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STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Dark

Renaissance

The Dangerous

Times and

Fatal Genius of

Shakespeare’s

Greatest Rival,

Christopher

Marlowe

‘Sparkling, addictive reading’

MAGGIE O’FARRELL

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DARK RENAISSANCE

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Also by

Stephen Greenblatt

Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud

(with Adam Phillips)

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

T e Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: T e Story that Created Us

T e Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Shakespeare’s Freedom

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Hamlet in Purgatory

Practicing New Historicism

(with Catherine Gallagher)

Marvelous Possessions: T e Wonder of the New World

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

Shakespearean Negotiations: T e Circulation of Social Energy in

Renaissance England

Renaissance Self- Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

Sir Walter Ralegh: T e Renaissance Man and His Roles

T ree Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley

Edited by

Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare’s Montaigne: T e Florio Translation of Essays

(with Peter G. Platt)

Religio Medici and Urne- Buriall

(with Ramie Targoff )

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

T e Norton Anthology of English Literature

(general editor)

T e Norton Shakespeare

(general editor)

New World Encounters

Redrawing the Boundaries: T e Transformation of English

and American Literary Studies

(with Giles Gunn)

Representing the English Renaissance

Allegory and Representation

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 5

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DARK

RENAISSANCE

THE D ANGEROUS TI MES

AND FATAL GENI US OF

SH AKESPE ARE’S GRE ATEST RIVAL,

CHRI STOPHER M ARLOWE

STEPHEN GREENBLATT

THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 7

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 8

To Horst Bredekamp

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 9

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 10

Contents

A World Apart .....................................................1

Handwriting on the Wall ...................................8

Th e Great Separation ....................................... 22

Th e Master’s Books ........................................... 38

Bright College Years ..........................................53

Gold Buttons ......................................................76

Recruitment ....................................................... 88

In the Liberties ................................................ 113

Th e Conquest of London ............................... 127

10.

Secret Sharers ...................................................141

11.

Hog Lane .......................................................... 158

12.

Th e Counterfeiters .......................................... 170

13.

Strange Company ............................................176

14.

Dangerous Acquaintances ............................. 193

15.

Wizardry ..........................................................208

16.

Th e Faustian Bargain .....................................226

17.

Neptune’s Smile .............................................. 253

18.

Into the Light ...................................................268

Acknowledgments •

287

Notes •

291

Index •

319

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 11

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DARK RENAISSANCE

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Elizabeth I, “T e Rainbow Portrait,” c. 1600 (attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the

Younger or Isaac Oliver). Marquess of Salisbury, Hatﬁ eld House. T e portrait celebrates

the elderly queen, with dyed red hair and low-cut gown, as an ageless beauty, while the

eyes and ears that decorate her dress suggest her omniscience (Hatﬁ eld House,

T e Historical Association).

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 14

C H A P T E R 1

A World Apart

o a sophisticated Italian who traveled to England in the

late sixteenth century, the island might not have appeared, as it

had to the ancient Roman poet Virgil, “wholly separated from

all the world.” But it would certainly have seemed bleak. To be sure, in

London the visitor would have seen many signs of wealth and power:

the sprawling royal residence of Whitehall; grand dwellings along the

Th ames for the leading aristocrats and their entourages; the magnifi cent

abbey at Westminster housing the royal tombs; in the busy commercial

center paved streets, some of them graced with beautiful fountains; a

brooding fortress, said to have been built by Julius Caesar and used in

the sixteenth century as a prison, a mint, an armory, and the site of a

royal menagerie. But there was much else that would have given a foreign

visitor pause.

Th e weather was a trial. England, along with much of northern

Europe, found itself in the midst of what is now termed the Little Ice

Age, with bitter cold winters and fi erce storms that destroyed crops and

caused periodic famine. Th e roads were terrible, and after dark they were

the haunts of robbers. In London the most popular entertainments were

animal fi ghts. Large crowds paid to see a horse with a monkey on its back

attacked by fi erce dogs. Th e poor beleaguered horse would gallop and

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dark renaissance

2 •

kick; the monkey would scream; the audience would roar. When the

exhausted horse collapsed and was killed, it would be time to bring out the

bears and bulls, tie them to stakes, unleash the dogs, and repeat the fun.

“Th is sport,” remarked a visitor from the Continent, “is

not

very pleasant

to watch.” In the churches psalms were sung and Mass was celebrated not

in the time- honored Latin but in plain English. Th e Reformation had left

other, more tangible marks as well. “It is a pitiful sight,” wrote an Italian

merchant who kept a journal of his visit to London in 1562, “to see the

beautiful marble statues of saints and other decorations there, broken

and ruined because of their heresy.” In the streets, foreigners were advised

to keep a low profi le, since the crowds could be suspicious or hostile.

Even hospitable encounters could cause considerable baﬄ ement. If

you were invited to dinner, you had to brace yourself. “It is almost impos-

sible to believe,” remarked the merchant, “that they could eat so much

meat.” To wash it down, the English “make a drink from barley and the

seeds of hops which they call beer, healthy but sickening to taste.” Com-

pared to Italian women, English women seemed unnervingly free: they

could go out of the house by themselves, unaccompanied by their men-

folk; bustle about in the markets and serve in shops; even go by them-

selves to public entertainments. “Th ey kiss each other a lot,” observed

the merchant of the men and women he was observing; “If a stranger

enters a house and does not fi rst of all kiss the mistress on the lips, they

think him badly brought up.” And yet at the same time women deemed

to be scolds could be literally muzzled by a horrible device called a brank,

and anyone suspected of sexual immorality could be publicly whipped

and shamed.

It was disorienting. Th e mansions along the Strand and the handsome

Royal Exchange in the city center gave way almost at once to a vast war-

ren of tenements and hovels. Half- timbered buildings with dormers and

gables extended out over the streets, blocking the light and forming mal-

odorous tunnels for the carriages and pack animals and pedestrians to

pass through. Th e narrow lanes were fi lled with excrement and off al. On

London Bridge, alongside shops for luxury goods, the severed heads of

convicted traitors were stuck up on spikes for passersby to contemplate.

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 16

A World Apart

• 3

On the gallows near Tyburn there were public mutilations and hangings

almost every day.

Th e people spoke a language largely unknown to the rest of the civi-

lized world. Virtually nothing written in English had aroused suﬃ cient

interest to merit translation into one of the dominant continental lan-

guages or into Latin, the shared language of learning. Early in the century

an Englishman, Th omas More, had published a brilliant short work in

Latin,

Utopia

, that quickly earned him Europe- wide acclaim, but More

had been beheaded by the merciless king Henry VIII. Two gifted poets

in Henry’s court, Th omas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, had

some success importing and adapting Italian and French poetic models—

Wyatt introduced the sonnet form into English— but they too were both

snuff ed out. Accused of treason, Surrey was executed in the Tower at the

age of thirty, and Wyatt, who had been imprisoned on suspicion of having

had an aff air with Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, died at thirty- nine

in the wake of a second imprisonment. Th eir deaths seemed to have had a

chilling eff ect on cultural life.

In sixteenth- century Italy the major universities were all sites of

extraordinary achievements: the founding of the fi rst botanical gardens

for the scientifi c study of plants; epochal advances in anatomy and embry-

ology; the positing of germ theory and the creation of epidemiology; a

revolution in physics and astronomy. Th e two English universities by

comparison were scientifi c backwaters. Learned scholars lectured on the

ancients Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen, but new frontiers of inquiry were

kept shut, and the attention of teachers and their students was focused

elsewhere. Both Oxford and Cambridge were riven by bitter confl icts, as

the ascendant Protestant authorities tried to eradicate any residual loy-

alty to Roman Catholicism and as more radical Protestants complained

that the Reformation in England had not gone nearly far enough.

Th e religious confl icts had been going on for more than a half- century,

ever since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and in their murderous tangles

they caught up the lives and fates of virtually everyone in the kingdom.

Oﬃ cially at least, the ruler’s religion was the religion of the entire country;

no other faiths were tolerated, neither Judaism nor Islam, of course, but

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4 •

also not any version of Christianity other than the ruler’s own. In mak-

ing himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England, Henry’s inter-

ests lay principally in getting his hands on a divorce and on the wealth of

the monasteries. Th e six- year reign of his son Edward VI, who came to

the throne at the age of ten, inaugurated a sharper turn in doctrine and

church organization toward Protestantism. Th en, after Edward’s death

from tuberculosis and after an abortive nine- day reign by his seventeen-

year- old Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey that ended in her execution,

his sister Mary returned the country to the Roman Catholic Church. Five

tumultuous years later Mary died, and with the accession of her younger

sister Elizabeth, England once again oﬃ cially became Protestant. Each

of these changes of regime was accompanied by dark waves of conspira-

cies, suspicions, arrests, and executions, all on top of the ordinary punish-

ments meted out in a brutally punitive society.

It is diﬃ cult to take in how nightmarish the situation was, for we have

little or nothing comparable in our world. Perhaps the fate of a German

family that experienced, in fewer than sixty years, the Weimar Republic,

National Socialism, the Communist government of East Germany, the

fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunifi cation conjures up something

of its unbearable stress and danger. A window into daily life in Tudor

England is provided by a rare diary that survives from the mid- sixteenth

century. Th e diary was kept by a merchant, Henry Machyn, who lived in

London and took it upon himself to record events around him. On April

21, 1556, to open the pages at random, he wrote that two men, Master

Frogmorton and Master Woodall, were taken from the Tower to a court-

room to be tried on charges of “conspiracy against the queen and other

matters.”

On April 24 he noted that six men were “carried to Smithfi eld

to be burned”— Smithfi eld was a preferred site for executing heretics—

along with other men “carried into the country to be burned.” Later that

same afternoon he observed three men put into the pillory in Cheapside,

near London Bridge, one for perjury and the other two for subornation

of perjury. On April 28 Frogmorton and Woodall, Machyn noted, were

hanged, drawn, and quartered, and their heads stuck on pikes on London

Bridge. Th e next week he recorded more men hauled off to the Tower

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 18

A World Apart

• 5

on charges of treason, more heretics (“one a painter, the other a cloth-

worker”) burned, and more malefactors put in the pillory, this time with

their ears nailed to the wood. So, interspersed with notations about the

outbreak of plague, the diary goes on, page after page, all more or less the

same whether the regime was Catholic or Protestant, though of course

the faith of those accused of treason or heresy would have been reversed.

In such circumstances, in order to keep one’s head on, it made sense to

keep one’s head down.

Henry VIII had separated his realm, already geographically isolated,

from the old faith that united most of the rest of Europe, and in 1580 his

heretic daughter, nearing fi fty years old, sat on the throne unmarried and

without an heir. Elizabeth I was not the monster that her father was, but

the torturers and the executioners were kept extremely busy. To someone

from the Continent, the queen must have looked exotic or perhaps sim-

ply outlandish. Her face painted white tinged with pink, her hair dyed

bright red, and her teeth turning black, she was periodically paraded, like

a weird religious icon covered with precious jewels, before her adoring

people. At court richly clad favorites and even sober senior advisers had

to address her on their knees and to couch their appeals in the language

of romantic love, as if she were an alluring young maiden being wooed by

smitten suitors.

Even in her sixties the queen was still at it. Upon being ushered into the

Privy Chamber, the French ambassador André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse,

was unnerved to fi nd Elizabeth “strangely attired” in what seemed to him

a dress of gauze. “She kept the front of her dress open,” he wrote in his

diary, “and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and

often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was

too hot.” Th e following week she received him again, this time in a black

taff eta gown similarly slit in front. “She has a trick of putting both hands

on her gown and opening it,” the startled ambassador noted, “insomuch

that all her belly can be seen.”

Th e queen’s gambit was quite deliberate; her interlocutors, thrown

off - balance, felt they were entering into an unsettling, fantastical world.

Her father’s court had boasted the presence of the great German painter

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6 •

Hans Holbein the Younger; Elizabeth would not tolerate any artist so

committed to the nuanced depiction of reality. Instead, she patronized as

her oﬃ cial painter a goldsmith by training whom she ordered never to use

shadows in any portraits of her. She was to remain untouched by time.

It was as if a thick, hardened, protective coating, akin to the heavy white

lead- based makeup applied to smallpox-scarred faces, had been spread

over all of English cultural life. By 1580, though Elizabeth had been on

the throne for more than twenty years, her reign had largely managed to

produce among her own subjects only artistic mediocrities. Native English

culture seemed as backward in poetry as it was in painting, sculpture, and

the life of the mind. An Italian visitor— justifi ably proud of Botticelli,

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and others— would have been

puzzled to see the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard trotted out as the leading

English painter. What then (if he could read English) would he have made

of the leaden versifi ers Barnabe Googe, Nicholas Grimald, and Th omas

Tusser? Where, he might have asked, were the equivalents in England to

Ariosto, Tasso, or Vittoria Colonna? Th e answer would have been that

they did not exist, and there seemed little prospect that they ever would.

An alert observer in search of signs of cultural life in this wasteland

might have noticed— alongside the bearbaiting pits and other venues for

blood sports— a novel round structure that had been erected only a few

years earlier in the rough area east of the city called Shoreditch. Called

simply Th e Th eatre, it was the fi rst freestanding playhouse that had been

built in England since ancient Roman times, and it was successful enough

to have led to the construction of a second playhouse, Th e Curtain, a few

hundred yards away. But to a visitor accustomed to such sophisticated

entertainments of the Italian courts as Ariosto’s comedy

Cassaria

or Tas-

so’s pastoral romance

Aminta

, nothing that went on within the walls of

these wooden theaters would have seemed worth the risk of exposure

to pickpockets or worse. Th e plays were incredibly crude, and besides,

the playhouses had been built in the suburbs because the authorities had

expelled the playing companies from the city center in order to reduce the

spread of deadly bubonic plague.

Th en, not instantly but with startling rapidity, it all changed. Th e

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A World Apart

• 7

coating that had hardened over the realm’s culture cracked. If four hun-

dred years later we look back on this period as an astonishing time, it is

because of what burst forth in the decades after 1580: a constellation of

brilliant poets, the greatest dramatists in the English language, extraor-

dinary advances in navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, the fi rst

attempts to establish English colonies in the New World, and in intellec-

tual life, the speculative and experimental daring that led Francis Bacon

to declare that “knowledge itself is power.” Th ere is no single explanation

for an explosion of creative energy of this magnitude, yet one remarkable

fi gure embodies the ferocious energy and daring that brought England,

belatedly, into the creative cultural turmoil that had been transforming

the Continent for more than a century.

Christopher Marlowe was an unlikely person to have played a major

role in breaking open the rigid carapace that had constricted the English

creative spirit. Born to a poor provincial cobbler, he was murdered at the

age of twenty- nine. In those brief, tumultuous years he was a remarkably

productive writer— no fewer than seven plays, along with extraordinary

poems— but nothing bearing his name was published during his lifetime.

No letters, diaries, or drafts in his hand are known to have survived; nor

are there any surviving letters addressed to him. He wrote in a society

in which the notions of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and

freedom of religion were unknown. Much of what we know about his life

and opinions comes from the reports of spies and informants or from tes-

timony extracted by torture. But Marlowe serves as the thread that leads

us through a labyrinth of corridors, many of them dimly lit, dangerous,

and shrouded with secrets, and fi nally into the light. In the course of his

restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and his stupendous achievements,

Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.

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C H A P T E R 2

Handwriting on the Wall

t had been a particularly miserable English spring. Th e rains

refused to let up. Th e euphoria that had buoyed up the country fi ve

years earlier, with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, had long since

evaporated; many believed that a new invasion was imminent. Th e sixty-

year- old unmarried queen Elizabeth had no heir and steadfastly refused

to settle the issue of succession. Th ere were rumors that terrorist cells—

fanatics determined to reestablish Roman Catholicism as the faith of

England— would attempt to assassinate her. At the same time radical

Protestant agitators were issuing vehement broadsides against the estab-

lished church. As if this weren’t enough, unemployment in London was

high, the bad weather portended rising prices and possible food shortages,

and landlords were demanding higher rents.

To make this season of discontent still worse, the dread bubonic

plague, briefl y in remission, had returned with a vengeance. Th e disease

was terrifyingly contagious. Victims would awaken with fever and chills.

A feeling of extreme weakness or exhaustion would give way to diarrhea,

vomiting, bleeding from the mouth, nose, or rectum, and telltale buboes,

or swollen lymph nodes, in the groin or armpit. Death, often in great

agony, would almost inevitably follow.

Innumerable preventive measures were proposed, most of which were

useless— or, in the case of the killing of dogs and cats, worse than useless,

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 9

since as we now understand, the disease was spread by rat- borne fl eas. In

the absence of predators, rats proliferated. Th e smoke of dried rosemary,

frankincense, or bay leaves burning in a chafi ng dish was thought to help

clear the air of infection, and if those ingredients were not readily avail-

able, physicians recommended burning old shoes. In the streets people

walked about sniﬃ ng oranges stuff ed with cloves. Pressed fi rmly enough

against the nose, perhaps these functioned as a kind of mask.

Civic oﬃ cials, realizing that crowds heightened contagion, took steps

to institute what we now call social distancing. Collecting data from par-

ish registers, they carefully tracked plague- related deaths. When those

deaths surpassed thirty per week, they initiated protective measures. In

January 1593, they shut the playhouses and banned public spectacles, col-

lective entertainments, and sporting events. Worship services were the

only exceptions, since it was assumed that God would not visit the plague

on anyone who was in church praying.

One entirely predictable outcome of the rising tension that aﬄ icted

everyone was a search for scapegoats. Th ere were few or no Jews around

to blame; the entire Jewish population of England had been expelled in

1290, in the fi rst mass ethnic cleansing in Europe. In the absence of the

traditional objects of religious hatred, Catholics were the obvious choice—

after all, the state routinely hunted down and killed English priests,

trained in overseas seminaries, who had returned to England in order to

conduct clandestine masses. Th e established church also directed anger

at Puritans who, agitating for what they saw as a “purer” faith, mocked

the bishops and condemned as pagan such popular observances as Christ-

mas and Maypoles. On April 6, 1593, two Cambridge- educated radical

ministers were taken from Newgate prison to the gallows at Tyburn and

hanged “for devising and circulating seditious books.”

But the majority of ordinary Londoners did not seem drawn to inter-

denominational bloodbaths. Many Protestants had a residual loyalty to

the old faith, and in most conforming families, there would have been at

least one aunt or brother or cousin who was secretly an ardent Catho-

lic. So too, almost certainly, other family members would have felt that

the Protestant Reformation had not gone nearly far enough in England.

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10 •

Th e populace in general was more amused than alarmed by the irreverent

attacks on the establishment from Puritan separatists that circulated ille-

gally under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate; they did not hold these

religious activists responsible for economic hardship or social misery.

Th e most common target of antipathy was London’s small commu-

nity of resident aliens— “strangers.” Th ey were for the most part Protes-

tant refugees, some from France in the wake of the Wars of Religion and

the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and others from what is now Bel-

gium and the Netherlands after the Spanish army invaded and set up the

Inquisition. Th e refugees were in general peaceful and hardworking peo-

ple who dutifully paid the special tax imposed on foreigners and largely

kept to themselves. Forbidden to compete in retail trade, they prospered

in enterprises like brewing, engraving, and cloth weaving. But though

they amounted to only a tiny percentage of the city’s population of almost

two hundred thousand, they were repeatedly charged with taking away

the jobs of native- born Englishmen.

In the unhappy spring of 1593, an anonymous fl yer circulated, angrily

demanding that the foreigners all be expelled; members of Parliament

made speeches about their alleged threat to the economy; drunken louts

in taverns muttered about taking action. On May 5 Londoners awoke

to see a particularly menacing placard nailed to the wall of the so- called

Dutch Church, the church where the Protestant refugees from Roman

Catholic persecution prayed.

For almost fi fty years this church had been assigned by royal char-

ter to London’s community of “Germans and other strangers.” But the

fi fty- three- line poem on the placard, addressed to the “strangers that do

inhabit in this land,” was a litany of accusations. “Your Machiavellian

merchant spoils the state.” “Your usury doth leave us all for dead . . . And

like the Jews, you eat us up as bread.” “Cutthroat- like in selling you undo

us all.”

You have caused our

rents to rise. Your cheap, gawdy goods drive ours

out of the market. You live far better here than you did back where you came

from. Our soldiers are sent abroad to ﬁ ght in your wars. You have forced us

out onto the streets. You will make us all starve and die

. As the complaints

reached a crescendo, they turned into a chilling warning:

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 11

Since words nor threats nor any other thing

Can make you to avoid this certain ill,

We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying.

Not Paris’ massacre so much blood did spill

As we will do just vengeance on you all.

Our swords are whetted, the placard ended; therefore, “Fly, fl y, and never

return.” It was signed “Tamburlaine.”

Th e Elizabethan state did not take such threats lightly. Apart from

whatever sympathy the queen and her advisers may have felt for the plight

of Protestant refugees from the Continent, they hated any popular dis-

order. In 1570, when collective discontent in Norwich, about one hun-

dred miles northeast of London, led to a planned uprising to force the

expulsion of the foreign weavers, the agitation’s ringleaders were quickly

identifi ed and apprehended. Th ey were then made examples of, in the way

the authorities most favored to impress on the crowd the consequence of

disobedience: they were hanged, cut down while still alive, castrated, dis-

emboweled, and sliced in quarters.

Confronted in 1593 with comparable agitation, the authorities acted

quickly. On May 10, the City of London off ered a reward of one hundred

crowns— roughly fi ve times the average Elizabethan workman’s annual

income— for the identity of the person who wrote the words on the

Dutch Church wall. At their weekly meeting, the Privy Council issued

instructions to their oﬃ cers “to make search and apprehend every per-

son” who might be suspected of having written the libelous placard. Th e

oﬃ cers were authorized to “search in any of the chambers, studies, chests,

or other like places for all manner of writings or papers that may give you

light for the discovery of the libelers.” And upon fi nding likely suspects,

the order continued, if “they shall refuse to confess the truth, you shall by

authority hereof put them to the torture in Bridewell, and by the extrem-

ity thereof . . . draw them to discover their knowledge concerning the said

libels.” Th e order was issued on May 11 and was set in motion immedi-

ately. Th e very next day there was an ominous hammering on the door of

the writer Th omas Kyd.

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12 •

Th e oﬃ cers who barged into Kyd’s rooms were not ordinary constables,

the kind in buff - colored jerkins that might seize you for not paying your

debts or for disturbing the peace. From their insignia, Kyd would have

grasped at once that the business, whatever it turned out to be, was alto-

gether more menacing. Th ese were agents of the Privy Council, the queen’s

closest advisers, and they were clearly looking for someone or something.

It is possible that the fi rst questions that they asked had to do with the

whereabouts of Christoper Marlowe, for the name on the placard, Tam-

burlaine, was the hero of Marlowe’s spectacularly successful two- part

play, and its playwright had earned a dangerous reputation for blasphemy

and provocation. But though, as poor, struggling young writers, they had

once known each other reasonably well, Kyd might have had no idea.

Over the past years Marlowe had begun to move in exalted social circles,

to which Kyd had no access. As the oﬃ cers could see for themselves, he

was merely a humble scribbler, trying to eke out a living by writing plays

and by translating contemporary works from French and Latin.

Kyd was arrested in his workspace. On his table, therefore, there

would have been quills for pens, a knife to sharpen them, inkpots, note-

books, manuscripts, correspondence, and possibly a small number of

bound and unbound books. (Books were relatively expensive, and Kyd,

in his early thirties, was not a wealthy man.) Th e oﬃ cers began imme-

diately to gather up the papers on the table, and they proceeded uncer-

emoniously to rifl e through the cabinets, open the chests, and sweep up

every piece of paper they could fi nd. Attempting to show that he had

nothing to hide, Kyd, his ink- stained hands no doubt trembling, oblig-

ingly brought them even more. Th en and there they set about to read

what they had seized.

Kyd was not one of those writers whose manuscripts were indecipher-

able. He had excellent penmanship and with good reason. He was the

son of a scrivener, a professional scribe paid to draw up and copy oﬃ cial

documents. To judge from the surviving specimens of his own handwrit-

ing, he had mastered his father’s craft and probably practiced it himself

during slack times. Th e profession was a reasonably remunerative one—

Kyd’s father had saved enough money to send him to London’s celebrated

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 13

Merchant Taylor’s School, located near Cannon Street in the commercial

heart of the city— but copying was regarded as a mechanical trade and

lacked social prestige. Scriveners were mockingly called

noverints

, after

the Latin phrase (“Be it known to all present”) with which most of their

painstakingly inscribed legal documents would begin.

Real gentlemen were not expected to have good penmanship, to write

“fair,” as it was called; on the contrary, even if they had learned how to do

so, they may have deliberately aff ected a certain casual untidiness. “I once

did hold it,” Prince Hamlet tells his friend Horatio,

A baseness to write fair, and labored much

How to forget that learning, but, sir, now

It did me yeoman’s service. (5.2.34– 37)

Th e yeoman’s service in question was the prince’s ability to forge the com-

mission that sent his school chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to

their deaths.

Kyd had no comparable status- consciousness to induce him to hide

his manual skills. Th ough he went to a fi ne secondary school, he lacked

the ambition, or more likely the money, to follow in the path of many of

his more privileged classmates and go on to Oxford or Cambridge. Had

he done so, he could upon graduation have proudly styled himself a gen-

tleman. Instead, after learning his father’s trade, he took steps that any

person anxious about rank and reputation would have regarded as rash:

he embarked on the precarious path of writing for the professional stage.

An odor of shame hung over London’s burgeoning entertainment

industry. Religious moralists called the newly built playhouses satanic

dens of iniquity; clergymen warned that God reserved a place in hell for

those seduced by their sinister charms; civic authorities complained that

they were public nuisances, promoting idleness, spreading disease, and

causing traﬃ c problems. Unpatronized actors were legally classifi ed as

vagabonds, liable to be branded and whipped out of town. At least in the

early years, writers for the commercial stage rarely broadcast their names;

most plays, when they were published at all, appeared anonymously.

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14 •

Notwithstanding all the disapproving voices, the public fl ocked to the

theaters by the thousands.

Repertory companies, in fi erce competition with one another, had an

insatiable appetite for new material, and they were willing to pay for it.

Th e renumeration was suﬃ cient to attract not only socially marginal peo-

ple like Kyd but also university graduates, at least those who had failed to

go on to more respectable careers or had chosen to walk on the wild side.

Th e latter, even when they brazenly fl aunted a bohemian lifestyle, shored

up their shaky social standing by touting their own higher education and

mocking anyone who lacked it. In 1589 the Cambridge- educated play-

wright Th omas Nashe, in a letter addressed “To the Gentlemen Students

of Both Universities,” ridiculed upstarts who “leave the trade of

Noverint”

and busy themselves “with the endeavors of art.” If on a frosty morning you

encountered one of these ignoramuses, “he will aff ord you whole Ham-

lets, I should say handfuls of Tragical speeches.” In case Nashe’s readers

failed to identity the specifi c target of his mockery, he dropped another

hint. Th ese scribblers, he wrote, “imitate the Kid in Aesop” who, allured

by the wily fox’s tricks, tried “to leap into a new occupation.” Th e foolish

kid— Kyd— would get just what he deserved. He would be eaten alive.

Why was Nashe so annoyed? Perhaps because the scrivener’s son had

written a commercially successful tragedy about the Danish prince. Kyd’s

classmate at the Merchant Taylor’s School, Th omas Lodge, also went out

of his way to make fun of the white- faced “ghost which cried so miserably

at the Th eatre, like an oyster- wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ ” (Book hunters for

centuries have avidly searched for this precursor of Shakespeare’s great

tragedy but thus far without any luck.) And much to the annoyance of

his better- born and university- educated rivals, Kyd had scored an even

greater success with another lurid revenge play,

T e Spanish Tragedy.

Kyd had always been very careful. He wasn’t one of those reckless

souls who loved to live on the edge: the heavy- drinking Robert Greene,

whose mistress was the sister of a notorious London criminal; the sharp-

tongued Nashe, who was imprisoned for one of his scurrilous pamphlets;

the restless Lodge, who shipped out on a voyage to Brazil and the Strait

of Magellan; and above all Christopher Marlowe, who said out loud what

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 15

no one who wanted to live a long life would venture even to whisper. Th e

scrivener’s son showed no such signs of wildness. He was content to stay

in the shadows and go about his work. Among the very few contemporary

references to him, one simply called him “industrious Kyd.”

But there was more to Kyd than met the eye.

T e Spanish Tragedy

aroused popular excitement by its sly implication that since the wellborn

and privileged are beyond the reach of the law, the less privileged can

obtain justice only by taking matters into their own hands. Kyd con-

trived to convey this radical message safely by locating his tragedy in

Spain, England’s principal national enemy. Th e hero, Hieronimo, is an

upright judge whose son is treacherously murdered by two men who are

so well- connected that there is no hope for the crime to be punished. In

the play’s mad climax, the father enlists his son’s grieving lover to help

him kill the two aristocratic murderers before the eyes of the whole royal

court. When the deed is done and he is asked to reveal his confederates,

he refuses to speak. “Fetch forth the tortures,” orders the king; “Traitor

as thou art, I’ll make thee tell.” “Never,” Hieronimo replies and then pro-

ceeds to bite off his tongue. Th e tongue, spat out onstage, must have made

the audience scream.

Th e box oﬃ ce receipts for this piece of blood- soaked entertainment

were spectacular and remained so for decades. Th ough the play’s author

would not have directly profi ted from the success— the theatrical entre-

preneur who had bought the script and owned the rights would reap the

benefi t— his triumph made him well- known and aroused the jealousy of

his fellow playwrights.

In 1593, when the oﬃ cers of the Privy Council

arrested him,

Kyd was at the top of his game.

His arrest must have taken him by surprise, for Kyd was by no means

the most obvious suspect for the oﬃ cers who were looking for the author

of the incendiary verses. Th e placard’s mentions of Machiavelli, of the

Jews, and of the Paris massacre would immediately have conjured up

someone else: the author of two popular, indeed notorious plays,

T e Jew

of Malta

and

T e Massacre at Paris.

Before the plague forced the clos-

ing of the theaters, these plays had been seen by thousands of London-

ers

And as was well- known, they were written not by Kyd but by Kyd’s

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16 •

famous contemporary Christopher Marlowe. As if the heavy hints were

not enough, the placard’s signature, Tamburlaine, seemed to give the

game away.

Th e oﬃ cers could have immediately suspected Marlowe, but they

might not have known where to fi nd him. Th ey could have gone to the

neighborhood of the Rose Th eater, where

Tamburlaine

and other of his

plays had been performed, and made inquiries among those— actors,

bookkeepers, producers, and the like— who had a professional relation-

ship with playwrights. Marlowe’s actual whereabouts may not have been

forthcoming— in fact, as surviving records show, he was not in London

at the time— but someone could have mentioned that a few years earlier

he had shared rooms with Kyd. Hence the unwelcome visit Kyd received.

• • •

The search failed to turn up any evidence linking Kyd or anyone

else to the Dutch Church libel. But the oﬃ cers did not come away empty-

handed. Somewhere in the pile of “waste and idle papers” that Kyd had

handed over to them was a three- page document in which they spotted

what they termed “vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.”

It was as if they had come to investigate burglary and found evidence of

something far worse.

Th ough the document was written in a fi ne professional hand, such as

that of a trained scrivener, Kyd denied any knowledge of it and had many

samples to show that in fact his handwriting was diff erent. But heresy

in Elizabethan England was a serious charge, one that carried a death

sentence, and ultimately it did not matter whose handwriting it was. Th e

oﬃ cers arrested Kyd in order to have him explain the presence of the

off ending pages in his rooms.

Th e heretical text argued that there was a fundamental contradic-

tion between the Bible’s aﬃ rmation that God is “Everlasting, Invisible,

Immutable, Incomprehensible, Immortal” and the claim that Jesus, who

was certainly visible, comprehensible, and mortal, was God. Jesus may

have been an inspired moral teacher, the greatest who ever lived, but he

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 17

was a human being, not the incarnate deity. Th is argument, the famil-

iar starting point for what would become Unitarianism, was regarded as

tantamount to atheism. England in the sixteenth century had repeatedly

changed its oﬃ cial religious orthodoxy— veering queasily from Catholic

to Protestant to Catholic again and back to Protestant— but the changes

never produced a genial spirit of tolerance. On the contrary, each reli-

gious regime furiously attacked its perceived enemies, sharpening axes

and building terrible pyres in the name of the God of Love. And all the

warring parties joined together to persecute anyone who had the temer-

ity to question Jesus’s divinity. Th ough the doubt must have arisen

frequently— it springs naturally from the Gospels’ moving depiction of

Jesus’s humanity— it was far too dangerous to express openly, let alone to

be written down in documents of the kind found in Kyd’s rooms.

Elizabethan plays often featured scenes in which a character, secure,

comfortable, and confi dent, suddenly fi nds himself in a terrifying situa-

tion, without friends and without hope. Kyd had written just such a scene

T e Spanish Tragedy

, and now in real life he found himself in the midst

of one. He was hauled off to Bridewell prison to be interrogated. Th e

Elizabethans were technologically backward, by our standards, but they

had developed a sophisticated array of techniques for causing pain. Simu-

lated drowning (still favored by the CIA) was much in use, as was hanging

prisoners in manacles with their feet not quite touching the ground. Even

more feared were the demonic machines: thumbscrews, the rack, which

slowly dislocated the limbs, and the scavenger’s daughter, which bent the

body in upon itself until it formed a circle of agony.

One or more of these methods was likely to have been Kyd’s fate, for

in a letter written a few weeks later he complained of the “pains and unde-

served tortures” that had been infl icted on him. Th e ordeal caused mental

as well as physical injuries. Th e next year he referred to his “aﬄ ictions of

the mind,” his “bitter times,” and his “privy broken passions.”

How much Kyd knew about the document that had caused him to be

arrested is not clear. A copy of it, made at the time of the arrest, would

sit unread in the state archives until a scholar in the twentieth century

found it and identifi ed its source. It turns out to have been an excerpt

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18 •

from a perfectly orthodox book published with the government’s permis-

sion in 1549, more than forty years before the arrest. Th e book was

T e

Fall of the Late Arrian

by an English schoolmaster and academic named

John Proctor. It had been written not to promote the heretical argu-

ments that alarmed the arresting oﬃ cers but to refute them. Even the

most restrained Renaissance works of theology routinely excerpted or

provided long summaries of the positions they intended to demolish. Th e

incriminating document in Kyd’s room was simply a handwritten copy of

several of the printed pages.

Had Kyd explained the origin of the pages, he would still have had

some further explaining to do: Why were those passages copied out? And

where was the rest of the book, with its defense of orthodoxy? But the

accused man could at least have begun by pointing out that the source

was impeccably legitimate, and that fact would have been duly noted on

the transcript. Th ere is no such note, so it is possible that Kyd was com-

pletely in the dark.

Kyd was living the nightmare he had staged in

T e Spanish Trag-

edy

. Refusing to reveal his accomplices, his hero Hieronimo bites off his

tongue and stabs himself to death. Stretched on the rack, the poor play-

wright could hardly have been expected to follow his own script. To get

the pain to stop, he claimed that the heretical pages belonged to his for-

mer roommate, who must have left them behind when he moved out.

Who was this roommate? Christopher Marlowe.

On May 30, 1593, less than a month after the placard was nailed to

the wall of Dutch Church and only weeks after Kyd’s arrest and torture,

Christopher Marlowe was killed. He was twenty- nine years old. An oﬃ -

cial inquest was conducted and ruled that death came about as a result of

an argument over the bill (“ye reckoning”) for supper. No charges were

brought against the killer.

Th e surviving records do not indicate what Kyd told the interrogators

about Marlowe on those fateful days in the middle of May, but it was

enough to win his release from Bridewell. We can be certain that they

demanded more than just a name. Th e clearest indication of what he dis-

closed or at least hinted at during his detention comes in two desperate

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 19

letters that he sent in June, a few weeks after Marlowe’s death. Th e let-

ters were addressed to Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Great

Seal. Puckering was one of the principal fi gures on the Privy Council

that had initiated the whole investigation into the placard on the Dutch

Church wall.

Kyd had not been formally charged with a crime. Released from cus-

tody, he must have stumbled back to the room where he had been arrested.

But he was facing ruin. Like almost all writers in the period, he depended

on the approval and the fi nancial support of a powerful patron. In Kyd’s

case, the patron was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who supported

an important theater company. Th e discovery in the playwright’s posses-

sion of a document questioning Jesus’s divinity had led him to be sus-

pected of heresy, he wrote to Puckering, and now his patron— the man

he simply calls his “Lord”— refused to have anything further to do with

him unless he could exonerate himself. Kyd does not refer to this patron

by name; he assumed, no doubt correctly, that Puckering already knew to

whom he was referring.

In his anguished attempt to regain his patron’s favor, Kyd struggled

to distance himself from the person he had accused of atheism. “My fi rst

acquaintance with this Marlowe,” he wrote to Puckering, “rose upon his

bearing name to serve my Lord, although his Lordship never knew his

service but in writing for his players.” Th e two young playwrights then

came to know each other, Kyd claims, because they were both working for

the same patron’s repertory company— hence “our writing in one cham-

ber two years since.” Th ey were roommates, but Kyd managed to make it

sound like they found themselves sitting by chance at adjacent desks in a

writing studio.

Kyd knew at this point that he had to be extremely careful. Th e author-

ities’ suspicions had been aroused by what they had stumbled across in his

rooms, but if Kyd linked Lord Strange to heresy, it would lead to further

investigations and would, whatever the outcome, destroy any chance of

recovering his patron’s favor. Did Kyd’s excuse— that he and “this Mar-

lowe” knew each other only because they were both writing for the same

patron— implicate the patron in Marlowe’s alleged wickedness? Not at

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20 •

all, Kyd claimed, for the patron, his Lordship, did not have any personal

acquaintance with Marlowe and did not know his “conditions,” as the let-

ter termed them, that is, the opinions that revealed Marlowe to be an

atheist. “Never could my Lord endure his name or sight,” Kyd wrote,

“when he had heard of his conditions.” Th ese conditions, he added pru-

dently, would not have squared with “the form of divine prayer used duly

in his Lordship’s house.”

Even if this excuse were accepted, where did it leave Kyd? If he were

as innocent as he claimed, how was it possible that he “should love or be

familiar friend with one so irreligious”? Here Kyd’s writhings, accompa-

nied by a fl urry of Latin maxims, become ever more like those of Dickens’s

Uriah Heep. Neither “for person, qualities, nor honesty,” he declares, was

Marlowe ever worthy of friendship. Besides, Kyd adds of his erstwhile

roommate, “he was intemperate and of a cruel heart.”

Ask people who knew them both, Kyd pleaded with Puckering, to

verify that he, innocent Kyd, had nothing to do with Marlowe’s wicked-

ness. In exchange for favorable treatment and a good word to his patron,

he hinted that he might have further information to impart: “If I knew

any whom I could justly accuse of that damnable off ense to the awful

majesty of God or of that other mutinous sedition toward the state, I

would as willingly reveal them as I would request your Lordship’s better

thoughts of me that have never off ended you.”

Puckering was a tough, wealthy, well- connected lawyer with consider-

able experience in cases of sedition, conspiracy, and treason. He had been

heavily involved in the complex maneuvers that led to the execution of

Mary, Queen of Scots. He had interrogated men and sent them to their

deaths. He demanded details about Marlowe’s opinions and about his

associates. Kyd knew that if he gave too many details, he would implicate

himself as a willing sharer in those opinions. It would not do for anyone

to think that the two were actually intimate or that Kyd had sat by will-

ingly while Marlowe expounded criminal ideas. But having fi ngered Mar-

lowe, he felt he had to give his interrogator more.

In a second letter sent the same month to Puckering, Kyd wrote that

he knew only a few of Marlowe’s “monstrous opinions.” But even in casual

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Handwriting on the Wall

• 21

talk it was Marlowe’s custom, he said, to jest at the divine scriptures, to

mock prayers, and to confute the sayings of the prophets and other holy

men. He would “suddenly take occasion to slip out” his wicked notions,

Kyd wrote, so that even the most pious person could not escape hearing

him disparage Saint Paul as a confi dence man or ridicule the parable of

the prodigal son or argue that supposed miracles might as well have been

done by ordinary mortals. Th e most startling of Marlowe’s alleged opin-

ions was one that Kyd could bring himself to pen only “with reverence

and trembling.” Marlowe, he reported, had said that “St. John [was] our

Savior Christ’s Alexis.”

Th e literary allusion is now lost to most of us, but any educated person

in the Renaissance would have understood it immediately. In a celebrated

poem by Virgil, read in Latin by all students in the period, a shepherd

falls madly in love with a beautiful boy. “Th e shepherd Corydon,” the

poem begins, “burned for the handsome Alexis.” To claim that John was

the Savior’s Alexis and that he loved him “with an extraordinary love” was

to claim that Jesus was a sodomite.

If Kyd was duly rewarded for his report on Marlowe by being restored,

on Puckering’s recommendation, to the good graces of his patron, it

would not have been for very long. By the end of the next year, poor, bro-

ken thirty- fi ve- year- old Th omas Kyd was dead.

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography — page 35

C H A P T E R 3

Th e Great Separation

ccording to Kyd, Marlowe’s signature quality— apart

from atheism— was suddenness. He would “so suddenly” slip out

his wicked opinions that no one could stop him; his “rashness”

enabled him to get away with what otherwise would have been severely

reprehended; his attempts at “sudden privy [i.e., stealthy] injuries to men”

succeeded because they were so quick and unanticipated. Th e character-

ization obviously serves as an excuse: how else could Kyd explain why he

ever associated with such a terrible person? Marlowe’s viciousness must

have burst out and taken poor, innocent bystanders by surprise. But it was

not only a defensive strategy. Th ere really was something unanticipated,

unforeseen, and sudden about Marlowe.

Centuries later, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, refl ecting on his

own experience, would write, “the young soul is devastated, torn loose,

torn out— it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure

governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken

to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an

undiscovered world fl ames up and thickens to all the senses.” Nietzsche

called this a “great separation,” and something similar lay at the heart of

Christopher Marlowe’s young life. It drew Marlowe away from his family,

his peers, his social class, his religion— the whole inherited set of accom-

modations to the world that makes life bearable to most people most of

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Stephen Greenblatt Dark Renaissance Biography

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