History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt
make his oration. As a member of the cathedral choir, Christopher would have had a fine view, as they ‘stood on either side of the church and brought her Majesty up with a square [solemn] song, she going under a canopy, borne by four of her temporal knights’. City officials were adorned in every bit of silk, velvet and ermine that their livery afforded, even the ordinary burghers were fitted with finery that amounted almost to fancy dress. There were lavish entertainments, masques and musicians, elaborate feasts, and a showering of Gloriana with sumptuous gifts. And there were players.
Christopher had seen players before. William Urry observes that there is a record of travelling troupes coming to Canterbury in almost every year of Marlowe’s boyhood. The Lord Warden’s Players, for example, came in 1569/70, and the city accounts for December 1574 record: ‘Item payd to the Lord of Leycester his players for playing.’ Perhaps, like his Gloucester contemporary R. Willis (the boy who had been the bedfellow of his teacher Master Downhale), Christopher had been taken by his father to see a morality play in the market place, standing ‘between his leggs, as he sate apon one of the benches’. For Willis, ‘[t]his sight tooke such impression in me, that when I came towards man’s estate, it was as fresh in my memory, as if I had seen it newly acted’. The pageantry and supposed idolatry of mediaeval mystery plays was disapproved of by stricter adherents of the Reformation, but an old Catholic pilgrimage town like Canterbury, one that a contemporary traveller noted was a ‘harborowe[r] of the Devill and the Pope’, still abandoned itself to such wickednesses as Maygames, bonfires in the streets and bell ringing on saints’ days, and may well have indulged itself in the odd performance of a miracle play.
But something was happening in the 1560s and 1570s that made the shows Christopher saw very different, more alluring than the old Mystery cycles, and perhaps even a little more wicked. Already in the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the tradition of religious and civic performances had begun to give way to troupes of strolling players who offered spicier fare. There was a move from morality to mirth, from the didactic to the entertaining. Theatre was becoming more fun. In London in 1567, the Red Lion, the first commercial playhouse with a paying audience, had opened. The amphitheatre-like design of the Red Lion playhouse, based itself on the buildings used for bear-baiting and other earthy entertainment, became the model for the Theatre, which opened in Shoreditch on one of the main roads leading out of London, three years after Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Canterbury (and, incidentally, lodged the word in English with its modern meaning). These new public playhouses offered ‘gallimaufreys’ – hotchpotches of romance and drama, narratives with ‘many a terrible monster made of broune paper’, amorous knights, acrobatics and knockabout clowns. These medleys, Philip Sidney’s ‘mungrell Tragycomedie’, catered to a new body of urban playgoers who were looking for something in between community religious drama and the stiffer plays performed in private homes and after banquets. Powerful men such as the Lord Chamberlain and the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, began to sponsor the playhouses, as presenting the new drama at court became a sign of their status and standing with the Queen, with rival companies doing battle over who was chosen to perform the Christmas entertainments. At first, this was a London-based phenomenon and the provinces lagged behind, but go-ahead companies such as ‘the Lord of Leycester his players’ would have brought the drama that so captivated Christopher Marlowe to Canterbury.
What is more, Stephen Gosson was once again showing the way. He had begun to write plays. None has survived, but the author Francis Meres ranked him ‘the best for pastoral’, and Gosson himself mentions a tragedy, Cataline’s Conspiracy, a comedy, Captain Mario, and a moral play, Praise at Parting. According to Gosson, it was Cataline’s Conspiracy that Marlowe was first to see, when he was ten, in 1574 – the year that ‘diverse strange impressions of fire and smoke’ appeared in the night skies over Canterbury, and the heavens seemed to burn ‘marvellously ragingly’, with flames that rose from the horizon and met overhead, ‘and did double and roll in one another, as if it had been in a clear furnace’. It was a magnificent display of the aurora borealis, but to the impressionable Christopher it seemed a portent. If Stephen could do it, so could he.
The King’s School, when Christopher finally made it there in 1578, greatly improved his formal education and unlike his earlier schools it also gave him the freedom and opportunity to strut his hour or two upon a stage. Like the grander English public schools, The King’s School had a lively tradition of performance. The acting of plays there was not only well established, but during Marlowe’s lifetime even threatened to get a little out of hand as ‘playing had become such an accomplished diversion among the schoolboys that it posed a problem of discipline’. The boys were renowned for Christmas entertainments in the cathedral, ‘settynge furthe of Tragedies, Comedyes, and interludes’ in costumes that involved considerable expenditure – the headmaster one year receiving an astonishing £14 6s 8d for Christmas plays. Their efforts at least once so impressed some passing professionals that they ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ to run away and join their troupe, promising them a princely £4 a year in earnings, and later again inveigled the boy players ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’ – far more tempting than the school plays, which were performed in Latin and Greek, but Christopher resisted.
Like Stephen Gosson, Christopher aimed at university, and on writing plays rather than acting in them. But in 1578, university was barely within his reach. At his new school he embarked upon more complex Latin grammar, later voyaging into Greek and the deeper waters of prose and poetry, before casting up on the rocks of rhetoric. Mere learning was not enough, ‘rhetoric’ helped translate language into persuasive action. He had to recognise rhetorical forms and devices used by the ancients, to master the skills of clear expression and to discriminate between good and bad style. He had also to learn how to make links between history and present behaviour. As Richard Grenewey, who translated Tacitus in the 1590s, put it: ‘History [is] the treasure of times past, as well as a guide an image of man’s present estate: a true and lively pattern of things to come, [and], as some term it, the workmistress of experience …’. So Christopher read the poets and the historians – the chaste bits at least – of Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Plautus and Horace; Sallust, Cicero, Caesar, Martial, Juvenal and Livy, and also such moderns as Erasmus and Baptista Mantua. In his final year he would have had to deliver several formal declamations.
Like Stephen before him he was a day boy, starting school at six in the morning with prayers and psalm-singing in the cathedral, before passing back under ‘the Dark Entry’, the low passage between the cloisters and the school, to his lessons (cf. ‘There’s a dark entry where they take it in …’, The Jew of Malta iii 4). Money was deducted from his scholarship allowance to pay for lunch at school: breast of mutton, according to one kitchen account, with peas and prunes; fish every Friday, and salt fish and herring during Lent. The cobbler’s boy from St George’s parish began to make friends above his station – like Samuel Kennet. Sam and Kit were new boys together and left school in the same year. Sam’s father had served in the royal households of both Henry VIII and the present queen, and his great-great-grandfather had been standard-bearer to Henry V at Agincourt. He had Kit enthralled with family stories of knights and the glory of England, and was even more awe-inspiring for his glittering treasure of first-hand tales of court life.
Now that he was rubbing doublets with the gentry, Kit had to brush up on his manners. The instructions to young Francis – the French boy he encountered in the language book he had used with Oliver’s father – would have helped: use a napkin, not your hand to wipe your mouth; don’t touch food that you are not going to eat yourself; don’t lean on the table (‘Did you learne to eat in a hogstie?’); clean your own knife and put it back in its sheath (forks were not yet widely used in England); don’t pick your teeth with your penknife (use a ‘tooth-picke of quill or wood’); and be sure not to get your sleeves in the fat.
And as Christopher had done with Stephen Gosson, so Oliver tagged along with Christopher at every free moment. Records are scanty, but documents in the Bernhardt Institute collection help build up a picture of the two boys at the time. An ‘apprisement of suche goodes as were Mr Oliver Laurens’s’ (dated 1609), made after his death, includes a list of books, some of which must date back to his boyhood.* ‘Nowels Catechismes one in