Christopher Marlowe

As presented by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, ancient Rome, with its double dealing, spying, and state-sanctioned murders reminded me more than a little of the presentation of Elizabethan England in David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004). Claudius’s tendency to quietly stay out of the way, underestimated and unremarked, would have served him well amid the religiously inspired plots and counterplots of Elizabeth’s reign nearly sixteen centuries later.

Sadly, Christopher Marlowe probably wouldn’t have taken such advice. From the little we know about him, and David Riggs’s extrapolations from that evidence, Marlowe seems like a man who would have found trouble in any era, no matter how hard he had to look. He brawled in the streets. He might have been gay, was likely an atheist, and he traveled in questionable circles. Worst of all, he spoke and wrote freely in an age when that was perilous. His mysterious, much-studied stabbing death in a private house in Deptford, during a quarrel with swindler Ingram Frizer, could not have come as much of a surprise to his friends. Anyone courting death in the violent culture of Elizabethan England should not have expected a long engagement.

The son of a shoemaker in Canterbury, Marlowe attended Cambridge on scholarship. In 1587, Cambridge officials hesitated to grant his degree because of rumors that he might be involved in Catholic plotting, but a cryptic note from the Queen’s Privy Council changed their minds. It asked that they award the degree and allay any rumors, because Marlowe “had done her Majesty good service . . . in matters touching the benefit of the country.” Spying? No one knows. The note is the only piece of hard evidence, though Riggs makes a good case for Marlowe the spy from other, circumstantial evidence. And thus began the mysteries that surrounded Marlowe the rest of his life.

About Marlowe the writer, a little more is known. He wrote “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” In a time when Virgil was all the rage, he translated the politically unacceptable Ovid. In 1587, his first London stage production, Tamburlaine the Great, was a tremendous hit, so he followed it with Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. In the next five years, he had hits with The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and The Massacre at Paris, each bloodier than the last.

In the midst of his writing success, Marlowe was dogged by trouble. He was arrested in the Netherlands for counterfeiting, getting off somehow on the excuse that he only wanted “to see the goldsmith’s cunning.” In Shoreditch, he was arrested as a participant in a brawl wherein one of his friends killed a man, and later he was required to post a guarantee that he would not disturb the peace. In Canterbury, he was sued for destruction of property. (Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Marlowe didn’t, so far as we know, kill anyone.)

He consorted regularly with half a dozen or so of Elizabeth’s spies, at least some of whom were double agents. And, if one of her informants is to be believed, Marlowe loudly and regularly proclaimed his atheism, in the pugnacious manner of late-night college dormitory disputants:

Marlowe “doth not only hold [these opinions] himself,” Baines concluded, “but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers.”

Under torture, Marlowe’s friend and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd corroborated the accusations:

“It was his custom,” he wrote, “in table talk or otherwise to jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.”

Such beliefs were not to be spoken aloud, for any doubt gave aid and comfort to the queen’s Catholic enemies. Days after the accusations, Marlowe was dead after the “great reckoning in a little room,” about which Charles Nicholl has written a whole book, and which Riggs describes—and investigates—extremely well. Was Marlowe murdered by order of the Queen? The facts are complex, but Riggs argues convincingly that “all relevant evidence leads back to the palace.” Within a fortnight, the Queen had pardoned the killer.

Near the book’s end, Riggs asks:

Was the great poet a good man? Firsthand recollections about Marlowe’s character are hard to come by. Nashe counted him “among my friend that used me like a friend.” The printer Edward Blount calls him “the man, that hath been dear unto us.” The satirist John Marston memorably refers to “kind Kit Marlowe.” On the other hand, Kyd’s letters to Puckering assert that Marlowe was “intemperate and of a cruel heart,” a person who rashly attempted “sudden privy injuries to men.”

Riggs attempts to mitigate Kyd’s words, arguing that, having been tortured, he was attempting to distance himself from Marlowe, but Kyd’s description sounds as apt as the kinder ones.

That’s the Marlowe who’s so fascinating: a man of contradictions and confusions and mysteries, living in an era that seems a heightened composite of those qualities. And David Riggs does a laudable job of, essentially, creating that Marlowe for us, making him real and compelling against the backdrop of those times. His brief life and penchant for trouble call to mind the Edna St. Vincent Millay lines, from "First Fig" (1920):

My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

I've already imagined Marlowe consorting with Claudius, so I might as well pull him out of history again and wonder how he would find our era, when a person with his literary talents has a more clear—and certainly much safer—path. I don’t think I’d like to have been friends with Marlowe, but I’d like to have had other friends who were. That way, I could avoid being dragged into his troubles, but I’d get to see him once in a while at parties. I’d always be kept up on the gossip. And I’m guessing that wouldn’t lessen the mystery or the contradictions one bit. Kit Marlowe would still be trouble.

Oh, those Romans!

Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) purports to be the autobiography of Claudius, a late-period Roman emperor whose reign fell between those of Caligula and Nero. Before his accession, Claudius was regarded as feeble and inconsequential due to a variety of physical ailments, the nature of which historians still debate. He walked poorly, stuttered, drooled, and suffered fits, but he was smart, canny, and underestimated by those around him, and those qualities allowed him to outlast all his rivals.

Graves makes the mistake of affecting a somewhat antiquated, awkward style, presumably to retain some of the tone of the Roman histories from which he drew his story. And because Claudius is writing the story of his life rather than a novel, Graves gives the book far too little structure, relying instead on chronology. Because Roman society was so complexly intertwined, and because the book spans more than eighty years, there are also far more characters than someone writing a proper novel would deem sensible. While some minor characters, like the Praetorian Prefect Sejanus and the captivatingly brave Praetorian Prefect Cassius Chaerea, come to life, dozens of others appear only long enough to add confusion to an already crowded narrative.

Despite all that, the decision to cast I, Claudius as fiction was probably the correct one. What Graves gains thereby is the freedom to present the dizzying machinations of high-level Roman politics through the consciousness of someone who is at the heart of the struggle, but often unnoticed. For most of the book, Claudius is the Nick Carraway of Rome: marginal, yet deeply complicit. His perspective sharpens our understanding of both the players and the destructive consequences of their actions.

But it’s the source material that makes the book. The Romans are perpetually fascinating, an incredibly fertile source of stories. At times, they seem very near to us in their thought and daily lives; some of Cicero’s speeches could almost be delivered by a particularly forceful and eloquent politician today. But then there are moments where the distance between us gapes wide, as when the Emperor Augustus’s wife, Livia, relates the portents that accompanied his succession:

And at that fateful interruption of history what monstrous portents had not been seen? Had there not been flashes of armour from the clouds and bloody rain falling? Had not a serpent of gigantic size appeared in the main street of Alexandria and uttered an incredibly loud hiss? Had not the ghosts of dead Pharaohs appeared? Had not their statues frowned? Had not Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, uttered a bellow of lamentation and burst into tears?

Or when a noble boy chokes to death on a pear, and

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

Graves knows that that disjunction is a big part of why we read the Romans, and he supplies plenty. When Claudius’s brother, Germanicus, becomes a political threat to the Emperor Tiberius, he is cursed by a witch:

The next day a slave reported with a face of terror that as he had been washing the floor in the hall he had noticed a loose tile and, lifting it up, had found underneath what appeared to be the naked and decaying corpse of a baby, the belly painted red and horns tied to the forehead. An immediate search was made in every room and a dozen equally gruesome finds were made under the tiles or in niches scooped in the walls behind hangings. They included the corpse of a cat with rudimentary wings growing from its back, and the head of a Negro with a child’s hand protruding from its mouth. With each of these dreadful relics was a lead tablet on which was Germanicus’s name.

To no one’s surprise, Germanicus dies soon after.

And that’s the other reason we read about the Romans: the murders and machinations. I, Claudius features plenty. Through the reigns of Augustus and his stepson, Tiberius, who succeeded him, Augustus’s wife, Livia, is the manipulative power behind the throne. She’s the most compelling character in the book, utterly amoral and always several steps ahead, not just of her opponents, but of the reader as well. All possible rivals to Augustus and Tiberius end up dead, but in ways that no one ever manages to pin on her or either emperor. The ingrown, incestuous nature of Roman politics makes her ruthlessness more breathtaking: nearly everyone she murders is a relative. As Claudius realizes about his grandmother at a young age,

Most women are inclined to set a modest limit to their ambitions; a few rare ones set a bold limit. But Livia was unique in setting no limit at all to hers, and yet remaining perfectly level-headed and cool in what would be judged in any other woman to be raving madness.

The plotting and counter-plotting is dizzying. To be celebrated for any success, to achieve any public popularity, is to be noticed by Livia, and to be noticed by Livia is a death sentence.

But all the astonishing amorality supplied by the characters in the first two-thirds of the novel is just a warm-up. When the truly depraved Caligula appears, he makes his predecessors look like amateurs, like Karl Christian Rove showing up at a College Republicans gala.

Though there’s a fair amount of uncertainty among historians about just how insane Caligula was—Graves’s primary source, Suetonius, is generally agreed to have painted him in the worst possible light—there’s no question that he was a capricious, cruel, destructive emperor. He utterly discarded the pretense, maintained in varying degrees by his predecessors, that he was anything but an unfettered dictator, murdering at will and in public rivals whom Livia would have done away with more circumspectly. He spent profligately, nearly bankrupting the imperial treasury. He famously threatened to make his horse a senator. He also made a senator of a captain of guards who

had volunteered to drain a three-gallon jar of wine without removing it form his lips, and had really done so and kept the wine down in the bargain.

To refute a prophecy that he could no more be emperor than he could ride a horse across the Bay of Baiea, he

collected about four thousand vessels, including a thousand built especially for the occasion, and anchored them across the bay, thwart to thwart in a double line. . . . Then he boarded the double line across and threw earth on the boards and had the earth watered and rammed flat; and the result was a broad firm road, some six thousand paces long from end to end. When more ships arrived, just back from voyages to the East, he lashed them together into five islands which he linked to the road, one at every thousand paces. . . He installed a drinking-water system and planted gardens. The islands he made into villages.

Despite all the ruthlessness and violence that’s preceded him, Caligula manages to shock and horrify. Part of what’s awful and fascinating about Caligula—as with all of Roman history—is the level of detail that the historians have passed on to us, and Graves makes sure to incorporate as much as possible. A drunken Caligula causes the death of a prized hostage, Eleazar,

who was the tallest man in the world. He was over eleven foot high. He was not, however, strong in proportion to his height: he had a voice like the bleat of a camel and a weak back, and was considered to be of feeble intellect. He was a Jew by birth. Caligula had the body stuffed and dressed in armour and put Eleazar outside the door of his bed-chamber to frighten away would-be assassins.

Such are the glories of history: we know about the speaking voice of an utterly inconsequential Roman slave who was fated to suffer the indignity of being a scarecrow for assassins.

If you know any Roman history—or even if you’ve just read this far in this post—you’ll not be surprised to learn that it doesn’t work. Caligula is eventually murdered, and Claudius, perpetually underestimated, surprises everyone by succeeding him. Graves continues the story in Claudius the God, which will now go on my stack. But I may have to wait a bit before I dive into it. I can only take so much Roman nastiness at one time. I may have to read some Barbara Pym first. Or a Hard Case Crime novel. After Romans, grifters and gunmen seem positively saintly.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 5 of 8

Then there is the darker side of fashion, ranging from simple visual horrors to the actual evils of furs and feathers. And always, in fashion and clothing as in nearly everything, the Romans did it first, and worst.

From P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

”Jeeves is a great believer in the moral effect of clothes. He thinks I just as good, but I objected to the boots.”

I saw his point. There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea-boots.

From Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook (2001)

A man says with horror, “Later, I saw him without a hat.”

From David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (1996), collected in Graeme Gibson's Bedside Book of Birds (2005)

The indigenous people also took their toll on the native birds. The spectacular feathered capes and helmets that became uniforms of rank among Hawaiian chiefs, and the ceremonial feather-garments known as kahilis (loosely translated, “fly flaps”), cost thousands of avian lives. During early periods of Hawaiian history, commoners were even obliged to pay tribute to their alii in the currency of feathers. Shiny black plumage from one species, scarlet from another, green from another. Yellow was the most valued color, a stroke of bad luck for species like Drepanis pacifica, the Hawaii mamo, with its bright yellow rump highlighted against a starling-black body. The annals of Hawaiian fashion tell us that one chief, Kamehameha the Great, possessed a resplendent yellow cape containing the feathers of eighty thousand mamo.

From Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934)

About this time Julia went quite bald. I do not know whether [her mother] Livia had a hand in this: it seems not improbable, though certainly baldness was in the Caesar family. At all events, Augustus found an Egyptian wig-maker who made her one of the most magnificent fair wigs that was ever seen, and her charms were thus rather increased than diminished by her mischance; she had not had very good hair of her own. It is said that the wig was not built, in the usual way, on a base of hair net but was the whole scalp of a German chieftain’s daughter shrunk to the exact size of Julia’s head and kept alive and pliant by occasional rubbing with a special ointment. But I must say that I don’t believe this.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 3 of 8

When I think of the excesses of fashion, I tend to think of Bertie Wooster, whose desire to be de moda frequently outstrips his rather limited sense. But having been subjected so frequently to the withering sartorial opinions of Jeeves, he, too, can spot a fashion faux pas.

From P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

“What ho, Gussie,” I said.

You couldn’t have told it from my manner, but I was feeling more than a bit nonplussed. The spectacle before me was enough to nonplus anyone. I mean to say, this Fink-Nottle, as I remembered him, was the sort of shy, shrinking goop who might have been expected to shake like an aspen if invited to so much as a social Saturday afternoon at the vicarage. And yet here he was, if one could credit one’s senses, about to take part in a fancy-dress ball, a form of entertainment notoriously a testing experience for the toughest.

And he was attending that fancy-dress ball, mark you—not, like every other well-bred Englishman, as a Pierrot, but as Mephistopheles—this involving, as I need scarcely stress, not only scarlet tights but a pretty frightful false beard.

Rummy, you’ll admit. However, one masks one’s feelings, I betrayed no vulgar astonishment, but, as I say, what-hoed with civil nonchalance.

He grinned through the fungus—rather sheepishly, I thought.

From Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934)

Everyone knew that Livia kept her [her husband] Augustus in strict order and that, if not actually frightened of her, he was at any rate very careful not to offend her. One day, in his capacity as Censor, he was lecturing some rich men about allowing their wives to bedizen themselves with jewels. “For a woman to overdress,” he said, “is unseemly. It is the husband’s duty to restrain his wife from luxury.” Carried away by his own eloquence, he unfortunately added: “I sometimes have occasion to admonish my own wife about this. “ There was a delighted cry from the culprits. “Oh, Augustus,” they said, “do tell us in what words you admonish Livia. It will serve as a model for us.” Augustus was embarrassed and alarmed. “You mis-heard me,” he said, “I did not say that I had ever had occasion to reprimand Livia. As you know well, she is a paragon of matronly modesty. But I certainly would have no hesitation in reprimanding her, were she to forget her dignity by dressing, as some of your wives do, like an Alexandrian dancing-girl who has be some queer turn of fate become an Armenian queen-dowager.” That same evening, Livia tried to make Augustus look small by appearing at the dinner table in the most fantastically gorgeous finery she could lay her hands on, the foundation of which was one of Cleopatra’s ceremonial dresses. But he got well out of an awkward situation by praising her for her witty and opportune parody of the very fault he had been condemning.

From Marco Polo's The Travels of Marco Polo (1298-99)

Now you must know that the Great Khan hath set apart twelve thousand of his men who are distinguished by the name of Keshican; and on these twelve thousand barons he bestows thirteen changes of raiment, which are all different from one another. In one set twelve thousand are all of one colour and there are thirteen different sets of colours These robes are garnished with gems and pearls and other precious things in a very rich and costly manner.

The Emperor himself has thirteen suits corresponding to those of his Barons, in colour, though his are grander, richer, and costlier. And you may see that all this costs an amount which it is scarcely possible to calculate.

From Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook (2001)

Widmerpool plays croquet in uniform, refusing to relinquish some papers from under his arm in a briefcase.