History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt
of his journey to Cambridge. But Rome’s ‘wicked ways’ offered no allure to the conservative, puritanical, sixteen-year-old who arrived at Bene’t College – as Corpus Christi was then known – just after Christmas in 1580. It had been a long and arduous journey, and he immediately spent 1d on a meal, just enough for a little ale and a warming pottage (winter vegetables boiled with eggs, milk, saffron and a scraping of ginger) and perhaps, given the season, a mince pie made with mutton, beef suet, ‘various kinds of Spicery’ (nutmeg, mace cinnamon, depending on what could be afforded), orange and lemon peel, and perhaps a dash of ‘sack’ (sherry). His expenditure is recorded in the college buttery book, a patchily extant record of what students spent on food and drink, which together with the college account books give us an idea of Kit’s movements during his years at Cambridge.
Just getting started at Bene’t was an expensive business. The account books record ‘Marlin’ as paying a heavy 3s 4d as an admission fee to the college, and he also had to find 4d for the college gatekeeper (followed by another 4d when he was officially admitted as a scholar). To make matters worse, Christopher Pashley, his predecessor as Canterbury scholar, was tardy in packing his bags, and it was not until May that Kit Marlin officially took up the scholarship and matriculated. Just how he survived during these expensive first months is unclear; no doubt he was admitted on the strength of the scholarship that was to come, but somebody seems to have been supporting him. Perhaps Sir Roger Manwood once again came to the rescue, ascertaining a well-made Latin epitaph from the clever young man who could already ‘make a verse’ better than his contemporaries.
Kit joined the other two Canterbury scholars, Robert Thexton and Thomas Leugar, in a small chamber that had been converted from a ‘stoare house’ in the north-west corner of what is now Corpus Christi’s Old Court. He was a lanky youth, with the sort of shining, marble-white skin that seems visibly to tingle; and sparkling, sun-bright eyes, part flint, part green (a besotted elderly Fellow has left us a record).* We know from Stephen Gosson that even as a child Kit had a ‘sharp-provided wit’, and at Bene’t he impressed immediately with his ‘nimble mind’ and ‘retorts dextrous’. He also made a mark with his consumption of ale. Will Dukenfield, the malmsey-nosed tavern keeper of the Eagle & Childe (now the Eagle), two steps and a stumble from the Bene’t College gate, in his very old age remembered young Marlin as being addicted to ‘wine, women and watching [staying up all night]’ and ‘sitting at good ale, swilling and carousing’ all day long. Dukenfield’s recollection is itself no doubt ale-washed and subject to a certain lack of focus, so we cannot really be certain of its veracity, much less pinpoint it in time, and it should be noted that all this was reported by Dukenfield’s grandson many years after Marlowe and the flame-faced old tavern-keeper himself had died.†
However, quite soon after arriving in Cambridge Kit’s puritanical carapace was starting to crack. Initially, part of his attraction to the university, and to Bene’t College especially, had been its Puritan reputation. Bene’t was pre-eminently a Puritan college. Dr Aldrich, the Master until just five years before Kit arrived, was a leading partisan supporting the Puritan Thomas Cartwright, who had famously clashed with Bishop Whitgift, and been deprived of the chair of Divinity. Robert Browne, the founder of the ‘Brownists’, the forerunners of Congregationalism, completed his degree there in 1576, and had preached without licence in St Benet’s church in 1580. The church, which doubled as a college chapel, was well within earshot of Kit’s room. He had swapped the noise of the St George’s great waking bell, for the regular toll of St Benet’s (cf. ‘The triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure; or the bells of Saint Bennet, sir, may put you in mind – one, two, three’, Twelfth Night V i 34–5).
Kit held his scholarship for the full course of six years, to Masters degree level, rather than for the four-year bachelor of arts degree. (An MA ordinarily took seven years, which probably explains why he had to find some other sort of funding for the first few months.) Under the terms of Archbishop Parker’s scholarship, which aimed at staffing the established church, this meant that he had said that he would be taking holy orders. Either young Kit was sincerely intent on life as a clergyman – be it Protestant or Puritan – or he was showing a cool Machiavellian approach to getting the best education he could. However it was not unknown for other young men in similar situations to change their minds about religion. Stephen Gosson had abandoned playwriting in favour of railing against the sins of the theatre, and later entered the church; his friend Sam Kennet, who was already terrorising Catholic prisoners as yeoman warder in the Tower of London, would before Kit had finished his degree be converted to Rome. And Kit soon discovered that at Cambridge, in addition to ‘minds of the pure religion’, there was a knot of rebellious, rather clever young men who deplored what the poet John Donne (whose time there overlapped in part with Kit’s) called the ‘plain, simple, sullen, young, contemptuous’ features of Puritanism. One of this clutch of rebels was Thomas Nashe, a bright, skinny, boyish student who came up to St John’s College within a couple years of Kit entering Bene’t; he would soon become his close friend and collaborator. But even before he met Thomas Nashe, Kit’s perspectives were shifting.
Ours is not the only era in which young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty are ambitious, kick against fortune and convention, question their lot, and reinvent themselves a thousandfold. It is clear that Kit Marlin, at the tumultuous age of seventeen, was developing his own style, and a bit of a swagger – according to Gosson, the cobbler’s eldest son was becoming a ‘malapert [impudent] full-mouth, breathing defiance’.* And there are hints that, during his first months at Bene’t, Kit was rudderless and malcontent. Part of the reason for this had to do with his status. Even more than at that ‘seminary for gentlemen’, The King’s School, he now found himself exposed to the nobility and upper classes. Archbishop Cranmer had argued when re-founding The King’s School that it was ‘through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge, for that most part, [that] all gentle [men] ascend to their estate’. Tudor humanists, the historian John Adamson points out, had for some time been arguing that learning, manners and deportment were no less conferrers of gentlemanly virtues than noble lineage. Kit felt this keenly, but at Cambridge social rank was structured and glaring. The sons of the nobility and gentry were counselled to ‘Consort yourself with gentlemen of your own rank and quality.’ Though some students ostentatiously glittered, others were dismally poor. On the one hand were rich young blades such as Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who spent a mighty £7 on refurbishing his room at Trinity College, putting extra glass in the windows and buying wall hangings for his study; on the other were those like the wretched youth who owned little more than ‘a thinne Chest’, a hat, a hooded gown, a chair, one pair of hose, an old shirt, a meatknife, eight books, a lute, three sheets, and ‘a very old Blankett’. Kit fell somewhere in between. College records place the new scholar ‘Marlin’ in the convictus secundus, the ‘second list’ of students who were neither poor ‘sizars’, who had to perform menial tasks for other students (such as cleaning and waiting at table) to pay their way – the fate of a cobbler’s son, had it not been for the Parker Scholarship – nor ‘fellow-commoners’, rich boys like Essex, whose parents filled pockets and college coffers with gold, who dined at the Fellows’ table, and who were generally allowed to proceed to their degrees without the bothersome intervention of examinations.
For Kit, certain of his intellectual superiority, this social inferiority smarted. John Bakeless reads this resentment into lines from Hero and Leander. ‘And to this day is every scholar poor,/Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor’, and you can hear Kit’s frustration in the lament: ‘Alas, I am a scholar!/How should I have gold?/All that I have is but my stipend … /Which is no sooner receiv’d but it is spent’ (The Massacre at Paris I vii 18–20). At first, it would seem, he tried rather foolishly to buy himself into favour. Urry notes that ‘Marlin’s’ expenditure in his second week at college was a lavish 3s 1½d, an amount he never again equalled, not even in his heady final years, and a huge extravagance for someone who was supposed to be getting by on a shilling a week. But Kit soon realised that conspicuous consumption or headlong hospitality (whatever it was that demanded such spending) was pointless, and instead fell