History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt
houses did have viols hanging up for guests to use, and a ‘lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber’s shop’, the much-quoted passage from Thomas Morley’s Plain and Easy Introduction to Music is something of an exaggeration. Morley wrote:
But supper being ended and music books (according to custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up …
Morley, however, had a vested interest in presenting lack of musical knowledge as a social faux pas. Not only was he author of a teach-yourself music textbook, but also a composer of popular songs. After-dinner music was more likely to be presented by professionals, or talented members of the household. Yet Byrd himself had also made a famous appeal to everyone to sing, maintaining that not only did it ‘strengthen all the parts of the brest’ and ‘open the pipes’, but that the ‘exercise of singing is delightful to Nature & good to preserve the health of Man’, ending his uplifting evocation with the jingle ‘Since singing is so good a thing/I wish all men would learne to sing’. As the syllables of the couplet make a perfect sol-fa ditty, one can imagine hapless students of Byrd forever singing these words as they practised vocal scales. Fortunately for posterity, Byrd seldom wrote his own words in his secular work, rather using poetry by the likes of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Oxford, and later Kit himself, for his songs.
The gatherings at Harlington were different from the after-dinner norm; these were masters coming together to make music. That summer they sang madrigals. It was a form that was becoming increasingly fashionable in England – Tom Watson had already translated a few. The first sett, of Italian madrigalls Englished would be published in 1590, and dedicated to the Earl of Essex, who was also briefly of the party that summer. According to a note, which appears to have been written by an informer sent to report goings-on at Harlington, they sang the madrigal ‘Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?’, which had been written the year before by Henry Walpole, after a spot of Edmund Campion’s blood splattered onto his coat during the execution, and which Byrd set to music. Thanks to this singing spy, we know that Byrd also set two of Kit’s songs during the visit: O mistress mine and It was a lover and his lass.* Eventually, Kit would use somewhat altered versions of these songs in plays, but the score Byrd later published is the original one written that summer. Kit left Harlington with two successful songs to his credit, and if not a convert to Catholicism, he did at least become a devotee of the madrigal.
There is a theory that Kit did not go directly back to Cambridge after Harlington, but was the ‘Christoffer Marron’ who accompanied William Stanley (then twenty-one, later to be the sixth Earl of Derby) to the Court of Navarre, and perhaps further on to Spain. The letter in which the name is mentioned survives not in its original form, but in a contemporary manuscript copy, in which other mistakes with names are made, including at least one transposition of an ‘l’ to an ‘r’, so reading ‘Marlon’ for ‘Marron’ is not so far-fetched.* Unfortunately, no further proof exists, though it is true that Kit was later involved with the Stanley family, and the French scholar Abel Lefranc makes a convincing argument that Love’s Labour’s Lost includes scenes, characters and events that only someone with intimate knowledge of Henri of Navarre’s court could have written. The Protestant Henri Bourbon was separated from his wife Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King of France, but in 1578 in an attempt at reconciliation Marguerite had returned to Navarre, where Henri held court with a learned and highly cultured male coterie. Lefranc points out the distinct parallels between real life and the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where a king (in the play called Ferdinand, the name of William Stanley’s older brother, later Kit’s friend and patron) and three courtiers devote themselves to study and self-denial (mainly of women), but are frustrated by the arrival of the Princess of France. Lefranc quotes Montégut, the French translator of the play, as saying that the conversations, witty skirmishes and even the bad taste is so totally French that it must have been written by an insider, and points out that the three courtiers are given almost their actual names: Berowne for le baron de Biron, Longaville for le duc de Longueville, and Dumain for le duc du Maine. Furthermore, the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes is modelled both on Kit’s much-hated Welsh schoolmaster in Canterbury, and on Richard Lloyd, William Stanley’s tutor and companion on the tour. Holofernes presents a pageant of the Nine Worthies in the play; Lloyd wrote a long poem on the same topic. No other source for Love’s Labour’s Lost is known. Lefranc also points out a parallel between a love story current in court, and the story of Hamlet and Ophelia. There is also the possibility of a later visit, as a ‘Mr Marlin’ is a messenger for Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador who accompanied Henry of Navarre in the wars of 1591–2. But in the absence of further evidence, we must leave Kit’s visit to Navarre dangling as an enticing possibility.
Back in Cambridge, Kit was beginning to cut quite a dash, showing a fashionable taste for ‘gorgeous attire’, dressing like a London dandy in a doublet with ‘a collar that rose up so high and sharp as if it would have cut his throat by daylight’, voluminous breeches ‘as full and deep as the middle of winter’ and soft leather boots ‘in such artificial wrinkles, sets and plaits, as if they had been starched lately and came new from the laundress’s’. But skull caps and sombre ankle-length gowns were what the university wanted. Such insobriety fell foul of national Sumptuary Laws, which set out a strict dress code designed to curb extravagance and remind people of their station in life. Flouting these laws showed just the sort of defiance that arrivistes like Kit and other rebellious young ‘malcontents’ were notorious for, and seems to have been quite common. Fighting a losing battle against the flouncing ruff and dangling aiglet, the university authorities passed a series of injunctions during the 1570s and l580s against flashy dressing. Wearers of ‘great galligaskins’ (wide breeches) and other outrageous attire would be ‘ordered, reformed and punished … both for stuffe, fasshion and colour’. The ‘stuffe’ that courted disapproval was anything ‘in upon or about [the] doublett, coates, Jerkyn, jackett, cassock or hose, of velvet or silke’. Unseemly ‘fasshions’ included too-baggy breeches, fancy doublets, and the ruffled silks of the malcontent. Even minimalist, rather desperate gestures like allowing your gown collar to ‘fall’ rather than ‘stand’ were forbidden, and as for finer details, the authorities knew them all: nothing should be ‘embrodred, powdred, pynked, or welted … gathered, playted, garded, hacked, raced, laced or cutt’. Furthermore, ‘long lockes of Hayre uppon the heade’ gave them the horrors. Hair had to be ‘polled, notted or rounded’, and nothing else. Graduates had to forswear brightness and wear gowns made only of ‘wollen cloth of blacke, puke [a ‘dirty brown’ or the ‘camel’s colour’, eclipsed in candour only by ‘goose-turd’ – yellowish-green], London Browne, or other sad colour’. Kit, of course, favoured ‘lustie-gallant’ (light red) and primary colours that showed up well in candlelight, or the newly fashionable pale tints such as ‘cane’ and ‘milk-and-water’. Again, we hear the echo in Spencer’s speech in Edward II, ‘you must cast the scholar off,/And learn to court it like a Gentleman’, and of Dr Faustus who wants to ‘fill the public schools with silk’.
Despite chasing fashion, getting drunk and avoiding fines, Kit was working hard. He continued with his translation of Ovid’s Amores – often quite racy love elegies. Bene’t buttery and account books show that he was in full residence for a long and studious stretch up to gaining his BA in April 1584, though both Urry and Moore-Smith point to an absence of six or seven weeks in the summer of 1583. The recent rediscovery of a curious piece of late sixteenth-century pornography, First suckes at the brestes of Venus,* throws some light on what he may have been up to.
Erotic verse, upmarket literary pornography, was a legitimate source of sexual titillation for pent-up, post-pubescent Elizabethans sweating away at their studies. Thomas Nashe was later to pen the bawdy burlesque Lenten Stuff, and even more pithily The Choice of Valentines (also known as Nashe’s Dildo), a tremendously lascivious piece about one prematurely ejaculating Tomalin and his bawd Frances, who after taking his ‘silly worm’ in hand, ‘rolled it on her thigh … And