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

There was a vindictive streak, too, and in situations where he did not feel he was the weaker participant, he could be a bully. Charles Nicholl argues that it could very well be Richard Baines who is the ‘Mr Wanes’ in Paris in the spring of 1580, who ‘came unto one Henry Baily, a young youth, & demanded of him who was come of Rhemes and what their names were, having the boy in a corner of a chamber’. With his juniors he was also affected and boastful. This, where Kit was concerned, proved his downfall. Baines, who of necessity had to be reticent about his prowess for plotting, was bursting to tell the well-appointed young courier what he had been up to. Kit in turn told the college president, Dr William Allen. Just why he did this is not clear. Perhaps he had taken an instant dislike to Baines. Perhaps he did already have Catholic sympathies. It is also possible that this was the secret brief for Kit’s journey in the first place: Rheims conveniently focused anti-English government activity, and to have the college wiped out at a single sip by an egotistical maverick agent would not have been helpful to Sir Francis Walsingham. It is conceivable, too, that one of the Thomases was behind the exposure. We know that Thomas Watson had interests in both camps, as a Catholic in government service; and Thomas Walsingham had been involved in negotiations with Mary Stuart’s official ambassador in Paris.

As it turns out, Dr Allen already knew. In a letter to the Jesuit and college warden, Alfonso Agazzari, in May 1582, William Allen says Baines had been an explorator (spy) for four years – ever since his first admission. Allen bided his time, ‘unmasked’ the interloper some months after Kit’s visit, and locked him up for nearly a year. We know of Kit’s part as an informer through a second letter, from Dr Allen to an unnamed priest.* (#litres_trial_promo) What Allen knew, Baines could only suspect. He was certain Kit had a role in his exposure, but then he had also been indiscreet with a fellow seminarist to whom he offered untold wealth (quite unjustifiably, on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham) to join him in his treachery. So he could not be sure who had caused his downfall. Nevertheless, in his lonely cell he had plenty of time to fuel his loathing. Years later, Kit would secretly mock him in The Jew of Malta, in which Barabas the Jew is said ‘to go about to poison wells’, succeeding (unlike Baines) in doing away with an entire nunnery: ‘Here’s a drench to poison a whole stable of Flanders mares: I’ll carry’t to the nuns with a powder.’ (The Jew of Malta III iv 113–14). There are also shades of Baines in Hamlet’s camp, contemptible Osric, the verbose courtier who presides as a referee over the rapier fight in which Hamlet dies – taking the name ‘Osric’ from an earlier play, A Knack to Know a Knave, which is something Baines most certainly did not display at the time. In his dank dungeon, with no proof of Kit’s hand in his predicament, Baines could only silently seethe.

He was to have his revenge.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_ef516cbc-8b61-53d8-926f-669ac0f3c287)

Catch My Soul (#ulink_ef516cbc-8b61-53d8-926f-669ac0f3c287)

Kit was back in Cambridge by Michaelmas 1581. It had been a whirlwind tour of the Continent – just four or five weeks, much of the time would have been spent in transit, and at least part of this on horseback. The players had a wagon, but once Kit left them for Rheims, travelling by horse rather than walking was an expensive choice, which seems to indicate that (unless his time with the players had been especially lucrative) he was being funded by someone else.

College life was surely dull by comparison, just a little less hard and humdrum than a day at St John’s College described by the preacher Thomas Lever in the 1550s:

There be divers there which rise daily betwixte foure and five of the clocke in the morning, and from five until sixe of the clocke, use common prayer with an exhortacion of gods worde in a common chappell, and from sixe unto ten of the clocke use ever either private study or commune lectures. At ten of the clocke they go to dinner, whereas they be content with a penye piece of biefe amongest .iiii. having a fewe porage made of the brothe of the same biefe, with salt and otemell, and nothinge els.

After this slender dinner they be either teachinge or learninge untill v. of the clocke in the evening, when as they have a supper not much better than their diner. Immediatelie after the whiche, they go either to reasoning in problemes or unto some other studye, until it be nine or tenne of the clocke, and there being without fire are faine to walk or runne up and downe halfe an houre, to gette a heate on their feete whan they go to bed.

Lever was probably painting a heroically severe picture to impress his congregation. Kit didn’t have to run up and down to warm his feet before going to sleep, but he was cooped up with his fellow scholars – the senior Robert Thexton hogging the big bed, while he and Thomas Leugar slept on hard ‘truckle-beds’ that slid out from underneath, in a room that smelled of burning animal fat from the rushlights they worked by after dark. Though not quite as dissolute as the dramatist Robert Greene, who admitted to ‘consum[ing] the flower of my youth’ at Cambridge ‘amongst wags as lewd as myself’, Kit liked a jovial cup in the company of the bacchanalian blades who came up to college almost on a part-time basis, with no intention of taking a degree but simply of filling in time before studying law in London, or travelling on the Continent – ‘a wild and wanton herd … of youthful and unhandled colts’ who spent their time fencing and dancing, whose behaviour resulted in an increasing number of vice-chancellor’s injunctions against playing football, going to bear-baiting and plays in the town, and whose first element of knowledge was ‘to be shown the colleges, and initiated in a tavern by the way’.* (#litres_trial_promo) They were a Babylonical bunch with insatiable appetites, but unlike them Kit had a thirst for learning as well as revelry, and the ability to indulge all his cravings at once.

In his first year, the rigid Cambridge curriculum officially confined his studies to Rhetoric. After that he could look forward to a year of Logic, then one of Philosophy, and later Greek, drawing and astronomy before moving on to a Masters degree. His quick mind raced beyond such limits, and he responded to academic circumscription with tangents of intellectual adventure. Cambridge allowed this. Attitudes to study underwent a radical change in the years before Kit arrived. Instead of merely lamenting the fact that lectures were so poorly attended, the authorities addressed themselves to the reason for the decline, and realised (about 100 years after the event) that the accessibility of printed books meant that students were no longer reliant on lectures for basic information. This revelation led to a new approach in which college tutors (rather than lectures) played an increasingly important role in a student’s education, and good tutors turned their charges’ minds and eyes to studies outside the curriculum, to books that brought them up to date with contemporary thought, and skills that would equip them for modern life. So Kit studied modern languages: French (in which he was already fluent) and Italian (which he became desperate to master), and read the controversial logician Ramus (who gets a brief critique, and is then gorily killed in The Massacre at Paris), Machiavelli (who delighted him) and, hot off the press, essays by Montaigne. Gabriel Harvey sourly noted the subversive course Cambridge studies were taking, complaining ‘You cannot step into a scholar’s study but (ten to one) you shall lightly find open either Bodin’s De Republica or Le Roy’s exposition upon Aristotle’s Politics or some other like French or Italian politic discourse’.

Much to Kit’s chagrin his curriculum did not include music, as it might have done at Oxford, and he could not afford the usual recourse of a private tutor. Ever since Thomas Bull had picked him out to sing in the Canterbury cathedral choir, and all through his time at The King’s School, Kit had a passion for music. As he later put it: ‘The man that hath no music in himself,/Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/The motions of his spirit are as dull as night,/And his affections dark as Erebus./Let no such man be trusted’ (The Merchant of Venice V i 83–8). The young malcontent Kit Marlin, in some turmoil over religion, full of rage and questioning, fired by new learning and excited by new friends, found counterpoise in ‘the sweet power of music’ – on at least one occasion in the home of the great composer and organist, William Byrd.

It is tempting to accept that the musician once dubbed as homo memorabilis is the ‘William Byrd’ who is paid 10 shillings in Bene’t College accounts, and who was a university wait. ‘Waits’ were municipal musicians – originally watchmen who played their instruments to assure citizens that all was well, but by the sixteenth century they performed at civic occasions and hired themselves out privately. Byrd’s biographer Edmund Fellowes refutes the possibility of this being the same William Byrd, pointing out that the name was a common one, and the position at this stage of his career too menial. Intriguingly, another William Byrd (alias Borne) was a close friend of the actor-manager Edward Alleyn, became a shareholder in the Admiral’s Men (the company that staged Christopher Marlowe’s plays), and was paid for his additions to Doctor Faustus. (It is thought that he used the alias Borne to disguise his identity on religious grounds.)

But it seems Kit’s contact with the composer Byrd came through theatre and his new friend from Paris, Tom Watson. Byrd composed music for Ricardus Tertius, a play by the Master of Caius, Thomas Legge (‘an horrible papist’), which was staged a number of times in the early 1580s. Tradition has it that it was at a performance of Ricardus Tertius that Kit first met the young Earl of Essex, who was at Trinity, and that both men disliked the play. Whatever the truth of this, it is evident that Kit thought he could do better than Legge, and would use the same subject matter to much better effect in one of his very first history plays.

Kit was already familiar with Byrd’s work – as a choirboy in Canterbury he had enjoyed singing from the composer’s Sacred Songs, which Byrd had published with his tutor Thomas Tallis in 1575, so delighting the Queen that she granted them a countrywide monopoly in printing church music. But it was at Cambridge that he first encountered Byrd’s secular music. And he liked it. He must have mentioned this to Tom Watson, because in 1582 he received an invitation, through Watson, to meet the composer (who was now approaching forty, and living in Middlesex). This may have been Tom Watson flaunting his connections, or it could quite arguably have been the Catholic net slowly closing in on Kit.

The Bene’t accounts and buttery books for 1582 and 1583 show that Kit was away from college for between five and seven weeks during the summer of 1582. At the time, Tom Watson was temporarily back from Paris and was living in the parish where he had been born, St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in London. Seven years Kit’s senior (Kit was still just eighteen), he seems to have stepped in to the position of older friend and mentor, from which Stephen Gosson had been tumbled by his Puritanism. Tom had come down from Oxford without taking his degree, had been a law student in London without becoming a lawyer, and now lived off his wits as a poet and playwright – with, as we have seen, the odd foray into the shadier corners of diplomacy for the ‘master spyder’, Sir Francis Walsingham. And he was a Catholic, a recusant whose name occurs in the St Helen’s parish list of ‘strangers who go not to church’. Kit joined him for a summer of writing poems, reading the classics, going to plays, and not going to church.* (#litres_trial_promo) Tom was finishing his The ’ Εϰατoμπα Θια or Passionate Centurie of Love, a series of eighteen-line poems, which he called ‘sonnets’, often based on classical, French or Italian sources. Kit was beginning a translation of Ovid’s sensual Amores, relishing the chance to improve his Italian (Tom had introduced him to the poems of Tasso), and honing his poetic skills, fascinated by the form of Watson’s sonnets, but not quite convinced he had got it right.

In the afternoons they went to plays – not polite indoor dramas like those written by his former Canterbury neighbour John Lyly for boy companies and courtly audiences, but rollicking gallimaufreys that coupled clowns with kings, and leashed in the odd musician and a number of nifty jiggers, too; plays the authorities disapproved of, which took place beyond City jurisdiction in the open amphitheatres of the Curtain or the Theatre, where there was ‘no want of young ruffins, nor lacke of harlots, utterlie past all shame’, and where law students from the Inns of Court created much the same sort of rumpus as hooligans at modern-day football matches. Here, from the gallery, they could heckle Richard Tarlton, the dumpy man who in all likelihood gave common currency to the word ‘clown’, and whose cross-eyes and cheeky expression had the audience wetting themselves as soon as he put his head through the hangings at the back of the stage:

Tarlton when his head was onely seene,

The Tirehouse dore and tapestrie betweene,

Set all the multitude in such a laughter,

They could not hold for scarse an houre after.

Tom and Kit were among the few who could match his banter. As the theatre historian Andrew Gurr points out, Tarlton was by the 1580s in one sense at least already a bit old-fashioned. His direct address to the audience, the gap he created between himself as clown/player and his role (a technique we would now view as distinctly post-Brechtian), was about to give way to a more illusionistic drama, where actors disappeared behind the characters they portrayed, more in the manner of cinema today. Kit, perhaps already grappling with his own first play, watched carefully, enjoyed the repartee, but did not approve. His plays were among the first to be different. Tamburlaine would edge Tarlton into the wings, as poetic tragedy supplanted knockabout. This was where he wanted to make his theatre, appealing to an amphitheatre audience, but he would draw its focus in a new direction. In the prologue to the first Tamburlaine the Great he promised to lead the audience away ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.’ The urbane fool Touchstone in As You Like It stands in direct contrast to knockabout Arden rustics, and of course there is the writer’s cri de coeur in Hamlet’s ‘And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them …’ (Hamlet III ii 36).

A rough new theatre was emerging from a turbulent world. It needed a figure of genius to give it fresh language and direction. Kit knew that he could do that. It is he, in the blank verse of Tamburlaine, his first solo effort, who would give Elizabethan drama its rhythm.

Tom had also introduced Kit to his London circle – a brood of poets and pamphleteers that burgeoned through the 1580s and 1590s, and who centuries later would be dubbed the ‘University Wits’ (by the wine connoisseur and doyen of Victorian literary taste, George Saintsbury). If any remnant of Puritanism still clung to Kit, it was dispelled by parley over the tavern table with Thomas Lodge, whose Defence of Poetry Music and Stage Plays had just unsheathed daggers against Stephen Gosson’s ranting Schoole of Abuse. Like the others, Kit frequented St Paul’s Churchyard, the centre of the printing (which then also meant publishing) and bookselling, where there were already over twenty ‘stationers’ at trade (the modern word has its origin in these licensed booksellers who traded from ‘stations’, rather than being itinerant). Kit’s childhood friend, Oliver Laurens, was unhappily apprenticed here to the epitome of Sloth, so vividly described by Thomas Nashe as:

. . . a Stationer that I knowe, with his thumb under his girdle, who if a man come to his stall and aske him for a book, never stirs his head, or looks upon him, but stands stone still, and speakes not a word: onely with his little finger points backwards to his boy, who must be his interpreter, and so all the day gaping like a dumbe image he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then he is as quick as other three, eating six times every day.

Oliver was later to enter into a more fruitful arrangement with the publisher Thomas Thorpe, with whom he was to work for years to come. It was with Oliver that Kit went to see the premier tourist attraction of the time, Sir Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, moored down river at Deptford. The adventurer had returned from his circumnavigation of the globe, his ship stuffed with treasure, on a Sunday in September 1580, causing such a stir that nobody went to church that day. In the summer of 1581 the Queen visited him on board, handed a sword to the ambassador of her suitor, the Duke of Anjou, to knight him, and declared the ship a national monument. For the past year, hordes of visitors had swarmed over the ship, chipping off bits as souvenirs. Over eleven years later, when Kit was sipping ale at Eleanor Bull’s house on Deptford Strand, nothing was left of the Golden Hind but a few skeletal timbers, sticking up from the dry dock like a rotting ribcage.

Though Kit could range around London with Oliver, he was not able to see his other old friend, Sam Kennet. The one-time ‘terrible Puritan’, scourge of Roman Catholic prisoners in the Tower, had himself become a convert, and by the summer of 1582 was a seminarist at Rheims. Was Kit also already a Catholic? It is hard to tell. Charles Nicholl makes the point that there was at that time something seductive about Catholicism, something forbidden that made becoming a Catholic a gesture of defiance, especially attractive to those who deplored the spread of Puritanism, and among the young literary set. Thomas Lodge would one day convert, as would the philosophically fickle Stephen Gosson, who after writing plays, then puritanically ranting against them, went off to Rheims – though he later relented and returned to England to become an Anglican vicar. Tom Watson was of course a Catholic, and when he took Kit to stay at Harlington, William Byrd’s house in Middlesex, he was transporting the young man to an anteroom of Rome. Byrd’s home was a resort for Catholics; it is included in a list now housed at the Public Record Office of ‘places where certaine Recusantes remaine in and about the city of London: or are to be com by uppon warninge’. Though himself loyal, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and (it seems) enjoying special protection from the Privy Council, Byrd was a close friend of the staunch Catholic Charles Paget, and had possibly also known the plotter Anthony Babington and the recent Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. Hovering on the edge of this circle was Robert Poley – ‘Sweet Robyn’ – who was to be so charming to Eleanor Bull, and who earlier that year had married Tom Watson’s sister. Even more curiously, both Poley and Tom Watson were by then in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham.

The purpose of Tom and Kit’s visit to Harlington was ‘to make good pastime’, and was apparently innocent. Although such gatherings were not uncommon, it is not entirely true that music filtered through every aspect of Elizabethan life, as a sort of merrie muzak with citizens singing at their work, madrigals after dinner and everyone as adept as their Queen at a range of instruments; at one end of the scale (as it were) there was church music, and at the other ‘that lascivious, amorous, effeminate, voluptuous music’ in theatres. While perhaps many houses did have viols hanging up for guests to use, and a ‘lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber’s shop’, the much-quoted passage from Thomas Morley’s Plain and Easy Introduction to Music is something of an exaggeration. Morley wrote:

But supper being ended and music books (according to custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up …

Morley, however, had a vested interest in presenting lack of musical knowledge as a social faux pas. Not only was he author of a teach-yourself music textbook, but also a composer of popular songs. After-dinner music was more likely to be presented by professionals, or talented members of the household. Yet Byrd himself had also made a famous appeal to everyone to sing, maintaining that not only did it ‘strengthen all the parts of the brest’ and ‘open the pipes’, but that the ‘exercise of singing is delightful to Nature & good to preserve the health of Man’, ending his uplifting evocation with the jingle ‘Since singing is so good a thing/I wish all men would learne to sing’. As the syllables of the couplet make a perfect sol-fa ditty, one can imagine hapless students of Byrd forever singing these words as they practised vocal scales. Fortunately for posterity, Byrd seldom wrote his own words in his secular work, rather using poetry by the likes of Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Oxford, and later Kit himself, for his songs.

The gatherings at Harlington were different from the after-dinner norm; these were masters coming together to make music. That summer they sang madrigals. It was a form that was becoming increasingly fashionable in England – Tom Watson had already translated a few. The first sett, of Italian madrigalls Englished would be published in 1590, and dedicated to the Earl of Essex, who was also briefly of the party that summer. According to a note, which appears to have been written by an informer sent to report goings-on at Harlington, they sang the madrigal ‘Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?’, which had been written the year before by Henry Walpole, after a spot of Edmund Campion’s blood splattered onto his coat during the execution, and which Byrd set to music. Thanks to this singing spy, we know that Byrd also set two of Kit’s songs during the visit: O mistress mine and It was a lover and his lass.* Eventually, Kit would use somewhat altered versions of these songs in plays, but the score Byrd later published is the original one written that summer. Kit left Harlington with two successful songs to his credit, and if not a convert to Catholicism, he did at least become a devotee of the madrigal.

There is a theory that Kit did not go directly back to Cambridge after Harlington, but was the ‘Christoffer Marron’ who accompanied William Stanley (then twenty-one, later to be the sixth Earl of Derby) to the Court of Navarre, and perhaps further on to Spain. The letter in which the name is mentioned survives not in its original form, but in a contemporary manuscript copy, in which other mistakes with names are made, including at least one transposition of an ‘l’ to an ‘r’, so reading ‘Marlon’ for ‘Marron’ is not so far-fetched.* (#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, no further proof exists, though it is true that Kit was later involved with the Stanley family, and the French scholar Abel Lefranc makes a convincing argument that Love’s Labour’s Lost includes scenes, characters and events that only someone with intimate knowledge of Henri of Navarre’s court could have written. The Protestant Henri Bourbon was separated from his wife Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King of France, but in 1578 in an attempt at reconciliation Marguerite had returned to Navarre, where Henri held court with a learned and highly cultured male coterie. Lefranc points out the distinct parallels between real life and the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, where a king (in the play called Ferdinand, the name of William Stanley’s older brother, later Kit’s friend and patron) and three courtiers devote themselves to study and self-denial (mainly of women), but are frustrated by the arrival of the Princess of France. Lefranc quotes Montégut, the French translator of the play, as saying that the conversations, witty skirmishes and even the bad taste is so totally French that it must have been written by an insider, and points out that the three courtiers are given almost their actual names: Berowne for le baron de Biron, Longaville for le duc de Longueville, and Dumain for le duc du Maine. Furthermore, the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes is modelled both on Kit’s much-hated Welsh schoolmaster in Canterbury, and on Richard Lloyd, William Stanley’s tutor and companion on the tour. Holofernes presents a pageant of the Nine Worthies in the play; Lloyd wrote a long poem on the same topic. No other source for Love’s Labour’s Lost is known. Lefranc also points out a parallel between a love story current in court, and the story of Hamlet and Ophelia. There is also the possibility of a later visit, as a ‘Mr Marlin’ is a messenger for Sir Henry Unton, the English ambassador who accompanied Henry of Navarre in the wars of 1591–2. But in the absence of further evidence, we must leave Kit’s visit to Navarre dangling as an enticing possibility.

Back in Cambridge, Kit was beginning to cut quite a dash, showing a fashionable taste for ‘gorgeous attire’, dressing like a London dandy in a doublet with ‘a collar that rose up so high and sharp as if it would have cut his throat by daylight’, voluminous breeches ‘as full and deep as the middle of winter’ and soft leather boots ‘in such artificial wrinkles, sets and plaits, as if they had been starched lately and came new from the laundress’s’. But skull caps and sombre ankle-length gowns were what the university wanted. Such insobriety fell foul of national Sumptuary Laws, which set out a strict dress code designed to curb extravagance and remind people of their station in life. Flouting these laws showed just the sort of defiance that arrivistes like Kit and other rebellious young ‘malcontents’ were notorious for, and seems to have been quite common. Fighting a losing battle against the flouncing ruff and dangling aiglet, the university authorities passed a series of injunctions during the 1570s and l580s against flashy dressing. Wearers of ‘great galligaskins’ (wide breeches) and other outrageous attire would be ‘ordered, reformed and punished … both for stuffe, fasshion and colour’. The ‘stuffe’ that courted disapproval was anything ‘in upon or about [the] doublett, coates, Jerkyn, jackett, cassock or hose, of velvet or silke’. Unseemly ‘fasshions’ included too-baggy breeches, fancy doublets, and the ruffled silks of the malcontent. Even minimalist, rather desperate gestures like allowing your gown collar to ‘fall’ rather than ‘stand’ were forbidden, and as for finer details, the authorities knew them all: nothing should be ‘embrodred, powdred, pynked, or welted … gathered, playted, garded, hacked, raced, laced or cutt’. Furthermore, ‘long lockes of Hayre uppon the heade’ gave them the horrors. Hair had to be ‘polled, notted or rounded’, and nothing else. Graduates had to forswear brightness and wear gowns made only of ‘wollen cloth of blacke, puke [a ‘dirty brown’ or the ‘camel’s colour’, eclipsed in candour only by ‘goose-turd’ – yellowish-green], London Browne, or other sad colour’. Kit, of course, favoured ‘lustie-gallant’ (light red) and primary colours that showed up well in candlelight, or the newly fashionable pale tints such as ‘cane’ and ‘milk-and-water’. Again, we hear the echo in Spencer’s speech in Edward II, ‘you must cast the scholar off,/And learn to court it like a Gentleman’, and of Dr Faustus who wants to ‘fill the public schools with silk’.

Despite chasing fashion, getting drunk and avoiding fines, Kit was working hard. He continued with his translation of Ovid’s Amores – often quite racy love elegies. Bene’t buttery and account books show that he was in full residence for a long and studious stretch up to gaining his BA in April 1584, though both Urry and Moore-Smith point to an absence of six or seven weeks in the summer of 1583. The recent rediscovery of a curious piece of late sixteenth-century pornography, First suckes at the brestes of Venus,* throws some light on what he may have been up to.

Erotic verse, upmarket literary pornography, was a legitimate source of sexual titillation for pent-up, post-pubescent Elizabethans sweating away at their studies. Thomas Nashe was later to pen the bawdy burlesque Lenten Stuff, and even more pithily The Choice of Valentines (also known as Nashe’s Dildo), a tremendously lascivious piece about one prematurely ejaculating Tomalin and his bawd Frances, who after taking his ‘silly worm’ in hand, ‘rolled it on her thigh … And dandled it and danc’d it up and down’, but in the end must needs resort to the services of her ‘little dildo’ that ‘bendeth not, nor foldest any deal,/But stands as stiff as he were made of steel,/And plays at peacock twixt my legs right blithe’. The fruitier bits of Kit’s translation of Ovid, and later poems such as Hero and Leander can be seen in this light, though he seems to have disapproved of masturbation, once rebuking the ‘tender churl’ who ‘mak’st waste in niggarding’ (Sonnet 1).

First suckes seems to have been inspired by an earlier work, I modi, sixteen prints of ‘postures’ of love-making, each accompanied by an explanatory sonnet. The book was banned in Italy and though hard to come by, highly popular in England among students and lawyers at the Inns of Court. The prints in I modi are by ‘that rare Italian master’ Giulio Romano, the poems by Pietro Aretino, whom Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller called ‘one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made’. When it was first published, I modi enjoyed extensive circulation among the upper clergy and was furiously suppressed by Pope Clement VII – to the extent that almost every trace of it was eliminated. By the mid-1850s, Count Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck, an adventurer and amateur archaeologist, who had fought for Napoleon at Toulon and in Egypt, then escaping the English had travelled down the east coast of Africa, and later to Chile and Guatemala, came up with ink-and-wash reconstructions of I modi, based on prints he claimed to have seen in a monastery in Mexico. These tallied with fragments in the British Museum. The accompanying sonnets surfaced in a copy of I modi that was found for sale in Italy in 1928 by Walter Toscanini, son of the famous conductor. Assiduously kept from public gaze by Toscanini, it is now in the hands of another private collector. From the same source in Italy, an American collector bought First suckes (which seems to indicate that the two volumes were once owned as companion pieces). He keeps his find just as jealously guarded.

Like I modi, First suckes comprises sixteen prints and sonnets; each one deals with the loss of virginity. In eight of the poems a maid is deflowered, and in the other eight a young man has his first sexual experience – though it must be said that in each case the focus seems primarily on male enjoyment. Also, whereas the women are sexual caricatures, the poems about men appear to be based on the true experiences of real people, probably friends of the poet. There is a further link with I modi in that a quote from one of the Aretino poems appears on a separate leaf (apparently included as a prologue), beneath a portrait of a pleasured maid:

Che per mia fé’ questo é, miglior boccone

Che mangiar il pan unto apresso il foco.

(I believe this is a tastier feast

Than eating larded bread before a fire.)

It is not known who made the prints for First suckes, but the poems have been attributed to Thomas Nashe. Sonnet 6 is evidently about Kit Marlin, and hints at his Catholic (or even atheist) proclivities. The young man in a gondola in the accompanying print bears a striking resemblance to the Kit of the Corpus portrait, and he is punningly referred to as ‘Merlin’ (cf. Robert Greene in Epistle to Perimedes, ‘. . . mad and scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race’). The sonnet tells how young Merlin is most capably projected into the realm of the sexually experienced by one Bianca, ‘a cunning whore of Venice’, and how she feeds him fat black olives, takes the pips from his lips, sucks them quite clean and threads them into a rosary, for protection against the pox. The young man is ‘not yet two score’, which, if he is Kit, would make the year 1583. ‘Bianca’ is quite possibly the same ‘La signora Bianca’ who is twice mentioned on a list of ‘public whores condemned for transgression of the laws’, and fined ten and then thirty ducats. Venice was famous for its courtesans – they had their own ghetto, the Carampane, where they paraded on the Ponte delle Tette (literally ‘Bridge of Tits’) naked from the waist up (the authorities thought the sight of bare breasts would help prevent sodomy). This was in singular contrast to conservative English attitudes. Contemporary English manuals such as Thomas Cogan’s The Haven of Health advised frisky young men to control their ardour by sitting on cold stone, plunging themselves into icy water, or dousing their genitals in vinegar. Yet in Venice there were catalogues and guides to pleasures and prices, and many a young Englishman’s first carnal thrash occurred between the canals. Sir Philip Sidney cavorted in Venice when he was twenty, though a young Sir Henry Wotton (one day to be British ambassador there), ‘not being made of stone’ fled the wicked ladies to the safety of academic Padua.

If Kit was busy losing his virginity in Venice in 1583, he would have had to have been quick about it. He was away from Cambridge for a maximum of seven weeks. Andrew Badoer, an envoy in a hurry in the early sixteenth century, made it from Venice to London in twenty-six days, riding ‘incessantly, day and night’ – though he was in his sixties, and grizzled ‘nor do I know what more could have been expected of a man at my age’. Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, called the Queen of Hungary ‘a virago’ because she rode from Augsburg to Flanders (part of a possible route between England and Venice) in thirteen days, ‘a distance a man could scarce do in 17’. In 1589 Henry Cavendish, admittedly travelling a long and leisurely route via Hamburg and down through ‘Jarmany’, took nearly a month to get to Venice. It could be that Nashe sets the event in Venice because of the racy, romantic image the city enjoyed, and that it in fact took place in the stews of London. On the other hand, Richard Lassels, a tutor who had been five times to Italy, lamented that the courtesans of Venice were such an attraction that some young men would ‘travel one month for a night’s lodging with an impudent woman’. Kit did have a rosary made of olive pits. He kept it for years, though it eventually ended up among the possessions of the enigmatic Elizabethan astrologer Dr John Dee, and was discovered in 1662 in a secret drawer of a cedar chest, by a confectioner called Robert Jones.

Fast travel and expensive living could only mean one thing: Kit had another source of income. The evidence is elusive and needs careful sifting, but it would seem that by 1583 he was already in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham, at first (in modern-day spy parlance) as an ‘irregular’ – used only occasionally, while his worth was being tested – but after 1584 as an active member of the network. His links with Sir Francis Walsingham could even have begun as early as 1581, when he was befriended by Thomas Watson and Thomas Walsingham in Paris. Also in Paris at the time was one Nicholas Faunt, who like the two Thomases was working for Sir Francis, and was a Bene’t man. Though his time at college pre-dated Kit’s, it is very possibly Faunt who made the first introduction to the Walsinghams. Recruitment in 1581 might explain Kit’s presence in Rheims that year, and would make more sense of that curious visit to Navarre. The English would have been interested in intelligence from Henri’s court. After the Duke of Anjou, Henri was next in line to the French throne, and though the champion of the Huguenots, he had briefly converted to Catholicism after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and was now being courted again by Catholics. We know that the agent Anthony Bacon was gathering information about developments concerning Henri, and passing it on to Walsingham in 1584. Kit’s nascent Catholicism would not have been a barrier to his recruitment. Indeed, Walsingham made something of a speciality of ‘turning’ Catholics, and had a number of supposedly Catholic agents spying for him. With all the trappings of a new convert, Kit was ideally placed to inform on the activities of the Jesuit missionaries who had newly arrived at Cambridge in 1581. Perhaps, also, it was Kit who was reporting back on Byrd’s circle at Harling-ton in the summer of 1582.

Kit had entered an uneasy world of duplicity and betrayal, a realm of cold falsehood and calculated hypocrisy, where trust had been sucked hollow by cynicism. Information was its currency, and worth was judged by tangible results. Just what moved him to such an existence? To some extent it was the sheer pressure of necessity: he needed the money. When his time at Cambridge came to an end, the cobbler’s son from Canterbury would have had few options (given that he already seemed intent on reneging on his scholarship obligation to enter the Anglican church). He could become a tutor perhaps, a secretary to some notable, or even a poet in an aristocrat’s retinue, traipsing along forever in the train of high society. But this was not Kit’s style. For a young man of ‘vaulting ambition’, who like Tamburlaine felt that he had ‘an aspiring mind’ and a soul ‘whose faculties can comprehend the wondrous architecture of the world … climbing after knowledge infinite’, who was restless, rebellious, willing to live on his wits and certain of his ability, working for Walsingham offered a way forward. It may be distasteful, it would almost certainly be dangerous, but Kit knew that to take the position he wanted in the world, he had to be ‘proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,/And now and then stab, as occasion serves’. Those stabbings might be literal, or metaphorical: in the back. Friends became enemies at a shrug. ‘To some perhaps my name is odious,’ says Machevill (Machiavelli) in the Prologue to The Jew of Malta but, ‘Admir’d am I of those that hate me most … Let me be envied and not pitied’.

From the privileged viewpoint of posterity it is easy to raise a moral eyebrow and lament Kit’s decision to join this secret world. But, as Charles Nicholl puts it: ‘Our regret has no real claim on him. Posterity prefers poets to spies, but this young man could not be so choosy. He lived on his wits or else went hungry, and he was probably rather better rewarded for spying than he was for the poetry we remember him by.’ It is clear from his later plays, written long after he had stopped spying, that he had his own regrets, and that the evils of duplicity, ambition and betrayal ever occupied his mind: the spying servant, the spying friend, the spying husband, the spying courtier, the spying duke never quite leave the stage.

Deception simultaneously fuelled and consumed the secret service. ‘Treason begets spies and spies treason,’ noted Queen Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harington, wearily. Or as John le Carré put it centuries later: ‘You teach them to cheat, to cover their tracks, and they cheat on you as well.’ The dour Sir Francis watched over his web with care. Gathered close around him was a small core of men operating more or less permanently as controllers; beyond that was a haphazard, freelance band whose motivation was as likely to be money as politics – patriots and ne’er-do-wells, former pages and would-be ambassadors, the desperate, the greedy, men he had blackmailed, gamblers who had bankrupted themselves, vain adventurers, bored gentlemen, turncoats and zealots. Walsingham’s favourite maxim was: ‘There is less danger in fearing too much than too little, and there is nothing more dangerous than security.’ He checked and he double-checked. He sent out spies to confirm other spies’ information, spies to check on the other spies themselves, then another to inform on them all; he placed moles in Catholic organisations and set agents provocateurs among conspirators, ran double-agents, and was himself the victim of treachery. He had men pretend to be spies to discredit the opposite side, and found his agents snooped on by rival factions from his own side. He infiltrated conspiracies, undermined intrigue, and sometimes even made up plots from scratch to snare unsuspecting traitors.

Spanish invasion and Catholic conspiracy were the twin bugbears. Subtle, dedicated Sir Francis gathered intelligence from abroad and effected counter-espionage at home all to serve his queen, but this was by no means a national organisation. The Elizabethan secret service was a privately run affair. Lord Burghley had a web of informants too, as later did his son, Sir Robert Cecil (he whom Eleanor Bull so disliked), and the Earl of Essex – ambitious men all, who were often acting in their own self-interest and sometimes with a competition that verged on hostility. Intrigue went on at lower levels too, all the way down to one-man bands – quite literally in the case of one Richard Foley, an ironmaster from Stourbridge who disguised himself as a minstrel and wandered through Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain collecting information on new iron-founding techniques. Walsingham did eventually persuade Elizabeth to finance his activities, but it was never enough. Perhaps he would have derived some comfort in his poverty-stricken last years to know that technically this royal funding made his network the first ever professional English secret service.

Intelligence also came in on a casual basis from letter-writers (it was around this time that ‘intelligence’ began to take on the additional meaning of information gathered by spies). Sir Francis had well over a hundred such correspondents abroad every year after 1577. In a sense, this was innocent intelligence, simply keeping him in touch in an age without media, performing much the same function as a newspaper, but its value should not be underestimated. For Elizabeth and her government there was simply no other way, apart from emissaries’ reports, of getting basic news about what was going on in the world. There was a darker side too – secret, more devious, requiring agents with particular skills – and here poets and students were an able bag to scoop from. Writers made good spies: ‘They knew the international language, Latin, and the literary tastes of the day gave them a good smattering of French and Italian. They were mobile people: geographically mobile – young men disposed to travel and to see the world – but also socially mobile. In a class-ridden society, the literary demi-monde floated free, touching at once the back-streets of London and the heights of the nobility.’ So, as a budding poet, Kit was a good catch.

As regards his activity at this time, again Bene’t account and buttery books are revealing. After the stretch of hard study leading up to his BA he is away again, in the autumn of 1584. There is a discrepancy in the records in that the account books indicate he was away for nine out of the twelve weeks of term, yet the buttery records indicates that he was in college in the second, third, fourth, seventh, eleventh and twelfth weeks. Moore-Smith maintains he was also away for two weeks in the summer. This accords with the idea of a period of probation. After one or two initial forays in the early 1580s, Kit is being more earnestly recruited, tested on short but increasingly important local missions, snooping about in grand houses and taverns before being trusted with work on the Continent at the slightly more reputable edge of the profession. Overseas couriers and agents abroad were paid, on presentation of a warrant signed by Walsingham, by the Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, for ‘carrying letters for Her Majesty’s special and secret affairs’ or being ‘employed in affairs of special importance’.