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bio & stuff
Okay... I've tried to give the basics, with what I could find in a handful of books in the last couple of days. Espionage, frankly, confuses me. Someone else can, hopefully, tackle the more intricate details of his spy activities. I plan to edit this as we go, so please let me know of everything that's wrong or missing.



Marlowe's life

His father, migrant worker John Marlowe, moved from Ospringe to the cathedral town of Canterbury in the mid-1550s, at the age of 20. He probably had relatives there, and apprenticeship policies had been relaxed due to a flu epidemic that wiped out a fourth of the town. By 1560 he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. In 1561 he married Katherine Arthur of Dover; in 1562 a daughter, Mary, was born. Christopher was baptized on February 26, 1564-- exactly two months before Shakespeare. Children were generally baptized 2-3 days after birth. The Marlowes had nine children, five of which survived to adulthood (childhood mortality rates, as I'm sure you know, were very high). They were poor, and on welfare assistance from local charities when Christopher was young. This was a cathedral town, and the state religion had changed three times between 1547 and 1558. This had a bad effect on the town's economy, and strife between Protestants and (Sooper Sekrit) Catholics was quite common.

Like most boys, he began formal education at seven. Most tradesmen's sons didn't continue past that, but at eight he started grammar school and began studying Latin. He was expected to be able to orally compose Ovidian and Virgillian hexameters-- perfect training for the blank verse and heroic couplets he would later write. At 15, he won a scholarship for "poor boys" with "minds apt for learning" to the prestigious King's School. The day started with Latin prayers at six; classes began at seven and ended at five. Then they had more prayers and the evening meal, and then they recited the day's lessons from six to seven. The following year he was awarded a scholarship for "such as can make a verse" to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

(A word here on why this is a huge deal. A few decades previously, the son of a poor shoemaker would never have ended up with a Cambridge education. You were born in a certain social class, you grew up in it, you married in it, and you died in it. But the end of a feudal economy, the birth of capitalism, and the growth of the cities and the middle classes is turning all that on its head. For the first time in history, social mobility is possible. See Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning for more.)

He arrived at the school, comprised of both fee-paying gentlemen and poor boys on scholarship, in December 1580. This is probably where he honed his gift for rhetoric. He probably wrote his translation of Ovid's Amores and Dido, Queen of Carthage around 1584. He received his BA in July 1584 and proceeded to his MA course, during which he was frequently absent-- about half the year. There was a rumor in 1587 that he had gone overseas to the English seminary at Rheims, where many English Catholic students could be found in exile. We have no sightings of him going anywhere, however, other than a visit to Canterbury in August 1585. This is where the espionage stuff comes in-- during this period, England was threatened by Jesuits, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Spanish. In 1581, Queen Elizabeth authorized Sir Francis Walsingham to put together the nation's first secret service. Poets were often employed as messengers and go-betweens, but there's not much in the way of hard evidence that he was a spy. After he left school, however, he was frequently associated with members of the Elizabethan secret service such as Richard Baines, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Walsingham. Many assume that he worked for Sir Francis, but all government documents referring to Marlowe indicate that he only dealt with Lord Burleigh and his agents. The university tried to delay giving Marlowe his MA because of the absences, but on June 29 1587, the Queen's Privy Council informed the university that Marlowe "had done her Majesty good service... in matters touching the benefit of his country" and the MA was awarded.

Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine this year, and it was in the repertory of the Lord Admiral's Men by fall of 1587. It was a huge success; the sequel was probably written sometime that year as well. Robert Greene, so famous for talking shit about that "upstart crow" Shakespeare, talked shit in March 1588 about Tamburlaine, the play's atheist hero. Many plays written in the next few years would try to imitate Marlowe's style. Another rising star in the English theater was his future roommate, Thomas Kyd, who gave us the famous Spanish Tragedy in 1587. Kyd never went to university, and both he and the "Cobbler's eldest son" Marlowe were attacked by Nashe and Greene for moving beyond their social place.

On September 18, 1589, Marlowe and Watson (also a poet/playwright, and part of the band of operatives who kept an eye on the Rheims seminary) got into a fight in Hog Lane with William Bradley, an innkeeper (probably over a quarrel with Watson concerning a debt Bradley owed to another innkeeper. Or something). Watson drew his sword to separate Marlowe from Bradley, who turned on Watson and subsequently got Watson's sword in his chest. They were placed in Newgate "on suspicion of murder"; Marlowe posted bail on October 1. Newgate is where he probably met John Poole, counterfeiter extraordinaire.

Around this time, Marlowe began to write for Strange's Men. Lord Strange was a Catholic with a claim to the throne, so Marlowe may have been keeping him under surveillance. By 1591, Marlowe and Kyd were roommates. (Given events to come, for us to have Kyd bitching about Marlowe being a slob and his damn papers always getting mixed up with Kyd's stuff would be evil and wrong. But funny.) The Jew of Malta was written in 1591 and in repertory for Strange's Men's first performance on February 26, 1592. Dr. Faustus was probably written this year (it could have been earlier; scholars are very unsure on the date for this one).

Early in 1592, Marlowe and Baines, while in Flushing (on a Dutch island), attempted to make counterfeit coins with goldsmith Gifford Gilbert. As far as I can tell, they produced all of one Dutch shilling. Baines then informed on his partners. Or maybe Marlowe and Baines informed on each other-- honestly, this stuff gets really confusing. All three were sent back to Lord Burleigh, but there's no indication that Marlowe received any punishment, although counterfeiting was a capital offense.

Shakespeare's first Henriad was clearly influenced by Tamburlaine. Marlowe's Edward II, written in 1592, was in turn influenced by those plays. Edward II and 2 and </i>3 Henry VI</i> were all written for the Earl of Pembroke's Men, although there is no evidence that Marlowe and Shakespeare ever met.

In the summer of 1592, Greene publicly accused Marlowe of atheism. On September 15 he attacked tailor William Corkine with a stick and dagger. The case was settled out of court in early October.

He seemed to be actively seeking patronage in late 1592, and by the spring of 1593 was residing at Thomas Walsingham's Kentish manor. He also wrote the poem Hero and Leander around this time. On January 26, 1593, Strange's Men performed Marlowe's last play, The Massacre at Paris.

On May 5, "Tamberlaine," an anonymous rhymester, put up a placard in a London Dutch churchyard that used references to Marlowe's plays to stir up violence against the immigrant community. Anyone who could be suspected had to be examined, including Marlowe, although there's no evidence that he was involved. Kyd was placed under arrest the next day when heretical papers were found in his room; under torture, he said the papers were Marlowe's and accused him of atheism and blasphemy. The charge was investigated; Marlowe was arrested on May 18th. He made bail two days later, but was ordered to report to the Council daily. Meanwhile, special agent Thomas Drury had procured Baines' infamous note. It was delivered to the Council on May 27th.

On May 30th, Marlowe dined at the Widow Bull's in Deptford, in the company of Robert Poley, Nicholas Skerres, and Ingram Frazier. All three seem to be connected to various espionage-type things and sundry shady practices. (Everything I'm finding on them is either vague or contradictory.) Allegedly, Marlowe attacked Frazier in a quarrel over the bill, and Frazier stabbed him in self-defense while Poley and Skerres stood by and did nothing. Protestant ministers called his death divine justice.

Kyd died in August 1594, possibly as a result of damage done to his health by imprisonment and torture.


Marlowe's reputation

Marlowe has been described as both a genius and a vice-ridden blasphemer by his contemporaries; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Drayton say lovely things about him, while the anti-Marlowe side is largely comprised of Greene, Baines, and the Anglican church in general. Crimes of which Marlowe was accused in the last few years of his life include defecting to a Roman Catholic seminary, suspicion of murder, counterfeiting, disturbing the peace, felonious assault, and public atheism. Local constables were afraid of him, and rumor linked him to both Catholic Spain and plots to assassinate the Queen. But despite his frequent brushes with the law, he rarely went to trial and was never convicted.

Each of these accusations could be evidence for his work as a spy-- or they could all be easily explained away as something else. This was a violent age, when men carried swords and knew how to use them to settle quarrels. Many accusations could very well be false-- in a time when fear of God maintained social order, someone who didn't believe in God was believed to be capable of any crime. Eleven contemporaries refer to his blasphemy in writing, and it was considered quite the scandal; Marlowe "bestrides the moment when atheism comes out of the closet and acquires a public face" (Riggs 25).

Also, I put together a

Jessica's brief guide to early modern homoeroticism

While we're all here, I'd like to address the "gay" issue in "gay atheist spy." Technically we cannot call Marlowe "gay" because there was no "gay" in the Renaissance, although there were certainly men who had sex with men. What I mean is that there was no sense of having a "sexuality," of being hardwired from birth to be attracted to one sex over another and that preference being part of your identity. Homoeroticism was something you did, not something you were. And, for a variety of reasons, homoerotic attachments were fairly common, even celebrated.

Despite what you may have assumed from reading Romeo and Juliet, this was not an age that prized heteroerotic or marital love above all. Capitalism was in its infancy, so marriage was, to a great extent, how money was acquired and passed down through families-- a man was expected to be able to afford to set up house, and a woman was expected to bring a good dowry. A spouse was a business partner and, ideally, a friend-- someone hard-working, honest, kind, and able to give you children. While not all marriages were unhappy and some couples were very devoted to each other, they did not seek "romantic" love the way we do.

Instead, the friendship was the most prized relationship in the Renaissance, both among men and women-- and expression of affection in these relationships existed along a continuum that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to know whether any two people were "just friends" or "having a romantic affair." And the point is, we shouldn't try to figure that out, because the Renaissance would not have viewed those two things in binary opposition as we do-- given the importance of same-sex friendship, the notion of calling anyone just friends, as if that were less important than lovers, would be absurd.

Another aspect of the cult of friendship is the different ways in which we view gendered behavior. In our age, "feminine" behavior is associated with men who sleep with men. In the Renaissance, the "manly" thing to do would be to devote yourself to your male companions, whereas the "unmanly" thing to do would be to spend too much time with women.

Because of the beginnings of capitalism, many people could not afford to get as married as young as you would expect-- they would have to work for several years after reaching adulthood in order to be able to set up household. Although very young arranged marriages could occur among nobility, men generally married in their late twenties, women in their mid-twenties. Beds were frequently shared, so unmarried people usually had a same-sex bedfellow. This is one of the reasons, scholars think, why homoerotic relationships may have been more common than one would expect.

Yes, most Elizabethans probably thought that sexual relationships between two people of the same sex were morally wrong. They thought a lot of things were wrong. They did them anyway. Yes, you could be executed for being a sodomite. You could get executed for practically anything in Elizabethan England, and if those laws had actually been enforced, a large percentage of the population would have been wiped out for various crimes. Very few people were executed for sodomy, and the charge was always tacked on to another accusation-- if Baines' famous allegation hadn't been accusing Marlowe of atheism and counterfeiting, no one would have cared whether he liked tobacco and boys.

"Sodomy" was a rather vague term encompassing homoerotic sex, certain types of heteroerotic sex, and political crimes having nothing to do with sex at all. Anxiety over sodomy was social, not moral-- in an age where men had all the power, a boy could get far in the world by sleeping with the right guy. The Elizabethans had very strict ideas about social class (all the stricter because the advent of capitalism was destroying those class divisions before their very eyes), so that kind of thing drove them crazy. See Marlowe's Edward II, and any bio of James I.


Sources:

Kinney, Arthur. Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Riggs, David. "Marlowe's life." The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. ed. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Urry, William. Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1988.