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

With his wit, ‘sparkling, sun-bright eyes’, nimble mind and easy manner Kit wore his motley well, mobile and fluid with his friendships, flitting in and out of all sorts of social circles. From snippets – an entry in household accounts, a diary anecdote, a letter deriding ‘the man Marlin’* (#litres_trial_promo) – gradually a picture forms of the people he is beginning to mix with. We learn of his contact with Henry Percy, his exact contemporary and soon to be 9th Earl of Northumberland – the ‘Wizard Earl’ who built up one of the greatest libraries in the country, who while on a visit to Paris in 1582 had had to write reassuring his father that the exile Charles Paget (an associate of the composer William Byrd) was not trying to convert him to Catholicism. Paget himself had written to Sir Francis denying the charge, and Sir Francis no doubt wanted to keep an eye on the young Lord Percy, especially as his inclination to learning drew him towards the ‘wizardry’ of alchemy, new science and adventurous thinking. Kit was even more intimate with Percy’s close friend and later chief scholar Thomas Hariot, who, it was said, was the first Englishman to smoke a pipe, and from whom Kit picked up the expensive tobacco habit. This was itself tinged with the hue of rebellion. In casting round for a verb to describe the intake of tobacco, the first English users alighted on ‘drink’. It was not until well into the seventeenth century that people began to ‘smoke’ tobacco. This gives us a hint of the attitude those first tobacconists (as they were called) had to the leaf. Using the word ‘drink’ to describe the process indicates a mind-expanding experience. You drank tobacco like you drank in a view, or a new idea. Or the way you drank sack – and the effects were similar. Upright public opinion railed against this ‘filthy novelty’, King James himself damned it as ‘harmful to the brain’. So Kit and his fellow early experimenters with the weed can in some sense be seen as miscreant drug users.

Through Percy and Hariot, Kit met Sir Walter Ralegh, a gambling friend and intellectual confidant of the earl, who frequented the Northumberland seat, Petworth in Sussex, and whose agent Robert Browne created a rumpus over wine prices in Cambridge in 1585, leading to riots between town and gown and Sir Walter’s personal intervention. Kit also flirted with Ralegh’s arch rival, the handsome young Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, who had just been propelled into Elizabeth’s inner circle by his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester. At Cambridge he befriended the twelve-year-old Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the era’s most renowned pretty-boy, whose pink-petal eyelids and long, curled locks would inspire some of Kit’s finest verse. And, in a rare moment of calm, he relaxed at the stationer’s in St Paul’s Churchyard with his old friend Oliver Laurens. Gertrud Zelle argues that Kit also met up with Thomas Watson in London during one of Tom’s brief descents from the Continent, and that Kit was becoming increasingly ‘close with’ Thomas Walsingham, who had returned from France to a large house in Seething Lane, owned by Sir Francis, which served as the London headquarters of the network. Thomas had been promoted and was now in a position of control, a channel through which minor agents could gain access to Sir Francis. One of these informers attendant upon Thomas, wishing ‘secret recourse to Mr Secretary’, was none other than ‘Sweet Robyn’, Robert Poley. In the tangled brier of names that grows to fill Kit’s early life, this is one to be remembered, a bud to be plucked and placed alongside those of Wriothesley, Thomas Walsingham and Tom Watson, as we carefully watch them blossom.

As this social brier spread, so Kit’s intellectual tendrils curled and thrust themselves in unexpected directions. Friends such as Ralegh and Northumberland encouraged the questioning that had begun during his first days at Cambridge, a journey from the Christian viewpoint where doubt was a sin, to one where it was a virtue. Europe had been rocked by the claims of Copernicus, and the discovery of cultures that seemed to predate the Creation. It was a philosophically alarming world, where two great Christian factions were clashing, but where for people like Kit, God could no longer be trusted. If you wanted knowledge you had to flirt with the Devil. Or worse. It is around this time that rumours grew of Kit’s ‘atheism’ and his interest in the occult. He is supposed to have won over one Thomas Fineaux, who began studies at Bene’t in Kit’s last term there. In a way rather reminiscent of Doctor Faustus conjuring ‘in some bushy grove’, Fineux ‘would go out at midnight into a wood, & fall down upon his knees, & pray heartily that the devil would come, that he might see him (for he did not believe there was a devil) ‘.

Kit was not alone in his dilemma. Scientific curiosity had doubt as a handmaiden. The question arose that if you could no longer trust God, then whom could you trust? This was a time of psychological turbulence, uncertainty, reinvention – the figures that emerged from it as rock-like have become fixed as cultural icons. It is not for nothing that we now prefer to call this English Renaissance the ‘Early Modern Period’ – it is the period of upheaval during which England’s cultural world was made.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_68ff35e9-a99a-540c-a2a1-10e92498e820)

Gentlemen of a Company (#ulink_68ff35e9-a99a-540c-a2a1-10e92498e820)

As the recall of Thomas Walsingham to become a controller of London headquarters at Seething Lane in 1584 shows, Sir Francis was, by the mid-1580s, beginning to formalise his organisation and expand. In April 1583 he had three men reporting from Paris, nine from Antwerp, and two from Middelburg and Strasbourg; by 1585 his intelligencers abroad had grown to fifty. The reason for such expansion lay primarily in events in the Low Countries. The Duke of Parma’s campaign against the Protestant north was reaching a high point. Antwerp had been drawn into the battle zone and by June 1584 was under siege; in the same month Parma’s key opponent, William of Orange, was assassinated. Just a few weeks before, François, the Duke of Anjou, had died and with him the hope of French resistance to Parma, as the country sank into internal conflict over succession to the throne. England was now being drawn into the fray.

In May 1585 the Dutch were to offer sovereignty of the United Provinces to Elizabeth. The hawks on the Privy Council, Walsingham and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, said ‘aye’, but Lord Burghley and the doves gave a firm ‘nay’, as they thought that such a move risked outright war with Spain. In the end, Elizabeth turned down the Dutch offer because she too foresaw ‘long, bloody wars’ with one of the most powerful countries in Europe. She had already dispatched embassies to Denmark and to German princes to see if they would join in a Protestant League against the Spanish, but to no avail. English involvement was inevitable. Eventually, in August, she signed the Treaty of Nonsuch at the sumptuous pleasure palace built by Henry VIII at Cheam – so named because there was ‘none such like it in the realm’ (the royal equivalent of calling your house Dunroamin’).

Elizabeth agreed to send a force to support the Dutch, reluctantly naming Robert Dudley commander, with the warning not to ‘hazard a battaile without great advantage’. When Leicester precociously named himself ‘governor-general’ of the United Provinces, a move that implied sovereignty and which riled the Spanish, she was furious. Meanwhile, the Dutch had found a military genius in William of Orange’s successor, Maurice, who was hotly intent on war with Spain, and good at it.

Throughout all of this Elizabeth needed intelligence from France, the Low Countries and from Spain. She also needed to know what was going on in Leicester’s camp, to monitor the movements of the increasingly powerful Maurice of Orange, and to judge the mood in the courts of Denmark and of the German princes. This was the field in which Kit became engaged. Curiously, it was his interest in theatre that got him the job. Dramatists, as one would imagine, were more suited to spying than other writers, given the cloak-and-dagger antics of Elizabethan espionage. Complicated ciphers and invisible inks were commonplace; messages were smuggled inside beer barrels; seals were forged, couriers drugged; men disguised themselves as beggars and passed themselves off as members of other nationalities. Tradition has it that Kit deeply impressed Sir Francis with a scheme of getting a cipher-key to the conjuror Dr Dee (who was by this time living in Bohemia). He proposed shaving the head of a servant, who had eye trouble, inking the code on his pate, then allowing the hair to grow back and hide it. The man was sent to Dr Dee on the pretext that the writing on his head was a part of a spell that would help the great doctor effect a cure. The advantage of the plan was that not only was the message invisible in transit, but that the unsuspecting servant, who had been told that revealing the presence of the spell would destroy it, could not double-cross them. (Servants were usually the weakest link in a chain of espionage as their loyalty was easily bought.) Maybe Sir Francis would not have been so admiring had he known that the young poet had stolen the idea directly from Herodotus. Kit also came up with the idea (taken this time from Aeneas Tacticus) of writing a message on a tree leaf which was used to cover an apparently putrid ulcer on the leg of someone disguised as a beggar. Plagiarism, as well as deception, was evidently becoming something of a strong point.

Such disguises and complicated plots of betrayal and counter-betrayal were very much the stuff of the theatre of the time. What is more, if one is looking for the perfect cover, a travelling theatre company proves ideal – it would have access not only to burghers and market place, but to the heart of the local court. A player could pick up on gossip below the stairs, and would be within earshot when the lords were drunk, and a poet with such a company would penetrate upper social strata with an ease that few other means would allow. An English theatre company on the Continent might move with the immunity of jesters where English diplomats feared to tread.

Such companies existed. Kit had already briefly travelled with one, on his jaunt replacing William Peeters. Not only were companies touring on the Continent, but there were English players wherever an eager spymaster might have wished them to be. There are records of Maurice of Orange licensing English players, a troupe accompanied Leicester to the Low Countries; there were English players in the Danish court on at least two occasions, and in towns all over Germany throughout the period.

Known generically as the Englische Komödianten or ‘English comedians’, these troupes of players were resoundingly popular. They performed in the energetic, rag-bag gallimaufrey style that had so enthralled the young Kit in Canterbury, which corrupted students at Cambridge, and which was filling the London amphitheatres to the brim: a mixture of music, playing and acrobatics that quite astounded those who saw it. The English comedians’ spontaneity and vividness so enthused audiences that it revolutionised northern European theatre, turning what had previously been stiff, formal recitation into drama. For the first time this was theatre in its own right, not presented for religious instruction or as part of a festival. And people turned out in their thousands to watch. In Frankfurt, according to the sixteenth-century traveller Fynes Moryson, both men and women ‘flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and Action, rather than heare them, speaking English which they understand not’, and at Elsinore in 1585, the citizens flocked so ‘wonderfully’ to a performance in the town hall courtyard, that they broke down a wall. This popularity is especially surprising because, as Fynes Moryson remarks, so few of the audience understood the language. English was an island tongue with little continental currency. In court, a simultaneous translator might be employed as a sort of living surtitle, but this did not often happen in the market place. (Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with the popularity among British audiences in the 1980s and 1990s of, to them, largely incomprehensible Polish and Czech theatre companies, and later of Japanese noh and kabuki performances.)

The heyday of good English drama abroad was short-lived. One of the effects of performing for non-English audiences is that the companies preferred to stage high-action plays with spectacular visual effects. Kit wrote Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus for such an audience. As troupes relied on memory and improvisation rather than carrying around cumbersome prompt-books, texts soon became corrupted and grossly simplified, leaving a flotsam of tenuously linked violent and sensational scenes as subtlety receded. Language restrictions meant that performance style rapidly degenerated into clowning, extempore bawdy and highly exaggerated acting, as the companies became the refuge of second-rate actors. Hamlet knew what he was up against when he tackled the travelling players at Elsinore. The Danish prince remarks that he has seen players – and ones that are highly praised at that – who ‘have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably’; he says it offends him to the soul ‘to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters’, and demands that the players’ clowns ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ (Hamlet III ii). By the early 1600s most troupes had given up on English and were performing in German, and indeed comprised mainly German and Dutch actors who only called themselves ‘English comedians’ because it meant good business.

In the halcyon days of the 1580s and 1590s, however, when Kit was first touring with English comedians, the companies were in the vanguard of theatrical change. Players like the clown Will Kemp went on to fame in London; their performances had huge impact, yet still showed a finer touch – they were known ‘partly by their pretty inventions, partly by the gracefulness of their gestures, often also by the elegance of their speaking’. There were the germs here of what became known in England as ‘personation’ rather than playing – the fuller and more subtle representation of character, which Kit mastered so triumphantly in his later work.

And it paid well. Players could earn far more on the Continent than they could at home. In a pamphlet entitled ‘The Run-away’s Answer’ a group of poor, debt-withered actors defended themselves against Thomas Dekker’s reproaches for skipping the Channel with: ‘We can be bankrupts on this side and gentlemen of a company beyond the sea: we burst at London, and are pieced up at Rotterdam.’ To Kit, with his costly taste for tobacco-drinking and his failing for the garlands of fashion, this was no unwelcome news. He would be rewarded not only for his intelligencing, but also well paid for his cover. The benefit was not all on his side. He was a profitable addition to a travelling troupe. A poet alone would be dead wood, but although Kit ‘lacked voice’ as a player, he could cope with smaller parts and could sing well – and his ability with French and Dutch was a decided benefit in the Low Countries. The Bene’t accounts and buttery books show that Kit’s absences from college increase dramatically from 1585. He was away for eight weeks between April and June in 1585 and for nine weeks to the end of September, then again for nine weeks from April to June of 1586. These absences coincide perfectly with the spring and late-summer touring seasons of the English players.

We owe what knowledge we have of Kit’s first foray as a player/ spy, in April and May of 1585, to material uncovered by the theatre historian Joseph Keaton.* (#litres_trial_promo) Using the alias Timothie Larkin, Kit travelled to the Low Countries with John Bradstriet’s players. ‘Tim Larkin’, as Keaton points out, is an anagram of Kit Marlin. Spies seeking aliases sometimes succumbed to the Elizabethan delight in wordplay, in which anagrams were a particular obsession. Bad auguries, for example, were seen in that the name of the king of France, Henry (or Henri) de Valois could be rearranged as Vilain Herodas, or O crudelis hyena. The name John Bradstriet (sometimes written as Bradstreet or Breadstreet) also smacks of alias: Bread Street was the location of the Mermaid Tavern, the great literary watering hole of the time. Breadstreet appears on lists of players all over the Continent, but there is no record of his existence as one in England.

The troupe seems to have had some connection with Charles Howard, who had a personal company of players, and who became Lord Admiral in 1585. John Bradstriet’s name occurs a few years later on a passport for a number of players, led by one Robert Browne, which is signed by Lord Howard. Robert Browne, the actor who again and again comes up in the records as the leader of a troupe of English players, was a member of the Admiral’s Men (as Lord Howard’s Men became known after 1585), the company that was first to stage Kit’s plays in London.

Kit’s introduction to Bradstriet was made through Thomas Walsingham, which indicates that Bradstriet himself might have been an intelligencer, and that Kit perhaps was still on probation. The mission was a simple one. In the months running up to the Treaty of Nonsuch, as it became increasingly evident that England was going to be militarily involved in the Low Countries, the government needed as much information as possible about troop movements and numbers on the ground. A group of strolling players had some mobility even through Spanish-held territory. Travellers of the time seemed anyway somewhat nonchalant about moving through war zones, apparently seeing battles as nothing more than a bit of localised bother: Richard Lassels, the gentleman traveller, on the road to Italy some decades later, ‘chose to steer towards Genoa by the low way’ in order to avoid two armies ‘which lay in the way’. William Lithgow in his Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations similarly mentions ‘leaving both armies barking at each other like wolves’ and happily treading off in another direction. Bradstriet and his troupe were probably in more danger from deserters and brigands than from soldiers, who frequently escorted convoys of merchants’ wagons to ensure safe passage. Like one Wychegerde, a grain and sundries merchant sent by Sir Francis Walsingham a few years later to spy on Spanish-held towns and enemy garrisons, Kit probably had to climb through ditches and plod across soggy polders secretly to count Spaniards in their camps.

But he did also have some fun. The English players were not only innovative, spontaneous and acrobatic, they were sexy. Keaton mentions an account of ‘untold young virgines, enamoured of the players that followed them from citty to citty till the magistrates forbad them to play’ (the traveller Fynes Moryson noted a similar phenomenon in his Itinerary in 1592). A poem published in 1597 in Frankfurt, where the September book fair was a favourite players’ destination, lets us in on some of the excitement:

The tumbler also did us please,

He sprang high in the air with ease …

His hose they fitted him so tight,

His codpiece was a lovely sight.

Nubile maids and lecherous dames

He kindled into lustful flames …

For, know that those who paid their fee

To witness a bright comedy,

Or hear the tunes of fine musicians

Were more entranced by the additions

Of bawdy jests and comic strokes,

Of antics and salacious jokes,

And what, with his tight-fitting hose

The well-bred tumbler did disclose.

At the more serious end of the players’ activity, Kit was writing. His play Pyramus and Thisbe was first performed by Bradstriet’s men, and was still in English comedians’ repertoires in 1604. Tamburlaine was formed, not in the isolation of a Cambridge college (the solitary author in a garret is a creation of Romanticism), but in the rough and tumble of working with a real theatre company. Kit also translated and adapted Plautus’s Menaechmi, which sparked his fascination with twins and mistaken identity, and was later to form the basis of The Comedy of Errors. It was around this time too that he marked his transition into a new phase of life with another name change. As Moore-Smith points out, after 1585 the Marlin, Marlen, Malyn or Marlyn in college records becomes Marly, Marlye, Marley or Morley. Even given the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling, these two clusters of variance are different enough to be significant. Kit Marlin was a new man, and now styled himself Kit, or more often Christopher, Marley.

‘Marley’ returned to Cambridge in the early summer of 1585 buoyed by his new position and with his pockets (or to be exact, his sleeves and codpiece, which served as pockets in Elizabethan dress) filled with gold. Never was there cobbler’s son so full of pride. Immediately he did something that no-one in his family had ever dreamed of doing, something that at once showed soaring insolence, announced his arrival in society, and cryptically boasted about what he was up to. He had his portrait painted.

The old Master’s Lodge at Bene’t College housed a wood-panelled gallery dedicated to the display of paintings depicting important national figures, notable college academics and other worthy alumni. With astonishing hubris for someone of such youth and humble origins, when he left the college in 1587 Christopher gifted his picture to the Master – and indeed in the years that immediately followed, his success in London made him arguably one of Bene’t’s living luminaries, perhaps warranting a portrait prominently on show. After the incident at Deptford in 1593 and his public disgrace, Christopher Marley’s painting suddenly disappeared. It resurfaced at Cambridge only in 1953 (a numerical anagram that some scholars find intriguing in itself). A passing student noticed two panels of wood sticking up out of a pile of builders’ rubble when the Master’s Lodge was being renovated. Though faded, scratched and splattered by rain, they bore the shadow of a Tudor portrait. This fact was later confirmed by the National Portrait Gallery, and restoration work began. The Canadian scholar Calvin Hoffman was the first to suggest, in 1955, that the portrait was of Marlowe, and subsequent research using a computer programme that ages faces, convincingly connects the subject of this portrait with that of the painting (known as the Chandos portrait) made of him in his forties (see Appendix II).

Poets and players of the period did sometimes hire painters to record their likenesses for posterity – or rather to contrive an image of themselves and project it into the world, showing them in the way they wanted to be seen. Like successful merchants, they commissioned portraits to show that they had arrived in their particular profession. Even people involved in seamier activities had paintings made as mementoes of significant moments in their labours. In 1586 the plotter Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators posed for portraits on the eve of what they thought would be the toppling of Elizabeth and the raising of Mary Queen of Scots to her rightful position. Kit, at the age of twenty-one, was brazenly celebrating his arrival in society, and hinting perhaps that he was in the secret service. He posed with his arms folded, not a common posture in Elizabethan portraits. Sir Roy Strong interprets this as indicating a fashionable melancholy, the humour of the disappointed lover and those of artistic temperament. But it can also indicate that the sitter has something to hide. A. D. Wraight suggests that the pose imparts the message ‘I am one who is entrusted to keep secrets.’ And Charles Nicholl goes so far as to wonder whether he has a dagger up his sleeve, no doubt to ‘stab, as occasion serves’. An ideal posture, then, for the dreamy young poet who has entered the world of espionage.

Two inscriptions appear in the top left-hand corner of the Corpus portrait. The one, ‘ætatis suae 21 1585’ gives Kit’s age when the picture was painted. The other is a motto that reads ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit’ – ‘That which nourishes me destroys me’. Some take this as a statement of the consuming passion of unrequited love. Others see it as a confession of Kit’s predicament at Cambridge – he is under obligation to the Parker Scholarship, which is paying his way, to take holy orders, while the thought of life as an Anglican priest appals him. But the motto is also eerily prescient. It reflects the paradox of Christopher’s new world, a life (as we have seen) simultaneously fuelled and consumed by deception. He is beginning a brilliant new career, but one that by definition is infected with the germ of his downfall. As he moves deeper into the world of espionage, he comes closer to the moment where someone wants him dead, a step nearer to Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford. He seems to have a disturbing premonition of what he is letting himself in for. The motto recurs decades later, in a sonnet Kit wrote not long before he died, in which he seems to regret the youthful fury that, if it did not cause his death, very nearly destroyed his life:

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,

Consum’d with that which it is nourish’d by [my italics].

(Sonnet 73)

Kit stares out of the painting with eyes rather darker than in later portraits and an insolent, supercilious expression, matched by a half-curled smile. It is just a twitch short of a sneer. He is pale, almost pallid, but with a touch of youthful colour (or is it the flush of temper?) in his cheeks. A downy moustache tops a wispy ‘mouse-eaten’ beard that ‘groweth but here a tuft and there a tuft’, softly following his jaw line. His folded arms give him a slightly defensive look, but a full lower lip adds an air of sullen defiance, an edge of spoilt child, of someone who knows he can offend and has the protection of people more powerful than the viewer.

And he certainly was transgressing. He is blatantly defying both university dress regulations and the Sumptuary Laws. His bouffant hair is nowhere near the ‘polled, notted or rounded’ style that university authorities required. The open-throated shirt he wears, with its flopping collar of gossamer-fine linen, ‘a falling band of cobweb lawn’, is at the absolute peak of fashion in 1585. So is his magnificent doublet – close-fitting with prominent ‘wings’ on the shoulders and big padded sleeves, narrowing ‘bishop-style’ to a tight wrist. It is made of black fabric slashed to reveal a reddish velvet lining, and adorned with a dazzling set of huge, decorative gold buttons, up each sleeve as well as down the front – in substance, style and splendour contravening every rule of sober dressing. Here is a young man who is not only breaking the law, but has the defiance to have himself painted while doing so. A young man who goes even further and publicly hands over this evidence to the very authority who should discipline him. A young man who is certain of the protection of very powerful friends.

He is also a young man on a spree.* (#litres_trial_promo) His spending in the buttery in 1585 spiralled from a few paltry pennies a week to a heady 18d and 21d extravagances. The portrait is a flash of prestige, its very existence a boast; it is painted on high-quality oak, sawn radially on the tree – better than most other paintings of the period in the college. His doublet, Charles Nicholl estimates, even second-hand would have cost thirty shillings or more (about £750 by today’s reckoning). Perhaps the only reason for the folded arms is to show off as many as possible of its forty oversized gold buttons.

Once again all is not what it seems. Kit had borrowed the doublet from a fellow novice spy, Roger Walton, who had been a page to the old Earl of Northumberland, and like Kit moved in the circle of Henry Percy, the young ‘Wizard Earl’. By 1586 Walton was working in France for Sir Francis Walsingham, and a short while later the doublet (no longer quite so fashionable, but still worthy of remark) would again be captured for posterity when the English ambassador in Paris complained to Sir Francis of a young man who sounds remarkably like Kit himself, but whom the ambassador thinks is Roger Walton. This young disrupter ‘to some … showeth himself a great Papist, to others a Protestant, but as they take him that haunt him most, he hath neither God nor religion, a very evil condition, a swearer without measure and tearer of God, a notable whoremaster … a little above twenty, lean-faced and slender, somewhat tall, complexion a little sallowish, most goeth appareled in a doublet of black carke, cut upon a dark reddish velvet’.

We know Kit himself was in France during his second long absence from college in 1585, in the late summer. He appears momentarily at the baths at Plombières, which suggests he had again been at Rheims or possibly in Strasbourg, where Walsingham also ran agents and which was a popular destination for troupes of English comedians.* (#litres_trial_promo) This is the first hint we have of what was to become a lifelong predilection for public bathing. At times the reason for this may have been plain lust – the vapour baths or ‘stews’ of London were notorious brothels for both sexes – but house rules at Plombières stated quite clearly that: ‘All prostitutes and immodest girls are forbidden to enter the said baths, or to approach the same within five hundred paces, under penalty of being whipped at the four corners of the said baths …’. It seems more likely that one of the ‘untold virgins’ that followed Bradstriet’s players had not been so virginal after all, and that despite the protection of the olive-pip rosary so carefully made for him some years before by Bianca, the Venetian courtesan, Christopher had a dose of the clap – or in Elizabethan parlance, he had been ‘burned’. Hot baths were considered an effective cure for the searing pains of gonorrhoea. In Sonnet 153 Kit plays with the idea of Love’s ‘burning’. He has been ‘burned’ but a ‘maid of Dian’s’ steals Cupid’s brand and (in an apparent early form of inoculation) plunges it into a fountain, creating ‘a seething bath, which yet men prove/Against strange maladies a sovereign cure … I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,/And thither hied, a sad distempered guest,/But found no cure.’ In Sonnet 154 he once again goes for a cure to a bath that is ‘a healthful remedy/For men diseased’, but finds that neither treatment nor disease diminishes his ardour: ‘Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love’. Was he suffering from the more dangerous, often fatal, syphilis? In later life he shows a good knowledge of the disease and supposed cures, such as ‘villainous saffron’ in All’s Well That Ends Well; or mercury fumigation, as Doll Tearsheet undergoes in Henry V. Timon displays a detailed awareness of such symptoms as baldness and disintegration of the nose when he berates Phrynia and Timandra in Timon of Athens; and Lucio in Measure for Measure makes one of the earliest references in English literature to the disease being transmitted by a drinking vessel.

The glimpse we are given of Kit’s visit to Plombières is through a document written by an unnamed secretary of the essayist Montaigne, noting a conversation held in the seething waters between ‘an Englishman T. Larkkin’ and his master. The same secretary had, during an earlier visit, helped Montaigne write up his journal when the essayist was too ill to do so himself. That document survives, but the fragment mentioning Larkin appears to be part of a second journal, now lost.* (#litres_trial_promo) Montaigne had just finished his second term of office as Mayor of Bordeaux and was taking his family wandering, as he put it, to avoid the plague. Five years earlier, while on a grand tour of the spas of Germany and Italy in an attempt to cure his gallstones, he had especially enjoyed Plombières, and was back for more – astonishing regulars who came only to bathe by also drinking four pints of the waters every morning. He particularly liked the sweet, cool waters of the Queen’s Bath, which he said tasted of liquorice with a faint tang of iron. Montaigne and his man stayed at the Angel, where the cooks were good but the wine and bread bad, and where the chambers had private galleries that gave access to the baths. Kit’s lodgings were less grand.