What Happened To Christopher Marlowe?
Christopher Marlowe, wounded child of the angels, you are made immortal with a kiss.
The historical record of what happened to Christopher Marlowe isn't written yet.
It will be the work of the next 20-50 years of Shakespeare-Marlowe scholarship to uncover the authentic story.
But since I have a two year lead on the field, I'm generously willing to take an unwise and very dangerous speculative stab at what his story will roughly turn out to be.
Don't ever say I don't like to live dangerously!
And yes, I admit to being an idiot for even attempting this.
So don't be bugging me about the errors in it for the rest of recorded time. You wanted it.
As I write this everyone else in the world doesn't even know that Marlowe is Shakespeare, so don't suddenly be saying how smart you are there in 2311.
Come here and work it all out yourself! Ah, you don't dare..
See? It's not that easy with only what we have now. We have virtually nothing to go on. Which is why we need this..
Lee Vidor's Notorious Wildly Speculative New History Of Christopher Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe was brilliantly intelligent and talented. He grew up a shoemaker's son and by the time he was at Cambridge University on a scholarship he already knew he could surpass Ovid, the man considered the greatest poet who ever lived.
As a young student Marlowe translated Ovid's work from Latin, literary work which had already endured for 1600 years, and Marlowe knew he could surpass Ovid. At the age of 20-22 Marlowe already knew he may be the greatest writer who had ever lived.
And with the enormous success of the play Tamburlaine he was already a star dramatist and the toast of London while still officially a Cambridge student. Marlowe was a star and he hadn't even really begun his life's work. This is very heady stuff for a poor young man.
This was Marlowe's position at the age of 24. Every play he wrote was a huge success. One hit a year. He was the smartest and brightest and wittiest man in the kingdom. In the whole world.
Even Queen Elizabeth I knew his name and sought his talents for her Court entertainment.
And he was an undercover agent for the Crown to support himself, traveling abroad on secret missions, seeing Europe in the throes of a Renaissance, via his social contacts meeting the most important world intellectuals and scientists of the day, circulating with the finest minds of the country and of all Europe, some of whom where developing the movement towards reason and away from religious superstition, ideas which would grow to catalyze the Enlightenment in the following century.
Marlowe had talent and he had acclaim and he was developing power. And he was still a young man of only 26 or so.
Marlowe was also the brightest of them all in the entire nation. He was a revolutionary thinker and he was untamable. He could move the masses with his theater plays, he could make them think and feel anything he desired. And that gave him power. Because he could move the masses to action. In a dangerously unstable political time.
Marlowe believed in truth, as all young artists do, and he could not stand ignorance or superstition. He was a former theology student who had come to believe in reason over religious superstition. That placed him in political opposition to religious power, which was an extremely powerful court faction in Elizabethan England.
Some of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare were written in this period, this was a period of literary and personal transformation for Shakespeare-Marlowe. He emerges from it with Edward II ready to be produced under the Marlowe name, but with the other Shakespeare plays which follow (including Hamlet) not yet ready for the stage. During this period his previously written Marlowe plays are repeatedly staged to grand success.
Over time Marlowe's boundless theatrical and literary success, and his popular acclaim, led him to to express his power with overconfidence. It was a young man's misjudgment, an error seen over and over throughout history, a mistake with a dimension of Shakespearean tragedy to it; that young men do not yet grasp just how political power is maintained.
Marlowe made enemies among the religious power elite of the court. He thought himself beyond their reach. He was the greatest poet in the history of mankind, and he was celebrated and admired by all. The theater crowds showered him with applause. He believed the religious-political powers could not harm him.
And as Marlowe matured towards a greater consciousness he began to speak out for enlightenment and reason, which meant speaking out against religion and the church. This is why he was charged with atheism by religious factions, atheism then meant a belief in reason rather than superstition. It did not mean atheism as we define it today. And Marlowe's ideas threatened the enormous power of the Elizabethan church.
But Marlowe did not fully realize the entrenched power of the church faction in the government and the Court until it was too late. He assumed his talent and his illustrious connections among aristocratic lords, intellectual giants and powerful spymasters would protect him.
And so he did not guard his tongue. And he did not exercise caution in his choice of play subjects. And his ability to move the masses made Queen Elizabeth herself uncomfortable. She presided over a government historically torn between Reformation and Rome. It had only been 55 years since her father Henry VIII broke the English Church away from Rome, a reformation which had torn the country apart in religious division. Elizabeth I was a queen who was always guarding a balance of power.
And Marlowe spoke out so much, and consorted with such revolutionary intellectuals that he made religious enemies so powerful that they could not be fully resisted, not without endangering the political stability of the Court.
And so he was sacrificed by the Crown. He was favored and admired and so he was protected from torture and execution and instead sent into exile. But he could not be kept living safely in London.
His intellectual and literary genius had destroyed him. What nurtured him, had destroyed him, just as his personal Latin motto eerily foreshadowed.
And so it was that Christopher Marlowe lived a Shakespearean tragedy.
Shakespeare-Marlowe In Banishment.
Marlowe left London with a number of the Shakespeare plays already in progress. In the previous 4 years he had only staged one (or perhaps two) new plays, and this play, Edward II, was early in a transitioning style. One of the plays in progress which he took with him was Hamlet.
Marlowe appears to have spent a good deal of his exile based in Italy, possibly initially under the local protection of the illustrious family Gonzaga, Dukes and rulers of Mantua, who were extremely wealthy and known for sympathetically harboring fugitive artists. The family is respectfully mentioned by name (as Gonzago), in the play Hamlet, which was probably one of Marlowe's first plays (re)written in exile.
It appears that Marlowe's sudden exile was traumatic for him. He fell far, from the very pinnacle of the London social world into a remote foreign isolation. Apparently with only a month or so of warning.
And this exile was permanent, with no hope of return. Marlowe was officially dead in London. This was the only political deal that could be made, and so there was no possibility that he could be forgiven and suddenly turn up alive, since this would then declare Queen Elizabeth to be a liar. Whatever else happened, Marlowe the famous dramatist was dead forever.
Ironically it is this trauma and exile which brought the world the great humanist Shakespeare. Immediately Marlowe went into exile his development as a writer began to accelerate towards maturity and he quickly reached literary and humanistic heights he had never before achieved. The banishment and exile itself greatly influenced his writing. With the trauma of exile the boy is stripped away from him and the man is revealed.
In exile Marlowe drew upon European literature and folk tales for his literary sources, which were then transformed into English theater drama.
It appears that Marlowe spent a good deal of his time in Italy writing, as inferred by his prolific output. Doubtless he also spent time in the livelier cities and probably lived in Venice. Doubtless also sought the company of his intellectual peers. Perhaps even in the company of Galileo in Padua, since there is some indication of Marlowe's Galilean knowledge of the heavens in some of the Shakespeare-Marlowe plays. Both men were the same age.
There is no indication yet of Shakespeare-Marlowe under the recent Italian influence of Giovanni Bruno, who was in both Venice and Padua after 1591, before he was jailed in Rome for heresy, a similar charge which was Marlowe's downfall in London. As a young man in London, Marlowe probably knew Bruno and may have been influenced by his ideas during Bruno's years in London, when Bruno was well respected in Marlowe's intellectual circle. These are the roots of both the Enlightenment, and also Marlowe's alienation from the religious power of the church.
There are some indications however that Marlowe may also have spent time in France and Spain. He appears to haev spoken both these languages fluently and drawn upon their literary sources.
And so Marlowe in exile appears to have spent his time writing a great deal, probably living in Venice and perhaps traveling in Europe. Also profoundly missing England, as the texts of the Shakespeare plays show repeatedly. Shakespeare-Marlowe was a deeply patriotic writer, and he longed for the country which had lauded him in his youth and given him great honors before turning upon him.
Exactly what else Marlowe did during his relatively long life must now be fully explored by academics. He was a genius on the loose for 12-18 years in Renaissance Europe. He had money and friends and more imagination than anyone. His reputation as a genius was surely widespread in cultured European circles.
What else did he get up to during his long exile? Contemporaneously Cervantes was creating the novel, Galileo was changing the scientific conception of the world, and the ideas of the Enlightenment were spreading among the European intellectual elite as reason slowly took hold over the superstitions of religion.
It is unlikely that a dynamic, erudite and well-connected man like Marlowe was sitting in Italy doing nothing except writing the whole time. Marlowe was a highly social man when he lived in London.
Even before he went into exile he was a central figure in a circle of intellectuals who were sowing the first seeds of the European Enlightenment. Via the Raleigh Circle and Giordano Bruno, (a substantial character in Doctor Faustus is named Bruno), Marlowe was connected to intellectuals and revolutionary scientists all over Europe. It is possible that Christopher Marlowe in exile was up to a very great deal.
The Return Of Shakespeare-Marlowe From Exile.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, and the ascent of King James I to the English throne there emerged a new possibility for a pardon for Shakespeare-Marlowe. He had now been in banishment for more than 10 years, a long time in Elizabethan England when the average life expectancy of a man living in London was only 35 years.
In 1604 the death of the man who probably was Marlowe's prime religious prosecutor, John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, by chance also Marlowe's hometown, may have begun to clear the way for Marlowe to return to England.
Marlowe was now a more important dramatist than ever in the London theater. By now he had as many as 20-25 successful plays staged under the names of Marlowe and Shakespeare together. Thanks to his literary efforts his theater company were now officially The King's Men, the most favored theater company in the land, enjoying the King's personal patronage.
The submissions for Marlowe's pardon appear to have begun immediately the new King settled on the throne, even before 1605 the play the London Prodigal was performed by Marlowe's theater troupe for the King, and subsequently published (erroneously, perhaps deliberately), in the name of Shakespeare. The play is a plea for a pardon for a wayward youth and a message of repentance from the son of a mature man named Kit, who has come to London from Venice. (Read more on The London Prodigal play elsewhere on this site.)
The play The Tempest is believed to have been written in 1610-11, and is generally accepted as being Shakespeare-Marlowe's last play. The reason for this belief is that in the play the hero states he will now put his instrument/pen down and no longer perform 'magic'.
This is an odd statement for a 46 year old writer to make, while still far from the exhaustion of his creative powers.
It is the kind of statement a writer might make in exchange for a pardon and the chance to return to England, perhaps under an agreement that he will write no more plays. Otherwise how could he know that this would be his last play?
He could only know this with such certainty at 46 years old if faced with death by illness, or cessation of writing by agreement.
The evidence indicates that is was more likely the latter than the former. That Marlowe was allowed to return to England incognito, provided he wrote no more plays.
Shakespeare-Marlowe Back In England
And so, one way or another, for perhaps the last ten years of his life, Shakespeare-Marlowe was probably back in England. This would perhaps be from the years 1612-1613 on approximately, perhaps even earlier. At the end of an exile lasting 12-20 years.
And what he was doing in England was preparing all his plays for the publication of the First Folio.
There is much evidence to suggest that there was a good deal of final rewriting done for the First Folio publication, not least the sudden appearance of 18 completely new and unknown plays, all of them in manuscript. Some of them his most famous plays which do not exist in any other published versions.
Marlowe now edited and prepared the First Folio, with his lifelong friends who published it.
The actor William Shakespeare was dispatched back to Stratford into 'retirement'. Immediately before he left London in 1613, he mysteriously purchased a gatehouse next to the Blackfriars Theater, where the King's Men theatrical company worked. This house was probably for Marlowe to live in, while he took on duties at the theater. The house was purchased by the actor William Shakespeare under extremely abnormal terms of deed ownership, which included that it could not be passed on in his own will, apparently confirming that he did not actually own it.
It is possible that Marlowe working incognito at the Blackfriars Theater is the source of certain claimed Shakespeare collaborations after this date. Perhaps Marlowe could not write his own plays by his agreement with the Crown, but there is no reason that he could not help out another writer here and there, as long as it was uncredited.
I am not however convinced of the legitimacy of any of these claimed collaborations. Shakespeare-Marlowe was not the type of writer who needed nor desired collaborators. He was the kind of writer who already had too many personal and unsurpassed ideas of his own. And he now had the power to prevent interference in his works by anyone else. I am satisfied that the First Folio represents the authentic, whole and complete Shakespeare canon as Shakespeare-Marlowe wished to present it for all time.
It is not impossible though that he may have given plot suggestions and perhaps even scenes to friends writing for the King's Men. Thus we see hints of Shakespearean ideas here and there in the works of other lesser writers. This would have been part of his job at the theater with the King's Men, to get new plays ready to perform, and he could not write them himself under threat from the Crown. Marlowe had already had experienced more than enough Crown punishment in his life.
And so Shakespeare-Marlowe may have lived discreetly and anonymously in London, his identity known only to this close friends, working at the theater, living at the Blackfriars gatehouse and preparing his own plays for publishing in the First Folio. By now he would have been a fairly rich man, having been a highly valued shareholder in the theater company for twenty years already.
There is some subtle indication that Shakespeare-Marlowe may have died during the actual publication of the First Folio, which was at the printers from 1621-23. Something seems to have delayed the process for nearly a year, it is my (wild) speculation that this may have been the death of Shakespeare-Marlowe at the age of approximately 58.
Alternatively there is a an unsubstantiated letter offering evidence that Marlowe died in Italy in 1627. In this case he still edited the First Folio, probably via personal visits to London. Or perhaps he returned to live in London and ultimately left again to return to Italy. Doubtless he had made some kind of a romantic/family life in Italy during the long years of his exile. Shakespeare-Marlowe was unquestionably a man who respected and adored love.
At this time all of this new history is merely speculation, although it does fit the facts of Marlowe's imposture and exile as I have come to understand them during the last two years.
I've created this wild and undavised speculation in the hope of providing some basic new directions for future academic research.
Only careful research and time will reveal the truth of it all.
