"Love me little, love me long".
Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury, Kent, on the 26th of February, 1564. He met his end in Deptford, South London, on the 30th of May, 1593. So only 29, but in that brief spell he created a body of work that is still loved and performed to this day. I saw a production of Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside, Southwark, only a couple of years ago. This was an area he would have known well.
Marlowe was born just a couple of months before his more famous playwright peer. In my humble opinion, had he lived longer, the scribbler from Stratford would be the lesser known and appreciated of the two. It should have been the RMC rather than the RSC.
To be honest we do not really know what he looked like. The portrait above is often taken to be of him. It was found bricked up in an abandoned section of the university he attended in the earlier part of the 20th Century. The Latin motto states "What feeds me, destroys me" - which could only have been written by, or for, Marlowe. The date fits his time at Cambridge. He is supposed to have come to London in 1587.
As was custom at the time, his name appears in the written records in several variants - Marlin, Marley and Morley among them.
His was a brief but full life. There is something of the Kurt Cobain or the James Dean about him - or his contemporary, my favourite painter Caravaggio. I like my heroes flawed...
As well as penning Doctor Faustus, he also wrote The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine The Great Parts 1 & 2, The Massacre At Paris, Dido Queen of Carthage, and Edward II.
He was also an accomplished poet - look up his "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love" which opens with the line: "Come with me and be my love...".
And he was a spy, what would have been seen at the time as a religious heretic, and a homosexual. Plus, he was locked up for a few weeks for being involved in a fatal duel near his home in Norton Folgate (Spitalfields).
If you think you do not know his work, then think again. Have you never heard the phrase "The face that launched a thousand ships"?
"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in a thousand stars."
Officially he died in a tavern brawl - an argument over the bill (or the Reckonynge). You will find no-one today who accepts that. He was assassinated by his spymasters because he was seen as such a loose cannon. Or he was actually spirited out of the country, his death faked, and he lived out his days on the Continent. There is a report on record of a young man's body being removed from a prison at just this time by the authorities, his relatives never being told the reason why or finding out what happened to it.
And he was the true author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Yes, Marlowe is closely associated with the Shakespeare conspiracy theories.
In a nutshell, a lot of people think Shakespeare could not have written what he did as he was pulled out of school at age 11 to help in his father's glove-making business, and never went to university nor travelled abroad.
Marlowe did go to university and certainly travelled abroad, as he was arrested in the Netherlands for coining (forging money). This was at Flushing - or Vlissingen as it is now known.
"Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position".
It was at Cambridge that he was recruited as a spy. A popular place for recruiting spies...
"Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is there must we ever be".
I'll talk about Marlowe's earlier life at another time.
Yesterday I took a walk to the church of St. Nicholas in Deptford, where Marlowe is buried. It is about the only thing in this neighbourhood which Marlowe might have recognised, as the whole district is now covered in council estates - modern or 1950's. Deptford Green is a nondescript urban park. At a house here in 1593, Marlowe and some men who were also in the pay of Thomas Wallsingham, son of Queen Elizabeth's recently deceased spymaster Sir Francis, were holed up in a house belonging to Eleanor Bull, who had connections to Wallsingham and the spy world. They were supposed to be waiting to board ship. Bull's house wasn't a public tavern, but she did lay on food and drink. The official story has it that Marlowe got into a fight with one Ingram Frizer over the payment for what they had consumed. A drunken Marlowe attacked Frizer and, in self defence, he stabbed Marlowe through the right eye - the blade penetrating the brain. Frizer spent a month in jail and an inquest jury found he had indeed acted in self-defence, so he was released.
As I've said above, there are few who believe this tale. It is generally thought that the gay, atheist playwright was becoming a liability with his outspoken views and the company he was keeping - such as Sir Walter Raleighs' "School of Night" group and Lord Strange. Only a short time before his death, libels speaking out against foreigners were appearing in the City of London signed by someone calling himself "Tamburlaine". Marlowe's friend Thomas Kydd was arrested in connection with these.
Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of nearby St. Nicholas Church on June 1st, 1593. Despite the urban neighbourhood it now sits in, the churchyard itself is really quite beautiful. Marlowe's only monument is a tablet affixed to the yard wall (just to the right of the left hand tree in the image immediately above - and see below for the memorial itself). On the church's west wall facing this part of the churchyard is a monument to one John Addey, who left money in his will for the relief of the poor of the parish - £200 plus rents from properties he owned. His gravestone, dated 1606, lies just below this - by the side door to the church.
There has been a church here since the 12th Century. The main brick-built part of the church you see today was built in the 17th Century. St. Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors - so quite apt for this dockside district. You may notice that the top of the bell tower does not quite match the lower section. A stone tablet states that the top of the tower was blown down in a gale in 1901, and the renovated upper part was built in 1903.
"All places are alike, and every earth is fit for burial".
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