Playwright, Poet, Scholar, Spy: The Life of Kit Marlowe
And as I approach my 39th year on this sky marble, I’ve noticed a major uptick in my obsession with history. It is that relatively recent love that led me to pick up one of my favorite reads of 2022, Allison Epstein’s A Tip for the Hangman. It’s an Elizabethan espionage thriller where the playwright Christopher Marlowe spies on Mary, Queen of Scots, while navigating politics, theater, romance, and murder. It’s historical, it’s a spy thriller, it has murder and my personal catnip: fictionalized versions of real historical figures. It sounded like a good time, and it was.
The draw for me was Mary, Queen of Scots because she and I have history. When I was 5 years old, an older classmate asked me if I ever missed my real mom while pointing at an illustration of Mary Stuart in a history book. She then informed me that Mary was my real mother and that my “parents” only adopted me when she went and got her head chopped off. After yelling, “You’re not even my real mom!” in the back of a Honda Accord that afternoon, my path towards healing entailed me reading as much about this woman as possible to be double super extra sure that she was not, indeed, my mama. True story.
I say all this to say that I was prepared for lots of fun, juicy bits about The Queen of Scots and also Elizabeth I, both of whom are obviously formidable women with a long list of what makes them interesting studies. But I walked away needing to know more about Christopher Marlowe, desperate to know how much of Epstein’s novel was rooted in truth and how much was a deliciously entertaining fabrication. I learned that I’d been sleeping on Mr. Marlowe, whose real life may have been stranger than fiction as history often is. If you aren’t already in the know or just want a refresher, join me in this brief look at his story.
Christopher Marlowe was an Elizabethan poet and playwright. He was born in February 1564, just a couple of months before William Shakespeare, and is considered ol’ Billy Shakes’s most important predecessor in English drama. A bright student, Marlowe studied at prestigious institutions like the King’s School in Canterbury and Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, earning his B.A. from Cambridge in 1584. And this, dear friends, is where things get spicy.
Kit stayed on as a resident at Cambridge and was working on a master’s when my dude began disappearing for long periods of time with no great explanation when pressed as to where and why. Cambridge wasn’t having it, suspecting that Marlowe had gone off to the Catholic Seminary at Rheims to drink the Catholic Kool-Aid. In 1587, the university was on the cusp of denying Marlowe that Master of Arts degree when the Privy Council intervened in a totally normal, totally believable, not-at-all suspicious way. They recommended he receive the degree, citing “services for the state” as their reasoning:
So where was Kit all that time? And what “good service” did he complete?
It’s possible that there are totally normal explanations for Marlowe’s long absences from school. He wasn’t the only student to take off for chunks of time, for one, and there’s also a chance he skedaddled to avoid a 1585 plague outbreak in Cambridge. But it seems pretty widely accepted at this point that Kit Marlowe was a spy for the crown, and I can’t get enough of this plot twist. It’s rumored that he was recruited by none other than Head Spymaster in Charge, Sir Francis Walsingham, who I’m sure found Marlowe good for the job on paper: he was smart, ambitious, and was born and raised in the very Catholic town of Canterbury, making it plausible that he’d convert to the Catholic cause and thus be able to get in good with that Papist Mary Stuart.
And why would he need to do that, you ask? In all likelihood, a little something called the Babington plot. Conceived at Rheims, the very place Cambridge thought Marlowe went to in order to declare for Team Catholic, the plot was a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and install Mary Stuart on the English throne. The plot was uncovered during one of Marlowe’s mysterious absences from Cambridge, and shortly after the Privy Council came around to be all, “look, he was doing a quick thing for Lizzy.” Suspish much? I know I don’t have to work too hard to believe Marlowe was involved in uncovering the plot, but that’s admittedly because I want it to be true.
And the thing is, we’ll never actually know for sure whether Marlowe was, indeed, a spy because… well, that’s how spying works. If you’re doing it right, no one is really supposed to know that you’ve done it. Little is known, for example, about what might have come next for Marlowe after the Mary, Queen of Scots job, like whether he remained in service to the crown, for how long, and whether the end he eventually met with was the result of the line of work he was allegedly in. But historical records (way more than I’d have assumed) definitely make a strong case for the fact that he was all up in the spy game. Here is where I will plug A Tip for the Hangman again, if for no other reason than the excellent author’s notes where Epstein discusses those records and the connections to be drawn between them.
All of this and we haven’t even gotten to the thing he is actually, more definitively known for: his work as a playwright. That portion of his career kicked off in the late 1580s, beginning with Tamburlaine the Great parts one and two which he wrote while still at Cambridge. The timing of the rest of his plays isn’t 100% clear, but next came The Jew of Malta; Doctor Faustus; Dido, Queen of Carthage; and The Massacre of Paris. Towards the end of his career (probably) came Edward II, which fictionalizes another fascinating piece of history: that time King Edward II ascended to the throne and immediately brought back his exiled favorite, Piers Gaveston (IYKYK). That play’s depiction of a same-sex relationship was considered proof of Marlowe’s own homosexuality, which would have been a big (and bad) deal at the time. These rumors weren’t helped by the fact that homosexuality was a recurring theme in his work, including the poem “Hero and Leander.”
As I hinted at earlier, Marlowe met with an untimely and violent death. The most common version of the story I’ve come across is that he was at a tavern with three other men, a fight broke out over the bill, and it ended with Marlowe taking a knife to an eyeball. This version of events squares with Marlowe’s argumentative nature and a habit of getting into scuffles, some of which even landed him in prison. In other accounts, the venue was not a tavern but a room in a respectable house that had been specifically reserved for the purposes of a meeting, the participants of which were folks with espionage-scented ties to Queen Elizabeth and/or Sir Francis Walsingham. That version of events makes Marlowe’s death sound less like a brawl gone wrong and more a coordinated effort at silencing the playwright for good, perhaps the result of Marlowe’s increasingly unconventional religious and political beliefs.
The truth of his demise has long been speculated, and we’ll likely never know the truth. In the meantime, we have his work, and that of authors like Allison Epstein who’ve taken the shell of what we know and filled in the gaps. You’ll find that Marlowe makes a few fictional appearances, actually, including A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess and Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, the latter of which explores his ties to the School of Night and is just a romp of a read.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a history podcast or documentary somewhere with my name on it.
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