__________________________

Scholars now have at least one of the answers: it wasn’t really a brothel. It was the home of Dame Eleanor Bull, the mother of one of Marlowe’s classmates, Nathaniel Bull. (CMC, 105) The Bulls were members of "an ancient armorial family with members close about the queen and a distinguished ancestry going far back into the Middle Ages." Or so discovered William Urry, long time archivist for Canterbury. (86) Dame Bull was a "cousin" to Lord Burghley, Marlowe’s master. The Bulls and the Cecils were connected to the Muscovy Company, whose registered agent was the London producer of plays, Anthony Marlowe. (CM, Bakeless, vol.1, 89, 141-2 and CSP, Foreign, 1584-5, 132-3 and CSP, Domestic, 1591-4, 396-7, CMERC, 64) Henslowe mentions this Marlowe in his Dairy. Well informed scholars now suppose him a Kentish cousin of the poet’s. (Ibid.)

Marlowe, modern scholars suggest, was in Bull’s home awaiting transportation "beyond the seas," on yet another assignment for the Cecils. Where to? To Scotland and to King James, or so his friend Thomas Kyd had heard. (ISCM, 310-20) Haynes, a diplomatic historian and author of Invisible Power: Elizabeth’s Secret Service, mentions this in his more recent boot, The Gunpowder Plot, "just before Marlowe’s sudden death in May 1593 [Burghley] may have been considering using him again." (26.) Tucker Brooke points out, almost in passing, that Deptford was a common port of departure for Scotland. (TLM, 71) So we know Marlowe was in the right place to have been sailing for Scotland. His continued good currency with the Cecils is proof that any negative publicity which has attached itself to his good name related to his clandestine activities for the Cecils and not from any lack of good character on his part.

Conyers Read reminds readers the Cecils knew Henry Locke, "an Englishman and a poet in a small way, [who had] turned up in Scotland about 1590 and found favor with the King and the Queen." (Ibid.) The young James was gullible in the extreme and an easy mark it seems for handsome young poets. He’d fallen deeply in love with Lennox. (CMERC, 172-194) Sir Henry Wotton would show up in Scotland some ten years later, incognito, traveling as the Italian "Ottavio Baldi.". Wotton claimed to have antidotes against some specific poison rumored about to be deployed against James. Wotton lived several months in the court, incognito, with no one the wiser. (Such was the nature of those times.) For his troubles a grateful James I soon offered Wotton any ambassadorship he wanted. The wise Wotton took Venice, the scene of several of Shakespeare’s plays. (En. Brit., Vol.22, 799) Marlowe was not only far more handsome than Locke, his poetry was also many times superior. If a novice like Wotton could pass for an Italian, Marlowe could have passed for St. John the Baptist. We shall show Marlowe was perfect for this assignment in another way as well, he’d just completed a tour of duty working with James’ "cousin" Lady Arbella Stuart. (N&Q, 1997, Baker) He thus had first hand news about Arbella and Mary Queen of Scots, James’ mother.

Wilson, working behind the scenes, later reorganized Cecil’s secret service and oversaw the building of Hatfield House, Cecil’s primary residence. Haynes writing in Invisible Power, The Elizabethan Secret Services, found Wilson’s reward came in 1605

This 1602 period and itinerary fits nicely with the return to England of the Christopher Marlowe seen at Valladolid in 1602 by Vaughan and who we shall discuss in detail herein. The always able Wilson emerges as the best candidate for a post 1593 Marlowe. He is Nicholas Faunt’s analog, working hand in hand with Cecil, as his "private secretary," rather than with Bacon, as Faunt would. (For Faunt’s parallel track, we shall come to that in due course.) "Wilson" surfaces in the right places at the right time and his lovely Italic hand is a good match for Marlowe’s. [Hands can be matched, but not conclusively identified, as the history of these studies and modern forensic science have proven. ]  A Thomas Wilson was Marlowe’s neighbor in Canterbury, baptized in Marlowe’s church, and died there on 29 January 1621/22. (LDS, gen.records) So he would have provided a "working cover." Another "Thomas Wilson" was Secretary for Elizabeth I., still another wrote the book Shakespeare memorized, The Art of Rhetoric . Another was among the settlers of Jamestown, along with the Sidneys, the Herberts, the Talbots and the Cavendishes, all major players in our narrative. [http://www.jamestowne.org/adv.htm]  

So it was a name brimming with hidden meanings, good omens and strong connections. However without DNA evidence the case remains an open one. Luckily one need not suppose Marlowe lived past 1593 to have written 1 Henry VI, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece.

So the public decline of Marlowe’s currency had nothing to do with either his intrinsic value or any perceived lack of utility to the Cecils. The cloud that hangs over Marlowe’s head, then and now, stems from charges leveled against Marlowe the second week in May and finalized in a Privy Council warrent for his arrest dated 18 May 1593. (ISCM) What has been missed is that Marlowe may well have been innocent of the charges pending against him. The times were turbulent and London was in the grip of the Plague. Marlowe had never been without enemies, particularly English Catholics, and the time seemed right for them to strike again. But we have leaped a head of our narrative a bit. If scholars were as mistaken about the events in Brussels and Flanders, as Nicholl was, they may well have been mistaken about other aspects of Marlowe’s official life prior to his troubles in 1593.

reconciling what appears to be conventional support for the dominant social and religious order with what is known of Marlowe’s life and opinions." (236)

One would only add to this the rest of Marlowe’s canon, i.e., Tamburlaine, Aeneas and Dido, Massacre at Paris, Edward II, Pharsalia etc., prove equally as difficult to reconcile with a challenge to the "dominant social and religious order." Grantley then claims Marlowe’s plays don’t mean what they say, let alone what they were taken to mean at the time, rather they mean what Grantley says. The fact is that "what is known of Marlowe’s life and opinions" assures us he was working within the established order "for the dominant social and religious" fraternity. The fact it was "factionalized" then, as now, and that he had enemies who would defame him and worse, is hardly proof of his real opinions. A man’s works are evidence of his opinions. And if these works assure us, as Grantley knows they do, that the opinions attributed to Marlowe were not his, it is the attribution that we must suspect, not his opinions.

We have nearly three hundred thousand words from which to judge Marlowe’s opinions. Whereas we have only a few hundred words from his detractors radicalizing his opinions. Why shouldn’t his canon and his record for "faithful dealing" mean more to historians and biographers than those radicalized charges? This is not to suggest Marlowe was a conventional thinker. He wasn’t. But that his masters and close friends perceived him as benign can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. He worked within, not from without, the power structure. Few men have led more selfless lives. No man, of his period, was more willing to take on wrong than was Marlowe. Faustus was wrong to sell his soul for "knowledge." Edward II was wrong to give up his kingdom for his love of Gaveston. Tamburlaine was wrong to count religion a childish toy. Barrabas was wrong to poison wells and beg after bacon. The Guise was wrong to massacre his subjects. And Aeneas was wrong to forsake Dido. Marlowe’s plays are strongly moralistic. And nothing in Marlowe’s life indicates that he wasn’t also.

We shall point our nearly half a dozen new chapters to what we might call Marlowe’s orthodox life, i.e., to his life prior to May 30, 1593. Chapters that will have to be added to, or at least, considered and carefully dismissed, in any authoritative future biography of Marlowe. We shall take them in chronological order.

Urry paints a rather complete picture of John Marlowe who seems to have been a trifle

Now there is a single solution to these two questions. If young Marlowe had been selected for a "higher calling" in the secret service of England, while seven or eight, not only would John Marlowe have been paid for young Christopher’s absence but he would have gained a type of local notoriety which would account for Urry’s description of him. John Marlow would know his son was involved in "greater men’s affairs," and would have been compensated for the loss of his son in the family business, but he would not have been free to discuss these arrangements about town.

So we are going to suggest scholars have ample evidence to suspect young Christopher Marlowe, because of his obvious verbal skills, likely manifested early on in languages and music, had been noticed locally and was "snapped up" by what we call the English net, i.e., what is today Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If one follows the careers of the young scholars who were in the King’s School with Marlowe, once cannot but help to suppose it a fertile recurring ground for young spies. Urry lists many who became ensnared. Benjamin Carrier deserves far more attention than he has received. He was not only in the King’s School with Marlowe, he followed Marlowe to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1580. (CMC, 52) So a close connection between these two lads is certain. Carrier represents the clerical route Marlowe could have taken had he not opted "to cast the scholar off" for government service and literary triumphs. Carrier, who took a BD, became vicar at Thurnham, Kent and rector at West Tarring, Sussex, where the Marlowes and the Lueknors were family friends. In 1603, more or less out of the blue, Carrier became "chaplain to King James...and [afterwards] a cathedral canon at Canterbury in 1608." (Ibid.) Having reached the top of his calling, Carrier "defected to Rome and died in France [at Rheims] in 1614." (Ibid.) It is quite possible Benjamin Carrier had been a "double agent" all his life. It is equally as possible that Marlowe interacted with him continuously, for their similar paths would have made a solid foundation for a lifelong friendship. Particularly in the age where community and school ties counted for something. Who was responsible for Carrier’s appointment as James’ chaplain? Was it Sir Lewis Leuknor, James’ mysterious master of ceremonies, about whom we shall learn more later? Leuknor (~Lewknor) claimed Marlowe’s degrees from Cambridge, but a check of that institution’s records yields no student by that name. (A.C., passim) Or was it Marlowe? Or Wotton?

A scan of a letter from Oxford University confirming our claim.

Urry also found that Marlowe’s younger brother Thomas sang for the Archbishop in the Cathedral choir in 1589 (15) a certain sign the family genes contained musical talent. If the young poet and translator went to work as a page and messenger boy when he was seven or eight, his seven years of service would have ended about Christmas of 1578 or at the time he entered the King’s School out of nowhere. Moreover his masters, who would by this time have invested seven years into the precocious young Marlowe, would have picked up the bill for his schooling. This would explain where the money came from and many of the other unanswered questions as well. However we cannot assume it simply because of its explanatory value. Fortunately we have ample evidence that the net was recruiting young boys from Canterbury and doing precisely what we have suggested was done with young Christopher, i.e., using them as pages and messenger boys, honing their linguistic skills, and then sending them to the King’s School and on to Cambridge. It is this parallel evidence that makes the case for what might had happened to young Marlowe a near certainty.

It is thus at this point that we must introduce young Nicholas Faunt to our narrative.

Faunt was born in Canterbury, as was his father, his grandfather and his great grand father. That Nicholas Faunt was the executor of the will of the Canterburian, John Okborn.

Charles Nicholl picked up on some of this in his book The Reckoning, suggesting Faunt must have been Marlowe’s entree into the net. However Nicholl made the mistake of following the DNB and thus failed to discover Faunt’s all important (for our narrative) Canterbury past. That past makes it certain Faunt and Marlowe were on parallel tracks. More importantly Faunt’s past can be used to extrapolate into Marlowe’s. And here is where we begin to pick up speed. It turns out that young Faunt was used in the net before, during and after his enrollment in the King’s School. For example a young Faunt was with Sir Francis Walsingham during the St Bartholomew Massacre in Paris on 24 August 1472. The same Massacre Marlowe dramatizes in language that suggest he witnessed it. Faunt carried Walsingham’s dispatch of these momentous events home to Elizabeth I. in his head. (A safe place that did not require laborious encryption.) It is said he could deliver these messages verbatim. (DNB; CMERC, 26,27,36) While no one doubts Faunt’s mature skills, the only person known to have a verbatim memory at that time was young Christopher Marlowe, so the question arises was Marlowe with Faunt?  

Marlowe would have been eight, just the right age for this kind of service. Faunt, the older of the two, would have been his companion or what is called, in the cloak and dagger trade, his "controller."

Scholars also know who else witnessed the Massacre that evening from the balcony of the English House, both of whom are of key importance to Marlowe’s life: Sir Philip Sidney, later to become Walsingham’s son-in-law, and Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s friend and patron, who was Walsingham’s younger cousin. (W, Read) Thomas Walsingham and Marlowe were nearly the same age, so it is quite possible Christopher was his companion, as he later was. Scholars simply don’t know. But the case for conjecture seems strong. We do know Marlowe knew about and had studied these distant events closely. We know Marlowe knew these four men, Faunt, Sidney and the two Walsinghams. We know Walsingham was using King’s School scholars for messengers before, after and while they were enrolled in the school. And we suspect Marlowe was an aural eidetic, on precisely the same track or career path as Faunt and that he cannot be found in Canterbury, where he should have been, during this early period. Canterbury records are better than average, for this period, so not finding Marlowe in one of the other schools or working for someone else in Canterbury is suggestive of his absence. When we add to it his later comprehensive knowledge of languages and customs, we have to suppose he, like Valentine, was linguist and a youthful traveler in, "tongues...my youthful travel therein made me happy, Or else I often had been miserable." (IV.i.34) And that like Speed he had learned to "speak in print." (II.i.175)

New evidence regarding Sidney's trip after leaving Paris, close on the heels of the Massacre, pinpoints his route to Heidelberg and beyond.  It took Sidney through "Balduc," the town now called "Bar-le-Duc," which is due south of Verdun.   (PS-ADL, Stewart, 93)  "From Heidelberg, Philip, Lodowick Bryskett and the servants traveled north past Mannheim and Darmstadt to Frankfurt...just a little way up the Main from where this river joined the Rhine." (Ibid., 94; emphasis mine)  This is important because Ule has made the case the description of the falls at the confluence of the Rhine and the Main, found in Dr Faustus, based on a personal visit to this region. (CM, op.cit.) Indeed most of Faustus bases on what seems to be personal remembrances of what is now Germany.  Stewart, writing in his new biography of Sidney about the Massacre's impact on those that witnessed it, notes, "for many...it created a shared experience to which they referred constantly, almost compulsively, for the rest of their lives." (Ibid., 89, emphasis mine)  This is our whole point.  Marlowe's play on this subject was, at the very least, a poignant reminder to these young nobles of that horrible event.  More than likely, it is evidence of a "compulsively shared experience," a kind of catharsis, for the young poet and his friends who witnessed these atrocities.  Since it is our purpose here to propose to the reader that works said Shakespeare's were actually Marlowe's, I should note the very early Venus and Adonis contains a line or two suggesting the poet witnessed the Massacre, perhaps very closely, as Stewart speculates may have happened to young Sidney. The line is about the silent trajectory of a "deadly bullet,"

It is easy for a reader to miss the significance of this passage.  Our normal experience of bullets  is that they are preceded by a loud report, i.e., they are not silent.  But here the poet knows "deadly bullets" strike before the report reaches the victim.  This is because they travel faster than sound.  The only way one learns this is either through experience or from the study of ballistics, a science, in this regard, almost non existent at the time.  So it seems likely the young poet had been standing next to persons who were felled by a silent rain of deadly bullets which struck them before  or "ere" the report reached their ears.  He remembers this and with this memory come the "berry's stain" that is characteristic of a bullet wound to the chest. 

In addition to this we have some circumstantial linkage to the Sidneys. Urry notices that Sir Phillip, then "Esquire," showed up in Canterbury shortly after the time Marlowe entered the King’s School. (CMC,6) Sidney and his sister were there to interact with John Casimir, Prince of the Protestant armies. This was during the summer of 1579, an important time for students of these events, since that was the summer of Sir William Herbert’s conception. Herbert is the driving force behind the First Folio’s publication. It was not the first time Sidney had visited Canterbury. Sidney’s biographer, Duncan-Jones, records that Sidney took on a new page, the lutist "Daniel Bachelor" at the very same moment Marlowe entered the King’s School. (SPS, op.cit.) Bachelor has been suggested as the rival poet and there is deep confusion among scholars and musicologists as to who Bachelor was. He may have been Samuel Daniel, Bachelor of Arts. In any case, the appearance of a young "Daniel Bachelor" or "Samuel Daniel," as Sidney’s page at the same moment Marlowe entered the King’s School is notable. Particularly since later, at Wilton House, Daniel was the tutor to young William Herbert. If we need to say this more clearly, the case can be made that Marlowe was replaced by Sidney with another page during the late summer or early fall of 1579, perhaps for an indiscretion, "practicing to steal away a lady." The page who replaced him seems to have become the tutor to William Herbert and thus, has standing as the "rival poet." Since biography is not a science, we cannot be much more certain of these events than this. And we remind the reader that these connections are not solid ones.

Nevertheless lets see how they fit in the larger picture. With them in, does it come into focus or drift further out? The time of service for a page was seven years. Extrapolating back from Christmas 1578 would take to us 1571, or to when young Christopher would have been seven. Which is the time these boys entered service. We can add to this Marlowe’s plays suggest he

traveled Europe on a route similar to Sidney’s travels. (CM, Ule) In looking for textual support Two Gentlemen of Verona is a play based on the adventures of two traveling English linguists and their madcap pages, Speed and Launce. Lastly we have hints from Thomas Nashe that Marlowe was "Jack Wilton" or chief of pygmies (or Pages) at Wilton House, Mary’s primary residence, where Sidney frequently visited. A personal relationship between Marlowe and Mary has always been possible, since Marlowe dedicated Latin love poems to her, which he attributed to his friend and former professor, Dr. Thomas Watson. (CW) Watson saved Marlowe during the fight in Hogs Lane. (Hotson, Urry) Again the case is circumstantial, but it would appear Marlowe served in the net prior to entering the King’s School and that he was used early on in a capacity similar to Faunt’s. Whether he was Sidney’s page or Thomas Walsingham’s page, or even someone else’s, we simply don’t know.

We shall now inquire into what Marlowe did for the net while he was at Cambridge and after he left it in 1587. This too is speculative since the net was, as Haynes put it, an exercise in "invisible power." It used spies, cipher and shredded or burned its paper trail. Working obliquely, scholars of Marlowe’s life have placed Marlowe at home in Canterbury in August 1595, when on "xix day of August" he witnessed the will of a neighbor, Kathryn Benchkin. (CMC,123.) What they had not noticed was that Giordano Bruno, who had been in England for several years, was at that same moment preparing to leave England, through Canterbury, as Bossy notes in his account of Bruno’s activities in The Embassy Affair. Was Marlowe absent from Cambridge because he was with Bruno? Or did they just run into each other in Canterbury or did his entree come though Sidney, to whom Bruno dedicated two of his books? Or in London at Ralegh’s or Harriot’s? Marlowe is also absent from his university during the winter quarter or semester. Or during the time Bruno trekked to Rheims, then on to Paris and from there onward, according to Bossy. Could Marlowe have gone with him? Scholars know that Walsingham had Bruno "shadowed." And scholars know the code name of the young man assigned was "Henry Fagot." We even have "Fagot’s" letters easy to hand, thanks to Bossy’s work. The letters use a Kings’ School cipher, which substitutes the next consonant for any given vowel. (Pollak, Interview, op.cit.) "Fagot" jokes with Walsingham about the code and sends the key in the clear. The joke turns on the difficulties of Germanic languages, already too rich( for English ears and tongues) in consonants. (PRO SP 78/14, no. 90 bis., see Bossy, 238, Pollak, op.cit.) Bossy proposes "Fagot" was Bruno. However his Italian is worse than his French. Even Bossy calls it "execrable, and on the face of it is inconceivable that they could have been written by an Italian." (85)

Morever his hand isn’t Bruno’s. Bossy writes "the documentary problem is that Fagot and Bruno wrote totally different hands." (81) So how could "Fagot" have been Bruno? "Fagot’s" hand in those letters is, however, a lovely Italic hand quite similar to the hand of the Arrian Heresy notes. Given Marlowe’s interest in Bruno’s thought and Bruno’s rescue, written into the revised Dr. Faustus (1616), it would seem biographers have enough material to make a reasonable case that young Marlowe was "Henry Fagot." The case grows stronger when we notice how frequently Marlowe and Shakespeare draw on materials from Bruno, as Lee and others have noted at length. (Elizabethan Essays, 152-5) Again scholars cannot prove it, but it is possible Marlowe shadowed Bruno for Walsingham late in 1585 and early in 1586. The letter we have cited, using the King’s School cipher and jesting with Sir Francis, is not dated, but seems to have been written in late November or early December from Paris. Bossy writes, "as well as having no real name, Fagot has no real biography: he appears from nowhere, disappears into space, says (at least directly) nothing about himself." (76) The dates of Fagot’s letters from France overlap well with Marlowe’s absences from Cambridge. The will is dated "xix August," or just at the moment Bruno was set to leave England. Surely he would have visited the Sidneys, in Kent. Fagot’s earlier letters from England, which Bossy quoted, were dated in April 1583. These also correspond to Marlowe’s absences from Cambridge. (CMC, 56.) Urry reports Marlowe was missing from Cambridge in 1583 during the "quarter ending at Midsummer," i.e., Spring quarter, for a period of "at least six weeks." We thus have a pattern, an important pattern. Fagot is writing to Walsingham when Marlowe is absent from the King’s School. He is writing in a King’s School cipher and he is writing in an Italic hand remarkably like Marlowe’s. The focus grows better with Marlowe in the picture than without him. The case for Marlowe as Fagot seems many times stronger than the case for Bruno as Fagot, as offered by Bossy.

We make one final point here. Urry gives Marlowe’s location as Canterbury on a "Sunday in November...either 7 or 14 November 1585," it comes from court testimony of his brother-in-law, John Moore, who was called upon to remember when Marlowe read the will of Mrs. Benchkin "plainely and distincktyly." a year earlier. (CMC, 57) So this date isn’t firm. The only sound date is that of 19 August, when Marlowe signed as witness to the will. Urry reports him at Cambridge for only three weeks in the first quarter of 1586 (Lent) and only two weeks during the quarter ending at Midsummer (Easter Term). The records aren’t actually proof that Marlowe was there, as another may have taken his place or used his name or it may have been entered on the so called Buttery Book by accident. But the fact they are, for the most part, bare, is suggestive Marlowe wasn’t there for most of this time. The same time Fagot was in France.

All of this wouldn’t be so important if it weren’t for what would soon happen to Marlowe. Urry reports:

This is important because we know Cambridge nearly refused to grant Marlowe’s MA at commencement in July 1587. The charges against him were, as we shall see, that he’d been traveling "over the seas" to France. These travels do not seem have taken place in 1586 or 1587, based on the record, so they must reach back to these earlier absences. 

Oddly Brooke concludes the reverse. Brooke thinks the cloud hanging over Marlowe’s graduation was from something he did for the Crown between "March and June, 1587." (TLC, 34) Brooke’s reason seems sound enough, because it was in March that he applied for his degree and seems to be "in perfectly good standing." However as Urry and I have pointed out, Marlowe seems to have been at Cambridge during this period, with the only extended period of his absence harking back to 1585/6. One suspects Marlowe’s supplication for his MA was simply accepted, in the normal fashion, and that opposition to it arose, not because he was gone, but because he was there until June. Is this clear? Any Cambridge graduate can summit, after a period of two years, a petition for their MA. It’s a matter of routine. However the granting of it, is not routine and must pass review. So Brooke was wrong to assume that the fact his petition was accepted meant he was good standing.

After reviewing the Cambridge records following graduation, Urry concluded, "by the late summer of 1587 Christopher Marlowe, MA, has (as far as we can tell) forsaken his college and university for ever." (CMC, 59) Urry does not end his narrative there, he reminds us Marlowe was, as a Parker Scholar, an aspirant for "holy orders." Had he taken them, he would have remained at his university for another year or so. We shall see why this is important in due course. Meanwhile the question is what did Marlowe do during the summer of 1587? A letter from Robert Ardern to Burghley dated the 2^nd of October 1587 mentions a "Mr Morley." It is one of the many ways Marlowe’s name was spelled at Cambridge. Ardern’s Morley is clearly a Burghley projector. Phillip Henderson and many others have thought him the poet.

Nicholl rejects him as the poet, but the rejection is hardly conclusive. Ardern’s "Mr Morley" may well have been Christopher Marlowe, MA. It is, after all, Lord Burghley’s signature on the Privy Council’s message to Cambridge, not Walsingham’s. So scholars have evidence for an early Marlowe/Burghley alliance. That relationship becomes conclusive when Marlowe is shipped back to Burghley from Flanders in 1591/2 by Sir Robert Sidney and again when Burghley releases Marlowe from the Pricy Council warrent on 20 May 1593, even though the charges against him in both cases were of a capital nature. This proves the point that as far as the Cecils were concerned Marlowe had done no wrong. Haynes, in his study The Gunpowder Plot, was among the first to notice the Cecils were planning in May 1593 to send Marlowe to Scotland, ostensively on the issue of the so called "Spanish Blanks." A letter between Burghley and his son, Sir Robert Cecil, dated 21 May 1593 confirms this. (LBQE, Read, 484) As does the fact Marlowe appears to have died in what is now known as a Burghley "safe-house." (TR, 325)

Sticking with 1588, scholars know Arbella Stuart had a letter in French, in an Italic hand like Fagot’s and Marlowe’s, dated 13 July 1588, delivered to Burghley a day or so before the Armada was spotted or while the country was at its highest level of alert. (BL Lansdowne MS 34,ff 145-46; LLAS, 120) Marlowe’s connection to Lady Arbella will be proven in due course, but the appearance of this letter, likely delivered by Marlowe to Burghley, suggests Burghley took the letter and dispatched its bearer, "one Morely," post haste, to The Nonpareil, once Drake’s flagship. Nearly every able bodied man in England was being drafted or "pressed" into service that July, so this isn’t difficult to suppose.

A. D. Wright found evidence for such service hidden in Edward III, a play published anonymously but often considered either Marlowe’s or Shakespeare’s. (Crawford gave it to Marlowe, Sams to Shakespeare.) The evidence is to be found in the so called Mariner’s Tale, an interlude that even names the ship and its captain the poet seems to have served with. The ship was The Nonpareil. (CM&EA, 73) Burghley was Vice Admiral. The poet speaks of the channel turning "pink" with human blood, as many, during the Normandy invasion, recall first hand. Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, was anchored at Deptford, Kent. Both it and Drake are alluded to in the Timon, ms., now shown Marlowe’s. (Baker, op.cit.)

To sum up, we have suggested several hypothetical chapters to Marlowe’s life. The chapters cannot be proven without a time machine. On the other hand the evidence for Marlowe is far stronger than the evidence offered by Bossy for Bruno or by Nicholl for another "Morley." We’ve also suggested he was with Faunt in 1572, witnessed the St. Bartholomew Massacre and carried Walsingham’s account of it back to Elizabeth I. in his head, under the supervision of the somewhat older Nicholas Faunt. We suspect him to have been either Sir Thomas Walsingham’s page or Sidney’s. We’ve placed Marlowe and Mary Sidney Herbert in Canterbury at the time of her conception of William Hebert, i.e., July 1579, and we’ve linked Sidney’s new page, taken on that year, with the rival poet, Samuel Daniel, Bachelor of Arts. In addition we’ve pointed out that earlier studies of Marlowe’s family life have neglected to account both for who paid for his schooling and who supplemented John Marlowe for the loss of his son in his shop. The fact John was forced to take on various apprentices, as shown in depth by Urry, (CMC) documents that Christopher’s lost cost him dearly.

We’ve suggested he worked with Walsingham shadowing Bruno to Paris, under the code name or alias of "Henry Fagot." A fagot is a burning branch or torch and did not carry the additional pejorative meaning it now has. That such a branch becomes Marlowe’s trope or motto is well known and will be reviewed shortly. So this too is suggestive. We’ve then offered evidence placing him with Burghley, acting as a proxy in the Low Countries during the fall in 1587 and afterwards with Arbella Stuart until the summer of 1588, at which time he was drafted or "pressed" for duty with the English fleet. He saw action on The Nonpareil, an account of which ends up in his play, Edward III. After his return he returned to full-time to Arbella. We’ve also located Faunt on the night of 30 May 1593 in Dover, Kent preparing to send English agents to France on the following day. (LPL, op.cit.) The reader is free to believe or disbelieve these chapters, but they are not simple conjectures. Faunt was in Dover, preparing to dispatch English agents to France on that important day. The Nonpareil is in Edward III. Marlowe did write a play about the Massacre at Paris, as if he’d witnessed it. Edward II does contain a stream of diplomatic intelligence about James VI, just as does Hamlet. Mary Herbert conceived William Herbert in July 1579 while in Canterbury. Sidney took on a new page at this same time.

David Durant, in his biography, Bess of Hardwick, gives us the following account of Arbella’s accomplishments:

            Arbella was reported to have studied Greek and Hebrew, as well as speaking

[           and writing] French, Italian, Spanish and reading Latin and, being fond of

            music, she played the viol. (196)

With these circumstances in mind let’s consider this scene from Edward II, supposedly written the same year:

                                        Having read unto her since she was a child.

                                        Spencer: Then Baldock, you must cast the scholar off,

                                        And learn to court it like a Gentleman. (ii, i)

Notice that both Marlowe and Baldock had read to a "lady...since she was a child;" both hoped for "preferment" because of it; both had their hopes dashed and both had to "cast the scholar off" and "learn to court it like a Gentleman." One of Arbella’s letters actually quotes from Lucan’s Pharsalia or The Civil Wars of Rome, the book Marlowe was translating when the events at Deptford overwhelmed him. (LLAS,155 ) No parallels could be closer. Nicholl in reviewing the diplomatic evidence concerning Marlowe’s life and the evidence of it in his literary canon concluded that Marlowe’s materials were frequently drawn from his covert diplomatic experience:

The "closeness" and "collusion" between Marlowe’s day job and night job is the theme of this paper. Finding diplomatic intelligence about Bess and George Talbot in 1 Henry VI is the clincher for identifying Marlowe as its author. This is the same sort of "closeness" modern writers of diplomatic spy games evidence in their works. Major cloak and dagger writers of our age were university educated former intelligent agents gone public: Ian Flemming, Tom Clancy and John le Carre. The plays, many of them best classified as diplomatic docudramas and nearly all of them drawing of what was then English diplomatic intelligence, i.e., cloak and dagger stuff, are laced with education and worldly travels. They suggest the same professional level background as Flemming, Clacy and le Carre: a university educated mind, a linguist of the first order and a traveler, actual or mental. I’ve mention the marvelous early play Lord Cromwell. It too teams with Marlovian and Shakespearian images, phrases and locales.

...Sir Christopher, is that your man?

Hales....Your grace, he is a scholar, and a linguist

One that hath traveled through many parts...

Wol. ...have you been a traveler?

Cromwell. My lord,

I have added to my knowledge, the Low Countries,

With France, Spain, German and Italy...

Sound familiar?

We are nearing the end of updating the reader on the new developments in Marlowe’s biography. I have mentioned that a man claiming to be "Thomas Morley" surfaced in Brussels in the home of Charles Paget, "a leader of the exiled Catholics." (CM, Ule, 242) Letters about him are among the CSPF. In the letter from Paget to Barnes, Paget

wrote,

Barnes passed the letter on to Thomas Phelippes, who passed it on to Lord Burghley. Meanwhile Barnes wrote back to Paget,

This was just a few months before being arrested in Flushing and the subtext seems in both cases to have been Arbella and exiled English Catholics. It is not likely this "Morley" was the

organist. It is likely that both Morleys were the same individuals. In any case Marlowe was working for Burghley and for Arbella, or playing both ends against the middle.

The conditions of his termination suggest a ploy. From Bess’s despatch, we know Burghley had written Bess warning her that a plot on Arbella’s life had been discovered and that members of her household staff were suspected. What better ploy than to offer them a disgruntled employee who would have known Arbella personally, i.e., "one Morley"? Even if this was not the hidden case, we know the plot was foiled and that Marlowe returned shortly to Canterbury in what appears to have been a foul mood. He fought with the singing man William Corkine. (CMC, 66-68) The times are just right. He leaves Shrewsbury in late August or early September and is back in Canterbury on 15^th of September 1592. We know that six months later he will be standing, first in line, as the Cecils’ proxy to the court of King James VI, Arbella’s cousin. He was the perfect agent for the assignment. Not only did he know Arbella and could thus carry James news of her, he had been studying James closely as we can see from the text of Edward II. Lawrence Normand has gone over it in considerable depth and noted the remarkable parallels between it and what was then a stream of private diplomatic intelligence about King James VI and Lennox. (CMERC, op.cit.) The plays were actually diplomatic docudramas which explored subjects that might not otherwise be exportable. Edward II was an oblique inquiry into how James’ homosexuality would effect his rule. Think of them as primitive computer simulations or "war games." In this case the writer selected proved to be larger than the subject and thus his treatments, as opposed to others, have survived. They took on a life of their own. Elizabethans were proficient at having to consider important issues indirectly and skilled at reading the "subtext." Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth all based on diplomatic intelligence from Scotland, as scholars know. The burning question is how did Shakespeare obtain access to this material? We know how Marlowe did.

On the face of which was added:

arlovians have evidence suggesting the body said Marlowe’s was that of John Penry. Penry and Marlowe (and Greenwood, who was hanged a month earlier) were classmates from Cambridge. (CMC, 60) Penry and Greenwood were divines, Separatists, accused of having had a hand in the Marprelate Tracks, which many believe Marlowe involved in. (J. Joffen, MLA Conference, 12, 28,1981, TLM, op.cit.) Separatists believed the state should not be involved in religious matters. Penry had been jailed, tried and convicted over denying the Virgin’s supremacy in matters of faith, and was awaiting execution. (The Criss of the Seventeenth century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, Trevor-Roper, Chapter Three, "The European Witch Craze," 105-115 and henry Charles Lea’s Torture, 146) The Crown had even jailed Peter Wentworth for bringing up the question of succession in Parliament. He was lucky, earlier it had chopped off the hand of John Stubbs for the same "offense." (Elizabeth I, Somerset, 323-314) Penry’s last letter to Lord Burghley bears three dates, two on the recto, one on the verso. The last one just moments before he was hanged on the 29^th of May 1593, about a mile or so from Deptford. (I have held it in my own hands.) It asks Burghley to see to his body and to his family. The letter is among the Burghley papers in the British Library. Now the question is who picked up Penry’s body and what happened to it?

The body said Marlowe’s, as we have mentioned, was promptly buried in Deptford. (TDCM, op.cit.) The record correctly identifies his slayer. But there is no record of Penry’s burial. (Moore, Farey) Did Burghley task Marlowe to pick up Penry’s body on the 29^th of May? Did Marlowe have it with him at Deptford? It was just the next day. The English method of hanging does not break and "stretch" the neck as does the American method. So the body could have been used. Particularly since about twenty four hours after death rigor mortis has ended and the body is again slack and fresh looking. So substitution, particularly in those days, was possible, see: . Scholars simply don’t know the answers to these questions, but it should be an open question as to when and if Marlowe died.

Scholars have rather good evidence of his post 1593 survival. I bring these up not because they directly impact his likely authorship of Henry VI, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, but because they are exculpating your author’s alleged mental condition. The records show that a Christopher Marlor (or Marlowe) surfaced on 20/30 May 1596 in Valladolid, Spain, pretending to be an English Catholic. 

That was six years to the day from the date of the poet’s release and/or death in Deptford. A report sent to the Privy Council from Pisa dated on the 4/14 of July 1602 warns the Council that his "caterpillar" or "spy" was set to return to England. The letter’s date coincides with the time that "Thomas Wilson" would be traveling back to England, allegedly from Florence, but through France. Why travel inland, where the ocean route was faster? Perhaps he left from Valladolid? Leslie Hotson, who seems to have been the first to notice Vaughan’s dispatch, quoted it in full in his book on Marlowe’s death. (DCM, 60-61) However there he incorrectly identified this Christopher Marlow "as he will be called," as the Trinity Marlowe. The problem is the Trinity Marlowe had died in 1596 and thus cannot be this "caterpillar." (Alumni Cantabrigienses, I,3, 213) In my own investigation of these records, it turned out that this Christopher Morley’s will was witnessed by Hugh Holland, the same man who would later sign a dedicatory epistle to the First Folio of Shakespeare, as if he’d known the author. Odd, isn’t it? Bakeless, suspecting a problem, suggested him a John Mathew or Mathews from Trinity, but the dates and names simply don’t fit with the Cambridge records. (AC, op.cit.)

The sighting at Valladolid is of particular interest to scholars since this Marlow, whoever he proves to have been, was at the seminary at the same time Cervantes was there working on Don Quixote. This is important because the marvelous English translation of Don Quixote was attributed to a "T. S." or a "Thomas Shelton," a name comprised of the first name of Sir Thomas Walsingham and the maiden name of his wife, Lady Audrey Shelton. The matchless translator of Cervantes Spanish, "Thomas Shelton," has proven to be a nom de plume and has otherwise remained unidentified. (Francis Carr, "Who was Thomas Shelton?"; Francis Bacon Home Page) Fancy that. Under the circumstances the most likely suspect is this mysterious "Christopher Marlowe" or "Marlow" at Valladolid. Shakespeare is said to have written a play based on Don Quixote, Cardenio and Othello alludes to it several times. Charles Hamilton and I have suggested this was the so called Second Maiden’s Tragedy, ms. (1994, 258) So the linkage is important to Shakespearian scholars as well. Marlowe’s name is to be found in the records of Catholic poisoners in Gatehouse Prison for the period between 25 June and 23 September, 1604, where he is said to have been using the alias Mathews:

a seminary priest, oweth for his diet and lodging for 7 week and two

day being close prisoner at the rate of 14s the week: L5 2s. For

washing: 2s [Total] L5 4s 4d. (CM, Ule, 508; CSPD)

The charges for his billet were sent to Sir Robert Cecil. He was summarily released and is not heard of again. Who was he, if not the Marlowe from Valladolid, and thus the poet? Again scholars simply do not know. But there is ample evidence on the table to suspect that Marlowe may have survived 1593 and compelling evidence to suppose that he was not guilty of any of the charges leveled against him in the Baines note. This leads us to the conclusion that Marlowe’s treatment at the hands of history has been unjustified.

Indeed Tucker Brooke writing in his biography of Marlowe (33, cf2) suggested that the Valladolid scholar was widely believed to have been the poet (as one would certainly suspect) and that it was this "caterpillar" who was responsible for the second wave of bad press that overwhelmed the poet’s reputation. Tucker wrote:

Brooke cites TLS letters from Hotson which appeared on June 24 and July 27, 1925. Or just before Hotson’s book made it to print. As we have just seen, Hotson incorrectly identified this Marlowe as the Trinity Marlowe, who died in 1596. No John Mathew can be traced at Cambridge. So the question as to who this Marlowe was is still unsolved. We suggest the English record, which calls him Christopher Marlowe alias Mathews, is more likely to be correct tham the Valladolid record, which reverses these names. The fact that those alive at the time believed this man to have been the poet is also worth noting. Why shouldn’t they know more about his real identity than we do? Weren’t they there? Didn’t they know these people?

So if his friends were in high places, his enemies were also. Suppose for a moment that Marlowe had run a collision course against Rome? Just as the entail suggests. Just as Nicholl discovered. Suppose further that he, unlike Henry VIII, was unflanked. Rome has a history of being slow to forgive. It has taken four hundred years for it to concede that the earth rotates the sun and two millenniums for a papal degree clearing modern Jewry from their ancestors’ role in the death of Jesus. While we no longer see Dr Faustus as an anti-Catholic broadside, we can hardly suppose it to have been perceived in any other way during Marlowe’s age. Consider just its dramatic end. Faustus is urged by his good angels to repent as his death draws near. Yet he will not repent. Why? because there is not enough time for good deeds. Faustus, like orthodox Catholics, didn’t believe in salvation by grace. So we have dramatized in Faustus the conflict that is the root of the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism: salivation by grace versus salivation by deeds. Faustus, a Catholic despite his conflict with the pope, will not believe in salivation by grace even when urged to it by a choir of angels. He kept his faith in tact and died a martyr to he Catholic cause, as many true Englishmen were dying during that period. We can bet our boots that Marlowe’s audience was on its feet urging Faustus to take salivation by grace. And from this simple analysis we can see that Marlowe, trained for Christian service, was fulfilling the requirements of his Parker scholarship. Dr Faustus is still bringing souls to Christ and more than a few of them have been Roman Catholic souls. It is more than merely preposterous to suppose the author of Faustus was an atheist. That charge has to be schismatic, Roman Catholic in its origin. As is much of Marlowe’s bad press. Signaling a reconciliation, T. S. Eliot, a headline Catholic himself, has called Marlowe the "most Christian...of his contemporaries." (Collected Essays, "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.")

It is not our purpose to awake sentiments best left sleeping. We live in an age when one’s religion and sexual orientation is properly not connected to one’s political rights. But the fact is that Marlowe lived in an age when men and women died for what seem today to be minor schismatic differences. Into that melee Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris must have been a focal point for anti-Catholic sentiments. So Marlowe, for better or for worse, had thrown himself headlong into the midst of this struggle for the ascendancy of Protestantism. Surely his inflammatory The Jew of Malta fits nicely into this scheme. Step by step, play by play, Marlowe was signaling his allegiance to Christian causes of an anti-Jewish and anti-Papal nature. This meant he was making powerful enemies.

We all know the charges pending against him on the 18^th of May, the charges lying behind the Privy Council’s arrest order of that day and itemized in the Baines note, included not just treason, but heresy and homosexuality as well. Sober minds doubt the efficacy of any of these charges. But the fact that he officially died before he could address them, and died under suspicious circumstances, circumstances that seemed to confirm them, certainly painted him in the worst possible light. Tamburlaine and Edward II both helped increase the intensity of this negative illumination. It was Tambrulaine, who counted religion but a childish toy, and Edward II, who delighted in homosexual joys. Neither were helpful as exculpating witnesses. Though both could be defended as psychological studies of demented men. However taken out of context, as Marlowe’s enemies did and do, they were nothing but trouble for him. The question is could Marlowe and his high friends afford, in that era, an open fight with witch-hunters who believed the Plague to have been caused by God’s wrath against London play-makers and not Yersinia pestis? The question answers itself. In truth, they could not. Such is the power of ignorance.

Scholars now know both Tamburlaine and Edward II base on diplomatic intelligence streams, the former about the Russian Tzar, Ivan the Terrible, and the other about James VI of Scotland. That James VI was destined to become James I of England. These discoveries have been brought out in considerable detail by a school of modern, mainly Kentish scholars, and appear as collected papers in the book Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. (1999) Rowse seems to have been the first to notice the parallels between Ivan the Terrible and Tamburlaine. (CMERC, ‘Visible Bullets’) With this in mind Marlowe would have had an ace or a trump card up his sleeve. And a living Marlowe could defend himself from either charge, but a dead Marlowe had no standing in the propaganda war that was about to break over his head. As Kyd put it, mortui non mordent, the dead don’t bite back. The conservative Charles Nicholl, after years of consideration, concluded that the Crown had Marlowe killed to avoid an open fight:

We don’t conclude that at all. The three men with Marlowe were never suspected of being killers, or "wet boys" as they are called in the trade. Foreswearers, yes, but killers no, as Peter Farey has pointed out at great length. (Op.cit.) We do however agree with Nicholl that the events at Deptford were certainly lies. Elaborate ones. But the notion that Sir Thomas Walsingham had Marlowe murdered is nothing short of implausible. The Crown could have had Marlowe killed under torture. We have seen the Privy Council edict authorizing its use. Kyd nearly died under it.

 If the Crown had wanted Marlowe dead there were a thousand legal means. Instead Burghley released him on a recognizance bond. Ten days later Marlowe is said dead in Burghley’s safe-house. He had been awaiting transportation to Scotland to be with King James VI as a Cecil projector. On that same evening Marlowe’s life-long friend and ally is at Dover, Kent preparing to send English agents to Calais on the next day. (LPL, op.cit..) Faunt returns to London via the inland route, through Canterbury. A year or so latter Shakespeare writing, for all the world like Marlowe, is privy to the same stream of diplomatic intelligence that Marlowe was. He is up to his ears in the protean events of the succession-game. He is preaching Cecils’ constitutionalism, nearly openly. He writes as if he’d been to Scotland and knew King James VI personally. Later, in The Winter’s Tale, he will allude to knowing young Prince Henry personally,

Two more things must be said here. I’ve noted powerful men and women, there at the time, believed James I might have had Prince Henry killed to prevent him from taking over the throne. It wouldn’t be the first time in history something like that had happened, as Xenophon notes in his study on Tyranny. James would not only have had motive and opportunity, he might even have had another, more compelling reason to mistrust Prince Henry. Henry’s eyes were a lovely brown, whereas his and Anne’s were both blue. William Roughead summed up James not unfairly when he wrote,

Roughead says nothing about his open homosexual habits that encouraged the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury and led to a revolution. It is those habits, as well as the color of Prince Henry’s eyes, that cast a doubt on his fatherhood. The record shows James and Anne were without a pregnancy until the late spring or early summer of 1593. Why? Queen Anne was a close friend of Henry Locke, the minor English poet who had shown up in Scotland in the early 1590s. Wouldn’t she have been even a closer friend to Marlowe? "Emilia Lanier" implies so in her banned translation of the New Testament which appeared in 1611.(SDRJ, Rowse) It argued, in what was then a heretical and Marlowe like fashion, that sin enters the human race through men, since Mary birthed Jesus without it. This long overlooked book, which appeared at the same time the King James Bible appeared, also contains a dedication to Arbella Stuart. It boasts the author knew her as well: "whom long I have known, but not known so well as I desired." This same author also laments he was "blessed" by "Great Queen Eliz’s favor" but now lived "closed up in sorrow’s cell." Its marvelous rendering of Biblical Greek, in what Rowse called its "easy command of iambic pentameter," rhymed I might add, makes a post 1593 Marlowe the usual suspect. Lanier, a famous courtesan of the period, can hardly have been the actual translator of its Greek, as occasional lapses from the feminine to the masculine pronoun suggest. For those who have not read it, it is a moving version of the New Testament. focusing on the betrayal of Jesus, with all four Gospels reduced to one, along with a schismatic commentary. Scholars have long suspected Shakespeare worked on the King James translation and point to his name appearing in the 46^th Psalm, neatly encrypted. Indeed the plays reflect a religious conversion dating to about this same period. Violet A. Wilson, the author of Society Women of Shakespeare’s Time, doesn’t stoop to mention Ms. Lanier, perhaps she had never heard of her? Rowse claims only two copies are known to survive, both damaged. Rowse argued Lanier was Shakespeare’s "dark lady," but of course she was no lady, as Wilson must have blushingly known.

So pardon me if I scoff a bit. The "Marlowe survived 1593 and lived to become Shakespeare theory," first suggested by Queen Elizabeth I., is the most viable of all the theories advanced to date. It is particularly more viable than the rustic actor theory first proposed by advertisements in the First Folio, seven years after his death. However to keep things chronological, we must now turn to the years following Marlowe’s official death. The analysis will explain how Elizabeth I. became the world’s first known Marlovian.

'Tis now June 1593. Marlowe is said to have been killed. An odd silence surrounds it. Yet a remarkable thing happened. Somehow between 1593 and 1598 Marlowe’s public currency skyrocketed. In fact it soared so high that beginning in 1598, or just after the publication of Hero and Leander, broadsides against him began to appear for the first time. Let us follow this vicissitude closely. Marlowe is released on 20^th of May 1593 and allegedly slain on the 30^th of May in Deptford, Kent. His works are nevertheless brought to registration in the normal fashion over the next 60 some odd years. An account of his death was prepared for the Queen, but we have no public notices of it until 1598, five years later. (With the single exception of what Tucker Brooke called Gabriel Harvey’s "cloudy drivel," which seemed to suggest Marlowe had died of the plague. (TLM, 112) Indeed there seem to have been no court gossip about Marlowe’s fate. At least none of the thousands of thoroughly scrutinized journals or letters mention it. Edward II can hardly have accounted for all of his increased standing. It appeared in 1594, boasting that Lord Pembroke’s players had performed it. Was a lost edition of his The Jew of Malta responsible for his popularity? It entered on 17 May 1594 or a year to the day from the date of his arrest order. Was it published? Scholars don’ know. Had Hero and Leander appeared in print? It too had been entered shortly after Marlowe’s death on 28 September 1593, by John Wolf. Or six years to the day from the date of the Bradley Duel in Hogs Lane, where the hero Watson save Marlowe’s skin by a "gust."

Again scholars don’t know, but somehow before the appearance of Blount’s edition of Hero and Leander, late in 1597 or early 1598, Marlowe underwent a dramatic reversal of fortune. Marlowe’s host in May of 1593 was his friend and patron Sir Thomas Walsingham. Thomas was the cousin of Sir Francis Walsingham and a court figure, who many suspect, (including the authors of Invisible Power, The Gunpowder Plot and The Reckoning) continued Sir Francis’ work for Elizabeth’s secret service. A possible friendship between Marlowe and Thomas Walsingham can be traced back into their childhoods, as we have pointed out. In any case it would have been foolish in the extreme for the aspiring Blount to link the post May 1593 Marlowe with the powerful Sir Thomas Walsingham. Yet that is precisely what happened in 1597/8 (CMCW, V2, 425) when Edmund Blount published what is believed to be the first edition of Hero and Leander. Scholars have no idea how many copies of it were printed but the link to Walsingham is more than merely casual and it continues in future editions without interruption. Blount makes them out as close personal friends and no objection or retraction ensued. How could this be?

How could a confidant of the Queen, as powerful as Sir Thomas, be closely linked to a seditionist and an atheist? Let alone to a homosexual. Something dramatic had happened behind the scenes to repatriate Marlowe. What was it? Why were there no tracts or broadsides against him between 1593 and 1598? The broadsides cited by Hotson all date to 1598 or later, i.e., after Marlowe’s currency at Court seems to have been rising.

His publication history helps here. Hero and Leander appeared in 1598, in several popular editions and continued in print until 1616. Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s The Civil Wars of Rome, or rather its first book, is known from an edition dated to 1600, suggestive of this revival. No one knows when Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies first appeared, but the 1 June 1599 entry in the Stationers’ Registry to have them and "Davyes Epigrams" burnt is suggestive of a reaction to his rising popularity of 1598 and as a reaction to the broadsides against him cited above. One perceives three things: 1) behind the scenes Marlowe’s currency was rising (somehow) between 1593 and 1598; 2) it became strong enough to go public in 1598; 3) there was a backlash against it which resulted in the public burning of his translation of Ovid in June 1599. For a dead poet he seems quite active. Indeed even his printer suggests the same thing in his epistle attached to the 1600 edition of Lucan. There Thomas Thorpe addresses "Edward Blunt...in the memory of that pure Elementall wit Christopher Marlowe; whose ghoast or Genius is to be seene walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets." Thorpe is writing of editions and the churchyard is St Pauls’ where books were sold. Simple math assures us Thorpe was writing about editions we don’t know, since only two, Ovid and Hero and Leander, not "three or four" books can be cited. We must either suppose lost editions or editions under other names. Unless we are given to think Thorpe didn’t know what he was writing about. What other names? How about "Shakespeare" ala Richard II? Even the Queen wasn’t prepared to by that whooper.

Among the Bacon papers in the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury, now housed in the Lambeth Palace Library directly across the Thames from Parliament, are papers from English agents to Anthony Bacon, who appears to have been running a covert operation for, let us say, the highest bidder. One of the letters is postmarked on Marlowe’s birthday in 1596, 26 February. (LPL, MS 656,f.109v) It is supposedly from "Anthony Rolston" and was postmarked in "Fontarabie" Spain. It reads in part:

It is an indisputable fact that the canon of Shakespeare, from this early play to The Tempest, is concerned with the repatriation of the returning exile. Overwhelmingly concerned with it. Why? The Sonnets suggest the author was exiled, almost in the open. They also suggest he was knifed by a coward:

And here all the weary bone chilling miles of an imposed exile in Sonnet Fifty:

Now new evidence has turned up, in documents known as the "Bag of Secrets" in the Public Record Office, that proves there is a pattern after all. This evidence concerns the Lopez Plot. In 1594, the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's last favorite and the rival of Lord Burghley, her chief minister, accused Roderigo Lopez, her Portuguese-Jewish doctor, of plotting to poison her. By accusing Lopez, Essex was tilting at Burghley, who had employed the doctor as an informant. Lopez never intended to harm Elizabeth. He was greedy and wanted money. The Queen knew this, and stopped his execution. But Lopez was hanged. Nobody knew who was responsible, until now.

Historians had guessed that Elizabeth reversed her decision to stay his hanging and signed an execution warrant, but the new evidence proves she never did. To circumvent the "problem" of Elizabeth's intervention, Lopez was tried for a second time in a different court the records of this second trial are in the Bag of Secrets. When convicted, he was hanged straight away.

The prime mover in Lopez's execution was Burghley. Why? Because Essex had discovered that Lopez had been bribed by Manuel d'Andrada, a Portuguese spy in the service of Philip II of Spain, the Catholic power against whom Protestant England was at war.

Three years earlier, Burghley had recruited d'Andrada as a double agent. It was a smoking gun. And if Essex were to find it, Burghley might himself be accused of treason. What makes it all fit is that this had happened before. When Burghley decided on his own authority to summon the Privy Council and dispatch a warrant to execute Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, he had gone against the known wishes of Elizabeth and muddied the waters to obfuscate the fact that he and his fellow counsellors acted clandestinely.

It was a blatant act of defiance for which Elizabeth sought to hang William Davison, her secretary, for allowing the death warrant to leave his possession.

On this occasion, too, Burghley covered his tracks in the archives, removing crucial documents. He lied to Elizabeth about his actions and he sent false evidence to the court of Star Chamber so that Davison would take all the blame.

We should no longer talk about Elizabeth and Burghley in the same breath. Queen and minister had different political creeds. Elizabeth believed she had an "imperial" sovereignty, but Burghley believed her monarchy was limited by the advice of the Privy Council, and the assent of Parliament. When push came to shove, he held that the Privy Council and Parliament could override royal sovereignty.

The key to Burghley isn't deference to monarchy, but quasi-republicanism. He bulldozed Elizabeth into a military strike in Scotland to assist the Protestant Lords in revolt against the Catholic regent. And then conspired with the rebels to exclude Mary from returning to her throne. Burghley was an outright republican because he not only sought to exclude Mary, but also plotted to subvert her rule. His constitutional schemes were breathtaking. (emphasis added) If Elizabeth died, the Privy Council and Parliament were to stay in power to safeguard the Protestant succession. Burghley's drafts envisaged an Interregnum at which time the "Council of State" would govern England and settle the succession.

The facts no longer support the familiar story. Nor was Burghley the model citizen he liked to appear. Later in life he looked after number one, fiddling his taxes and building expensive houses. He was the Queen's puppeteer, pulling strings to a greater degree than Elizabeth ever knew. To a large extent England was his fiefdom, governed by his "assured" Protestant clique. He wasn't the power behind the throne but the power in front of it....The gap between popular and academic history must be closed. History must always be accessible but the complexities, the depth, the feel, the ongoing debate, should not be stripped out.

Marlowe inscribes this cursus [i.e., an Ovidian career model] not simply to participate in the Renaissance recovery of classical authors, but in particular to contest the national authority of the ‘Virgil of England,’ Edmund Spenser. Using an Ovidian cursus to contest Spenser’s Virgilian cursus, Marlowe enters the generational project of writing English nationhood. Unlike Spenser, however, Marlowe writes a ‘counter-nationhood’—a nonpatriotic form of nationhood that subverts royal power with what Ovid calls libertas. (Inside Book Cover)

81.

Or I shall live your Epitaph to make,

Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I (once gone) to all the world must die;

The earth can yield me but a common grave,

When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie;

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read.

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead;

You still shall live (such virtue hath my Pen)

Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

And here is how Ovid said it in the Metamorphoses:

Now I have done my work. It will endure,

I trust, beyond Jove’s anger, fire and sword,

Beyond Time’s hunger. The day will come, I know,

So let it come, that day which has no power

Save over my body, to end my span of life

Whatever it may be. Still, part of me,

The better part, immortal, will be borne

Above the stars; my name will be remembered

Wherever Roman power rules conquered lands,

I shall be read, and through all centuries,

If prophecies of bards are ever truthful,

I shall be living, always. (OM, Humphries)

This is, we have noted, the same time Marlowe would have established himself in Scotland and in James’ court. I’ve mentioned Shakespeare writes as if he were there. Indeed it was during this period on 30 August 1594, that Prince Henry was baptized at Holyrood and a

series of festivities, masques, and entertainments followed. James appeared in one as a Knight of Malta, other nobles played various parts, and some were even persuaded into women’s clothes. An elaborate ship, eighteen feet long with silken lines and cloth of gold sails, awed the court; mock windmills, Moors, chariots and lessor marvels followed." (JI,232)

This Midsummer festival is the core of Shakespeare’s play MND, as Harrison and others have noted. (CW) They believe Shakespeare read about them, but it would seem someone like Shakespeare was in Scotland putting on this show, a show that ends up in MND. Indeed Bottom’s problem with playing the lion came about because in this 1594 jubilation a lion drawn chariot was replaced with a Moor "because his presence might have brought some fears to the nearest." (Harrison, 511) Sound familiar? Harrison thought so. This report appeared in what Harrison calls "a contemporary pamphlet," but neglects to cite it. Anne Barton, in The Riverside Shakespeare, neglects to mention it at all. Sir Roy Strong in his biography of Prince Henry reduces his early life to two pages and also fails to mention this report of his baptism. I would suggest all this silence about it is due to the fact it was precisely the sort of report Marlowe would have sent back from Scotland to Burghley for publication. The sort of report that he left of the Armada battle signing himself "Petruccio Ubaldino" and/or "J.L." and, later, worked into Edward III as the Mariner’s Tale. (CMEA, Wraight, 71)

It is at this point that the whole Peter Quince and Bottom subplot begins to make sense. Recall that Quince, Bottom and their troop are engaged is a "contest" for a masque before Theseus’s court, driven by an amateur competition. If Shakespeare was in Scotland during the time of these festivities, he would have witnessed several troops similar to Quince’s preparing and competing for this midsummer night’s event. One would suppose he would have helped oversee it. In any case he would have witnessed it from a far more lofty and sophisticated perspective. Harrison comes perilously close to this conclusion himself, writing, "It is likely that those present, used to a far higher standard of courtly comforts and entertainments, brought back amusing accounts of the affair, especially of the grand dinner...and...the...lion." (CW, 511) However it is not likely a London living Shakspere would then write MND round it based on these accounts. On the other hand, were he there himself, the proposition seems credible.

Returning to Famous Victories, the stage is thus set for oblique speech. A well tuned Elizabethan reader would know that Marlowe’s arrest in Deptford was being alluded to. The dead give away would be the change of dates from 25 June to "20^th day of May last past." But what are we to make of these allusions? The lesson follows in the text. For it is after these charges are read into the record, that the Prince appears and tries to extract his little spy of the booties from the clutches of the law. It is here they exchange the famous box to the ears. Despite this and despite the fact that the young prince is soon to become Henry V, the Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, stands his ground, orders the Prince’s spy to be hanged and the Price taken to jail. What’s the lesson? The lesson is that even the Prince cannot prevail over the law. What’s the solution? The spy must be freed outside the law. So if we follow the action line, we’ll discover that this is precisely what happens. Both the Prince and the spy turn up free in later scenes. The Prince boasts "‘tis enough for me to look into a prison, though I come not in myself. (Scene Five) The spy surfaces alive and well in Scene Nine, boasting "so soon as my Lord Chief Justice heard that the old King was dead he was glad to let me go for fear of my lord the young Prince." This same character is next seen in the home of John Cobbler. (Scene Ten) There we learn he is pressed into service for the Crown in France. Quite a lesson. Let’s review it. A cobbler spy working for the "prince" is arrested in Deptford, Kent on 20^th May 1593, while his "prince" tries to free him legally, the attempt fails, so he is freed off-stage, and afterwards, at John Cobbler’s home, he is pressed into duty for his "prince" in France. Could any oblique speech be more direct to our narrative?

This is not the only place that this date is given in an anonymous play of the period. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the 18^th of May is given as the date of the battle of Agincourt, i.e., the famous victory of Henry V. The only problem with this date is the battle took place on St. Crispen’s day, or 25^th of October 1415! (iii,2) It would seem several period writers choose to allude to Marlowe’s troubles obliquely. Unless, that is, the anonymous author of TSH was Marlowe, not Dekker, as often claimed.

I’ve mentioned these same events are alluded to in the mature version of 2 Henry IV. There in II,i we find an account given to the audience by the Hostess, given in front of the Lord Chief Justice, of Falstaff’s pledge to marry her. She tells us he gave it to her "upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the Prince broke [his] head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor." It was while she was "washing thy wound" that Falstaff swore "to marry me and make me my lady thy wife." This is indeed a very mature and clever account of these events. The key here is the phrase "the singing man of Windsor," who would have been Thomas Morley. The catcher is the date, "Wednesday in Wheeson week." This means the 30^th of May for the year 1593. (Perfect Calender, A2) We just can’t get any closer with oblique speech. The clincher is, in both of these cases, the "victim" survives the attack.

If we jump ahead to Twelfth Night one can find Marlowe hidden in the character of Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Aguecheek is a traveling master of ceremonies type, who can "speak three or four

languages without a book." And who had "all the good gifts of nature." (I,i) Like Marlowe, Sir Andrew plays the "viol de gamboys" and was "a great quarreler," i.e., a street fighter, who has only narrowly missed death by a "gust." This is an allusion to the fight with Bradley in Hog Lane. We know Marlowe played this instrument because he taught it to Arbella Stuart. The parallels to Marlowe become even more apparent as the play progresses. Sir Andrew is bashed in the head, off stage, and enters saying "he has broke my head across..." (V,i,178) Earlier he’s described himself as "a fellow of the strangest mind i’ the world. I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether." (I,i,121) No description of Marlowe can be more accurate. Unless we add to it the allusion to being "born under Taurus!" (I,i,148) Taurus rules the skies in May. (When the new Marlowe was born.) Indeed it is in May that this attack took place, "more matter for a May morning." (Ii,iv,157). Sir Andrew is just the sort of character Marlowe would have been playing in Scotland during the summer of 1594. Any way we cut it Shakespeare keeps alluding to Marlowe’s troubles in Kent in May 1593 and keeps on hinting that he survived them.

Even Harold Bloom is puzzled about how often Shakespeare thinks about Marlowe. (SIH) Bloom is convinced he never got over Marlowe’s "murder." Bloom is not unlike many Stratfordians who imagine Marlowe was murdered by the Crown:

           suppressed this brilliant play.

Bloom then quotes a passage from Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.195-205) and calls it

"sublime." He notes