A short life and a shady one

Scholars face a formidable task when they set out to write the lives of the playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan age. They do not possess the personal revelations, say, of Byron’s letters. They must piece together scraps of information contained in the lawsuits of an astonishingly litigious population; the comments of friends and enemies in the literary world. They must then fit all this together with the supposed personal references in their subject’s works. Park Honan does this admirably in his life of Marlowe from his birth in Canterbury in 1564 to his death aged 29 in widow Bull’s house in Deptford. It is an ingenious piece of informed speculation.

Marlowe emerges as a driven man. Like A. L. Rowse he was determined to escape from humble origins into a wider world by virtue of his literary gifts. Marlowe’s father was a cobbler and Honan detects in his son’s works a pronounced distaste for leather and boots. Both Rowse and Marlowe were scholarship boys: Rowse at Christ Church, Oxford and Marlowe at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Rowse made it to the Astors at Clivedon. Six years at Cambridge gave Marlowe the mastery of classical Latin necessary to attract an influential patron. By the 1590s he was loosely attached to the Durham house set of Sir Walter Raleigh and the ‘wizard earl’ Henry Percy, owner of one of the largest private libraries in England, now at Petworth. It was in this circle that Marlowe was known as a notorious ‘atheist’ at a time when ‘atheism’ was considered a crime, subversive of the established order in church and state and punishable by death. Marlowe was not an atheist in the sense that A. J. Ayer was and as neo-Darwinists now are; more likely, he was an Arian heretic, what might now be called a Unitarian.