Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, by Park Honan; review
bookburn
(quote)
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, by Park Honan
Piety, paranoia and the smell of curing leather
By Min Wild
Published: 06 November 2005
The record of the coroner's inquest presents a bizarre picture. It
implies that two of the four men in the room were seized with
paralysis, temporarily frozen at the moment when Ingram Frizer "gave
the aforesaid Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye". Robert
Poley and Nicholas Skeres, like Frizer, were seasoned deceivers,
skulkers, and line-spinners, but the Crown pardoned the murderer, on
the grounds that it was self-defence: all three could move on, and
Frizer prospered. Tamburlaine and Faustus, too, would still strut and
agonise on the stage, but Christopher Marlowe's restless mind - and
the succession of powerful, mythic characters it created - stopped
there, in Mrs Bull's house at Deptford in May 1593. His Puritan
enemies were delighted: "see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils
of this barking dog."
This important biography of Marlowe raises high expectations. Park
Honan has written an acclaimed life of Shakespeare and holds a
distinguished record in literary biography. More is known of Marlowe's
short life than of Shakespeare's long one, for Christopher, the son of
a Kent cobbler, won a scholarship to Cambridge and entered the world
of swirling smoke and mirrors that was Elizabethan espionage. Since
Marlowe's stock rose in the late Victorian period, much has been
discovered about his life. Honan not only illuminates some hitherto
murky corners, but also encourages further lampwork: there is more to
discover about the dangerous man in whose writings Hazlitt discerned
"a glow of the imagination unhallowed by any thing but its own
energies".
By heaven, this is an excellent, necessary and hugely welcome book.
Though it responsibly synthesises previous scholarship, brings new
perspectives and enlivens old, its greatest achievement is this: it
presents a Marlowe that the sane can live with. The work is a
corrective to decades of semi-fictional, fictional and downright
preposterous authorial posturings over the Elizabethan marvellous boy.
To ground in what is known, and to refuse fantasy and excess, however,
is not to impoverish the reader's encounter with this active man. The
fact is richer than the fancy, and Honan's approach is based in his
assessment of Marlowe as "not a romantic, but a questing realist".
Neither is this hagiography: Honan's words, chosen with fierce and
precise care, sometimes have wider applications. Marlowe's life "has
something to tell us about living with endemic, provocative faults, as
well as about gaiety, audacity, elated persistence".
Furthermore, the book is readable and engaging in a way that makes it
one of the best general introductions, not only to Marlowe, but to the
smelly, vicious and sometimes impossible world in which he lived.
Honan writes vividly about the past without the suffocations of
romance: we get the everydayness of Marlowe's life as well as the
over-rehearsed dramas. No-one has shown us so vigorously how
inescapable were the daily crowds of flat-capped, blue-clad
apprentices on the London streets, or the difference between the
common alehouses and the taverns "where men were drunk with more
credit and apology". His thumbnail portraits leap into life: Thomas
Nashe was "a thin boyish satirist with a tooth or two that poked out
at angles" when Marlowe first met him. Based in new research, and
especially effective, is Honan's evocation of Marlowe's childhood
Canterbury, a claustrophobia of slaughterhouses, piety, paranoia and
the smell of curing leather.
The glovemaker's son and the shoemaker's son turned the late
16th-century theatre into a remarkable place. Marlowe's introduction
of blank verse to the popular stage was electrifying, and Patrick
Cheney's reminder of his "absolute inaugural power" is fully
underwritten here. Honan's account of the interplay between Marlowe
and Shakespeare is not new, but it helpfully stresses the way in which
theirs was a "nearly collusive relationship" - this without inventing
addled trysts in Mrs Miggins' alehouse. Switching the roles of teacher
and pupil, each surpassed the other in theatrical innovation. Honan's
work on the plays and poetry is never less than sharp, and he has a
good eye for the continuing relevance of Marlowe's preoccupations with
"the roots of modern bestiality" - the brutal powers of prejudice and
greed.
Marlowe's is the most famous of literary deaths, and Honan has his own
suggestion as to its motive. Like Charles Nicholls, whose important
work he acknowledges, he links Marlowe's murder to the unsubstantiated
but riveting documents which accused him of atheism. One of these has
Marlowe indulging in some outrageous claims: that "Moses was but a
jugler," that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ," and
that "all they that love not Boyes and Tobacco are fooles." Like
Nicholls too, Honan sees Frizer as acting on his own account, yet with
a wink from a high place. Nicholls saw a "more complex kind of
meaninglessness" than a tavern bill brawl behind the murder: he
suggested that the Earl of Essex was behind it. To Honan, though,
Thomas Walsingham was the more likely candidate. We do not yet know:
Honan reminds us that "history holds its doors open".
Amid the complexities of the Elizabethan secret service, though, and
the excesses and successes of the drama, Honan keeps his focus on
Marlowe as a writer. He "understood desire" with bitter clarity: "Love
is not full of pity, as men say / But deaf and cruel where he means to
prey." Park Honan writes with a restrained power that in itself
reflects the vividness and the controlled violence of Marlowe's mighty
daring.
(unquote)
Peter Farey
"bookburn" quoted:
Thanks bb. I agree whole-heartedly with this assessment. The
book is excellent, and gets us into the *mind* of Marlowe in
a way that no other biography has managed. Naturally, I part
company with him when we get to that day at Deptford but, as
Min Wild says and he himself is at pains to emphasize, "history
holds its doors open". This is why I take his speaking of the
"infinitessimally thin possibility that Marlowe did not die when
we think he did" to be a major step forward in enlightened
thinking! Now where can I find a wedge with an infinitessimally
thin end?
Peter F.
pet...@rey.prestel.co.uk
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/index.htm
Art Neuendorffer
> Thanks bb. I agree whole-heartedly with this assessment. The
> book is excellent, and gets us into the *mind* of Marlowe in
> a way that no other biography has managed. Naturally, I part
> company with him when we get to that day at Deptford but, as
> Min Wild says and he himself is at pains to emphasize, "history
> holds its doors open". This is why I take his speaking of the
> "infinitessimally thin possibility that Marlowe did not die when
> we think he did" to be a major step forward in enlightened
> thinking! Now where can I find a wedge with an infinitessimally
> thin end?
At least MAR-L.O. has a habeas corpus murder trial, a gravesite and
even eulogies to indicate that he died during that solar eclipse in
1593.
L.O. has only TWO pathetically scribbled references about his St.
John's day/mid-summer night's 1604 death (and these disagree with each
other on where he was buried).
Art Neuendorffer
gangleri
L.O. has only TWO pathetically scribbled references about his St.
John's day/mid-summer night's 1604 death (and these disagree with each
other on where he was buried).
Comment:
Please elaborate - and post the two references.
Art Neuendorffer
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See: _The Death of Edward de Vere_ by Michael Llewellyn
p. 278 & p. 282 in
_Great Oxford, Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere
17th Earl of Oxford 1550-1604_ by Ed. Richard Malim
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p. 278 [available at Google Print:]
http://print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=%22vere%27+entry%22&btnG=Search
..........................................................
[Hackney's Parish Register of Burials:]
_ \_*_/
_ _\_/
* _X * Edward de Vere, Erle of Oxenford was buryed
_ _/_\ __________ the 6th daye of Julye Å 1604
_ _/ *_\
<<The strange, large 'X' type symbol appears to have been put there
much later. According to Paul Altrocchi, this must have happened many
decades later "...since pencils withsuch a sharp point did not appear
until the late 1600's." It really is anybody's guess who put it
there - perhaps an over-enthusiastic Oxfordian?>>
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p. 282
.......................................................
[Percival Golding (Oxford's 1st cousin) writes (1609-1619):]
"Edward de Vere, only son of John, borne the twelfthe day of April Anno
1550 Earle of Oxenforde, High Chamberlayne, Lord Bolebec, Sandford and
Badlesmere, Styard of the Forrest in Essex, and of the Privy Counsill
to the King Majestie that now is. Of whom I will only speak what all
mens voices confirme: He was a man in minde and body absolutely
accomplished with honourable endowments. He died at his house at
Hackney in the monthe of June Anno 1604 and lieth buryed at
Westminster."
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Art Neuendorffer