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It might have been a setup plotted by John LeCarre.
Exactly 430 years ago this coming Tuesday, four Englishmen met by appointment at a pleasant tavern and inn in Deptford Strand, on the south bank of the broad, tidal Thames.
Robert Poley, an agent in Queen Elizabeth's intelligence service, had just that day arrived from the Low Countries across the North Sea. Poley was famous, or infamous, for having led on, entrapped and betrayed the naive young Catholic Thomas Babington and his friends in an alleged plot to replace Queen Elizabeth with her imprisoned Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary's beheading had been merciful compared with the gruesome fate of the convicted traitors.
Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham, however, had just died. The intelligence service was now in disarray, its and Poley's future less than clear.
Another attendee was Ingram Frizer, business agent to a younger cousin of the deceased spy chief.
Frizer's employer Thomas Walsingham held a family estate in Kent, southeast of London. Frizer made money for himself and his master by lending at interest, a despised practice but endemic in a society where almost everyone--from the humblest tailor up to the Queen herself--struggled chronically with debt and cash flow problems.
A more obscure figure in this group was one Nicholas Skeres, who had played a minor role in the Babington affair.
And finally: Christopher Marlowe, nickname Kit, 29-year-old rock star of a poet and playwright, shoemaker's son, former choirboy, merit scholar, Cambridge M.A., occasional intelligencer for Francis Walsingham, sometime guest of cousin Thomas, associate of Sir Walter Raleigh, immoderate drinker, reckless talker, duellist, brawler, tobacco smoker. As well, reputed counterfeiter, dabbler in magic, pornographer, atheist, and sodomite.
Marlowe had his own cash flow—and other—problems. An outbreak of plague had shut London's theaters, tanking the market for playscripts. Despite a long poem partly drafted, he had nothing ready for the press. One literary patron had donated a little something, but wanted Marlowe to translate Roman classics, a drudgery not best suited to the poet's gifts.
Worse, much worse: Marlowe had come under suspicion from Her Majesty's government.
Not for the first time. A year before, in the Dutch port of Flushing--apparently while on an assignment from Walsingham—he'd been fingered for alleged counterfeiting. He'd talked his way out of it, then.
But slings and arrows multiplied.
Whispers suggested that Marlowe had written, under a pseudonym, certain witty and seditious Puritan pamphlets attacking the English bishops. As well, some unknown person had used wording of Marlowe's in an anonymous poem, urging violence against French refugees from Catholic persecution—and had signed it with the name of Marlowe's most famous character, Tamburlaine.
Authorities hunting seditious material ransacked the rooms of a fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd; under torture, Kyd testified that a brief account of certain heretical beliefs that they found among his things was actually Marlowe's.
On a more humiliating plane, the poet was also summonsed for assaulting a tailor to whom he owed money.
Somewhere around this time, an informant came forward with what he claimed were heretical opinions expressed by Marlowe, including, allegedly,
That the Indians and many Authors of antiquity have assuredly written of at least 16 thousand years agone, whereas Adam is said to have lived within 6 thowsand yeares.…
...that Moyses was but a Jugler [conjurer]....
That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.…
That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ...that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.
That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles.
And other statements still more shocking.
Just a few days before the meeting at Deptford, Marlowe had been arrested and called for questioning before the Privy Council, a body of the Queen's closest advisors who—among other functions—might investigate treason.
Puzzlingly, though, no record of that particular session survives, if it took place at all.
At Deptford, Marlowe and his companions spent most of May 30 together. They ate and drank in an upstairs chamber. They strolled in the inn's garden.
But by evening, according to the Queen's personal household coroner, who presided over the inquest, a dispute arose that grew violent. The three who survived it testified that Marlowe in a rage laid hold of Ingram Frizer's belt-worn dagger and turned it against Frizer. In the struggle,
...the said Ingram, in defense of his life, and with the aforesaid dagger of the value of 12 pence, gave the aforesaid Christopher then and there a mortal wound above his right eye to the depth of two inches and in breadth one inch, of which same mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then and there instantly died.
In other words, the knife point pierced into the eye socket, between the upper curve and the eye itself.
The poet's body was hustled into a common grave, in fact a plague pit, on the grounds of St. Nicholas' church in Deptford.
And Frizer received a pardon from the Queen.
The cause of the fatal affray? In the coroner's words:
le recknynge
A phrase the coroner glossed: "...they could not agree or concur on the payment of the sum of pence...."
In other words, "the reckoning" was construed to mean "the bill" (as someone also explains to the distressed title character in one scene of the award-winning 1998 film, Shakespeare In Love).
But "reckoning" in addition has a more expansive sense. The settling of accounts in broader terms.
Payback.
Judgment.
And equivocation could be a traitor's—or a spy's—convenient way of dodging perjury.
...
Historians have labored to piece out more of the story. Some have picked it apart. There are legends. There are theories. There are fiercely entrenched opinions.
The coroner's report should settle the matter. The coroner's report is a total lie. Or at least contains a significant lie. Or is tactically vague.
The poet was murdered. Nonsense, the killing was self-defense. As an associate of Sir Walter Raleigh, Marlowe became collateral damage in a vicious rivalry between him and the Earl of Essex. No, it was an extrajudicial execution.
Marlowe's body was disinterred and reburied somewhere on Thomas Walsingham's estate in Kent. No, Marlowe did not die that night. Instead, the body of a certain prisoner—coincidentally, just caught and executed for those witty Puritan pamphlets—was produced at the inquest and buried under Marlowe's name.
With the help of his Deptford friends, Marlowe escaped to Scotland. No, escaped to the Low Countries. Lived on in secret to "write Shakespeare." No! Yes! No!
Fiction also has gone to work on the poet's death, and life.
Anthony Burgess's 1993 novel, A Dead Man In Deptford, may qualify as the first major fictionalization of Marlowe's biography.
Burgess is best known in the U.S. for his violent, dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and its film version (1971). He was previously the author of a fictionalized account of Shakespeare's sex life, Nothing Like the Sun (1964), and a serious biography, Shakespeare (1970).
Appearing exactly 400 years after Marlowe's decease and mere months before the death of Burgess himself, A Dead Man in Deptford centered the poet's identity as a gay man in Elizabethan England.
NOTE: No significant spoilers in what follows.
...
But wait—what basis is there for Burgess or anyone to assume that Marlowe was gay at all?
True, gay writers have claimed him as an icon since the early 20th century.
But does that identification really rest on the word of the single informant quoted above, probably rewarded to compile the most damning of possible calumnies? And specifically on one clause:
That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles.
Almost, yes.
But. Thomas Kyd, the playwright tortured for evidence of sedition, also did testify to Marlowe's statement about Jesus and St. John.
But. Marlowe reportedly also claimed that Jesus had "dishonest" relations with the "Samaritan woman at the well" mentioned in the gospel of John—and with her sister, who does not appear in the Bible at all! (Some confusion here with Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha?)
Marlowe as well reportedly said that this (apparently bisexual) Jesus deserved to die! Hardly an endorsement of homosexuality.
And even supposing Marlowe actually asserted all the things claimed, could he have been serious? Or just pulling somebody's chain?
But. A story also was recorded by theater chronicler Francis Meres, that Marlowe died in a brawl with a rival over a homosexual affair. But. Meres was wrong about that, wasn't he? Wasn't he?
An online search turns up pronouncements all over the map.
"Some historians and literary scholars have suggested that Marlowe was homosexual...." --OUTInPerth
"Marlowe, who scholars generally agree was gay...." --Pink News
"A messy bitch who lived for drama." --Historical Homos
"We know next to nothing about Christopher Marlowe. When we speak or write about him, we are really referring to a construct called 'Marlowe.'"
--J.A. Downie, in "Marlowe: facts and fictions," quoted by David Mateer in "New Sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London," Early Theater, 11.2, 2008.
Then there are those who point to the content of his surviving work.
The Tragedy of Dido and Aeneas, for example (co-written with a college friend, Thomas Nashe). This opens with a grotesque and very gay comic scene between Zeus and his young cupbearer Ganymede, who perches on the knee of the almighty Thunderer and wheedles him for jewelry, promising, "And then I'll hug with you an hundred times."
Edward II. A historical tragedy prefiguring Shakespeare's Richard II, this play follows the takedown of a monarch through the machinations of a ruthless subordinate, who in this case uses as a political wedge the openly gay relationship between Edward and a favorite, Piers Gaveston. The separation of the two, and Gaveston's eventual death, are depicted with outright sympathy.
Hero and Leander, the ambitious long poem unfinished at Marlowe's death. The handsome Leander, swimming the Hellespont between Asia and Europe in pursuit of his lady-love Hero, draws amorous interest from the supreme sea-god Neptune.
Whereat the sapphire-visaged god grew proud
And made his capering Triton sound aloud,
Imagining that Ganymede, displeased,
Had left the heavens; therefore on him he seized
And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground
Was strewed with pearl.…
But when he knew it was not Ganymede,
For under water he was almost dead,
He heaved him up, and looking on his face,
Beat down the bold waves with his triple mace....
He clapped his plump cheeks, with his tresses played,
And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed.
He watched his arms, and as they opened wide,
At every stroke, betwixt them he would slide,
And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance,
And as he turned, cast many a lustful glance--
And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye--
And dive into the water, and there pry
Upon his breast, and thighs, and every limb,
And up again, and close beside him swim,
And talk of love. Leander made reply,
"You are deceived, I am no woman, I."
Thereat smiled Neptune, and then told a tale,
How that a shepherd sitting in a vale
Played with a boy so fair and kind
As for his love both earth and heaven pined.…
...Ere half this tale was done,
"Ay me!" Leander cried....
There is a lot to say about this apart from our main subject here. For one thing, this creative merging of the sea's close, controlling grip on a swimmer with the persistent handsiness of a determined sex pest is quite relatable to this reader. And would at least suggest the author might have experienced both.
Neptune becomes incensed at Leander's lack of interest but, mistakenly thinking he detects some trace of pity, lets the young man escape. In an ironic parallel to Neptune's behavior--or something--Leander, arriving on the far shore, uses poor-me tactics to talk his way into Hero's bed and then, yes, grapples and finally rapes her. The poem's unfinished, but we do know how the Greek myth ends: with Leander drowned. We can probably make a guess by whom. Though poetry lives by surprises; that could be wrong.
But to return to Marlowe's sexuality: not that this passage of Hero and Leander is approving, nor that poets are limited to expressing their personal subjectivity. But when gay readers (I'm not one) say of a passage like this that it displays a gay sensibility, then I think that weighs in the argument.
…
Centering the gay identity of his Marlowe was one of several key choices made by Burgess.
Another was the framing.
The novel's story is not narrated by Marlowe, nor by a close associate, nor by manufactured documentary records. Nor by an omniscient narrator, but by an obscure character, even his name withheld almost to the end, who admits:
"I know little. I was but a small actor and smaller play-botcher who observed him intermittently though indeed knew him in a very palpable sense (the Holy Bible speaks or speaketh of such unlawful knowing), that is to say on the margent of his life, though time is proving that dim eyes and dimmer wits confounded the periphery with the centre."
(p. 3)
So, this anonymous narrator, whose path only here and there sometimes vividly intersected Marlowe's, nonetheless is moved by the sheer impact of the poet's personality and work to devote to it tremendous reflection—and is openly imagining much of the story arc; as Burgess imagines him imagining it.
This narrator's voice btw resonates, to me, with James Joyce's dialogues in Portrait of the Artist or Dubliners. Burgess perhaps reflected that England's culture in the Elizabethan era still was mainly an oral culture, where speech would have shared some qualities of music. As well the in-story narrator had been soaking in stage verse.
Burgess's narrator, besides this, is relentlessly physical, biological, particular, earthy, gruesome, gory, gross, not to say scatological, so that the New England schoolmarm that survives in my DNA is apt to cringe. Until he pivots and turns mystic.
Burgess's framing partly insulates the novelist from complaints of inaccuracy, since his narrator can't be assumed to know everything even in the slight record that has come down to us. Nor can there be criticism for arranging the elements too neatly or improbably, since so much is labeled a product of the narrator's imagination. On the the other hand, the narrator can claim to know more of the texture of English life in the 1590s than a modern reader has any right to challenge.
Most of the time, still, it's natural to forget the frame and simply immerse in the tale.
The more I reread A Dead Man In Deptford, the more I am both moved and impressed.
Burgess does not attempt to be complete. He takes indubitable facts and persons from the historical record, together with the literary canon, and folds them together in a sort of origami, so that one imagined incident shapes another and another with an inevitability close to classic tragedy. Other episodes that might clutter the story he ignores.
Young Marlowe is supposed to become a minister in the English church. But he is a skeptic from the start. His gifts and ambition are all literary. At Cambridge, he's talent-spotted by successful poet and Walsingham connection Thomas Watson, and finds himself recruited almost by force into the spy service.
He will be unable to free himself from this the entanglement, even when its management of the Babington affair and the horrific aftermath fill him with regret and revulsion.
He also falls in love.
This could be taken as a dismissal, but before Kit could bow and leave, the door was thrust open and one entered. Walsingham frowningly said:
--This is mannerless, sir. Here be grave matters proceeding and you blunder in as it were a common tavern. Pray leave and come when you are called for.
The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. He saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant asweep with his broom...transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other, save in a covenant of experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. He was a young man of Kit's own age it seemed, lank locks of auburn parted and flowing, long face above a long body, so that Kit must needs look up at wide blue eyes and wide doubtfully smiling mouth, the wide collar open at the girlish throat, hose wrinkled and points carelessly tied, a light dew on him as if he had come from tennis or fives. From him rose a faint odor of sweat and rose water. He said:
--Grave matters, was it?
(p. 31; incoherencies intentional)
This is Thomas Walsingham.
In spite of many incidents to come, Burgess now has everything already set in motion towards a final katharsis.
(Btw, did you catch the foreshadowing? Tavern, knife, grave?)
...
Burgess hits all the major biographical milestones without major distortions. First fame, from a brief jeweled lyric that, set to music, that went viral—“The Passionate Shepherd To His Love”—but gained the poet not a penny. The blockbuster Tamburlaine, in two sensational parts. The scholar who sold his soul, Doctor Faustus, with its "face that launched a thousand ships/And burned the topless towers of Ilium," its hell-terrors and pageant of deadly sins. And so on, through The Massacre At Paris, the mass murder of protestant Huegenots by Catholics on St. Bartholomew's Day as recently as 1572. Theatrical business, discussions.
Travels to the Low Countries and France on Walsingham's business. Visiting booksellers. Hobnobbing with Raleigh's select circle of daring modernist thinkers. Philosophical and scientific reflections. Learning from Raleigh to smoke, and getting hooked. A disastrous duel. Chronic money troubles. Disillusion. The deaths of friends. Clouds thickening. Encircling isolation.
The casual cruelty of the time is also very much on show. And very much in line with Marlowe's plays, their stabbings, head-bashings, dead virgins raised like banners on lifted spears, a corpse disjointed like a carcass of beef, a king dispatched in a manner not to be specified in the printed version. And very much in line with with Burgess's own predilections.
Burgess did his homework impressively. Readers familiar with the era will recognize theatrical producer William Henslowe, leading actor Edward Alleyn, writers Robert Greene, Nashe, Kyd, more names from sometimes obscure sources, and in passing, one Will from Warwickshire.
They'll also notice how often Marlowe's imagined experience chimes with familiar tags and themes from his work, suggesting their inspiration. As the scene quoted above chimes with Hero and Leander:
Where both deliberate the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
The story at the same time forms a sort of travelogue of homosexual experiences.
Swimming parties in remoter reaches of the Cam while at University, frank talk with Tom Watson over translating Ovid. Assignations with Tom Walsingham in a disused outbuilding to avoid the knowledge of servants, including Frizer. Less serious dalliance with an actor young enough to play women's roles. In a theater, glimpse of a cross-dressing young Earl of Southampton with the Earl of Essex, the two disguised as a middle-class pair. Casual coupling unintentionally overlooked in a Paris safe-house. Pestering curiosity of straight or bi-curious lowlifes, mixed with defensive aggression. A visit home, the cosmopolitan son now beyond his family's understanding, love and anger. Among the theaters and bear-pits and whorehouses of Southwark, boy-brothels.
How accurate is this to the time?
Much of the "gay" element necessarily seems to draw on 20th-century gay experience. Burgess himself, the highly prolific, twice-married writer, apparently something of a fabulist in his own life, was canon-straight but a friend of William Burroughs among others. And of course he could read.
In general he did not balk at the odd unhistorical element, as in sending young Kit to a tutorial session at Cambridge with the mad heretic Francis Kett, when in fact the university would adopt its tutorial system only in the 1800s. (And their two careers at Cambridge barely overlapped.)
In this sense the novel sometimes reads as if through the semi-transparent overlay of another era. And this is likely the case with at least some "gay" elements.
Not much is directly known about what we would call gay life in England of this period. In fact, no such thing as "gay" or "homosexual" identity existed.
Sodomy existed more as a bogeyman—a demonic figure associated with Catholicism, witchcraft, heresy, treason, and foreigners—than as anything apt to be encountered in one's own neighborhood.
Sodomy was also an action, legally defined, for which the law prescribed death.
Yet, sodomy was rarely prosecuted.
Among the few investigations or court cases uncovered in 1500s court records by researcher Alan Bray, unusual circumstances stood out: repeated, ongoing rape of an underage boy; the attempted prosecution of an out-of-town transient, who was also Black; and in one case, a village clergyman making himself a sex pest.
Even in situations where today, we would have no trouble naming homosexual rape as such, 1500s authorities seemed universally disinclined to see sodomy and reluctant to act. Further, Bray could not find one single recorded instance from the 1500s where a court imposed the extreme penalty of death. This suggests a prevailing tolerance, at least where friends and neighbors were concerned.
At the same time, sodomy was luridly denounced in print. The maintenance of homosexual favorites as servants in upper-class households, even by such public figures as Sir Francis Bacon, attracted notice and some disparaging comment.
Poet Edmund Spenser had to defend himself against indignation over an episode in his popular Shepherd's Calendar, by explaining he only meant respectfully to imitate the revered Latin poet Virgil. Puritan ex-playwright Stephen Gosson denounced the stage as a hotbed of vice, attracting pedophiles and corrupting the boys who acted female roles.
None of this, though, defined a recognized identity. The man who kept an attractive page might also have a wife. The boy who accepted attentions from men would, once he came into full adulthood and could afford it, probably marry.
Much homosexual behavior was doubtless circumstantial. Elizabethan society was more gender-segregated than ours. Strict homosocial milieus included virtually all institutions of learning (faculty as well often forbidden to marry); armies on campaign; ships at sea. Servants and apprentices normally couldn't take wives, and apprenticeship lasted all the way to age 26. "The Bishop of Winchester's geese" (female prostitutes) cost money. Respectable girls were well guarded, and for the young, there was no such thing as "dating."
Yet despite this aspect, human nature being human nature, it seems certain that just as now, a certain number of men were attracted exclusively to other males, as Burgess chose to depict Marlowe.
His narrator:
I was at that time lodging with Tom Kyd, a man lonely and timid with boy and woman alike....Kit would sometimes come when Kyd was out to woo me with I love thee and I love thee, but I was older and shaving once a week and conning the parts of young men....I had come to hate the prying paws of the small gallants who came to the tiring room, by wine emboldened, saying -- What hast under here? -- fardingale or stuffed bodice -- and a moment only, sweetheart, it is my need. So in something like gentleness I would thrust Kit away, and he would shrug and droop but bear small malice. One day I put it to him:
--Why boys, why men, why never girls or women?
--There is a divine command, Lucretius calls on Alma Venus, delight of gods and men, and it may not be questioned. She commands me the way I must go and ever has, and nothing may be done.
And that, in the novel, is consequential down to the final scene. In which, the built-up lines of the story nest like the curled petals of a cruel rose.
And after which, Burgess comes through the Fourth Wall like nothing ever seen. With trumpets. And a battering ram.
.
…
In consensus reality, future generations were left with more gaps than facts. Marlowe's surviving work is incomplete and likely corrupted. The bishops burned some, though copies of a Lucan translation escaped, and his erotic Ovid. More just went missing. Biographical details are even more scant. An elegy by Marlowe's friend Thomas Nashe, which once existed in a few copies, was utterly lost.
His influence sifted all through English literature, however. To begin with, he is referenced throughout Shakespeare, that defining figure—the rolling pentameter, the uses of ambiguity, and allusion after allusion from the character Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (I will argue this with you in detail if you wish, but maybe not here, skeptical reader) through such things as half-quotes in Hamlet, a botched singing of "The Passionate Shepherd" in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and comically-ironically in the cross-dressing-centered As You Like It:
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
and
"It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."
In fiction, Marlowe has ascended in readers' consciousness since Burgess's achievement, from a minor Shakespeare precursor to something of an industry.
Goodreads now lists some 24 historical fictions featuring Christopher Marlowe. Burgess's still leads the pack.
Among others:
The year 2012 saw a novel by poet Ros Barber, in verse, about Marlowe that won two literary prizes: The Marlowe Papers. Barber was every bit as scholarly about her plot and background as Burgess. But she wrote in Marlowe's iambic pentameter, as Marlowe, and continued the story beyond May 30, 1593, when her protagonist escapes, later to "write Shakespeare." I was prepared to detest this book. The thesis....noooo. But—at a glance—the voice is actually good. The texture possibly convincing. Marlowe and Tom Walsingam again, a different dynamic. TBR.
A Tip For the Hangman, by Alison Epstein (2021) expands on a possible, but undocumented, personal involvement by Marlowe, still a student, in the framing for treason of Mary Queen of Scots. The prose looks competent. Possibly TBR.
Tamburlaine Must Die, by award-winning mystery author Louise Welsh (2004) covers the days leading up to the poet's death. Goodreads: "Christopher Marlowe walks the city's mean streets with just three days to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer escaped from the pages of his most violent play." The Nation: "Her novelist’s impulse to trade fact for fiction... is a perfect fit with the aggrandizing, enigmatic and story-haunted playwright.” So: ahistorical but engaging?
Forgive me if I traduce any other worthy offering in summarizing the rest as, "Christopher Marlowe, genre hostage." Spy adventures. Period "urban fantasy" with literal witches and faeries. And--this is Hell nor am I out of it--Christopher Marlowe, boy detective.
This age of ours eats works of art, and even history itself, mincing and pureeing and extruding it all as cultural pablum. Artificial "intelligence" will only…
--Oh, lighten up, Clio2.
--OK.
The fascination has extended into video, where on TNT television's Will, Marlowe and Tom Walsingam again appeared as lovers, a relationship that, despite lack of more than speculative underpinnings, looks well on its way to consensus canon.
And this sort of thing is, to admit it, very much the history of history. Popular history, at least.
...
A coda: that header portrait? You will see it over and over presented as a portrait of Marlowe. Other than the subject's being of the right age, 21 in 1585, the oil on panel has no known connection to Marlowe. It was found accidentally in the early 1950s during renovations at Marlowe's Cambridge college, where it had apparently been at some point used in construction as scrap wood. It has been heavily restored. Realistically, it's a stretch to identify it with the author of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus.
But it looks the way a young Christopher Marlowe ought to look, doesn't it?
It might not have been painted as Marlowe at all. Yet perhaps in a reality
whose terms are not of time and to which space is a child's puzzle
we may say
it is, now.
…
"Print the legend." --The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Books:
Bray, Alan. Homosexuality In Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press, Morningside Edition, with a new afterword and updated bibliography by the author, 1995. [Originally published in London by Gay Men's Press, 1982.]
Brook, C.F. Tucker, ed. The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1910.
Burgess, Anthony. A Dead Man In Deptford. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1995.
Honan, Park. Christopher Marlowe, Poet & Spy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1992.
Riggs, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2004. [Originally published in London by Faber and Faber, 2004.]
Wainwright, A.D., and Virginia F. Stern. In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1965.
Related diaries:
In Memoriam, Ch. M., 1564 - 30 May, 1593, May 30, 2015
CLASSIC POETRY: "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love" By Christopher Marlowe (R.I.P., May 30,1593), May 30, 2017
CLASSIC POETRY: Un-Straightwashing Shakespeare? Sonnets 20 and 63, Sept. 5, 2017 [Note: Having learned quite a bit since that diary, in more than one dimension, I'd handle this particular subject differently today; referenced for completeness and some of the included information. Clio2]
CLASSIC POETRY for Christopher Marlowe's Deathday: The Survival of Doctor Faustus, May 30, 2018
A Midsummer Nights' Masque: Who "Wrote Shakespeare?" Part II, June 24, 2019 (dismisses Marlowe and two other candidates)
A few links:
Anthony Burgess (Wikipedia)
Christopher Marlowe (Wikipedia)
"Christopher Marlowe," poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Deptford (Wikipedia)
Fiction featuring Christopher Marlowe (Goodreads)
Francis Kett (Wikipedia)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (film)
Putative Marlowe portrait (Wikipedia)
Francis Meres (Wikipedia)
Shakespeare In Love (1998 film). Still delightful, though ahistorical and, alas, produced by the deeply regrettable Harvey Weinstein.
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