Books: Marlowe Murder

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE — John Bakeless—Morrow ($3.75).

Contemporary books on Elizabethan literature range all the way from scholarly volumes, complete with footnotes and a dozen suggested readings for doubtful passages, to out & out romances telling tall tales of the Mermaid Tavern in phoney blank verse. Between these two extremes there are a few studies like Logan Pearsall Smith’s On Reading Shakespeare, designed for readers who want to know what modern scholarship has unearthed, but do not want to spend their lives studying such academic posers as what Shakespeare meant by “a mermaid on a dolphin’s back,” or why Gabriel Harvey hated Christopher Marlowe.

John Bakeless adds to this small list a careful, 404-page biography of Marlowe that pulls together a mass of recently discovered Marlowe material, explodes a few hoary Marlowe legends, but leaves the poet as mysterious and romantic as ever. Making a studious attempt to avoid scholarly language, Mr. Bakeless nevertheless spends much time answering earlier scholars, tracks many incorrect interpretations down many blind alleys.

Although it includes an exhaustive account of Marlowe’s college years, largely based on the Cambridge “Buttery Book” that lists Marlowe’s modest spendings for bread and beer, Christopher Marlowe reaches its high point in its account of the poet’s death. Until Dr. John Leslie Hotson published the coroner’s inquest on Marlowe twelve years ago, uncovering a 330-year-old mystery, biographers had been forced to accept the legend that had him killed in a brawl over an anonymous “lewd wench” in an unnamed London tavern. Early Puritan writers considered Marlowe’s terrible end at the age of 29 and at the height of his fame a just punishment for his atheism, wrote “See what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dogge!” but unfortunately did not give details. Strait-laced Victorians tended to emphasize Marlowe’s dissolute habits in explaining his early death. Because Marlowe’s patron was a Walsingham, and Sir Francis Walsingham was chief of Elizabeth’s highly-developed secret service, there was a theory that Marlowe had been a confidential government agent, was killed because he knew too much. If this theory could be proved it would drastically revise contemporary versions of Elizabethan literary life, suggesting that poets were more deeply involved with politics than is now known.

Cautiously pointing out that the circumstances of Marlowe’s death may have been accidental. John Bakeless’ version nevertheless supports those who believe that Marlowe was a spy. On May 30. 1593. Marlowe had been in London for six years. He had written three sensationally successful tragedies, including Tamburlaine, “the most important event in the history of English literature,” and his most recent play. Edward the Second, while not as successful as his first, showed greater mastery of his art. Leaving London to escape the plague, he had been recalled by the authorities two weeks before. At ten in the morning of May 30. with two government agents and a London thief, the prominent young playwright visited Dame Eleanor Bull’s tavern, took a private room, ate dinner, walked in a private garden with his strange companions.

If Marlowe was actually killed for political reasons, his associates were the men to do it. One was a shady figure named Ingram Frizer, once a confidence man, employed by Marlowe’s patron; one was a thief named Nicholas Skeres, who was mixed up in one of the Catholic conspiracies around Mary Queen of Scotland, and finally jailed for taking part in Essex uprising against Elizabeth. The third, Robert Poley, an important figure in the British secret service, had returned that morning from a confidential mission abroad. He had become Walsingham’s agent after a term in jail, had wormed his way into intimacy with the leaders of the Catholic party, intercepted their secret correspondence with Mary when they were plotting Elizabeth’s overthrow.

According to the inquest, which may have been a whitewash, these four conspirators stayed at Dame Bull’s tavern all day. At six o’clock they ate supper in their private room. Marlowe stretched out on the bed and the others, facing him, began playing backgammon. Frizer’s dagger was hanging over the back of a chair within Marlowe’s reach. Marlowe and Frizer may have argued over the bill. Poley may have been under orders to get Marlowe drunk and kill him. But the coroner’s account has it that Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s knife, whereupon the blade was turned upon himself, pushed down, entering the flesh above the right eye and plunging two inches into the frontal lobe of a brain that had been, until that instant, as powerful, creative, original, as any in the history of English literature.