History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt
he received an invitation, through Watson, to meet the composer (who was now approaching forty, and living in Middlesex). This may have been Tom Watson flaunting his connections, or it could quite arguably have been the Catholic net slowly closing in on Kit.
The Bene’t accounts and buttery books for 1582 and 1583 show that Kit was away from college for between five and seven weeks during the summer of 1582. At the time, Tom Watson was temporarily back from Paris and was living in the parish where he had been born, St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in London. Seven years Kit’s senior (Kit was still just eighteen), he seems to have stepped in to the position of older friend and mentor, from which Stephen Gosson had been tumbled by his Puritanism. Tom had come down from Oxford without taking his degree, had been a law student in London without becoming a lawyer, and now lived off his wits as a poet and playwright – with, as we have seen, the odd foray into the shadier corners of diplomacy for the ‘master spyder’, Sir Francis Walsingham. And he was a Catholic, a recusant whose name occurs in the St Helen’s parish list of ‘strangers who go not to church’. Kit joined him for a summer of writing poems, reading the classics, going to plays, and not going to church.* Tom was finishing his The ’ Εϰατoμπα Θια or Passionate Centurie of Love, a series of eighteen-line poems, which he called ‘sonnets’, often based on classical, French or Italian sources. Kit was beginning a translation of Ovid’s sensual Amores, relishing the chance to improve his Italian (Tom had introduced him to the poems of Tasso), and honing his poetic skills, fascinated by the form of Watson’s sonnets, but not quite convinced he had got it right.
In the afternoons they went to plays – not polite indoor dramas like those written by his former Canterbury neighbour John Lyly for boy companies and courtly audiences, but rollicking gallimaufreys that coupled clowns with kings, and leashed in the odd musician and a number of nifty jiggers, too; plays the authorities disapproved of, which took place beyond City jurisdiction in the open amphitheatres of the Curtain or the Theatre, where there was ‘no want of young ruffins, nor lacke of harlots, utterlie past all shame’, and where law students from the Inns of Court created much the same sort of rumpus as hooligans at modern-day football matches. Here, from the gallery, they could heckle Richard Tarlton, the dumpy man who in all likelihood gave common currency to the word ‘clown’, and whose cross-eyes and cheeky expression had the audience wetting themselves as soon as he put his head through the hangings at the back of the stage:
Tarlton when his head was onely seene,
The Tirehouse dore and tapestrie betweene,
Set all the multitude in such a laughter,
They could not hold for scarse an houre after.
Tom and Kit were among the few who could match his banter. As the theatre historian Andrew Gurr points out, Tarlton was by the 1580s in one sense at least already a bit old-fashioned. His direct address to the audience, the gap he created between himself as clown/player and his role (a technique we would now view as distinctly post-Brechtian), was about to give way to a more illusionistic drama, where actors disappeared behind the characters they portrayed, more in the manner of cinema today. Kit, perhaps already grappling with his own first play, watched carefully, enjoyed the repartee, but did not approve. His plays were among the first to be different. Tamburlaine would edge Tarlton into the wings, as poetic tragedy supplanted knockabout. This was where he wanted to make his theatre, appealing to an amphitheatre audience, but he would draw its focus in a new direction. In the prologue to the first Tamburlaine the Great he promised to lead the audience away ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.’ The urbane fool Touchstone in As You Like It stands in direct contrast to knockabout Arden rustics, and of course there is the writer’s cri de coeur in Hamlet’s ‘And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them …’ (Hamlet III ii 36).
A rough new theatre was emerging from a turbulent world. It needed a figure of genius to give it fresh language and direction. Kit knew that he could do that. It is he, in the blank verse of Tamburlaine, his first solo effort, who would give Elizabethan drama its rhythm.
Tom had also introduced Kit to his London circle – a brood of poets and pamphleteers that burgeoned through the 1580s and 1590s, and who centuries later would be dubbed the ‘University Wits’ (by the wine connoisseur and doyen of Victorian literary taste, George Saintsbury). If any remnant of Puritanism still clung to Kit, it was dispelled by parley over the tavern table with Thomas Lodge, whose Defence of Poetry Music and Stage Plays had just unsheathed daggers against Stephen Gosson’s ranting Schoole of Abuse. Like the others, Kit frequented St Paul’s Churchyard, the centre of the printing (which then also meant publishing) and bookselling, where there were already over twenty ‘stationers’ at trade (the modern word has its origin in these licensed booksellers who traded from ‘stations’, rather than being itinerant). Kit’s childhood friend, Oliver Laurens, was unhappily apprenticed here to the epitome of Sloth, so vividly described by Thomas Nashe as:
. . . a Stationer that I knowe, with his thumb under his girdle, who if a man come to his stall and aske him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, and speakes not a word: onely with his little finger points backwards to his boy, who must be his interpreter, and so all the day gaping like a dumbe image he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then he is as quick as other three, eating six times every day.
Oliver was later to enter into a more fruitful arrangement with the publisher Thomas Thorpe, with whom he was to work for years to come. It was with Oliver that Kit went to see the premier tourist attraction of the time, Sir Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, moored down river at Deptford. The adventurer had returned from his circumnavigation of the globe, his ship stuffed with treasure, on a Sunday in September 1580, causing such a stir that nobody went to church that day. In the summer of 1581 the Queen visited him on board, handed a sword to the ambassador of her suitor, the Duke of Anjou, to knight him, and declared the ship a national monument. For the past year, hordes of visitors had swarmed over the ship, chipping off bits as souvenirs. Over eleven years later, when Kit was sipping ale at Eleanor Bull’s house on Deptford Strand, nothing was left of the Golden Hind but a few skeletal timbers, sticking up from the dry dock like a rotting ribcage.
Though Kit could range around London with Oliver, he was not able to see his other old friend, Sam Kennet. The one-time ‘terrible Puritan’, scourge of Roman Catholic prisoners in the Tower, had himself become a convert, and by the summer of 1582 was a seminarist at Rheims. Was Kit also already a Catholic? It is hard to tell. Charles Nicholl makes the point that there was at that time something seductive about Catholicism, something forbidden that made becoming a Catholic a gesture of defiance, especially attractive to those who deplored the spread of Puritanism, and among the young literary set. Thomas Lodge would one day convert, as would the philosophically fickle Stephen Gosson, who after writing plays, then puritanically ranting against them, went off to Rheims – though he later relented and returned to England to become an Anglican vicar. Tom Watson was of course a Catholic, and when he took Kit to stay at Harlington, William Byrd’s house in Middlesex, he was transporting the young man to an anteroom of Rome. Byrd’s home was a resort for Catholics; it is included in a list now housed at the Public Record Office of ‘places where certaine Recusantes remaine in and about the city of London: or are to be com by uppon warninge’. Though himself loyal, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and (it seems) enjoying special protection from the Privy Council, Byrd was a close friend of the staunch Catholic Charles Paget, and had possibly also known the plotter Anthony Babington and the recent Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. Hovering on the edge of this circle was Robert Poley – ‘Sweet Robyn’ – who was to be so charming to Eleanor Bull, and who earlier that year had married Tom Watson’s sister. Even more curiously, both Poley and Tom Watson were by then in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham.
The purpose of Tom and Kit’s visit to Harlington was ‘to make good pastime’, and was apparently innocent. Although such gatherings were not uncommon, it is not entirely true that music filtered through every aspect of Elizabethan life, as a sort of merrie muzak with citizens singing at their work, madrigals after dinner and everyone as adept