As the recall of Thomas Walsingham to become a controller of London headquarters at Seething Lane in 1584 shows, Sir Francis was, by the mid-i58os, beginning to formalise his organisation and expand. In April 1583 he had three men reporting from Paris, nine from Antwerp, and two from Middelburg and Strasbourg; by 1585 his intelligencers abroad had grown to fifty. The reason for such expansion lay primarily in events in the Low Countries. The Duke of Parma's campaign against the Protestant north was reaching a high point. Antwerp had been drawn into the battle zone and by June 1584 was under siege; in the same month Parma's key opponent, William of Orange, was assassinated. Just a few weeks before, Francois, the Duke of Anjou, had died and with him the hope of French resistance to Parma, as the country sank into internal conflict over succession to the throne. England was now being drawn into the fray.
In May 1585 the Dutch were to offer sovereignty of the United Provinces to Elizabeth. The hawks on the Privy Council, Walsingham and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, said 'aye', but Lord Burghley and the doves gave a firm 'nay', as they thought that such a move risked outright war with Spain. In the end, Elizabeth turned down the Dutch offer because she too foresaw 'long, bloody wars' with one of the most powerful countries in Europe. She had already dispatched embassies to Denmark and to German princes to see if they would join in a Protestant League against the Spanish, but to no avail. English involvement was inevitable. Eventually, in August, she signed the Treaty of Nonsuch at the sumptuous pleasure palace built by Henry VIII at Cheam - so named because there was 'none such like it in the realm' (the royal equivalent of calling your house Dunroamin').
Elizabeth agreed to send a force to support the Dutch, reluctantly naming Robert Dudley commander, with the warning not to 'hazard a battaile without great advantage'. When Leicester precociously named himself 'governor-general' of the United Provinces, a move that implied sovereignty and which riled the Spanish, she was furious. Meanwhile, the Dutch had found a military genius in William of Orange's successor, Maurice, who was hotly intent on war with Spain, and good at it.
Throughout all of this Elizabeth needed intelligence from France, the Low Countries and from Spain. She also needed to know what was going on in Leicester's camp, to monitor the movements of the increasingly powerful Maurice of Orange, and to judge the mood in the courts of Denmark and of the German princes. This was the field in which Kit became engaged. Curiously, it was his interest in theatre that got him the job. Dramatists, as one would imagine, were more suited to spying than other writers, given the cloak-and-dagger antics of Elizabethan espionage. Complicated ciphers and invisible inks were commonplace; messages were smuggled inside beer barrels; seals were forged, couriers drugged; men disguised themselves as beggars and passed themselves off as members of other nationalities. Tradition has it that Kit deeply impressed Sir Francis with a scheme of getting a cipher-key to the conjuror Dr Dee (who was by this time living in Bohemia). He proposed shaving the head of a servant, who had eye trouble, inking the code on his pate, then allowing the hair to grow back and hide it. The man was sent to Dr Dee on the pretext that the writing on his head was a part of a spell that would help the great doctor effect a cure. The advantage of the plan was that not only was the message invisible in transit, but that the unsuspecting servant, who had been told that revealing the presence of the spell would destroy it, could not double-cross them. (Servants were usually the weakest link in a chain of espionage as their loyalty was easily bought.) Maybe Sir Francis would not have been so admiring had he known that the young poet had stolen the idea directly from Herodotus. Kit also came up with the idea (taken this time from Aeneas Tacticus) of writing a message on a tree leaf which was used to cover an apparently putrid ulcer on the leg of someone disguised as a beggar. Plagiarism, as well as deception, was evidently becoming something of a strong point.
Such disguises and complicated plots of betrayal and counter-betrayal were very much the stuff of the theatre of the time. What is more, if one is looking for the perfect cover, a travelling theatre company proves ideal - it would have access not only to burghers and market place, but to the heart of the local court. A player could pick up on gossip below the stairs, and would be within earshot when the lords were drunk, and a poet with such a company would penetrate upper social strata with an ease that few other means would allow. An English theatre company on the Continent might move with the immunity of jesters where English diplomats feared to tread.
Such companies existed. Kit had already briefly travelled with one, on his jaunt replacing William Peeters. Not only were companies touring on the Continent, but there were English players wherever an eager spymaster might have wished them to be. There are records of Maurice of Orange licensing English players, a troupe accompanied Leicester to the Low Countries; there were English players in the Danish court on at least two occasions, and in towns all over Germany throughout the period.
Known generically as the Englische Komodianten or 'English comedians', these troupes of players were resoundingly popular. They performed in the energetic, rag-bag gallimaufrey style that had so enthralled the young Kit in Canterbury, which corrupted students at Cambridge, and which was filling the London amphitheatres to the brim: a mixture of music, playing and acrobatics that quite astounded those who saw it. The English comedians' spontaneity and vividness so enthused audiences that it revolutionised northern European theatre, turning what had previously been stiff, formal recitation into drama. For the first time this was theatre in its own right, not presented for religious instruction or as part of a festival. And people turned out in their thousands to watch. In Frankfurt, according to the sixteenth-century traveller Fynes Moryson, both men and women 'flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and Action, rather than heare them, speaking English which they understand not', and at Elsinore in 1585, the citizens flocked so 'wonderfully' to a performance in the town hall courtyard, that they broke down a wall. This popularity is especially surprising because, as Fynes Moryson remarks, so few of the audience understood the language. English was an island tongue with little continental currency. In court, a simultaneous translator might be employed as a sort of living surtitle, but this did not often happen in the market place. (Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with the popularity among British audiences in the 1980s and 1990s of, to them, largely incomprehensible Polish and Czech theatre companies, and later of Japanese noh and kabuki performances.)
The heyday of good English drama abroad was short-lived. One of the effects of performing for non-English audiences is that the companies preferred to stage high-action plays with spectacular visual effects. Kit wrote Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus for such an audience. As troupes relied on memory and improvisation rather than carrying around cumbersome prompt-books, texts soon became corrupted and grossly simplified, leaving a flotsam of tenuously linked violent and sensational scenes as subtlety receded. Language restrictions meant that performance style rapidly degenerated into clowning, extempore bawdy and highly exaggerated acting, as the companies became the refuge of second-rate actors. Hamlet knew what he was up against when he tackled the travelling players at Elsinore. The Danish prince remarks that he has seen players - and ones that are highly praised at that - who 'have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably'; he says it offends him to the soul 'to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters', and demands that the players' clowns 'speak no more than is set down for them' (Hamlet III ii). By the early 1600s most troupes had given up on English and were performing in German, and indeed comprised mainly German and Dutch actors who only called themselves 'English comedians' because it meant good business.
In the halcyon days of the 1580s and 1590s, however, when Kit was first touring with English comedians, the companies were in the vanguard of theatrical change. Players like the clown Will Kemp went on to fame in London; their performances had huge impact, yet still showed a finer touch - they were known 'partly by their pretty inventions, partly by the gracefulness of their gestures, often also by the elegance of their speaking'. There were the germs here of what became known in England as 'personation' rather than playing - the fuller and more subtle representation of character, which Kit mastered so triumphantly in his later work.
And it paid well. Players could earn far more on the Continent than they could at home. In a pamphlet entitled 'The Run-away's Answer' a group of poor, debt-withered actors defended themselves against Thomas Dekker's reproaches for skipping the Channel with: 'We can be bankrupts on this side and gentlemen of a company beyond the sea: we burst at London, and are pieced up at Rotterdam.' To Kit, with his costly taste for tobacco drinking and his failing for the garlands of fashion, this was no unwelcome news. He would be rewarded not only for his intelligencing, but also well paid for his cover. The benefit was not all on his side. He was a profitable addition to a travelling troupe. A poet alone would be dead wood, but although Kit 'lacked voice' as a player, he could cope with smaller parts and could sing well - and his ability with French and Dutch was a decided benefit in the Low Countries. The Bene't accounts and buttery books show that Kit's absences from college increase dramatically from 1585. He was away for eight weeks between April and June in 1585 and for nine weeks to the end of September, then again for nine weeks from April to June of 1586. These absences coincide perfectly with the spring and late-summer touring seasons of the English players.
We owe what knowledge we have of Kit's first foray as a player/ spy, in April and May of 1585, to material uncovered by the theatre historian Joseph Keaton.* Using the alias Timothie Larkin, Kit travelled to the Low Countries with John Bradstriet's players. 'Tim Larkin', as Keaton points out, is an anagram of Kit Marlin. Spies seeking aliases sometimes succumbed to the Elizabethan delight in wordplay, in which anagrams were a particular obsession. Bad auguries, for example, were seen in that the name of the king of France, Henry (or Henri) de Valois could be rearranged as Vilain Herodas, or O crudelis hyena. The name John Bradstriet (sometimes written as Bradstreet or Breadstreet) also smacks of alias: Bread Street was the location of the Mermaid Tavern, the great literary watering hole of the time. Breadstreet appears on lists of players all over the Continent, but there is no record of his existence as one in England.
The troupe seems to have had some connection with Charles Howard, who had a personal company of players, and who became Lord Admiral in 1585. John Bradstriet's name occurs a few years later on a passport for a number of players, led by one Robert Browne, which is signed by Lord Howard. Robert Browne, the actor who again and again comes up in the records as the leader of a troupe of English players, was a member of the Admiral's Men (as Lord Howard's Men became known after 1585), the company that was first to stage Kit's plays in London.
Kit's introduction to Bradstriet was made through Thomas Walsingham, which indicates that Bradstriet himself might have been an intelligencer, and that Kit perhaps was still on probation. The mission was a simple one. In the months running up to the Treaty of Nonsuch, as it became increasingly evident that England was going to be militarily involved in the Low Countries, the government needed as much information as possible about troop movements and numbers on the ground. A group of strolling players had some mobility even through Spanish-held territory. Travellers of the time seemed anyway somewhat nonchalant about moving through war zones, apparently seeing battles as nothing more than a bit of localised bother: Richard Lassels, the gentleman traveller, on the road to Italy some decades later, 'chose to steer towards Genoa by the low way' in order to avoid two armies 'which lay in the way'. William Lithgow in his Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations similarly mentions 'leaving both armies barking at each other like wolves' and happily treading off in another direction. Bradstriet and his troupe were probably in more danger from deserters and brigands than from soldiers, who frequently escorted convoys of merchants' wagons to ensure safe passage. Like one Wychegerde, a grain and sundries merchant sent by Sir Francis Walsingham a few years later to spy on Spanish-held towns and enemy garrisons, Kit probably had to climb through ditches and plod across soggy polders secretly to count Spaniards in their camps.
But he did also have some fun. The English players were not only innovative, spontaneous and acrobatic, they were sexy. Keaton mentions an account of 'untold young virgines, enamoured of the players that followed them from citty to citty till the magistrates forbad them to play' (the traveller Fynes Moryson noted a similar phenomenon in his Itinerary in 1592). A poem published in 1597 in Frankfurt, where the September book fair was a favourite players' destination, lets us in on some of the excitement:
The tumbler also did us please,
He sprang high in the air with ease . . .
His hose they fitted him so tight,
His codpiece was a lovely sight.
Nubile maids and lecherous dames
He kindled into lustful flames . . .
For, know that those who paid their fee
To witness a bright comedy,
Or hear the tunes of fine musicians
Were more entranced by the additions
Of bawdy jests and comic strokes,
Of antics and salacious jokes,
And what, with his tight-fitting hose
The well-bred tumbler did disclose.
At the more serious end of the players' activity, Kit was writing. His play Pyramus and Thisbe was first performed by Bradstriet's men, and was still in English comedians' repertoires in 1604. Tamburlaine was formed, not in the isolation of a Cambridge college (the solitary author in a garret is a creation of Romanticism), but in the rough and tumble of working with a real theatre company. Kit also translated and adapted Plautus's Menaechmi, which sparked his fascination with twins and mistaken identity, and was later to form the basis of The Comedy of Errors. It was around this time too that he marked his transition into a new phase of life with another name change. As Moore-Smith points out, after 1585 the Marlin, Marlen, Malyn or Marlyn in college records becomes Marly, Marlye, Marley or Morley. Even given the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling, these two clusters of variance are different enough to be significant. Kit Marlin was a new man, and now styled himself Kit, or more often Christopher, Marley.
'Marley' returned to Cambridge in the early summer of 1585 buoyed by his new position and with his pockets (or to be exact, his sleeves and codpiece, which served as pockets in Elizabethan dress) filled with gold. Never was there cobbler's son so full of pride. Immediately he did something that no-one in his family had ever dreamed of doing, something that at once showed soaring insolence, announced his arrival in society, and cryptically boasted about what he was up to. He had his portrait painted.
The old Master's Lodge at Bene't College housed a wood-panelled gallery dedicated to the display of paintings depicting important national figures, notable college academics and other worthy alumni. With astonishing hubris for someone of such youth and humble origins, when he left the college in 1587 Christopher gifted his picture to the Master - and indeed in the years that immediately followed, his success in London made him arguably one of Bene't's living luminaries, perhaps warranting a portrait prominently on show. After the incident at Deptford in 1593 and his public disgrace, Christopher Marley's painting suddenly disappeared. It resurfaced at Cambridge only in 1953 (a numerical anagram that some scholars find intriguing in itself). A passing student noticed two panels of wood sticking up out of a pile of builders' rubble when the Master's Lodge was being renovated. Though faded, scratched and splattered by rain, they bore the shadow of a Tudor portrait. This fact was later confirmed by the National Portrait Gallery, and restoration work began. The Canadian scholar Calvin Hoffman was the first to suggest, in 1955, that the portrait was of Marlowe, and subsequent research using a computer programme that ages faces, convincingly connects the subject of this portrait with that of the painting (known as the Chandos portrait) made of him in his forties (see Appendix II).
Poets and players of the period did sometimes hire painters to record their likenesses for posterity - or rather to contrive an image of themselves and project it into the world, showing them in the way they wanted to be seen. Like successful merchants, they commissioned portraits to show that they had arrived in their particular profession. Even people involved in seamier activities had paintings made as mementoes of significant moments in their labours. In 1586 the plotter Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators posed for portraits on the eve of what they thought would be the toppling of Elizabeth and the raising of Mary Queen of Scots to her rightful position. Kit, at the age of twenty-one, was brazenly celebrating his arrival in society, and hinting perhaps that he was in the secret service. He posed with his arms folded, not a common posture in Elizabethan portraits. Sir Roy Strong interprets this as indicating a fashionable melancholy, the humour of the disappointed lover and those of artistic temperament. But it can also indicate that the sitter has something to hide. A. D. Wraight suggests that the pose imparts the message 'I am one who is entrusted to keep secrets.' And Charles Nicholl goes so far as to wonder whether he has a dagger up his sleeve, no doubt to 'stab, as occasion serves'. An ideal posture, then, for the dreamy young poet who has entered the world of espionage.
Two inscriptions appear in the top left-hand corner of the Corpus portrait. The one, 'cetatis suae 21 1585' gives Kit's age when the picture was painted. The other is a motto that reads 'Quod me nutrit me destruif - 'That which nourishes me destroys me'. Some take this as a statement of the consuming passion of unrequited love. Others see it as a confession of Kit's predicament at Cambridge - he is under obligation to the Parker Scholarship, which is paying his way, to take holy orders, while the thought of life as an Anglican priest appals him. But the motto is also eerily prescient. It reflects the paradox of Christopher's new world, a life (as we have seen) simultaneously fuelled and consumed by deception. He is beginning a brilliant new career, but one that by definition is infected with the germ of his downfall. As he moves deeper into the world of espionage, he comes closer to the moment where someone wants him dead, a step nearer to Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford. He seems to have a disturbing premonition of what he is letting himself in for. The motto recurs decades later, in a sonnet Kit wrote not long before he died, in which he seems to regret the youthful fury that, if it did not cause his death, very nearly destroyed his life:
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it is nourished by [my italics].
(Sonnet 73)
Kit stares out of the painting with eyes rather darker than in later portraits and an insolent, supercilious expression, matched by a half-curled smile. It is just a twitch short of a sneer. He is pale, almost pallid, but with a touch of youthful colour (or is it the flush of temper?) in his cheeks. A downy moustache tops a wispy 'mouse-eaten' beard that 'groweth but here a tuft and there a tuft', softly following his jaw line. His folded arms give him a slightly defensive look, but a full lower lip adds an air of sullen defiance, an edge of spoilt child, of someone who knows he can offend and has the protection of people more powerful than the viewer.
And he certainly was transgressing. He is blatantly defying both university dress regulations and the Sumptuary Laws. His bouffant hair is nowhere near the 'polled, notted or rounded' style that university authorities required. The open-throated shirt he wears, with its flopping collar of gossamer-fine linen, 'a falling band of cobweb lawn', is at the absolute peak of fashion in 1585. So is his magnificent doublet - close-fitting with prominent 'wings' on the shoulders and big padded sleeves, narrowing 'bishop-style' to a tight wrist. It is made of black fabric slashed to reveal a reddish velvet lining, and adorned with a dazzling set of huge, decorative gold buttons, up each sleeve as well as down the front - in substance, style and splendour contravening every rule of sober dressing. Here is a young man who is not only breaking the law, but has the defiance to have himself painted while doing so. A young man who goes even further and publicly hands over this evidence to the very authority who should discipline him. A young man who is certain of the protection of very powerful friends.
He is also a young man on a spree.* His spending in the buttery in 1585 spiralled from a few paltry pennies a week to a heady i8d and 21 d extravagances. The portrait is a flash of prestige, its very existence a boast; it is painted on high-quality oak, sawn radially on the tree - better than most other paintings of the period in the college. His doublet, Charles Nicholl estimates, even second-hand would have cost thirty shillings or more (about £750 by today's reckoning). Perhaps the only reason for the folded arms is to show off as many as possible of its forty oversized gold buttons.
Once again all is not what it seems. Kit had borrowed the doublet from a fellow novice spy, Roger Walton, who had been a page to the old Earl of Northumberland, and like Kit moved in the circle of Henry Percy, the young 'Wizard Earl'. By 1586 Walton was working in France for Sir Francis Walsingham, and a short while later the doublet (no longer quite so fashionable, but still worthy of remark) would again be captured for posterity when the English ambassador in Paris complained to Sir Francis of a young man who sounds remarkably like Kit himself, but whom the ambassador thinks is Roger Walton. This young disrupter 'to some . . . showeth himself a great Papist, to others a Protestant, but as they take him that haunt him most, he hath neither God nor religion, a very evil condition, a swearer without measure and tearer of God, a notable whoremaster . . . a little above twenty, lean-faced and slender, somewhat tall, complexion a little sallowish, most goeth appareled in a doublet of black carke, cut upon a dark reddish velvet'.
We know Kit himself was in France during his second long absence from college in 1585, in the late summer. He appears momentarily at the baths at Plombieres, which suggests he had again been at Rheims or possibly in Strasbourg, where Walsingham also ran agents and which was a popular destination for troupes of English comedians.* This is the first hint we have of what was to become a lifelong predilection for public bathing. At times the reason for this may have been plain lust - the vapour baths or 'stews' of London were notorious brothels for both sexes - but house rules at Plombieres stated quite clearly that: 'All prostitutes and immodest girls are forbidden to enter the said baths, or to approach the same within five hundred paces, under penalty of being whipped at the four corners of the said baths . . .'. It seems more likely that one of the 'untold virgins' that followed Bradstriet's players had not been so virginal after all, and that despite the protection of the olive-pip rosary so carefully made for him some years before by Bianca, the Venetian courtesan, Christopher had a dose of the clap or in Elizabethan parlance, he had been 'burned'. Hot baths were considered an effective cure for the searing pains of gonorrhoea. In Sonnet 153 Kit plays with the idea of Love's 'burning'. He has been 'burned' but a 'maid of Dian's' steals Cupid's brand and (in an apparent early form of inoculation) plunges it into a fountain, creating 'a seething bath, which yet men prove/Against strange maladies a sovereign cure . . . I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,/And thither hied, a sad distempered guest,/But found no cure.' In Sonnet 154 he once again goes for a cure to a bath that is 'a healthful remedy/For men diseased', but finds that neither treatment nor disease diminishes his ardour: 'Love's fire heats water, water cools not love'. Was he suffering from the more dangerous, often fatal, syphilis? In later life he shows a good knowledge of the disease and supposed cures, such as 'villainous saffron' in AlTs Well That Ends Well; or mercury fumigation, as Doll Tearsheet undergoes in Henry V. Timon displays a detailed awareness of such symptoms as baldness and disintegration of the nose when he berates Phrynia and Timandra in Timon of Athens; and Lucio in Measure for Measure makes one of the earliest references in English literature to the disease being transmitted by a drinking vessel.
The glimpse we are given of Kit's visit to Plombieres is through a document written by an unnamed secretary of the essayist Montaigne, noting a conversation held in the seething waters between 'an Englishman T. Larkkin' and his master. The same secretary had, during an earlier visit, helped Montaigne write up his journal when the essayist was too ill to do so himself. That document survives, but the fragment mentioning Larkin appears to be part of a second journal, now lost.* Montaigne had just finished his second term of office as Mayor of Bordeaux and was taking his family wandering, as he put it, to avoid the plague. Five years earlier, while on a grand tour of the spas of Germany and Italy in an attempt to cure his gallstones, he had especially enjoyed Plombieres, and was back for more - astonishing regulars who came only to bathe by also drinking four pints of the waters every morning. He particularly liked the sweet, cool waters of the Queen's Bath, which he said tasted of liquorice with a faint tang of iron. Montaigne and his man stayed at the Angel, where the cooks were good but the wine and bread bad, and where the chambers had private galleries that gave access to the baths. Kit's lodgings were less grand.
The pair took to the waters in their regulation skimpy briefs (Montaigne notes that although the baths were mixed, it was considered 'indecent for the men to bathe otherwise than quite naked, saving a little pair of drawers, and for the women, saving a shift'), sitting on the steps of the large oval principal bath, separated from each other by stable-like bars and sheltered from the sun by slatted planks. Hot water bubbled up from underground springs, as cooler waters from across the valley flowed in 'to temper the bath according to the wish of those taking it', and Kit, who had dipped into the new edition of Montaigne's Essais, eagerly pestered the older man into conversation.
At first he singularly failed to engage the philosopher, but after a confession of his own 'painefull pissing', managed to Parts of this second journal are quoted in de Lorn, The Craving of the Stew. elicit a long monologue on the nature of Montaigne's stools, 'voiding gravel, black threads and bubbles that are a long time in bursting', 'wind about the groin' and the benefits of various purges and waters, all faithfully recorded by the secretary. (Further details of Montaigne's ailments are expounded at length in the journal of his travels in Italy.) But buoyed by his feats with Bradstriet's men, Kit appears to have tried a different approach, posing as a successful poet of the new drama. This had a little more success, provoking a discussion of the 'great conflict and power of imagination', and of the quest of the writer:
Mont It is . . . le passagel To examine the verie movement of the mind, and ye the Poet should pierce and usurp the senses of other men.
Lark: Are not Actors but the ciphers of the tale?
Mont The sacred inspiration that stirs thee as Poet unto a choler, unto griefe, unto fury and beyond thyself, shoulde by thee strike and enter into the Actor and thus the multitude . . .
The following day, Kit was, according to the secretary, given the customary viewing of Montaigne's famous medal, struck on one side with the inscription, Que sgais-je? - 'What do I know?' - and on the other, in Greek, 'Restraint' - a virtue which did not at that time hold much appeal for him. They spoke of doubt and knowledge, the master exhorting his disciple to question and re-question, urging that it was 'but his thinking that made the taste of good or bad', and that he should look to within himself to find truth - advice that the fledgling spy was not perhaps ready for. The secretary records that his employer was 'animated by the spirit of young Mr Larkkin', who spoke in both Latin and French, but the dialogue seems to have run aground on the subjects of sensuality and affection - on friendship, physical beauty and the love permitted by the Greeks. On the third day Montaigne was reluctant to speak. On the fourth he appears to have relented, but began on safer ground with tales of the Indians of Brasil who had lived thousands of years before Adam, disappointed that Kit had not read his essay 'On Cannibals'. Once again Kit seems to have offended the Frenchman, and after that there is silence.
By April of 1586 (during yet another lengthy absence from Cambridge), Kit was back with the English comedians.* This time not with Bradstriet's company, but with a troupe that followed the Earl of Leicester, into the bowels of battle in the Low Countries. No doubt Leicester thought the players appropriate to his prestige as self-styled governor-general, though it was not unknown for musicians and actors to accompany military leaders to war. The composer Claudio Monteverdi travelled as maestro di cappella with the Duke of Mantua into battle with the Turks in 1595, a harrowing experience he recalled vividly for decades, and which emerged in his madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi or 'Madrigals of Love and War', in his setting of battle scenes from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and in a fascination with scenarios of affray.
Kit did not travel out with Leicester's original party, but was sent later by Sir Francis Walsingham. The Queen had been infuriated when Leicester unilaterally assumed the title 'governor-general', as it implied that he was accepting sovereignty over the United Provinces on her behalf, and this was a direct challenge to Spain. Perhaps Elizabeth herself was behind Walsing-ham's decision to send someone to spy on Leicester (who was, after all, a fellow 'hawk'). However it seems more likely that the old spymaster had something else in mind, for very soon after Kit's arrival, Leicester instructed the players to leave for the Danish court at Elsinore.
The dramatist Thomas Heywood, in his 'Apology for actors', tells us that the King of Denmark 'entertained into his service a company of English comedians, commended unto him by the honourable the Earl of Leicester', and the household accounts of the Danish court also record the presence of English players in the summer of 1586. Was Elizabeth perhaps still entertaining the idea of Denmark joining a Protestant alliance against the Catholic League, and therefore eager for an ear in the Danish court? This is possibly so, but it seems the Queen had an even more pressing reason for wanting to know who might be coming and going in Elsinore, and what the courtiers might be whispering to each other in castle corridors. There was talk of marrying Princess Anna of Denmark to James I of Scotland, something Elizabeth was anxious to stall, as she favoured a match with Catharine of Navarre. She needed to know how the nuptial negotiations were going, for some of the buzz of court gossip to be transmitted to London. (She was, in the end, unsuccessful in obstructing the marriage, and in 1589 James sent an embassy to Denmark to fetch his young bride.)
So Kit's sojourn with Leicester's soldiers was brief. The only evidence we have of it is his remarkable ability to write battle scenes (as with Monteverdi, his experiences remained extraordinarily vivid), and a curious passage from the second Tamburlaine. This snippet of tactical know-how appears to be a result of a conversation with Paul Ive, another Walsingham spy who operated mainly in the Low Countries. The play, written around 1587, includes a technical speech about fortifying a garrison which closely mirrors a military manual written by Ive, but published only in 1589. In 2 Tamburlaine we have:
It must have privy ditches, countermines
And secret issuings to defend the ditch.
It must have high argines and covered ways
To keep the bulwark fronts from the battery.
And in Ive's book:
It must also have countermines, privy ditches, secret issuings out to defend the ditch, casemates in the ditch, covered ways round about it, and an argine or bank to impeach the approach.
A little more is known about Kit's activity with Leicester's players through research conducted by Joseph Keaton. It seems that this time, perhaps to facilitate social mobility in the Danish court, he joined the troupe not as an actor or musician, but as a poet. Keaton argues that he is the 'Daniel Jonns' who like the other players received payments of six thalers a month from the Danish court, though he leaves Elsinore before the others. Also in the company (pre-dating Kit's arrival) was Will Kemp, the clown who, in his own words, 'spent his life in mad Jigges and merry jestes', and for whom Kit was one day to create such roles as Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Peter in Romeo and Juliet, and Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing. Like Kit he eventually went back to London, to join Lord Strange's Men. His rough, physical style of clowning and penchant for ad-libbing grated with Kit, but the time they spent together in the Low Countries helped cement a functional, if not over-friendly, working relationship. A letter to Walsingham from his son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney, written in Utrecht in March 1586, is carried 'by Will, the Lord of Lester's jesting plaier', but there is no reason to suspect Kemp was also spy - if he was, he was either incompetent or working for someone else, as he had delivered an earlier letter from Sidney, about Leicester and intended for Walsingham, to Leicester's wife. He did, however, rejoin the company in Elsinore, after Kit had left. A 'Wilhelm Kempe instrumentalist' appears in the royal household accounts along with the other players in July and August.
Soon after presenting The Forces of Hercules in Utrecht at the end of April, the troupe 'began frolickly to foote it' to Elsinore, travelling through the popular playing spots of Bremen and Hamburg. Their presence was ostensibly part of ongoing festivities at Kronborg Castle, the new royal residence at Elsinore, begun in 1574 and completed the year before they arrived. The halls and high ramparts of Kronborg, the sagas and stories Kit heard there, the friendships he formed during his stay and even the little Danish he picked up, formed the first small fragments in the mosaic of Hamlet. It is he who departs from other tellers of the story, such as the Danish chronicler Saxo and the Frenchman Belleforest, to set the play in Elsinore rather than Jutland, and he even anachronistically locates it in Kronborg, with some poetic colouring in the addition of cliffs and mountains. Later scholars offer a detailed identification of this setting, from the 'platform before the castle' and ghost-walked ramparts, to Polonius's house and Ophelia's stream. The existence of a chapel on the passage used by the Queen from the Riddersal (where the players would have performed) to her apartments, for example, making topographical sense of Hamlet encountering Claudius at prayer while on his way to his mother's chamber after the performance of The Mousetrap.
Kit and the players arrived in Elsinore in a clamour of drums and trumpets, an attention-grabbing ploy that was used by English players, though not by others in Europe at the time (cf. Parolles in All's Well that Ends Well, who says that Captain Dumain 'has led the drum before the English tragedians'). Complaints of magistrates in contemporary records of towns around the Continent bear witness to the English players' deafening arrival - the genteel folk of Cologne on three separate occasions forbade them to make noise with their drums. But then the English were generally known as a clamorous lot. Paul Hentzner, a German travelling through England in the 1590s, noted somewhat wearily that they were 'vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of canon, drums and the ringing of bells, so that it is common for a number of them, that have got a glass in their heads, to go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for hours together, for the sake of exercise'. In Denmark the rowdies met their match, both in noise-making and in drinking. The Danes had the reputation of being the heaviest drinkers in Europe and, as William Segar, a member of an English embassy in 1603 reported: 'It would make a man sick to heare of their drunken healths . . . Every health reported sixe, eight or ten shot of great Ordinance, so that during the king's abode the ship discharged 160 shot.' Hamlet also notes these noisy toasts, remarking that 'no jocund health' is drunk by the king but that 'the great cannon to the clouds shall tell' (Hamlet I ii 125-6), and the guns are joined by drums and trumpets:
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,
'Now the King drinks to Hamlet'.
(Hamlet V ii 267-70)
It is, Hamlet drily notes, 'a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance'.
If Danish troupes had a lesson in publicity to learn from the English players, Kit and his company took a valuable playing tip from their hosts. A dumb show preceding the drama was a Danish convention (then unknown in England), as the Danes still performed in Latin and used mime to get the message across to illiterate audiences. It is, of course, an ideal technique when performing in a language the audience does not understand, and such dumb-show prologues became a feature of performances by the English comedians on the Continent (and also in the provinces back home) - indeed, the strolling players in Hamlet offer one (III ii).
The image we have of Kit in Elsinore is of someone moving fairly freely through a relaxed court, developing an intimacy with Danish customs, eating 'dainties' of bacon and salt meats with dark bread ('very black, heavy and windy' according to Fynes Moryson) and learning a little of the language (his Dutch probably helping here). Hamlet shows a knowledge of Danish words and names that is not gleaned second-hand. When Polo-nius asks 'Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris' (II i 7) this is not only grammatically sound, but is the only such correct use of the word 'Danskers1 in English literature of the time. Kit introduced the Danish word rus (meaning a full draught, or bout of drinking) into English - as 'rouse' ('And the King's rouse the heaven shall bruit again', Hamlet I ii 127), and he carefully changes non-Danish names into Danish ones when he draws on Belleforest's French version of the story. His Latin and nascent Italian eased his access to upper echelons of the court (the Earl of Rutland spoke Italian with the King on his diplomatic mission in 1603), and he even made friends with a couple of fellow students - admitting to them that he was 'no mere plaier', though probably not revealing his true identity. With his new friends he talked about the university at Wittenberg (the favourite of the Danish nobility of the time), and 'fair Padua, nursery of the arts' (which all three wanted to visit). The trio achieved a bemused notoriety for their 'Bachinall entertainments' and for 'reeling the streets' of the fishing village beside the castle - young, blithe and 'gilded with grand liquor'. Perhaps it was beside tavern fires that Kit first heard old Danish chronicles, or perhaps he was inspired by the magnificent chamber in the castle which so impressed William Segar that it was the only one he fully describes:
. . . it is hanged with Tapistary of fresh-coloured silke, without gold, wherin all the Danish kings are exprest in antique habits, according to their severall times, with their armes and inscriptions, containing all their conquests and victories: the roofe is of inlett woods and hung full of great branches of brasse for lights.
Segar further notes that the 'queen's closet' was also splendidly hung with these tapestries. Is this perhaps what Kit had in mind when in the chamber scene Hamlet entreaties Gertrude, after he has stabbed Polonius, to 'Look here upon this picture, and on this,/The counterfeit presentment of two brothers' (III iv 53-4). Since the Restoration, performances of Hamlet have had Hamlet produce miniatures of Claudius and the old king at this point. This raises the question of why on earth Hamlet would be carrying a portrait of Claudius next to his bosom. It makes some sense that he is referring either to wall paintings or to two tapestries - raising the symbolically deft possibility that one of them is the arras behind which Polonius hides. His stabbing of Polonius through an arras bearing the portrait of Claudius would add acid irony to the lines 'Is it the King? . . . I took thee for thy better . . .' (Ill iv 25-32). A movement made by someone hiding behind the arras of the old king gives an intriguing dramatic colour to Hamlet's seeing the ghost of his father in the dark room, while Gertrude does not.
Working with his Danish student friends, and using their copy of Saxo's History of Denmark, Kit wrote Hamlet for the court at Elsinore as part of his obligation for the monthly 6 thalers. This is not the Hamlet we know today, but a much simpler play that was to remain in the repertoire of various English comedians' companies for decades, and influence a German version of the story called Der Bestrafte Brudermord. Scholars refer to this elusive early play as the Un-Hamlet. We know little about it, but like Kit on his missions of espionage, it makes mysterious single appearances, even in England, until the Hamlet we are now familiar with definitely arrives in 1600 or 1601. In 1589, soon after Kit had finished the early version, his Cambridge friend Tom Nashe wrote in his 'Epistle' to Greene's novella Menaphon: 'Hee will afoord you whole Hamlets, I should say, handfuls, of Tragical speaches'. In 1594 his one-time employer the theatre manager Philip Henslowe noted in his account book, 'Received at hamlet viijs [eight shillings]'; and in 1596 Thomas Lodge (who, like Kit, worked with the Admiral's Men, and whose novel Rosalynde was the source for As You Like It), wrote in Wits Miserie, '. . . ye Visard of ye ghost which cried so miserably at ye Theator, like an oister wife, "Hamlet, revenge" '.
Kit left Elsinore suddenly, without the other players, some time in June 1585. Perhaps he simply had to get back to Cambridge, possibly his mission was accomplished - or maybe his cover was blown. It does seem that he later came to suspect his two Danish friends of treachery, though he was to meet them again, in Italy. According to the University of Padua archives, Rosencrance was a student there from 1587 to 1589, and Guild-enstiene registered a few years later.
Kit returned to England, with at least one new play in his bag, during a barren summer with a thin harvest in prospect. After two decades of plenty, 1585 and 1586 were years of hardship and shortage. War in the Low Countries further sucked the country dry - and the plants that most prospered on this stony ground were paranoia and persecution. Catholics at home were yoked with enemies abroad. From 1585 Catholic priests and all who helped them were by law to hang. Parishes were searched, householders questioned, and the shadow of Richard Topcliffe, Lord Burghley's notoriously sadistic torturer, elongated across the land. Conspiracy was detected everywhere, and as the pressure to squeeze out traitors intensified, so the number of plots - both real and imaginary - grew. We can count them off on our fingers over the next few years - the Stafford plot of 1587, the Lopez plot of 1594, the Squire plot of 1598 - but the one that wrenched the frame of the nation, that led ultimately to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, was the Babington plot in 1586. The machinations of the plot, and the cynical way in which Sir Francis used it to further his long-held aim of eliminating Mary, give us a flavour of the world in which Kit now moved. At least one of his spy friends was involved.
In late May, some weeks before Christopher arrived back, Anthony Babington - twenty-four, handsome, rich, a Catholic and a law student at Lincoln's Inn - met with one John Savage and an altogether shadier character, Father John Ballard, ajesuit priest who, disguised as the dashing Captain Fortesque, his cape trimmed with gold, silver buttons on his hat and sporting a satin doublet, had travelled abroad and returned to report that 60,000 troops (French, Italian and Spanish) were poised to invade England in the summer. Ballard asked Babington to sound out Catholic gentry in Scotland and to help raise English support as a fifth column to the invasion. He also planned to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. This was something John Savage, the third man at the meeting, had vowed to do, but it had been a government agent, Gilbert Gifford, who had incited that oath. Sir Francis had agents provocateurs - 'projectors' - attached to all three men. Ballard's ever-present sidekick and fixer, Barnard Maude, was a Walsingham agent, and soon to charm his way into Babington's affection was Sweet Robyn, Robert Poley. At the beginning of July, Babington rather naively wrote to Mary to tell all, believing her royal assent would give the final stamp of legitimacy to their efforts. As Nicholl points out, the plot bears Babington's name not so much because he was its instigator, but because he was its weakest link. His letter was long and recklessly specific, listing the conspirators' main aims: to lay the way for a Catholic invasion; free Mary from captivity, and finally to despatch 'the usurping competitor', Elizabeth. Mary replied point for point. The problem for the plotters was that Mary, in an Elizabethan sense, had been bugged.
The system had been set up by Gilbert Gifford. Incarcerated in Chartley Hall in Staffordshire, Mary nevertheless believed she had secret contact with the outside world through messages smuggled in and out in beer barrels - arriving in waterproof pouches, and leaving in the empty kegs. Sir Francis was intercepting the letters and deciphering them, before resealing them and sending them on. Mary's reply to Babington was what Sir Francis had long been waiting for, a plot that irrevocably implicated the Queen of Scots. In August Sir Francis pounced. Ballard was arrested while meeting with Babington at Robert Poley's house. Poley went off, ostensibly to plead Babington's case to Sir Francis and stay his arrest, but when he hadn't returned by evening, Babington himself fled, leaving Poley a letter aching with hurt, desperately trying to hold together a crumbling trust: I am the same I always pretended. I pray God you be, and ever so remain towards me . . . Farewell, sweet Robyn, if as I take thee, true to me. If not, adieu . . .'. He was arrested a few days later, along with a number of other conspirators, after hiding out in St John's Wood and disguising themselves as labourers by cutting their hair and staining their skins with walnut juice. They were all gruesomely executed.
At the last moment before the arrests, Sir Francis, tugging and twitching from the centre of his web, lifted his hands and receded. It is his deputy Thomas Walsingham who is seen coming to Poley's garden house on the morning that Ballard is apprehended; it is the Lord Admiral not Sir Francis who signs the warrant, and the affair is, in the words of another Walsingham agent, 'handled so circumspectly that neither you nor any of yours need be known in the matter'. But we do find a deepening of the working relationship between Thomas Walsingham and Sweet Robyn, and lurking on the edges of the scene as another government plant in Poley's house during the arrest set-up, is someone who was also hovering around Thomas Walsingham on the banks of the Seine back in 1581, the man Eleanor Bull thought not a gentleman - Nicholas Skeres, one more in that little party at Deptford in 1593, here again involved in intricate duplicity.
Kit's attendance at Bene't was exemplary up until Michaelmas, as he sunk himself into work for his Masters degree. Unlike many fellow dramatists, who slipped from university into London life without taking a degree, the qualification mattered to Kit as a firm seal to his status as a gentleman. Both Urry and Nicholl point to absences before his scholarship expired in March 1587, but most of his forays were to London, or back into the circle of Thomas Walsingham and the 'Wizard Earl' of Northumberland. Their mutual friend Tom Watson had just written a paraphrase of Coluthus's Raptus Helenae, a long poem about Helen of Troy, which he dedicated to Northumberland, and which Kit translated into English. Kit's version is now lost, though perhaps we have a teasing echo of it in the 'face that launched a thousand ships' in Doctor Faustus (V i 97), and the 'pearl/Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships' in Troilus and Cressida (II ii 82-3). The echo in Faustus adds force to the intriguing possibility that later in the year Kit once again joined the player troupe of Bradstriet or Browne for their regular tour to the Frankfurt book fair. In 1587, one of the new books introduced at the fair was the Faustbuch, a fantastical 'biography' of a real-life peripatetic scholar and magician, Georg or Johannes Faustus. Kit used this story for his Doctor Faustus - though his Faust is not a simple magician, but a man with a Tamburlaine-like ambition and lust for power, one who wants to be 'great Emperor of the world'. Early versions of the play were performed by Bradstriet's men on the Continent (two very dissimilar texts have come down to us), but the first performance recorded in London is only after events at Deptford, when the impresario Philip Henslowe notes receipts from a 'doctor ffostose' on 30 September 1594. Intriguingly, the Faustbuch may not have been Kit's first knowledge of the magician - in 2002 Dr Christopher de Hamel, Donnelley Fellow Librarian at Corpus Christi College, discovered in a 1469 edition of Aquinas, one of the first printed books, an annotation by Archbishop Parker himself ascribing the semi-magical art of printing to 'John Faustus'.
During these last months at Cambridge, Kit formed ever stronger bonds with Thomas Walsingham and Tom Watson. 'Witty Tom Watson', as a contemporary dubbed him, was famed for his Latin and English poetry, his stage plays, and the 'froth of [his] jests'. Francis Meres noted that he was one of the best for tragedy, and Tom Nashe (along with most other literary figures of the time) 'dearly loved and honoured' him, writing that 'for all things he hath left few his equals in England'. He had been Kit's introduction to London intellectual circles, and though only a few years older had become something of a mentor and father-figure. Kit, for his narrative poetry, was seen as 'Watson's heir'. With Thomas Walsingham - part Kit's employer as a spy, part his patron as a poet - Kit was entering into what one writer has called the 'flower-strewn world' of Elizabethan intense male friendship. Ajid it would be Thomas Walsingham who would tip Kit off about a threat to his standing at Cambridge.
Richard Baines, the sybaritic spy who had insinuated himself into the seminary at Rheims, who had plotted to poison the well water there, and whom Kit had sent tumbling into jail, was out for revenge. He had nothing more solid than a seething suspicion of the young Christopher Marley, and even this was something that in a world of leaking secrets, shifts of power and sudden counter-thrusts, he had to be cautious of exposing. But he knew how to strike Kit where it hurt, yet remain invisible himself. He started a rumour at the university that in his absences from Bene't College, Marley had gone over to Rheims. In an atmosphere of anti-Catholic paranoia, this would cost the bumptious arriviste, the cobbler's boy made good, his degree. A Cambridge man himself-he had been a prosperous 'gentleman pensioner' at Christ's College, and then moved to hotly Catholic Caius College - Baines knew where to drop his chance remarks, and carried enough of a whiff of popery about him for them to be believed. The idea was easily creditable, given young Marley's reputation as a malcontent and rebel. However Baines did not reckon with Kit's powerful friends.
On 29 June 1587, the Privy Council met at St James Palace in Westminster. Part of its business that morning was to draw up a letter to the Cambridge University authorities. The letter is missing from the university archives, but we get the gist of it from Privy Council minutes:
Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames [Rheims] and there to remain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent, but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discretely, whereby he had done her majesty good service, and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing: Their Lordships' request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her majesty's pleasure that anyone employed as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his Country should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th'affairs he went about.
'Christopher Morley' was rolling out very big guns indeed. He had not only done Her Majesty 'good service' while he was away, 'in matters touching the benefit of his Country', but he deserved reward, and the 'ignorant' people who defamed him had better hold their tongues. He got his degree. Richard Baines could only further fume and secretly bide his time.
* See Joseph Keaton, Luvvies' Labours Lost, a History of Forgotten Acting, p. 23ff.
* Even so, very much in the style of a true young blade about town, Kit seemed reluctant to pay for the portrait. A document, found behind a skirting board during restoration work in the Corpus Old Court and appearing to be a letter to the Master from one William Larkin (one wonders if this name is the source of Kit's alias when travelling with the players), complains that 'maister marley, a scoler wythin yowre colege' has contracted a painting for which Larkin 'can in no wayes receyve of him payment, for that he Sayth yt ys noo goode lykenes, but al men Sayth yt ys'. Perhaps here we also have a clue as to why Kit parted so readily with the work when he left the college. The letter, circulated among Fellows by Drs Mara Kalnins and Linne Mooney on 1 April 1996, now lies sealed in a conservation box in the Parker Library (see Appendix III).
* Kit's visit to Plombieres and other spas was first noted in Toby de Lorn's The Craving of the Stew, p. 17 ff.
* Keaton, Luvvies' Labours, p. 86.
* According to a report by a Danish court aide, possibly assigned to spy on them, quoted in Keaton, Luvvies'Labours, p. 261.