On the gods, their agents, and their doings, part one

From Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006):

Among many other things, the Flamen Dialis [Priest of Jupiter] was not allowed to take an oath, to pass more than three nights away from the city, or to see a corpse, an army on campaign, or anyone working on a festival day. In addition he could not ride a horse, have a knot anywhere within his house or even in his clothing, and could not be presented with a table without food since he was never to appear to be in want. Furthermore, he could only be shaved or have his hair cut by a slave using a bronze knife—surely another indication of antiquity—and the cut hair, along with other things such as nail clippings, had to be buried in a secret place. The flamen wore a special hat called the apex, which appears to have been made from fur, had a point on top and flaps over the ears. These restrictions made a normal senatorial career impossible.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837)

Mr. Hooper had the reputation of a good preacher, but not an energetic one: he strove to win his people heavenward, by mild persuasive influences, rather than to drive them thither, by the thunders of the Word. The sermon which he now delivered, was marked by the same characteristics of style and manner, as the general series of his pulpit oratory. But there was something, either in the sentiment of the discourse itself, or in the imagination of the auditors, which made it greatly the most powerful effort that they had ever heard from their pastor's lips. It was tinged, rather more darkly than usual, with the gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper's temperament. The subject had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. A subtle power was breathed into his words. Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought. Many spread their clasped hands on their bosoms. There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said; at least, no violence; and yet, with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hearers quaked. An unsought pathos came hand in hand with awe. So sensible were the audience of some unwonted attribute in their minister, that they longed for a breath of wind to blow aside the veil, almost believing that a stranger's visage would be discovered, though the form, gesture, and voice were those of Mr. Hooper.

From James Boswell’s London Journal, 5 December 1762:

I then went to St. George’s Church, where I heard a good sermon on the prophets testifying of Jesus Christ. I was upon honour much disposed to be a Christian. Yet I was rather cold in my devotions. The Duchess of Grafton attracted my eyes rather too much.

From David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

[In 1558,] after five years of Roman Catholicism, at a time when existing members of the clergy were ravaged by disease and religious upheaval, suitable candidates for the incoming Protestant ministry proved hard to come by. Matthew Parker, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, hastily ordained a multitude of priests, including the tailor William Sweeting, who were unqualified for their new vocation. Church authorities discovered that the impoverished Reverend Sweeting was incapable of preaching even one sermon a year, yet this fact did not deter them from adding a nearby parish church to his ministry.

From J. F. Powers’s “A Losing Game,” collected in The Complete Stories of J. F. Powers (2000)

Father Fabre, coming from the bathroom, stopped and knocked at the pastor’s door—something about the door had said, Why not? No sound came from the room, but the pastor had a ghostly step and there he was, opening the door an inch, giving his new curate a glimpse of the green eyeshade he wore and of the chaos in which he dwelt. Father Fabre saw the radio in the unmade bed, the correspondence, the pamphlets, the folding money, and all the rest of it—what the bishop, on an official visitation, barging into the room and then hurriedly backing out, had passed off to the attending clergy as “a little unfinished business.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“How about that table you promised me?”

The pastor just looked at him.

“The one for my room, remember? Something to put my typewriter on.”

“See what I can do.”

The pastor had said that before. Father Fabre said, “I’m using the radiator now.”

The pastor nodded, apparently granting him permission to continue using it.

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.

On love

From Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters

21 September 1932
It was a very cold evening and I felt very tired, but we went down Weston lane and looked at the stars. I said that the happiness one got out of love was worth any unhappiness it might (and generally does) bring. I can’t remember what Rupert said but he wasn’t so sure about it not having had the experience I suppose.

From Propertius’s Elegies, 1.1 (ca. 54-40 BC), as translated and collected in A Loeb Classical Library Reader

Cynthia first with her eyes ensnared me, poor wretch, that had previously been untouched by desire. It was then that Love made me lower my looks of stubborn pride and trod my head beneath his feet, until the villain taught me to shun decent girls and live the life of a ne’er-do-well. Poor me, for a whole year now this frenzy has not abated, while I am compelled to endure the frown of heaven.

2 Samuel 11:2

And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself, and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.

From Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

In this particular mimesis of [my mother] Tatiana I had aspired to be courted by barons and counts, as she had, and I bettered her: I ended up going steady—how corny can you get?—with an alcoholic prince. No earlier accomplishments of mine evoked such a surge of maternal approval as I received during my affair with that particular cad.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests.

From Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599, 1600)

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or sleepy mountain yields.

From Evelyn Waugh’s "Love in the Slump" (1932)

“You’re always so much nicer to me than anyone else, Tom; I wonder why?” and before he could deflect her—he had had an unusually exacting day’s business and the dance had been stupefying—she had popped the question.

“Well of course,” he had stammered, “I mean to say there’s nothing I’d like more, old girl. I mean, you know, of course I’ve always been crazy about you . . . But the difficulty is I simply can’t afford to marry. Absolutely out of the question for years, you know.”

“But I don’t think I should mind being poor with you, Tom; we know each other so well. Everything would be easy.”

And before Tom knew whether he was pleased or not, the engagement had been announced.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.

From Barbara Pym's A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters
1 November 1933

What a bad sign it is to get the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse out of the library.

From Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931)

Barlow said: “If it’s really poisoning your life, why not ask her to marry you? I sometimes do that. Girls like it. Besides, you’d be quite safe. I don’t think she’d accept you for a moment.”

From an early 1938 letter from Barbara Pym to her friend Robert Liddell, collected in A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters

“Mrs Minshall seems to want us all to be either dead or married,” said Mrs. Pym to her daughter as they drove home in the car.

“Well, I do not see what else we can be,” said Barbara in a thoughtful tone. “I suppose we all come to one state or the other eventually. I do not know which I would rather be in.”

“Oh, there is plenty of time for that,” said Mrs. Pym comfortably.

From Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599, 1600)

The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

From David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

Six years after Marlowe’s death, when his [translation of Ovid’s Amores] had appeared in print, Archbishop Whitgift ordered all copies to “be presently brought to the Bishop of London to be burned” in St. Paul’s churchyard.