History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe

What is more, Stephen Gosson was once again showing the way. He had begun to write plays. None has survived, but the author Francis Meres ranked him ‘the best for pastoral’, and Gosson himself mentions a tragedy, Cataline’s Conspiracy, a comedy, Captain Mario, and a moral play, Praise at Parting. According to Gosson, it was Cataline’s Conspiracy that Marlowe was first to see, when he was ten, in 1574 – the year that ‘diverse strange impressions of fire and smoke’ appeared in the night skies over Canterbury, and the heavens seemed to burn ‘marvellously ragingly’, with flames that rose from the horizon and met overhead, ‘and did double and roll in one another, as if it had been in a clear furnace’. It was a magnificent display of the aurora borealis, but to the impressionable Christopher it seemed a portent. If Stephen could do it, so could he.

The King’s School, when Christopher finally made it there in 1578, greatly improved his formal education and unlike his earlier schools it also gave him the freedom and opportunity to strut his hour or two upon a stage. Like the grander English public schools, The King’s School had a lively tradition of performance. The acting of plays there was not only well established, but during Marlowe’s lifetime even threatened to get a little out of hand as ‘playing had become such an accomplished diversion among the schoolboys that it posed a problem of discipline’. The boys were renowned for Christmas entertainments in the cathedral, ‘settynge furthe of Tragedies, Comedyes, and interludes’ in costumes that involved considerable expenditure – the headmaster one year receiving an astonishing £14 6s 8d for Christmas plays. Their efforts at least once so impressed some passing professionals that they ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ to run away and join their troupe, promising them a princely £4 a year in earnings, and later again inveigled the boy players ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’ – far more tempting than the school plays, which were performed in Latin and Greek, but Christopher resisted.

Like Stephen Gosson, Christopher aimed at university, and on writing plays rather than acting in them. But in 1578, university was barely within his reach. At his new school he embarked upon more complex Latin grammar, later voyaging into Greek and the deeper waters of prose and poetry, before casting up on the rocks of rhetoric. Mere learning was not enough, ‘rhetoric’ helped translate language into persuasive action. He had to recognise rhetorical forms and devices used by the ancients, to master the skills of clear expression and to discriminate between good and bad style. He had also to learn how to make links between history and present behaviour. As Richard Grenewey, who translated Tacitus in the 1590s, put it: ‘History [is] the treasure of times past, as well as a guide an image of man’s present estate: a true and lively pattern of things to come, [and], as some term it, the workmistress of experience …’. So Christopher read the poets and the historians – the chaste bits at least – of Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Plautus and Horace; Sallust, Cicero, Caesar, Martial, Juvenal and Livy, and also such moderns as Erasmus and Baptista Mantua. In his final year he would have had to deliver several formal declamations.

Like Stephen before him he was a day boy, starting school at six in the morning with prayers and psalm-singing in the cathedral, before passing back under ‘the Dark Entry’, the low passage between the cloisters and the school, to his lessons (cf. ‘There’s a dark entry where they take it in …’, The Jew of Malta iii 4). Money was deducted from his scholarship allowance to pay for lunch at school: breast of mutton, according to one kitchen account, with peas and prunes; fish every Friday, and salt fish and herring during Lent. The cobbler’s boy from St George’s parish began to make friends above his station – like Samuel Kennet. Sam and Kit were new boys together and left school in the same year. Sam’s father had served in the royal households of both Henry VIII and the present queen, and his great-great-grandfather had been standard-bearer to Henry V at Agincourt. He had Kit enthralled with family stories of knights and the glory of England, and was even more awe-inspiring for his glittering treasure of first-hand tales of court life.

Now that he was rubbing doublets with the gentry, Kit had to brush up on his manners. The instructions to young Francis – the French boy he encountered in the language book he had used with Oliver’s father – would have helped: use a napkin, not your hand to wipe your mouth; don’t touch food that you are not going to eat yourself; don’t lean on the table (‘Did you learne to eat in a hogstie?’); clean your own knife and put it back in its sheath (forks were not yet widely used in England); don’t pick your teeth with your penknife (use a ‘tooth-picke of quill or wood’); and be sure not to get your sleeves in the fat.

And as Christopher had done with Stephen Gosson, so Oliver tagged along with Christopher at every free moment. Records are scanty, but documents in the Bernhardt Institute collection help build up a picture of the two boys at the time. An ‘apprisement of suche goodes as were Mr Oliver Laurens’s’ (dated 1609), made after his death, includes a list of books, some of which must date back to his boyhood.* (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Nowels Catechismes one in Latin, one in Englishe’ and ‘Luciana dialogi Latini et hist’, which has an annotation in a different, unidentified hand, revealing that Oliver was taught Latin as a child by ‘the atheist Marloe’. If the Lucian indeed included The True History, then the boys at least had some fantasising fun during their after-hours lessons, as the book claims to describe a journey to the moon. Dr Rosine cites an account of Oliver taking Christopher to worship at a Huguenot chapel, and we find Christopher getting into trouble when he ‘solde his poyntes’ to a scrivener in exchange for teaching Oliver to write – ‘poyntes’ were tagged laces for tying doublet to hose. These were apparently special silver-tipped ones given to Christopher by Sir Roger Manwood. This account was in a copy of a deposition by the ever-litigious John Marlowe, though the case is surprisingly absent from Canterbury records.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Christopher spent just two years at The King’s School. In 1580 – not quite in the footsteps of Stephen Gosson, who had gone to Oxford – he was promised a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His voice as well as his learning had got him there. The scholarship, one in a long line established by Archbishop Parker, himself Master of Corpus Christi from 1544 to 1553, had been set out in the archbishop’s will and provided for a scholar of The King’s School who was Canterbury born and bred. It required that:

. . . schollers shal and must at the time of their election be so entered into the skill of song as that they shall at first sight solf [sing to the sol-fa syllables] and sing plaine song. And they shalbe of the best and aptest schollers well instructed in their grammer and if it may be such as can make a verse.

Young Christopher could do all that, and well. Even at the age of sixteen he could ‘make a verse’ better than the rest. With the scholarship, he had almost reached the peak of the first ‘high Pyramide’ he had set himself to scale, in a climb that had begun the day that Stephen Gosson had walked into John Marlowe’s shop to buy new shoes for school.

Stephen’s life, however, had suddenly and radically changed course. He had failed to take his degree, had hived off to London to write plays, and now, suddenly, in the year before Marlowe went up to Cambridge, had done a complete about-face and published the Schoole of Abuse, one of the most vituperative anti-theatre diatribes of the time, railing on (once he had finished with the evils of plays and players) against the decay of the English spirit. According to Gosson’s Alchemist pamphlet, Marlowe was deeply affected by the book, and had, by the time he went up to university, become a Puritan. His friendship with Sam Kennet, who was about to embark upon his career as ‘the most terrible Puritan’ in the Tower, would seem to bear this out. But even if this is so, it was not a state of grace that was to last very long. The prods and tugs of Kit’s new fortune would propel him in alarming new directions. The boy who had thought: ‘That like I best that flies beyond my reach’ was about to stretch himself further than he had ever done before. In 1580 – the year in which earthquakes shook England, setting church bells pealing unaided, and a blazing star appeared in Pisces – Kit Marlin (as he had started to style himself) sloughed off Canterbury and set out for Cambridge.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e7a829ff-65a7-50f5-83e6-62996689886e)

Une Histoire Inventée (#ulink_e7a829ff-65a7-50f5-83e6-62996689886e)

Sir Francis Walsingham, the English ambassador who had been so appalled by the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was back in England by the time Kit left Canterbury, and an increasingly potent force in foreign affairs. Elizabeth had made him Secretary of State the year after the massacre and knighted him four years later. He had been involved with Lord Burghley’s spies for years. Now he himself was beginning to throw out the first strands of a net of espionage that he was to knot, weave and twitch for the rest of his life. A silent, labouring spider, he spun his web to snare his enemies and serve his Queen. It obsessed him. So much so that he sunk his personal fortune into it and died in poverty.

Sir Francis was a thin man. He held himself straight, and his beard was perfectly clipped and combed. He had the sort of mouth that settles naturally into a slight downward curve, and eyes that seemed to show permanent, personal moral disapproval. His Queen called him her ‘Moor’, perhaps because of his reputation for scheming (attributed variously in Elizabethan times to Moors or Jews), coupled with his swarthy complexion and a fondness for wearing black. The historian William Camden labelled him ‘a sharp maintainer of the purer religion’, a fervent Protestant, if not a Puritan, who dedicated himself to the exposure of Catholic plots against the realm and believed ‘that devilish woman’ Mary, Queen of Scots, was a danger as long as she lived. Under the Catholic Mary Stuart he had fled England to study at the tolerant University of Padua, and was fluent in both Italian and French. In foreign affairs he was an ardent interventionist, advocating aggressively anti-Catholic policies. In this he was opposed to the conservative Lord Treasurer Lord Burghley, and by the Queen herself, who was unwilling to be drawn into a Protestant crusade that might unite Spain and France with Scotland, against her. But Elizabeth was certain of one thing about her ‘Moor’: only death would end his consuming loyalty. ‘Mr Secretary’ would adoringly, doggedly, dutifully perform her will, even if he disagreed. Disagreement was allowed. Sir Francis fearlessly argued his position, driving his monarch to outbursts of screaming fury, but, once a course was settled, he was a servant of the Queen, not an adviser.

The issue that most exercised Elizabeth, Lord Burghley, Sir Francis and his fellow hawk, the Queen’s current favourite, the Earl of Leicester, was the situation in the Low Countries, then the main battleground between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe. In 1572, the same year as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Protestant Dutch had seized part of their territories back from the occupying Spanish. After the Dutch Revolt, the northern provinces (roughly approximating to the Netherlands of today) had united in a Protestant bloc, while the southern part (much of which is now Belgium) was still controlled by Catholic Spain, which also ruled over much of Italy and had ambitions in France and England. Whilst the United Provinces in the north declared their independence, forces led by the Duke of Parma were conducting an increasingly successful reconquest of the Low Countries from the south. Walsingham and Leicester pressed for military intervention: in the Low Countries to help William of Orange against the Spanish, and in France to assist the Huguenots in their struggle against the pro-Spanish Guisards. If England did not help, reasoned the interventionists, this brought the prospect of direct Spanish invasion of the island even closer. The Queen demurred, and was supported in her reluctance by moderates, such as Lord Burghley, that ever-adroit, politically pliable kinsman of Eleanor Bull, a man who had served under both Catholic and Protestant queens, who carried a copy of Cicero and the Protestant Prayer Book in his pocket, but at home kept a certificate signed by the vicar of Wimbledon, proving he had attended Catholic mass under Mary, just in case.

In 1578 Elizabeth had further complicated matters by entering into negotiations for marriage to François, Duke of Anjou, hoping, it seems, to ensure French help against the Spanish, and put a brake on those of her ministers pressurising for English involvement in the Low Countries. Though the duke was a Catholic, anti-Spanish feeling was feasibly strong enough for the French to be persuaded to aid the Dutch rebels, allowing England to side-step the conflict. In 1581, after some years of uncertainty, Elizabeth announced her intention to go ahead with the marriage. This horrified Walsingham, and caused alarm among the Protestant populace, who feared the consequences of a marriage to a Catholic prince (they had been down that road before with Mary I), and that England might become a satellite to a foreign Catholic power. So back home Elizabeth was having to prove her Protestant credentials. And the proof came in the persecution. Execution of Catholic priests began in 1577 and increased sharply from 1581. The Recusancy Act of 1581 upped penalties for absence from church services to £20 a month (about 500 times a workman’s daily wage).

What was guaranteed to unite Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham was the belief that English Catholics were involved in an international popish plot to overthrow the Queen. There were indeed plots to kill Elizabeth, to assist foreign invasion, and to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. Catholicism became defiant, dangerous, extreme – and, perhaps just for those reasons, alluring to hot-headed young men. In the very year that Kit began at Cambridge, Jesuits from abroad had set up a network there to recruit students to the faith.

Such were the political winds that were blowing as Kit Marlin trudged, through biting winter air from Saffron Walden, on the last leg of his journey to Cambridge. But Rome’s ‘wicked ways’ offered no allure to the conservative, puritanical, sixteen-year-old who arrived at Bene’t College – as Corpus Christi was then known – just after Christmas in 1580. It had been a long and arduous journey, and he immediately spent 1d on a meal, just enough for a little ale and a warming pottage (winter vegetables boiled with eggs, milk, saffron and a scraping of ginger) and perhaps, given the season, a mince pie made with mutton, beef suet, ‘various kinds of Spicery’ (nutmeg, mace cinnamon, depending on what could be afforded), orange and lemon peel, and perhaps a dash of ‘sack’ (sherry). His expenditure is recorded in the college buttery book, a patchily extant record of what students spent on food and drink, which together with the college account books give us an idea of Kit’s movements during his years at Cambridge.

Just getting started at Bene’t was an expensive business. The account books record ‘Marlin’ as paying a heavy 3s 4d as an admission fee to the college, and he also had to find 4d for the college gatekeeper (followed by another 4d when he was officially admitted as a scholar). To make matters worse, Christopher Pashley, his predecessor as Canterbury scholar, was tardy in packing his bags, and it was not until May that Kit Marlin officially took up the scholarship and matriculated. Just how he survived during these expensive first months is unclear; no doubt he was admitted on the strength of the scholarship that was to come, but somebody seems to have been supporting him. Perhaps Sir Roger Manwood once again came to the rescue, ascertaining a well-made Latin epitaph from the clever young man who could already ‘make a verse’ better than his contemporaries.

Kit joined the other two Canterbury scholars, Robert Thexton and Thomas Leugar, in a small chamber that had been converted from a ‘stoare house’ in the north-west corner of what is now Corpus Christi’s Old Court. He was a lanky youth, with the sort of shining, marble-white skin that seems visibly to tingle; and sparkling, sun-bright eyes, part flint, part green (a besotted elderly Fellow has left us a record).* (#litres_trial_promo) We know from Stephen Gosson that even as a child Kit had a ‘sharp-provided wit’, and at Bene’t he impressed immediately with his ‘nimble mind’ and ‘retorts dextrous’. He also made a mark with his consumption of ale. Will Dukenfield, the malmsey-nosed tavern keeper of the Eagle & Childe (now the Eagle), two steps and a stumble from the Bene’t College gate, in his very old age remembered young Marlin as being addicted to ‘wine, women and watching [staying up all night]’ and ‘sitting at good ale, swilling and carousing’ all day long. Dukenfield’s recollection is itself no doubt ale-washed and subject to a certain lack of focus, so we cannot really be certain of its veracity, much less pinpoint it in time, and it should be noted that all this was reported by Dukenfield’s grandson many years after Marlowe and the flame-faced old tavern-keeper himself had died.† (#litres_trial_promo)

However, quite soon after arriving in Cambridge Kit’s puritanical carapace was starting to crack. Initially, part of his attraction to the university, and to Bene’t College especially, had been its Puritan reputation. Bene’t was pre-eminently a Puritan college. Dr Aldrich, the Master until just five years before Kit arrived, was a leading partisan supporting the Puritan Thomas Cartwright, who had famously clashed with Bishop Whitgift, and been deprived of the chair of Divinity. Robert Browne, the founder of the ‘Brownists’, the forerunners of Congregationalism, completed his degree there in 1576, and had preached without licence in St Benet’s church in 1580. The church, which doubled as a college chapel, was well within earshot of Kit’s room. He had swapped the noise of the St George’s great waking bell, for the regular toll of St Benet’s (cf. ‘The triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure; or the bells of Saint Bennet, sir, may put you in mind – one, two, three’, Twelfth Night V i 34–5).

Kit held his scholarship for the full course of six years, to Masters degree level, rather than for the four-year bachelor of arts degree. (An MA ordinarily took seven years, which probably explains why he had to find some other sort of funding for the first few months.) Under the terms of Archbishop Parker’s scholarship, which aimed at staffing the established church, this meant that he had said that he would be taking holy orders. Either young Kit was sincerely intent on life as a clergyman – be it Protestant or Puritan – or he was showing a cool Machiavellian approach to getting the best education he could. However it was not unknown for other young men in similar situations to change their minds about religion. Stephen Gosson had abandoned playwriting in favour of railing against the sins of the theatre, and later entered the church; his friend Sam Kennet, who was already terrorising Catholic prisoners as yeoman warder in the Tower of London, would before Kit had finished his degree be converted to Rome. And Kit soon discovered that at Cambridge, in addition to ‘minds of the pure religion’, there was a knot of rebellious, rather clever young men who deplored what the poet John Donne (whose time there overlapped in part with Kit’s) called the ‘plain, simple, sullen, young, contemptuous’ features of Puritanism. One of this clutch of rebels was Thomas Nashe, a bright, skinny, boyish student who came up to St John’s College within a couple years of Kit entering Bene’t; he would soon become his close friend and collaborator. But even before he met Thomas Nashe, Kit’s perspectives were shifting.

Ours is not the only era in which young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty are ambitious, kick against fortune and convention, question their lot, and reinvent themselves a thousandfold. It is clear that Kit Marlin, at the tumultuous age of seventeen, was developing his own style, and a bit of a swagger – according to Gosson, the cobbler’s eldest son was becoming a ‘malapert [impudent] full-mouth, breathing defiance’.* (#litres_trial_promo) And there are hints that, during his first months at Bene’t, Kit was rudderless and malcontent. Part of the reason for this had to do with his status. Even more than at that ‘seminary for gentlemen’, The King’s School, he now found himself exposed to the nobility and upper classes. Archbishop Cranmer had argued when re-founding The King’s School that it was ‘through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge, for that most part, [that] all gentle [men] ascend to their estate’. Tudor humanists, the historian John Adamson points out, had for some time been arguing that learning, manners and deportment were no less conferrers of gentlemanly virtues than noble lineage. Kit felt this keenly, but at Cambridge social rank was structured and glaring. The sons of the nobility and gentry were counselled to ‘Consort yourself with gentlemen of your own rank and quality.’ Though some students ostentatiously glittered, others were dismally poor. On the one hand were rich young blades such as Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who spent a mighty £7 on refurbishing his room at Trinity College, putting extra glass in the windows and buying wall hangings for his study; on the other were those like the wretched youth who owned little more than ‘a thinne Chest’, a hat, a hooded gown, a chair, one pair of hose, an old shirt, a meatknife, eight books, a lute, three sheets, and ‘a very old Blankett’. Kit fell somewhere in between. College records place the new scholar ‘Marlin’ in the convictus secundus, the ‘second list’ of students who were neither poor ‘sizars’, who had to perform menial tasks for other students (such as cleaning and waiting at table) to pay their way – the fate of a cobbler’s son, had it not been for the Parker Scholarship – nor ‘fellow-commoners’, rich boys like Essex, whose parents filled pockets and college coffers with gold, who dined at the Fellows’ table, and who were generally allowed to proceed to their degrees without the bothersome intervention of examinations.

For Kit, certain of his intellectual superiority, this social inferiority smarted. John Bakeless reads this resentment into lines from Hero and Leander. ‘And to this day is every scholar poor,/Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor’, and you can hear Kit’s frustration in the lament: ‘Alas, I am a scholar!/How should I have gold?/All that I have is but my stipend … /Which is no sooner receiv’d but it is spent’ (The Massacre at Paris I vii 18–20). At first, it would seem, he tried rather foolishly to buy himself into favour. Urry notes that ‘Marlin’s’ expenditure in his second week at college was a lavish 3s 1½d, an amount he never again equalled, not even in his heady final years, and a huge extravagance for someone who was supposed to be getting by on a shilling a week. But Kit soon realised that conspicuous consumption or headlong hospitality (whatever it was that demanded such spending) was pointless, and instead fell back on a more sustainable resource: his ‘ingenuity’. He reacted to this world of gentlemen who demanded deference and respect, with pride, rebellion and a deployment of ready wit – a response he would recall years later when he wrote Edward II:

. . . you must cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman.

’Tis not a black coat and a little band,

A velvet-cap’d cloak, fac’d before with serge,

And smelling to a nosegay all the day,

Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

Or saying long grace at table’s end,

Or making low legs to a nobleman,

Or looking downward with your eyelids close,

And saying ‘Truly, an’t may please your honour,’

Can you get any favour with great men.

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

(Edward II II i 30–42)

It was not deference that would get you high friends and favour, it was spark. Not for Kit the making of low legs to noblemen, the downcast eyes and ‘May it please your honour’. He was proud and resolutely cocky, but a charmer. The lanky lad with a sharp wit and a ready retort made friends easily, even, it soon became clear, across social barriers that were not usually breached. The stabbing part (‘now and then stab’) was to come later.

At the same time Kit shed his Puritanism. What replaced it? A curious and previously unnoted interlude in his first year at Bene’t gives us a clue. Urry hints at it when he reveals that: ‘In 1581 one William Peeters, during Marlowe’s absence, was granted Marlowe’s food, which was charged against him in his absence …’. Other biographers have simply let this pass, but what young Kit got up to in those weeks has a curious link with the murder in Deptford twelve years later, and casts some light on the course his life was taking. People he met during this short absence from Cambridge were one day completely to redirect his life. The evidence lies in two unexpected places: an archive in Belgium, and the Vatican.* (#litres_trial_promo)

William (or Willem) Peeters was from Flanders. An erstwhile student of the University of Leiden, he arrived in Cambridge as an ‘instrumentalist’ with a group of travelling players. This is not unprecedented. Strolling troupes did pass through the town, and foreign musicians were not uncommon. Two broad types of theatre were performed at the university in Kit’s time. The colleges staged performances as instructive academic exercises, mostly in Latin, sometimes in Greek, and occasionally venturing lighter fare in English; wilder, wickeder and more exciting drama came in the form of comedies and satires performed by commercial players. The authorities frequently tried to discourage such wanton revels. Lord Leicester’s Men, whom Kit had already seen perform in Canterbury, had been prevented from performing in Cambridge in 1579. The following year, Lord Burghley, who was chancellor of the university, recommended that his son-in-law the Earl of Oxford’s men come to Cambridge. Though the company had just performed for the Queen, the vice-chancellor politely scotched Burghley’s request, pleading the dangers of plague at public assemblies, and sniffily stating that commencement (the time of conferring degrees) was upon them and this ‘requireth rather diligence in stodie than dissoluteness in playes’. Even the Queen’s Men, three years later, were sent off with a payment of 50 shillings for not performing, ‘forbidding theim to playe in the towne & so ridd theim cleane away’.

But other troupes did perform, and English plays were becoming wildly popular with student actors too. We know that Gammer Gurton’s Needle was performed at Christ’s College and the lively satire Tarrarantantara wowed audiences more than once at Clare. At Trinity, Kit and Thomas Nashe enjoyed Pedantius, which scoffed at the Puritan Gabriel Harvey, who was a Fellow of Trinity Hall and a mutual enemy of theirs. The players mimicked Harvey’s mannerisms perfectly and, said Nashe, ‘delineated [him] from the soale of the foote to the crowne of head’. Another play, Duns Furens so lambasted ‘the little Minnow his Brother’ Richard Harvey that, according to Nashe, ‘Dick came and broke the Colledge glasse windows’, and was put in the stocks till the show was over, and for most of the next night too. Furious fenestraclasm seems to have been a favourite mode of dramatic critique. In 1583 Trinity paid ‘for lv foot of newe glasse in the hall after the playes’, and subsequent to that took the precaution of ‘taking downe and setting vp the glasse wyndowes’ for the duration, while St John’s paid for ‘nettes to hange before the windowes of ye Halle’, before giving up on such flimsy protection and following Trinity’s lead. ‘Stage-keepers’, sometimes armed and often equipped with visors and steel caps, were employed to try to keep order. But audience participation remained energetic. Sir John Harington, who was a ‘truantly scholar’ at King’s around 1580, noted that the antics of the stage-keepers often made matters worse, as they went up and down ‘with vizors and lights, puffing and thrusting, and keeping out all men so precisely, till all the town is drawn by this revel to the place; and at last, tag and rag, fresh men and sub-sizers, and all be packed in together so thick, as now is scant left room for the prologue to come upon the stage’.

In the Bene’t college accounts for 1581, we find a payment of 10d ‘made to one Lamb and Porter’ ‘for making houses at the Comaedie’ and another ‘In Largeis to the Actors for a Beaver [visor]’. Was this perhaps the company William Peeters was with, unused to rumbustious Cambridge audiences, and having to provide themselves with a ‘stagekeeper’? Certainly Peeters joined a company of English players in Leiden early in 1581, and was back at the university in late 1582.* (#litres_trial_promo) Printed bills announcing English players are mentioned in a Dutch document from 1565, and organised groups of professional players from England became increasingly common on the Continent from the 1580s onwards. The troupes managed to travel through war zones, and indeed accompanied military leaders, sometimes appearing to perform for soldiers and citizens on both sides of the conflict. Such troupes would play an important part in Kit’s life over the next few years.

Just how Kit made contact with William Peeters is uncertain, though it is conceivable that his prowess with the Dutch language, picked up in Canterbury, provided the introduction, or possibly it was his interest in drama. It would certainly seem that despite the implicit reprimand he had received reading his friend Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, Kit’s enthusiasm for the theatre was very much alive. He was quickly giving up on Stephen’s Puritanism. ‘Will not a filthy play,’ ranted a Puritan preacher, ‘with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred?’ That, for the future playwright, was precisely the attraction.

Obscurity surrounds the arrangement Kit made with Peeters, but whatever it was, it would appear to have had the blessing of the college authorities. Students were supposed to stay up at university full time, though with permission they could absent themselves for four weeks a year. The malapert Marlin appears to have persuaded the college to allow a similar arrangement to that practised by students at the Inns of Court, who would pay someone else to be at the meals that were a compulsory part of attendance requirements.† (#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps he convinced them that he could benefit from a period of study at Leiden, temporarily taking Peeters’s vacated place, and thus effecting one of the world’s first ever student exchanges. Certainly the famous university at Padua welcomed a great many foreign students, often from middling or lower ranks, who did not register officially for the ‘studium’, but followed courses of study on an informal basis for a short period of time. Perhaps Marlin convinced the authorities that he was going to do the same at Leiden. In any event, the college tolerated his absence, and charged him for Peeters’s meals. But Leiden was not his destination. In the late summer of 1581, he was in France.

We get glimpses only of Kit on his first journey abroad. It would seem that he travelled with the players as a musician – most likely a ‘singing-man’ – and under Peeters’s name. This was daring, but would have obviated the need for a passport. The English, unless they were merchants, had to obtain a licence to travel to foreign countries. This was issued by a court official or nobleman, and often had conditions attached, such as strictures on visiting Rome or other places where there were Catholic seminaries. A similar arrangement existed for troupes of players moving around the Continent, where local notables or city fathers would provide them with written permission to proceed, and sometimes a promise of protection along the way. The passport issued to Will Ireland and his troupe still included Peeters’s name at the time when he was eating Marlin’s meals in Bene’t (see Appendix I). In an age with no photographs, it was simple enough for Kit, an accomplished linguist, to assume the persona of the Fleming, and head off on an expenses-paid adventure. Such flits happened. The players that ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ of the King’s School ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’, lured them with promises of good earnings. A letter from one J. Beaulieu to William Trumbull, the English envoy at the court at Brussels, requested: ‘I send you a note of my Lord Deny for the finding of a certain youth of his, who hath been debauched from him by certain players, and is now with them at Brussels’. Kit, obviously, did not want to relinquish his scholarship, nor to travel with the players forever – hence his contrivance with Peeters and dissembling of college authorities – but it is clear that the twin lures of theatre and travel were irresistible to him, even at this stage.

The players were heading for Paris, in all likelihood following in the train of a diplomatic mission sent to discuss the marriage between Queen Elizabeth and François, Duke of Alençon (later Duke of Anjou), the Queen having just announced her intention of marrying the French prince. Whether or not she meant this is unclear, but she sent a reluctant representative, Sir Francis Walsingham, to Paris to negotiate the match. He was also charged with carefully putting together an Anglo-French treaty intended to muzzle Spanish aggression (this was the whole point of the proposed nuptials), and to divine the attitude of Anjou’s brother King Henri, without whose support the scheme would be worthless. Sir Francis was accompanied by his young second cousin Thomas, who was just a year older than Kit and was acting as a courier. Thomas Walsingham had in his company an Englishman called ‘Skeggs’, who Charles Nicholl convincingly surmises is none other than Nicholas Skeres, one of the fateful four who were in Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford that day in May 1593. Also in the party was Thomas Watson, a young Catholic poet who had once been resident in Douai and who was also carrying messages for Sir Francis. Tom Watson and Kit were to become close friends and one day to end up in jail together. Kit and Tom Walsingham would become even closer. Many years later, when he was writing Meliboeus as an elegy to Sir Francis, Tom Watson would dedicate the poem to Thomas Walsingham, and recall with affection these days in Paris, when they were living ‘by the banks of the Seine’.

Espionage historian Gertrud Zelle has uncovered an account that gives us one brief flash of Kit and the two Thomases on their evening revels around town, consuming large quantities of wine, tucking in to wild boar (cheaper and more readily available than in England), capons with oranges (to them a novel combination) and mounds of bread (far more than was the customary back home), all the time Kit’s dazzling wit and facility with French easing the way.* (#litres_trial_promo) The only other evidence indicating that Kit may have been in Paris is circumstantial: a story about an affair in the upper echelons of Parisian society was doing the rounds in the city’s taverns at the time, and it emerged many years later as the plot for Measure for Measure. The French scholar Georges Lambin uncovered the Parisian tale, and found that it is used in the play with barely disguised names: Angelo for Angenoust, Claudio for Claude Tonard, Varrius for de Vaux, and so on all the way down to one Ragosin, who appears as Ragozine the pirate.

After Kit had been in Paris just a few days, somebody – most likely Thomas Walsingham, but maybe Sir Francis himself – gave him the task of going to Rheims, to collect a ‘Note’. Rheims was the location of an English Catholic seminary, a honeypot for converts and between 1580 and 1587 believed to be the source of almost every plot against Elizabeth. The English College had been founded in Douai, in Flanders, in 1569, but had been forced to move to Rheims when Protestants took over the town in 1578. It soon became a focal point for English Catholics of all classes, a source of anti-Elizabethan pamphlets and banned devotional books (such as the Rheims Bible), and a training ground for missionaries – like the Jesuits who had arrived to garner converts in Cambridge, just as Kit was beginning his studies. There was, as Gray puts it, a ‘perpetual leakage’ of students from Cambridge to Rheims, which increased markedly after 1580. Robert Parsons, who like his associate Edmund Campion toured England luring youth to Rome, reported back to Claudius Acquavivia, the Superior General of the Jesuits, that: ‘At Cambridge I have at length insinuated a certain priest into the very university under the guise of a scholar or a gentleman commoner and have procured him help from a place not far from town; within a few months he has sent over to Rheims seven very fit youths.’ So Kit would have heard of Rheims. Maybe he rather wanted to go there himself, flirting with the views of Catholic rebels, as he slid back from ‘plain, sullen’ Puritanism. It may even have been the very reason he accompanied the players to Paris.

If Kit made friends in Paris, he made a lifelong enemy at Rheims. Richard Baines had been a gentleman pensioner at Christ’s College in Cambridge, and had later moved to Caius, a seedbed for young Catholics, before enrolling at the seminary in Rheims in 1578. By the time Kit arrived to collect the ‘Note’ from him, Baines was already a deacon and set for full ordination in a matter of weeks. But things were not as they seemed. Baines was spying for the English government. He was hobnobbing with his superiors, trying to find out secrets about the English College president Dr William Allen ‘and set[ting] them down in writing, with intent to give the note of the same to the [Privy] Council’. He was insinuating himself among younger students too, who (in a monastically austere, religiously fanatical environment) he thought ‘might easily be carried into discontentment’ and encouraged ‘to mislike of rule and discipline, and of subjection to their masters’. Not content with sniffing out secrets and stirring rebellion, he had a plan to kill off the entire college population by poisoning the well water. That sort of melodramatic gesture befitted him well. A fluttering, flattering ‘water-fly’,* (#litres_trial_promo) he was also the ‘fawning spaniel’† (#litres_trial_promo) who would obsequiously contradict himself as he stumbled along behind the prevailing opinion of a conversation. He was verbose, full of ‘pretty scoffs’ and ‘wicked words’ (though more so in speech than in the tittle-tattling ‘Notes’ he wrote), admitting that he ‘had a delight rather to fill [his] mouth and the auditors’ ears with dainty, delicate, nice and ridiculous terms and phrases, than with wholesome, sound and sacred doctrine’. Soft, rather than purposefully fat, he greedily desired ‘of more ease, wealth and … of more delicacy of diet and carnal delights than this place of banishment [Rheims] was like to yield …’, and he had an eye for a ‘well-looked boy’.