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HISTORY PLAY

HISTORY PLAY

The Lives and Afterlife of

Christopher Marlowe

RODNEY BOLT

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2004 by Rodney Bolt

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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eISBN: 978-1-59691-720-0

First U.S. Edition 2005

1 3 5 79 1 0 8 6 42

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Printed in the United States of America

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For my parents

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

T. S. ELIOT

Contents

My heartfelt thanks go to David Miller, Ravi Mirchandani, and Arabella Pike, who were all instrumental, in their different ways, in bringing this book to life. And a special thank you, too, to Amanda Katz for transferring that life successfully across the Atlantic.

I am deeply indebted to earlier Marlowe biographers, most notably William Urry, Leslie Hotson, John Bakeless and in particular Charles Nicholl. Their painstaking and serious scholarship has been of great value to me, and I can only hope that they do not thump their desks too hard, or (in some cases) turn in their graves at what I have done with it.

While every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright, I would be happy to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, for their assistance with accommodation, and to the staff of the Parker Library at the college for their help and attention to my requests. Dr Mara Kalnins, a Fellow of the college, and Dr Linne Mooney, very kindly gave their permission to reproduce the letter included in Appendix III. Staff at the University of Padua Library, too, were very helpful and tolerant of odd requests.

Roon van Santen generously offered his design services in pursuit of a maverick idea, which Allan Grotjohann superbly put into effect. Frank Wynne came up with ingenious last-minute suggestions. Ton Amir, Sandra Ponzanesi, Massimo Scalabrini, Isabel Cebeiro and Pierre Bouvier all helped in recondite corners of translation. Fausto Schiavetto put me up in Padua, and Vitorina Corte offered refuge when I needed it. Warm thanks to all of them.

But my deepest debt of all is to Hans Nicolai, Gerard van Vuuren and Andrew May, who have borne my obsession with this book for the past three years with fortitude, even giving practical help with research. Anna Arthur, Chris Chambers, Iris Maher and Dheera Sujan have also been stalwart in their support. Without them, the task would have been tough indeed.

How curious and interesting is the parallel - as far as poverty of biographical details is concerned - between Satan and Shakespeare. It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in tradition. They are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. By way of a preamble to this book, I should like to set down a list of every positively known fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is. Beyond these details we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - a tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

FACTS

He was born on the 23rd of April, 1564.

Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could not sign their names.

At Stratford, a small back-settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to 'make their mark' in attesting important documents, because they could not write their names.

Of the first eighteen years of his life nothing is known. They are a blank.

On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Whateley.

Next day William Shakespeare took out a licence to marry Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication of the banns.

Within six months the first child was born.

About two (blank) years followed, during which period nothingat all happened to Shakespeare, so far as anybody knows.

Then came twins - 1585. February.

Two blank years follow.

Then - 1587 - he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind.

Five blank years follow. During this period nothing happenedto him, as far as anybody actually knows.

Then - 1592 - there is mention of him as an actor.

Next year - 1593 - his name appears in the official list of players.

Next year - 1594 - he played before the Queen. A detail of no consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And remained obscure.

Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then

In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.

Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.

Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no protest.

Then - 1610-11 - he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbour who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.

He lived five or six years - till 1616 - in the joy of these elevated pursuits. Then he made a will and signed each of its three pages with his name.

A thorough businessman's will. It named in minute detail every item of property he owned in the world - houses, lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on - all the way down to his 'second-best bed' and its furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he left husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money still lacking. No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare's will.

He left her that 'second-best bed'.

And not another thing;