageous things, and they are outrageous, that Marlowe was saying, and I believe he was saying many of them, that list was actually copied and given to the Queen. And that there's a marginal note on the document that was given to the Queen that says let this be attended to. Basically let this be taken care of. It's possible that there's no relationship between those things and Marlowe's death. But I think that it is from my perspective, given the whole structure of Marlowe's life, extremely likely that this is not a random event or the consequence of a flare up of temper, but that this is a decision that was made end Marlow's life. And I think that Shakespeare's reflection on what I take to be his reflection on this also gives you the feeling that something strange happened in that room in Deptford. When a man's verses cannot be understood, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. We'll never know for sure. But given the whole shape of Marlowe's life, though it is perfectly plausible speculation that it's just the consequence of his flaring up of his temper. It's at least and for me more plausible that it's the consequence of years of skating at the edge with dangerous people, with a dangerous life, with a fascination with the most radical and disturbing thoughts that this whole period could generate about all aspects of life. About belief, about power, about sex. Marlowe was unbelievably daring. And it's possible whether he was daring, let's say. I'm leaving aside the fact that we don't completely know what he was doing for the state, whether he was even being possibly paid to be this radical. Though if he was, it was a very bad bargain that he made because he ends up dead at 29.
- [50:02]
A
A bit like Dr. Thassus's pact, as you say. Well, thank you, Professor Greenblatt, so much for giving us so much of your time. You've been so generous and so eloquent and it's been such a joy to speak to you about this genius.
- [50:18]
B
My pleasure. Susanna.
- [50:21]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit. And to my producer, Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [50:55]
E
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