The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Sixty-Three About a great reckoning in a little room

I can never hear what they say but they haunt my mind's eye.

Look, there, as in a dumb-show, there are four of them. Four men come to a reckoning in a little room. Over and over, they act out for your delight the terrible scene. You always want it to be different, but each time the end is the same. The dagger thrust in the eye, the skull hacked open. Blood on the walls and the ceiling, the poet lying dead in a pool of his own hot blood on the floor.

From the start, from the moment when they meet together, you can see that two of these four men are ruffians, and one is not. It is none of these three, however, that you can't look away from. The fourth man, the victim, he is the natural magnet for your gaze. It is not just his sombre velvet doublet, his gold lace. It is not even that glittering ring hanging from his left ear, nor the gold buttons that seem far beyond his station. Neither is it, exactly, his sensual face, nor his dangerous smile. This is Christopher Marlowe, who is more than the sum of his parts. You can't take your eyes off a man like this.

The day has been hot. The place is a tavern in Deptford, three miles out of London, on the bank of the Thames. It's a low inn, and dirty, the house of a widow called Bull. There's a garden at the back of it, unkempt, full of thrusting May blossom, that runs down to the throbbing vein of the sunlit river.

These men met here this morning. All day they have been drinking and talking, and walking in the garden. They dined, too, at noon. Marlowe and the two ruffians have laughed a good deal - for the most part, you might think, at nothing. The third man, the gentleman, he does not laugh. His name is Robert Poley. He's a government agent. He sits still in his cloak, hands folded, his face in the shadows, while the others fool about. You will have noticed that he drinks much less than they do. You may also have noticed that the ruffians provide Mr Marlowe with two drinks for every one of their own.

Now it is six o'clock, and the cool of the May evening has begun, and bats flap to the eaves, and all four men have come back into the tavern. Their glasses refilled, they retire to a little private room.

What causes their quarrel? We shall never know. Something that eyes cannot see, perhaps. Three of these men are liars, and the truth-teller soon lies dead.

Christopher Marlowe, poet and playwright, is stabbed through the right eye, quickly, by Ingram Frizer, in this small room in Deptford, after what seems to be a sudden quarrel over the bill or 'reckoning' presented for their food and drink. At the inquest, Frizer will claim Marlowe first attacked him, for no reason that he could guess, and unprovoked. He pleads he only killed the poet in self-defence. His fellow ruffian, one Nicholas Skeres, supports this story. Frizer will be acquitted by royal pardon.

What part Poley played I can never determine. I know only that there were those in high places who wanted Marlowe dead, and if he really died by chance as the result of a blow struck in a tavern brawl over who should pay the bill then it was certainly convenient for the Privy Council, before whom he was due to appear to answer charges of atheism and blasphemy.

As Marlowe wrote himself: Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. Only it was not so much cut, my dears, as hacked to bits.

The son of a cobbler, he was just the two months older than William Shakespeare. His was a restless spirit, of an over-reaching ambition. Ben Jonson praised him for his 'mighty line'. You can hear this at its mightiest in Tamburlaine, the play of his which had the most success. The Lord Admiral's company first performed it in that same summer that Mr Shakespeare came to London, and I know that the newcomer stood three times among the groundlings to be intoxicated by its thundrous verbal music - he told me so himself. Marlowe fired both Will's fancy and his ambition. He said that hearing Marlowe opened his ears. He said that Tamburlaine was like Herod of the Coventry play made intelligent. He said that Marlowe, single-handed, had dragged the verse of the play-makers out of antiquity, and matched it to the sound of the speaking human voice, and made it modern and alive along every line.

He got to know the man, too, and I believe they were friends, despite deep differences of temper and of temperament. I believe that Marlowe may have helped Mr Shakespeare in the charting of the three King Henry VI plays, and that you can see some influence of Marlowe's Jew of Malta in the opening scenes of Shakespeare's Richard III.

That, though, is about the extent of it. There are those who suggest that if Marlowe had not been snuffed out in the blaze of his youth, then he would have gone on to be Shakespeare's equal. I cannot agree. Marlowe is all fine lines that stop the play - which may be poetry, but it is not drama. Also, Marlowe's scenes are brilliant, but they do not connect or cohere.

Michael Drayton once wrote of him: His raptures were / All air and fire. Which is true. But unlike Mr S he had not eaten of the earth and found it sweet. Nor had he any gift for comedy, in which Shakespeare is rich. Marlowe would have been incapable of creating a Falstaff. Look at the clown scenes in his Faustus; there's not a real laugh to be had. Some say Marlowe didn't write them, I know, that they were extemporised by the actors in the first place. If so, that's because he dared not even try in such a vein.

I say that Shakespeare and Marlowe were very different as men, and so they were. The epithet most often applied to Mr Shakespeare by his friends was that he was 'gentle'. No one would ever have dreamt of describing Marlowe thus. He was headlong, he was violent, he was like a little Lucifer. 'Intemperate and of a cruel heart,' said his friend and fellow lodger Thomas Kyd, but then poor Kyd was on the rack when he said that, as when he blurted out several of those 'monstrous opinions' which made Marlowe's name so hated by those in authority. There were supposed to be three sheets of paper which the cobbler's son had written denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Saviour - though if anyone ever read them, then I never met him. Then there was that report that he called John the disciple 'Christ's Alexis', meaning that Jesus had loved the man unnaturally just because he said of him that John was the disciple he loved best. In this, of course, Marlowe was simply attributing to Jesus his own predilections, as revealed on that other notorious occasion when he declared that 'all that love not tobacco and boys are fools'. His principal heresies, assembled, seem to be these:

That all Protestants are hypocritical asses;

That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores, and that Christ had known them carnally;

That the archangel Gabriel, by his salutation to the Virgin Mary, was bawd to the Holy Ghost;

That all the Apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth, and that he could have written the Gospels better himself.

These are bold sayings. They are also rather silly. I think that Marlowe, had he lived, would have outgrown such schoolboy blasphemy. I think also that had Marlowe learnt to believe it might have provided him with some release from the bondage of his intellectual pride. However, someone, in some high place - (and not God, I think) - decreed Marlowe should not have the chance to grow or to learn at all. Hence that dagger-thrust which penetrated his skull, making a wound of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch, just above the right eye. He was twenty-nine years old when they cut him down.

They say, some say, that Marlowe died blaspheming. I never heard him. When I watch that dumb show in the little theatre of my head I see nothing that makes me think that he dies blaspheming. Consider, it can only have been his murderers who ever claimed he did any such thing, and why should we believe them?

To be professed an atheist while bearing the name of Christopher must be an extraordinary burden.

Mr Shakespeare always spoke of Christopher Marlowe with tender affection. True, he was never like Ben Jonson, who put down his contemporaries. But Marlowe he went out of his way to praise. In his play of As You Like It he also pays his murdered friend the compliment of several backward glances, as when he had me (as Rosalind) mention how Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet 'did what he could to die before'. (That was Marlowe to the life, as I have heard, a fire-eater who no one could ever have mistaken for a cud-chewer.) In the same play, Phoebe the shepherdess quotes directly from Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander when she invokes the dead poet on Mr Shakespeare's behalf:

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:

'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'

And then Touchstone, to cap it all, recalls Marlowe's death by Frizer's dagger over the 'reckoning' in that Deptford tavern, when he says to Audrey: 'When a man's verses cannot be understood ... it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.' That last allusion is the one that always brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it. It is the more effective for being double: Mr Shakespeare means us to remember not only Marlowe's death, but one of his mightiest lines, from The Jew of Malta, where he speaks of 'Infinite riches in a little room'.

I have often wished I had met Mr Christopher Marlowe. He was surely the best of those spirits they called the Bohemians, the play-makers who flourished between 1580 and 1590, the group which included George Peele and Thomas Nashe, and even (to be charitable) Robert Greene. Their plays were a great jumble of good and bad, a reflection in this of their own irregular lives. But at least they began that process which Shakespeare perfected. In their writing you see them start to take the ordinary common words and set them down in such a way that the verse sparkles and laughs at you, or then is sad and makes you want to cry. Before William Shakespeare, none of them did it better than Christopher Marlowe.

I wish I could hear what he says as he walks in the garden. I wish I could hear what he says when it comes to that reckoning.