In Our Time - Marlowe

Episode Date: July 7, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Christopher Marlowe. In the prologue to The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say:"I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance. Birds of the air will tell of murders past! I am ashamed to hear such fooleries.Many will talk of title to a crown. What right had Caesar to the empire? Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood."A forger, a brawler, a spy, a homosexual and accused of atheism but above all a playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe was the most celebrated writer of his generation, bringing Tamburlaine, Faustus and The Jew of Malta to the stage and far outshining William Shakespeare during his lifetime. Then came his mysterious death at 29, days before he was due to appear on trial accused of heresy. Was he stabbed in an argument over a bill? Was he assassinated? And how does his work measure up to Shakespeare, a man who paid generous tribute and some say stole some of his best lines? Was Marlowe assassinated by the Elizabethan state? How subversive was his literary work? And had he lived as long as his contemporary Shakespeare, how would he have compared?With Katherine Duncan-Jones, Senior Research Fellow in the English Faculty of Oxford University; Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature, University of Warwick; Emma Smith, Lecturer in English, Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the prologue to the Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say, I count religion but a childish toy,

and hold there is no sin but ignorance. Birds of the air will tell of murders past, I am ashamed to hear such foolies. Many will talk of title to a crown. What right had Caesar to the empire? Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure, when like the Dracos they were writ in blood. By the age of 29, Marlowe was a brilliant scholar,

a popular playwright, an international spy, a forger, a homosexual, and accused of atheism. His huge and ambitious characters like Tamerlane and Faustus are often taken to be versions of Marlowe himself. By the age of 30, Marlowe was dead. dead. Was he assassinated by the Elizabethan state? And had he lived as long as his contemporary Shakespeare, how would he have compared? With me to discuss Christopher Marlowe are Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, Catherine Duncan Jones,

Senior Research Fellow in the English Faculty of Oxford University, and Emma Smith, lecturer in English at Oxford University. Catherine Duncan Jones, can we start with what we know of Christopher Marlow's upbringing? Yes, he was born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, very much the same social class as Shakespeare. His father was a shoemaker, which was a bit grander, more bourgeois than it sounds, and active in local government, active in his craft guild. And in Canterbury, which is very important, I think, from Marlowe's later development. Canterbury then, the one thing we think of is the Archbishop of Canterbury now. That was obviously highly important then. And I think growing up in Canterbury probably made my

Marlowe strongly aware from an early age of the power of the church and of religion, which possibly at an early age he decided he did not want to participate in. And the other thing about Canterbury is that it was full of immigrants after London. It was the city with the largest number of mainly Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands. So that religion and difficulties with religions other than England were things that Marlowe grew up aware of. And there was a very good school there. Again, like Shakespeare, we'll pursue this much later,

but there was a very good school in Stratford. But King's School can't have been better than Stratford Grammar School, and we do know that Marlowe attended it for at least two years. And from there, won a scholarship called a Parker Scholarship to go to Cambridge. The normal condition of a Parker scholarship is that you were expected to be ordained

and become a clergyman, something which Marlowe did not do. Was he thought of, was the winning of that scholarship evidence of cleverness, or was it one of the things that you bought or fiddled in those days? I think it was evidence of cleverness. I think he was talent spotted. I think Marlowe was lucky early in his life in ways that Shakespeare appears not to have been lucky, that he was talent spotted by people who could offer him patronage in the form of scholarships.

Who would that be? That's fascinating. Who had talent spotted? That I'm not absolutely sure of, but almost certainly somebody had, probably a schoolmaster at King's School Canterbury brought him to the notice of those who administered the Parker Scholarships. When he went to Cambridge, what do we know about his companions and the company he kept? He kept a lot of company, Robert Green,

the prolific playwright and poet, with his long jolly red beard and heavy drinking habits. Thomas Nash at St. John's, also a rather wild young man, very, very lively and adventurous and slightly apt to get into trouble, though Nash did work for Whitgift as his first job, so it was not averse to working with bishops and archbishops,

as Marlow appears to have been. It was a very lively group of young men who were in Cambridge in the late 1580s. And you could say his literary career began then, didn't it? Almost certainly. It began then, possibly with his translations of Orvid, almost certainly with his earlier surviving play, Dido Queen of Carthage.

heavily based on virtual. Jonathan Bate, I mentioned in the introduction the notion that he was a spy, the first Cambridge spy. Can you tell us what we know about that, what facts we have about that, and whether it did begin at Cambridge? Yeah, I mean, there's a good deal of speculation surrounding this, but Corpus Christi was his college in Cambridge,

and a document called the Buttery Book survives, which is really a list of the students paying the money for their food, for their college meals. And there are a number of periods where Marlowe's name is absent from the buttery book, suggesting he was away from the university. Well, that's not mysterious in itself. But what then happened was when the time came for him to proceed to his degree, to the degree of MA, some people said,

don't let this man take his degree because he intends to go to Reims. Now Reims was the place in northern France where there was a Catholic seminary, It was essentially the headquarters of the group who were hoping to restore England to Roman Catholicism. I mean, England felt besieged by the Roman Catholicism, great empire and the great countries of Europe kept saying they would invade it, there were enemies within, enemies, without that was the atmosphere. Exactly right. I mean, we're talking about the period here leading up to the Spanish Armada,

the sense that England, a small, reformed country, a country that's broken with Rome at a time when Europe is dominated by Spain and other Catholic forces. And of course, Catholics are being persecuted in England. There was a sense that becoming a Catholic was a form of traitorship. You know, you speak of Cambridge spies, and there is a sort of analogy with the 1930s. That sense of the fear of Catholicism then was like the fear of communism in the 20th century.

Anyway, I interrupted you. So we're getting to find out how much you know about whether it was a spy on. Well, that's right. So people were saying, don't let him proceed to his degree, because he's got Catholic sympathies. But then this got as far as the Privy Council, the absolute top of the government system. And a message came from the Privy Council saying,

do let Mr. Marlowe proceed to his degree because when he went to Reams, he was doing good service to Her Majesty. And service, often in that sort of document, does mean spying, secret service. So the clear implication is, that what Marlow had done is he had gone to Reams, not with the intention of converting to Catholicism,

but with the intention of spying on the Catholics there. And will that do? Can we say, therefore, he's a spy? Do you need to bring more evidence to bear? Well, the evidence really comes at a later stage to do with the connections, the people he was connecting with. But there's enough to go on to say... There's enough to go on.

I think that phrase good service. Yes. And the fact that, you know, the issue of whether an undergraduate is allowed to get his degree or not, this is not usually something that goes to the Privy Council. It suggests he has some friends in high places. It does, as Catherine was saying earlier on. And so this very clever young man plucked out of Canterbury, plucked out of Cambridge. Obviously, somebody's talent spotted once more.

He's soon getting into all sorts of trouble. There's the business of counterfeiting coinage which follows quick. What's going on there? bit later. And we find him in the Netherlands. Now, the Netherlands is the absolute epicenter of the religious war in Europe. You remember at this time, the Netherlands is under the control of Spain, but the Dutch are trying to free themselves. And so you've got Spanish Catholics and Dutch Protestants, and England gets involved in that war. And obviously there's a lot of intelligence work going on around it.

So Marlowe appears in the Netherlands and he gets accused of counterfeiting coinage there. And he often seems to have got involved with these rather shady dealers, lone sharks, low-life characters. But once again, message comes from the Privy Council,

just back off. Don't prosecute Mr. Marlow over this. Which again seems to suggest he's got people protecting him. And the obvious inference from that is that he is involved on the special service of Her Majesty. Fascinating, isn't it? Hey, it comes down from Cambridge, comes to London,

and starts to write plays, Emma Smith. As Catherine said, Gannies' literature career at Cambridge, translated Ovid's love poems and co-wrote Dido Queen of Carthage. Was it an odd, is it an odd choice for a man, as it were, picked out for a sort of greatness twice to go into the comparative, of villainy of writing plays in London at the time. Well, as we've already heard about his fellows at Cambridge, he's part of a circle of university wits of people who are going from that rarefied,

but rather boisterous intellectual atmosphere in Cambridge to the London theatre. So I don't think it is that unusual. But certainly the play with which he really emerges on the London stage is the play Tamburlain, the first part of Tamblain, probably in 1587 is an extraordinary play of extraordinary scope. Can you tell the listeners just to freshen their minds about Tamerlane? Well, the plot of Tamblain is remarkably simple. Tamblaine is a mighty ruler.

He's born a shepherd but won't be constrained and confined by that. And the play is about his conquests, his conquests through Persia, through Turkey, through parts of the Middle East and into Europe. And it's a play which looks, frequently looks, as if it is going to end in Tamblain's ultimate downfall. It seems to play with notions that nobody can be as ambitious, as striving, as resistant to any constraint as this, and survive it.

But in fact, Tamblain, the first part of Tamblaine, ends with Tamblaine's absolute triumph. It ends like a comedy. He marries Zonocrity and all seems to go well for him. As we're told it, it was a tremendous success. Can you tell us how that's measured and what it meant to him at the time? Well, one very important piece of evidence about the success of Tamblain is that it spawns a sequel.

It's the first, really, the first sequel play. So Tamblain parts one and two are not a two-part play, but they're a play plus a sequel. The preface to the part two of Tamblain makes it quite clear. It's in response to popular demand. So Tamblain comes back. That's a very good measure of success. But there are also all kinds of ways in which the word tamburlaine

becomes a byword for conquest, for a force which can't be restrained. Thomas Decker calls the plague a stalking tamblaine. He uses the phrase, that word stalking seems to have referred to Edward Allain's particular, perhaps rather mannered, but obviously very impressive gait as Tamberlane. There is a libel, a piece of graffiti essentially, against immigrants, against those religious immigrants which are part of Marlowe's life from his Canterbury days through to the Netherlands, as Jonathan is saying. The Dutch Church in Threadneedle Street is subject to an attack by anti-immigrant,

writers and a long piece of prose is signed Tamblaine. So it does become a current name involved in all kinds of aspects of English culture. Catherine Duncan Jones, can you tell us what, apart from its success, it was very gory, very epic and I saw it at Oxford, actually, a wonderful production. I saw that same production. Yes, John Duncan's production. Yes. Can you tell us what might have been thought of knew about it in terms of the writing? The writing is extraordinarily good. It's a particularly powerful blank verse.

Tamblaine speaks quite a lot of speeches 40, 50 lines long, and they're absolutely mesmerizing if they're well-performed. Should I say something about the blank verse? I perhaps should, just to remind listeners to all of whom I'm sure know that blank verse is titam, titan, titum, titum, titum, titan, titan. As in, was this the face that launched a thousand ships? So that's from another Marlow play. and one of the things that if Marle wrote Tamblaine,

and we have no direct contemporary evidence that he wrote Tambourne, but I'm inclined to believe that he's the main author of it, that is remarkable in the verse of Tamblaine is that blank verse is not rhymed. It goes in that five-foot rhythm. But he builds up most tremendous patterns with repeated words and repeated names like the woman whom Tamblaine loves

and marries at the end of part one and who dies. beginning of part two is xenocrity, where Tamerlane tries to stop her dying with a long, long speech which keeps having the line to entertain divine xenocrity, to entertain divine zanocriti, to entertain divine zonocrity, so there's no rhyme, but there are wonderful patterns of repetition which are absolutely mesmerizing. One waits for those repetitions to come. Wonderful for actors to speak, wonderful for audiences to hear. I think the other thing that's amazing about his language is how exotic it must have sounded. He loved exotic names. I mean,

Tamblaine's three sons are called Usum Cassane, Tekeleys and Theridamus. And Tamblaine, he's always getting out a map. Makes Jonathan and Mullen seem quite plain, really. He gets out of map and he looks at places like trebizond and Samarkand. And there's a wonderful moment when one of his general says, and we'll do this and then we'll ride in triumph through Persepolis. and Tamblain says, and ride in triumph through Persepolis, is it not passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Tamblaine sometimes almost seems like a child, the way he delights in this extraordinary thing, I'm just a shepherd, and yet I'm going to be king of the world. And these exotic names are a key part of that. But one of the things is, is Emma Smith, that he wants to be king of the world. When he dies, he says, and shall I die and this unconquerade? Is it unconquerade?

Unchal I and this unconquer. It's another of those lines that repeats and repeats. Well, certainly there are some parts of the world. Tamblaine calls for a map just before his death, and that's what prompts that line, shall I die, and they sound concord. The map is very important in Tamblain. It's long been known that Marlowe uses Ortelius' famous Atlas, which is called very tellingly Teartum Orbis Terrarum,

the theatre of the world. So there's something theatrical even about mapping and atlases in this period. and Tamblaine is animating those paper maps and owning them somehow appropriating them. So even though he dies on this note of what has not been conquered, I think the overwhelming accumulative sense, partly through those exotic place names, and they have an epic quality,

the listing of names, the piling up of names, I think that the stress of the play is on what has been achieved, not on what has been, on that element of failure. Before we go on with the life, can we look at one, well, two more players, but warning detail. Catherine Duncan Jones,

the Jew of Malta, that was first performed at the Rose Theatre around 1588 to 89. Could you outline briefly the plot of that for us? Yes, this probably also had Edward Allen, whom Emma has mentioned as the chief actor. It's a very complicated plot, which I will only summarise very superficially.

The central figure, is Barabbas, the Jew, who would have been played by Edward Allen in that first production. And it concerns a Malta which has been fought over by three different groups, the Turks, the Christians and the Jews. And at the beginning of the play, Barabbas, who is the wealthiest merchant in Malta, probably the richest man in Malta, is, as he sees it, understandably deeply wronged because all his money is taken away to pay tribute to keep the Turks at bay. and the rest of the play unfolds with Barabbas taking complicated and savage revenge on the people who have wronged him, though he also suffers.

The other, as Tamblain I mentioned, this savage, tyrant and conqueror has this one softer thing, his adoration of sonocity. Barabbas has this one softer thing, his daughter, Abigail, whom he adores, but who becomes a Christian and in the end is killed. And Barabbas loses both his money and his daughter in the middle parts of the play

and comes up with another wonderful blank first line just to show how Marlowe can vary when he varies the blank first line because he does it so rarely it's extraordinarily powerful and he's got this wonderful line oh girl oh gold oh beauty

oh my bliss and then the stage direction is hugs money bags the daughter the money the daughter the money and the money he does of course get back He plans horrible revenge both on the Christians and then when the Turks to come to power on the Turks, he acquires a very dodgy Turkish servant and Confederate Ithamore, whom he sort of he talent spots and builds up as his favourite in the end, whereas Tamblain apparently dies of old age but sitting on his chariot.

Barabbas, like other Marlowe hero villains, gets his comeuppance and is. in the end tricked by the very nasty Christian governor of Malta who seems no better in any way than either the Jewish or the Islamic characters and is dropped by a trick into a boiling cauldron and dies horribly. Is there any... Well, thank you for that. I mean, talk about book of the morning. We... That'll wake you up. Emma Smith, is there any sense in which we're reaching for? It's a very... It's perhaps two contemporary thing to do, too, of our time, which is nothing to do with what we're talking about really. People have said, Marlow is in some sense writing about the sort of person he was in these massive figures.

Would you say of that about Barabbas as well as of Tamila? Well, it's a very tempting, it's a very tempting theory, it's a very tempting way to read Marlow's plays. If he is writing about himself, he's creating serially ambivalent or even negative self-portraits. But these are characters with enormous ingenuity and often a rather theatrical ingenuity. They do figure playwriting in certain ways. There are ways in which Tamblaine sets up dramatic situations. There's a very famous sequence where the change of colours, the change of the colours of the flags, signals the impending doom of his opposition.

So there are very theatrical elements to these characters, but they are very ambivalent figures. It's tempting, though, to see them as. images of this aspirant socially and intellectually and morally perhaps aspirant figure, Marla himself. Jonathan Bait, Catherine's mentioned that the three figures, the Christian figure, the Turkish figure, and Barabas, a Jewish figure, equally without virtue in many ways.

But is there any sense in which, because this is a question, is there any sense of which Barabbas is more meanly treated, is there any anti-Semitic sense in it? I mean, there's no doubt there's a strong element of anti-Semitic prejudice in this play. I mean, the stereotype of the Jew, the association of the Jew with money, with greed is there. I don't think anybody can deny that. But as Catherine says, the extraordinary thing about this play is the way that the Christians are no better and many ways are worse than the Jews.

I mean, Barabas, I call him Barabas because of the rhythm. is he's not a usurer in the way that Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is. He's an honest merchant. He's got his wealth by honest means. But then the fact that he is wealthy is exploited by Fenezi, the governor. And you began the program by quoting the prologue to the play, spoken in the voice of Machiavelli, Machiavelli, who argues that religion is just a device for political control.

If you then ask for question, who is the Machiavellian, character in this play, who is following the precepts of Machiavelli's The Prince, the primary answer to that question is Fenezi, the governor, rather than Barabas, the Jew. The Christian, exactly, yeah. So, you know, there is a clear influence on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. I know we'll talk about Shakespeare a little bit later, but the thing the two plays do seem to have in common is the sense that the Christians come across as no better than the Jews. And in Marlowe's case, it's inevitable that people should have tied that in with opinions he seems to have expressed that are dismissive of all religions.

There be a powerful thing, and obviously very Camberlane and Barabbas, I'm sorry, with my premonition. And Faustus, we're not going to talk about much or not at all. But before we move away from a place of the life, Edward II, Amund Smith, is of a different order. Can you just again briefly give us a little... summing up of that, and then let's try to find out why it's so different. Well, Edward II is a history play. It's Marlowe's entry into the genre which is extremely popular in the 1590s, which we now associate most with Shakespeare.

And Edward II is the story of a weak king, Edward, whose weakness is exemplified in his preference for what editors and critics have tended euphemistically to call his favourite Gaviston, his lover Gaviston. And his consequent neglect of his political, his public duties. And as a result of this, one of his more aspirant nobleman Mortimer, Mortimer is the aspirant figure who won't be constrained, I think, in this play rather than the title character. Mortimer in league, in a sexual liaison with Edward's Queen Isabel,

tries to take power. In fact, Edward is deposed. He's horribly murdered. But Mortimer 2 gets his comeuppance, and the play ends with the coronation, well, the accession of Edward's son, the young Edward III, who immediately takes steps to have his mother imprisoned

and to punish those wrongdoers. So it's a story about political shifts, but their political shifts shown very much through private and sort of personal relationships. That's what Marlowe does very strongly to the chronicle history he gets from Raphael. Hollins shared from the prose history, the second edition 1587, a very recent book for Marlowe. What he does with the story of Edward II, the second he gets from that is to eroticise it really, to eroticise the relationship between Edward and Gaviston and to make that crucial. The play opens with a letter from Edward

to Gaviston and also to eroticist. the relationship between Mortimer and Isabella, which is much less obvious in the source. How plain, Catherine Dr. Ducon, how prime would it have been to the audience seeing the play then, that this was a strong homosexual relationship? I'm not sure how plain it would have been at all. I think the audience might have been very familiar with the idea of same-sex relationships, but it does seem as if in some ways the problem with the relationship between Edward and Gaveston

is a problem that is shown in. many plays the period, that here is a monarch who values personal relationships above his, as it were, official relationships with his nobles and his advisers by whom he should be guided, and instead is, even as a young newly acceded king, wanting to have lots of fun and games with this young man that he grew up with. It's absolutely true, as Emma says, the relationship is strongly eroticised. But what other characters, his barons and nobles who disapprove of Edward would say about the relationship, doesn't actually say, oh gosh, we've got a screaming puffter for our king, as it were, our words to that effect.

What they object to is the fact that Gaveston is the wrong social status and he's wasting the king's time. Rather as in some later history plays by Shakespeare, Falstaff is wasting the time of the Prince of Wales. So Gaveston is wasting the time of the king and drawing away attention that should be given to his counsel. But at the same time, in terms of this sort of visual representation, within the play. It's pretty clear at the end of the play as to what Morrow is getting at

because of the way in which Edward II is murdered. That is to say, a red-hot poker is brought on stage. He's pressed down onto a table and the poker is inserted up his fundament. I apologise for saying that on Radio 4. But it is quite extremely. But if I may interrupt. No lines in the play say that. The audience that Red Holland Shred would know that, but oddly enough, there isn't a line that explains why the spit is called for, the red hot spit. I think the stage direction does make it clear that the red hot spit is brought on. And certainly every time I've seen the play, it's been pretty clear what's going on.

I think that's absolutely right, because the play has been obviously very naturally adopted as a gay play and as a piece of absolutely revolting sadistic gay bashing, as it were, bashing is too milder word for that murder. But you see what I mean? There isn't actually a line in the play that indicates to the audience that he's not simply being smothered, having already been tortured in various ways and mocked and deprived of...

Well, I'm convinced that the spit is called for. It seems to me it's a, you know, Mala was a great, visual writer. Of course, our problem is that we don't have the, you know, we have no record of the play visually as it was first performed. We only have the words, but it's always important to remember with a Marlow or a Shakespeare play that the words are only part of the story, the visual stage images, are crucial. I'm sure that's right, that great spectacular images. I was thinking about there's a part in Tamblain where Tamblane has imprisoned the king of the Turks, Badgerseth. He has Badgerseth in a cage, which he uses as a footstool in part.

two in a scene which seems to have been spectacularly popular. Tamblaine is drawn in a chariot pulled by conquered kings pulling ropes with their teeth. These are amazing stage images like the cauldron into which Barabbas falls. We know that Henslow invested in a probably was rather an expensive stage prop in order to be able to make that the Couda Teatro at the end of the Jew of Malta. We know that there is a cauldron for the Jew among the props of the Lord. Emerald's men. So clearly some investment is being made in these spectacles, which is an important counter to the idea of the mighty line, the linguistic power. Right. Now, for the rest of the program, we want to talk a little bit about Shakespeare and Marlow and then go for this death,

murder, assassination, whatever it might have been. Catherine Duncan Jones, they were born in the same years, as you said at the beginning, and as also you said at the beginning of the period, and came from similar enough backgrounds until the age of about 16, when, as it were, Shakespeare peeled off to We Do Not Know Where, and Marlowe appealed off to Cambridge, 16 or 17. They came to London, they might have come to London at about the same time. Do we know anything about their companionship, knowing each other? We don't know as much as we would like. Marlowe is the only contemporary writer to whom Shakespeare clearly alludes

and from whom he quotes a line very, very clearly, and as you like it, where he quotes a line from here on Leander, which is still a sort of cliche, whoever loved that love not at first sight. I think they must have known each other. I can't think that they didn't. I think we've mentioned that Marlowe was talent-spotted and was in a way privileged from an early age and had this peculiarly strong relationship

with the Privy Council at an early age when still at Cambridge. Shakespeare doesn't appear to have enjoyed early patronage, but he was something that Marlowe wasn't. He was an actor. Marlowe was a scholar and a playwright, Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright, and as an actor, it seems to me highly likely

that Marlowe encountered him as an actor, even if not initially as a playwright. I think they probably did know each other in the late 1580s. Amosbitt, can you tell us what Shakespeare might have owed to Marlowe as a writer? Well, there's some wonderful interaction between them in the early 1590s. If we were to take Edward II, we can see ways in which, Marlow's Edward II draws on Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth plays

but also influences Shakespeare's Richard the second. So there's an interplay and I think it's important that maybe contrary to that popular view, say we get in a film like Shakespeare and love a very attractive view of Marlowe as the more experienced, more suave and sophisticated sort of guide to Shakespeare. I think instead of that model,

we should think of one where there's much more interplay at this point of right. rather intense, not quite collaboration in that we don't think they have a writer play together, but the way in which their themes and their writing intersect is a form of collaboration, I think. I have read in preparing for this whether these are just claims or how valid they are, that Marlow's line became as adopted by Shakespeare, and that Marlough grappled with the idea of soliloquy before Shakespeare did. Is there anything in those two things?

Jonathan, do you want to be nice to like. Yeah, I think there is. I mean, Catherine talked about earlier about Marlowe's just, extraordinary gift for the blank verse five-beat line, which becomes the basic medium of writing in Shakespeare. And there's no doubt that Shakespeare learns that from Marla. And the art of writing long speeches and of these moments of soliloquy moments

where characters start talking to themselves and to the audience. And you can really sort of trace the development of that in Shakespeare, going back to Marla. For instance, we would see, if you look at an early Shakespeare play like Titus Andronicus, his first tragedy, there's a very, very clear influence on the villain of that play, the scheming villain, a moor called Aaron, clearly influenced by the Jew of Mortar. There's a speech that is almost like a rewriting of the passage where the Jew of Malta and his friend Ithamor are delighting in their villainy, sort of outdoing each other in villainy.

and the thing about these villains is that they often get the most dynamic verse and are the most charismatic characters so the idea that the villain, Aaron in that earlier play then thinking forward to Richard the third to Iago in Othello to Edmund in King Lear that idea of the charismatic villains speaking dazzling verse

I think that's one of the main things Shakespeare gets from Mali Now I move on towards the death now so we can assume his leading you mentioned again I keep referring back to your opening, Mark Catherine, about the low life he must have moved in an... Was it you, Emma? A low life must have been out,

or we know that the Atchical life was the other side, the river outside the city boundaries in an area of prostitutes, pimps, all that sort of stuff. So he's around there, and he's still being protected in some way. But he's taking a lot of risks, isn't he? Can we just outline how he came... Almost go fast forward to the last day of his life? Oh, could I just mention something before the last day,

life. I'm sorry, it's about Marlowe and Shakespeare, the connection. Whether or not they knew each other in the late 1580s, they were yoked together in the autumn of 1592, the last autumn, as it turned out of Marlowe's life, when they were both attacked in a book called Greensworth's Wreath's Wreath of Witt, and they were paired, and they both got angry about this attack. Marlowe was attacked as an atheist and a Machiavell, and so much for this theme of the convergence of Marlowe with his villain heroes, and Shakespeare was attacked as an upstart writer and actor who thought he could do anything. They both, in my, I believe, reposted.

Shakespeare reposted by writing Venus and Donus to show what a wonderful rich classical poem he could write, untainted by the theatre. Marlowe reposted by writing hero and Leander, which he didn't live to complete. But I do believe they were yoked. And in the last eight months of Marlowe's life were actually connected in both a personal and the literary way. But I really want to get back to the final. day, until the final day. Well, I should just take you through the events here.

It really begins with the thing Emma talked about earlier. The libel pinned up on the church associated with the Dutch refugees. It was signed Tamblame. The authorities were worried there were going to be riots

to do with immigrants. They were also worried about Catholic plots. They were worried about atheism, machiavellianism and so on. They start rounding suspects up. they go to Marlow's rooms and arrest his roommate, another dramatist called Thomas Kidd. Under torture, Kidd then reveals that a piece of paper found in their rooms that contained a number of scandalous allegations was written by Marlowe rather than by him.

Allegations along the lines of Jesus had a homosexual relationship with John the Evangelist. Moses was nothing but a conjurer, the famous one, All Who Love Not Tobacco and Boys, are fools. So Marlowe is clearly suspected of having very dangerous opinions. Then a spy called Richard Baines hands in a document with the same kind of allegations. So Marlowe is arrested on May the 20th, but he's bailed but has to report daily to the authorities.

Ten days later, he's in. a room in Detford with three characters, Ingram Frieser, Robert Pooley, William Skiers, characters associated with the Secret Service, very dodgy characters. We don't exactly know why they went there, but in the course of the day, there's some kind of a quarrel, at the end of which Marl is stabbed above the eye with Fryzer's 12-penny dagger. It goes in to a depth of two inches above his eyes, straight into his brains. He dies. There's an inquest. Friza gets off on the grounds of self-defense. So the big question we then have is,

was this actually an assassination, or was it just some kind of fight? I take this to you on. When the charges were doing, had his influential friends deserted him at this stage? I mean, was he really up against it? Because he seems, as has been pointed out again and again in this programme, He was in trouble. He got plucked out. He saved and looked after.

He doesn't seem to be being looked after at the moment anymore, does he? That's quite true. I mean, the John Pickering or Puckering, who is the person to whom, the person on the Privy Council, to whom he's handling these allegations and these problems in London, doesn't seem to be protecting Marla. So it does seem as if those patrons, those figures around him have deserted him. Yet he was staying Mr Thomas Walsingham in Skadbury.

He does appear to have had a very faithful patron in Walsingham with whom he seems to have been staying. But did his atheism particularly wrinkle at the court? Well, I think it did. I mean, the really striking thing is that when Baines brought on these allegations, these were actually shown to Queen Elizabeth herself. And Bain says at the end of his note that these vile opinions mean that the man deserves to die.

And Queen Elizabeth herself says, prosecute the matter to the full. And so some people have seen that as Elizabeth giving authority for Marlowe to be assassinated. What's your... Sorry, you're going to say something. I'm just going to say the dating of all these documents is so difficult. That's the problem with conspiracy because the sense is that the Baines note actually, the Bainson that Jonathan's quoted, comes to the British Council after the death of Marlowe's.

It comes at the beginning of June. Marlowe dies on the 30th of May. So it is one of those events like all good conspiracy stories, particularly with a death, a violent death in them, that we can go on and on. There are three views of it. He was murdered in the way it was said. There was a row at the end of a drunken day, a hot summer day down at Deadford in the pub,

had a fight. He was being in brawls before we hear. Knife went in, through a room. He was assassinated. It was a setup. He was taken down there to be assassinated. There also is a theory by a chap called Calvin Hoffman that he faked his own death and came back as...

But what's your view of this, Catherine? I don't really believe in the assassination because I'm not sure why they hung about drinking all day. if they were there to assassinate him, why didn't they just get on with it and do it straight away and throw him in the river or something? I mean, it dust the circumstances of it,

of the all-day drinking. And then the scuffle, which is so predictable when four testosterone-fueled young men have been drinking all day on a warm summer, warm, perhaps the first warm day of the summer at the end of May. I don't really go for it.

Obviously, there is a great deal going on with Marlowe's relationship with authority at that period. And insofar as I have a theory, I think he may have been in Detford because he was actually on his way to leave the country. And Detford might not seem like very far from London now, but it was a natural route to take before getting a boat to escape the country. I mean, I'm always a believer in cock-ups rather than conspiracies.

So I very much doubt there was an assassination order. But on the other hand, there is no doubt that these people he was with, Pooley in particular, were very, very involved with intelligence work. My sense is that somebody from the Privy Council, maybe Lord Burley, has told these people to get to see Marlowe and to ask some hard questions. I think they were sort of keeping tabs on him. I don't think that the actual intention was to kill him that day.

But obviously there was a lot of anxiety about him. Is there any... It's a last question really. Is there any way we can say had Marlowe lived? Would his work have taken off, as it were, in the way that Shakespeare's took off? I think that's a question which is so strongly connected with the desire for Marlowe not to have died. And that's a desire to have had more of his work. And that's why the window in Poets Cawne in Westminster Abbey has query 1593 is the death date.

We don't want to believe Marlowe has died, just like we didn't want to believe Elvis was dead. Of course Elvis isn't dead. But I think that the sense that Marlowe's work is often said, If Shakespeare had died at this point in his career that Marlowe dies in his, you know, all of literary history would be different. Our sense of Shakespeare would be very different. So it's a tantalising thought that there could have been another 20 years of this. Catherine? It's very hard to know.

I wonder whether if he had lived longer, and I absolutely sure the general wish that he had lived longer, he might have written works that were not plays, might have moved away from the theatre and written more in other literary forms. I think that Shakespeare's work even before up to and including the spring of 1593 is more substantial. and more varied than Marlowe's. In Marlowe, we've got half a dozen plays, and with Shakespeare, I think we've got 7 or 8, and they include comedies

like The Comedy of Errors and the Tame of the Shrew. They're more diverse, he's more versatile than Marlowe is. Briefly, Jonathan. I think just picking up on that, I mean, the kind of, the key question is whether Marlowe would have developed gifts of comedy. He was a great, tragic and historic writer,

and Shakespeare owed him a huge debt in that respect. He doesn't seem to have been much good at comedy, and in the end, I think that's why Shakespeare, Shakespeare had the edge. Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed that. That's thanks to Catherine Duncan Jones, Emma Smith and Jonathan Bate.

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