The Elizabethans (50 page)

As a student, he favoured the randy Ovid and the rebellious Lucan – he wrote translations of both. It appears (and this again seems so modern) that even while he was at Cambridge he had somehow been enlisted in political ‘affaires’. In mid-1587 we find Christopher Morley on his way to Reims, working as one of Walsingham’s spies, and posing as a recusant and would-be priest. How was he enlisted? One of his fellow agents, Richard Baines, quoted him as saying that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boies were fooles’.
¹⁸
One of his Cambridge acquaintances, Thomas Fineux of Hougham, near Dover, attested that ‘Marlowe made him an atheist’. Walsingham would have seen that Marlowe’s lack of religious belief would have made him a very useful spy, when it came to posing as a Catholic: he need have no scruples that would interfere with his work. Perhaps the love of boys played a part in the story – either that Marlowe was involved with a world of homosexual spies, or that he had made himself open to blackmail.

Nobody knows exactly when Marlowe wrote
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
. It seems to be an early work, perhaps from 1588–9.
¹⁹
Clearly, on the heavily censored London stage, Marlowe could not be blatantly atheistical. Equally clearly, the ‘hellish fall’ of Dr Faustus, which the Chorus, at the end of the play holds up as an object-lesson in the consequences of seeking forbidden knowledge, is thrilling to both author and audience. We are as far as possible, in this play, from the medieval miracle plays in which Heaven and Hell are realities. Marlowe’s Faustus is a rootless sensualist who comes unstuck. But though some members of the audience might have shuddered, as they would at a genuinely religious medieval cycle, the sophisticates among Marlowe’s first audience would read all the signals. F.S. Boas, Marlowe’s biographer, observed that:

Marlowe must have recognised in Faustus his own counterpart. The Canterbury boy through the bounty of Archbishop Parker had reached Cambridge to qualify himself there for the clerical career. His studies had earned him the Bachelor’s and the Master’s degrees, but he had turned his back on the Church, and on arrival in London had gained a reputation for atheism. Similarly, Faustus through the bounty of a rich uncle had been sent to Wittenberg to study divinity, and had obtained with credit his doctorate in the subject. But his interests lay elsewhere, and he had turned secretly to the study of necromancy and conjuration.
²⁰

Faust is a mythic character who haunts the sixteenth century, and who finds his most eloquent incarnation in Marlowe’s tragi-farce. Luther, in his
Table-Talk
, had spoken of Faust, the arrogant scholar-turned-necromancer, accompanied by a dog who was really the Devil. These early Protestant accounts of Faust speak of him having died when the Devil decided to wring his neck. Goethe’s Faust is the spokesman of the Enlightenment free-thinker,
led eternally onwards
to greater intellectual and sexual satisfaction by his having cast aside dogmatic restraints. He is not damned: one of many factors that makes Gounod’s rendering so ludicrous. For Luther and the other Reformers, however, Faust is a terrible warning of what happens to the unbaptised imagination. He deliberately lays aside divine knowledge and goes it alone in quest of knowledge-as-power. The ‘original’ or ‘real’ Faust appears to have been born at the little town of Kindlingen and to have studied at Krakow. Marlowe, by the time he had picked up on the legend, makes him a mainstream German: ‘Of riper years to Wertenberg he went . . .’

It is astounding how fast the Faust story turned into legend, passing in oral tradition through Poland, France, Holland and England during the 1580s and 1590s. It was very much a current piece of popular lore when Marlowe first saw his play performed. It draws, consciously or otherwise, on many stories circulating in Europe about men selling themselves to Satan in exchange for immortality or secret knowledge. Luther’s horror of the story – and Luther, who was very superstitious, would almost certainly have believed that the Devil could pop up and strangle his adepts on Earth – was based on the fear that in starting (in effect) the Reformation, he had begun something unstoppable, and something that would ultimately rebound against the pure word of God. Among intellectuals, as we have already noticed in our considerations of Dr Dee, the belief in magic was widespread. Marlowe probably did dabble in Satanism, and probably did express atheistic beliefs.

What he achieved in the theatre, however, was sheer thrill. It is neither more nor less ‘deep’ than a Graham Greene novel:

I do repent; and yet I do despair:

Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast . . .

Such thrills, which are achieved largely through Marlowe’s superb gifts of rhetoric, in the drama of Faustus, first grabbed the public attention in his bombastic
tour de force
, the
Tamburlaine
plays.

Greek tragedy began as part of religious ceremonial, plumbing deep familial, psychological fears. Tragedy in the English theatre had different wellsprings and found very different settings in which to expand and explore its own possibilities. It exploited the combined skills of travelling, vagabond-actors, singing-boys and comedians. It was staged for mobs hungry for sensation in new, purpose-built – with an emphasis on the
built
, the enclosed – arenas. In a violent, crowded city, it projected fantasies of power and violence and madness, which drowned the fears and sorrows of its audience with melodramatic horrors, exciting not so much the Fear and Pity that Aristotle had looked for in the poetic masterpieces of Euripides, as the sensationalism of the circus combined with the irrationality of nightmare. A favoured theme was revenge.

Theirs was a society that depended for its very preservation on the failure to finish what later psychiatric theory would call ‘unfinished business’. There were so many stories in individual English lives at this date that cried for
vendetta
: the Catholics who resented losing position or land or money for the sake of faith; the old families yielding place to new money; the burgeoning petty-bourgeois Puritan-leaning class of merchants and tradesmen whose voice was unheeded in Church and state, as well as the thousand private causes for resentment in family feuds, street violence or rivalries, commercial or amorous. The law, with a justice so rough that our sensibility could hardly deem it justice at all, cut off a hand here, hanged a miscreant there; disembowelled a traitor, mangled a heretic, whipped a petty-criminal within inches of his life. In this world the story of the lurid murder, revenged after a convoluted story by killings no less bloody, was just what the collective psyche seemed to require.

Thomas Kyd (1558–94) was a pupil of Mulcaster’s, and a contemporary of Spenser’s, at the Merchant Taylors’ School. His short life followed the pattern of nihilistic disillusion that can be found in the writings of Greene and Nashe or inferred from the death of Marlowe, and which seems to have been almost a
sine qua non
for theatrical poets: he was arrested on 12 May 1593, and when his rooms were searched, papers were found that allowed his prosecutors to accuse him of atheism. (The purport of these documents seems in fact to have been a rather mild form of Unitarianism.
²¹
) He was tortured and died not long afterwards:

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear,

Which never danger yet could haunt before? . . .

The audiences of Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
enjoyed the gruesome killing of Horatio, the father – Hieronimo – going mad with grief, the staged ‘play within a play’ that helps to unmask the murderers, and the suicide of heroine and hero. The enthusiasm of the crowds for this extraordinary play would not have been lost on the fledgling dramatist Ben Jonson, who probably contributed some lines to it, or on another young man who had come up to London from Stratford-on-Avon, perhaps as a travelling player. This would have been in the late 1580s, and Shakespeare had left a Stratford in which he could still keenly remember the death of one Katherine Hamlett by drowning;
²²
she was disinterred when it was feared she died by suicide – one of the many ingredients in his brain, presumably, together with the influence and excitement of Kyd’s tragedy, that would one day fructify as his own complicated revenge-drama.

But if Kyd gave the crowds an intoxicating cocktail of poetry and gore, moral outrage fulfilled by violence, the emergence of Marlowe as tragedian was indeed a pyrotechnic fizz in the London sky. Tamburlaine gives voice to every mob’s basest political fantasy: namely, that waiting among the crowds at any historical juncture is some Rienzi or Hitler who, regardless of lowly origins, and in defiance of any moral or social convention, can seize pure, naked, delectable power. Those who had felt the charm of Queen Elizabeth I precisely because, and not in spite of, the fact that many denounced her as a bastard; those who loved the piratical side of her nature, and cheered home the looted Spanish gold on Drake’s or Hawkins’s ships, or gathered excitedly to watch bears baited or papists disembowelled – all these would be enraptured by the story of a Scythian shepherd-robber’s aggrandisement, set to a verse the like of which had never been heard in English:

Now hang our bloody colours by Damascus,

Reflexing hues of blood upon their heads,

While they walk quivering on their city-walls,

Half-dead for fear before they feel my wrath.

Then let us freely banquet, and carouse

Full bowls of wine unto the god of war,

That means to fill your helmets full of gold,

And make Damascus’ spoils as rich to you

As was to Jason Colchos’ golden fleece . . .

Marlowe himself, in his
The Massacre at Paris
– about St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 – was fully aware that there was nothing even the most sensation-hungry theatrical impresario could put on stage at the Rose or the Theatre that could match the drama of what was happening to England itself. The dramatists knew that there were rich mines to be plundered from native soil. This applied both to the small-town murder story, such as the 1585(?)
Arden of Faversham
(an anonymous play, which has been attributed variously to Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare, not in any of the three cases entirely convincingly), and to such historical dramas as the anonymous
Troublesome History of John, King of England
(1587?).

Clearly, in a world where an ill-judged comment in a political pamphlet could result in author and printer having hands chopped off, any written work that reflected on the current political scene needed to be crafted with great caution. The Tudor dynasty had emerged with dubious legality from a painfully protracted civil war. Anyone with political and historical intelligence in the 1580s knew that the drama of England itself, its evolution as a state, grew out of these civil wars and the contemporary wars with France in the reign of Henry VI. These problems in turn evolved from the succession-wrangles consequent upon Henry Bolingbroke having seized power from Richard II in 1399.

It was fascinating material for stage-drama: yet dangerous, for one of the repeated and demonstrable truths of English history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was that no one holds power without consent; that even the most popular or absolute of monarchs can find power slipping, or being grabbed, from their fist. That is a story which all mobs, and no monarchs or tyrants, want to hear.

It is very unlikely that the play we often refer to as
Henry VI Part I
was the work of one hand. Authorship of plays was not, especially in the early days of the purpose-built theatres, displayed on billboards, nor did authors retain any rights in material that they would have sold outright to the impresario. Only later, in the unusual situation of an author publishing his play, do we get a sense of authorship in this modern sense. In any case, the first
Henry VI
play in chronological terms is unlikely to have been the first to have been performed.
The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey
is what we call
Henry VI Part II
. Unlike
Part I
, which seems to have been a heavily collaborative work (scholars detect in it the hands of Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Marlowe and George Peele),
Part II
was largely Shakespeare’s own work.

Whatever work Shakespeare (1564–1616) had previously done in the theatre, as an actor and as a collaborative playwright contributing to others’ work, it is in the plays about Henry VI – whatever title you give them – that he emerges as a figure in the London theatre. When Shakespeare was in his mid-to-late twenties,
Henry VI Parts II and III
were complete. Robert Greene denounced the new arrival, with a clear parody of one of Shakespeare’s lines in the play. ‘For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde
, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute
Johannes fac totum
, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’

Here we have an obvious reference, by an
envious
, dying man (Greene died on 3 September 1592) to a new star. The ‘Tygers heart’ reference is to
Henry VI Part III, Act I, Scene 4
. The captive Duke of York stands, humiliated, on a molehill wearing a paper crown and being taunted by the terrifying Queen Margaret. She waves a napkin stained with the blood of York’s son:

Where are your mess of sons to back you now?

The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?

And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,