Though he was hot-tempered, Kit was not a natural killer. He had been deeply disturbed by the slaying of Walter Hoochspier: 'I know, sir, what it is to kill a man,' he wrote, in a speech he added to the second Tamburlaine, sounding a note of sympathy for the 'coward' Calyphas. 'It works remorse of conscience in me./I take no pleasure to be murderous,/Nor care for blood when wine will quench my thirst' (2 Tamburlaine IV i 27-30). Oliver Laurens records a remorse that was almost excessive, and wrote that Kit was doubly troubled by Walter Hoochspier's name being a near anagram of his own (in these games a W can be inverted to make an M, so we end up with Christophe Marloe). It is around this time that Kit began the obsessive hand-washing that was to last much of his life.
The Kit that returned to London in early 1589 was a thoughtful, less wild, more sober young man than the one that had left. Perhaps sated by the 'perdona-mi's of Italy 'who stand so much on the new form', he was no longer of the sort that might lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. Life had become weightier. But it would be a mistake to hang all this on a single event. The picture now known as the Grafton portrait, painted in Antwerp for his twenty-fourth birthday in February 1588, as a companion to Oliver's portrait, shows a wan young man, already quieter, more pensive than the cocky sneerer of 1585
The Hog Lane affray - the first that is heard of Kit after his return from Italy - is much used by biographers to paint his character as murderous and violent. Yet this is unfair. His future room-mate, Thomas Kyd, did say that Kit was given to 'rashnes in attempting soden [sudden] pryvie injuries to men', but Kyd had his own reasons for blackening Kit's reputation - and it is the rashness and spontaneity that must be emphasised, the sudden flare of temper rather than the brutish, belligerent or cruel. Other contemporaries refer to Kit as 'deare unto us', 'kynde Kit Marlowe', or 'that pure elemental wit Chr. Marlow'. Kit was not the antagonist in Hog Lane, but (with Walter Hoochspier still on his conscience) he drew back from the fray, urging calm like Romeo in the fight between Tybalt and Mercutio. When Romeo finally kills Tybalt it is in 'fire-eyed fury' (Romeo and Juliet III i 124). He casts off 'respective lenity' and is transported, as Kit was in Padua, beyond his customary gentleness.
Hog Lane had its source among the tall houses of Norton Folgate, ran south of the Curtain theatre, then beyond the last tenement, and out west through grazing land - Mallow Field on the City side, and to the north High Field, or Finsbury Field, where three windmills creaked and turned, and archers filled the air with the twang and whack of target practice. Men also met there to fight duels. It is up this end of Hog Lane, in the early afternoon of the 18th of September, that Kit encountered William Bradley, son of an innkeeper, resident of Gray's Inn Lane, and bearer of a grudge against Kit's close friend Tom Watson. He was a year older than Kit, a known thug and scoundrel, and he owed £14 to John Alleyn, the brother of the actor Edward Alleyn. Alleyn had made to sue Bradley for his money, and Bradley countered by threatening Alleyn's lawyer Hugh Swift with a severe drubbing if he went ahead with the case. Hugh Swift was Tom Watson's brother-in-law, and Tom was swift to intervene on his behalf. Tension between Bradley and his opponents spiked out into hostility, especially after he somewhat disingenuously petitioned the courts to protect him against violence from Alleyn, Swift and Tom Watson.
What occurred in Hog Lane was not a brawl, but a more formal clash, a fight governed by the 'book of arithmetic'. Bradley was waiting for Watson near the duelling-fields of Finsbury when Kit came along, possibly a little earlier than arranged, to try and make peace. But Bradley attacked him, and they were fighting when Tom Watson arrived, drawing his sword to intervene and stop the fight (or at least that's what Watson told the coroner). Bradley, noticing the man he had originally come to meet, shouted: 'Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee' (the coroner's clerk breaks off his Latin and gives this in English). According to the report, 'Morley seipstnn retraxit & a pugnado desistit', he lowered his point and withdrew. Tom was wounded and driven up against the ditch at the northern edge of the lane, from where he lashed out, plunging his blade below Bradley's right nipple, and killing him on the spot. Kit did not flee, as he had in Padua, but waited with Tom Watson for the arresting officer (one Stephen Wylde, a local tailor) to arrive. Under English law they had acted in self-defence and could expect some leniency.
The two were taken before the Lieutenant of the Tower, who had them marched across the City to Newgate, which had one of the worst reputations of all fourteen London prisons. Their names were inscribed in Newgate's Black Book - Tom Watson entered as 'gentleman', Kit (to his chagrin) as 'yeoman' - then they were manacled and shoved through a hatch into a stinking hold called Limbo, a 'dark Opace wild room' that appeared to be a dungeon but was in reality the space between the top and the bottom of the arch under Newgate. It was lit by a single candle on a large black rock, known as the Black Dog of Newgate, against which a prisoner had once dashed out his brains. Rats writhed about their ankles, leaping and snatching anything edible from their hands. Starved, diseased fellow inmates pressed in on them from the gloom, piteously pleading for pennies. For, as with all prisons of the time, Newgate was more tolerable if you were rich. Prisoners had to pay for everything: for one of three grades of accommodation, for food, to have manacles removed and doors opened or locked. And they had to pay again and again, not just an official fee, but considerable 'garnish'.
As he was fairly sure he would be there only a short time, and had friends who could pay for him, Kit was soon free of his chains and able to move to the Master's Side (the privileged realm of master felons), rather than the Middle Ward or subterranean Stone Hold, described by the prisoner Luke Hutton, who had arrived in Newgate just a few months before, as 'a foul kennel' where men lay worse than dogs 'on boards as hard as chennell [hard coal]'. For a weekly charge of ten shillings Kit might enjoy a daily repast of:
Bone of meat with broth
Bone beef, a piece
Veal roasted a loin or breast or else one capon
Bread, as much as [he] will eat
Small beer and wine claret, a quart
while poorer prisoners cooked for themselves, filling the chambers with fumes and steam, or surviving off beer and bread soaked in broth. Around them there were, in the words of the playwright Thomas Dekker (who also did a stretch), jailors hoarsely and harshly bawling for prisoners to their bed, and prisoners reviling and cursing jailers for making such a hellish din . . . some in their chamber singing and dancing, being half drunk; others breaking open doors to get more drink to be whole drunk. Some roaring for tobacco; others raging and bidding hell's plague on all tobacco . . .'.
Kit, who had not even wounded Bradley, was released on recognisance of £40 after just thirteen days. At a trial at the Old Bailey in December, the judges accepted the claim of self-defence. There is no record of any further punishment for Kit, but Tom Watson was sent back to Newgate to await royal pardon, and it was only in February that he was set free. On the bench was Sir Roger Manwood, Kit's scurrilous childhood patron, who no doubt earned himself another line or two of the flattering Latin epitaph Kit would one day compose for him. Sir Roger was related to the Walsinghams by marriage, and was a neighbour to Thomas, who might have also been influential in Kit's favour. Of the two men who had stood surety for Kit for the hefty sum of £40, one, Richard Kitchen, was a gentleman and frequenter of the Mermaid, though the other was a lowly 'horn-breaker', a maker of lantern horns, Humphrey Rowland. Just how he and Kit knew each other becomes clearer on closer examination. Curiously, despite his humble profession, Rowland was considered financially sound enough to stand surety for people on at least two other occasions. What is more, his admission to the freedom of the City and entry into the (entirely inappropriate) Guild of Cutlers was effected by a personal letter from none other than the mighty Lord Burghley, despite protestations by the Lord Mayor that this was against City ordinances, and that cutlery was an 'art he doth not occupie'. Rowland was also rich enough to have a number of servants, including one Andrew Vandepeare and a 'Jn° Cornells' of Antwerp. The Low Countries, conspicuous wealth, Lord Burghley, and high favour - once again we find elements of the alchemy of espionage in Kit's life. His powerful friends were apparently still at work on his behalf. He needed them.
Following his extended stay in Italy, hasty retreat from Padua, long journey home after shipwreck - and then a spell in jail - Kit had no money in his purse. His first solution to this was to dig out, rework and speedily sell plays he had written before. In this he found a useful assistant in the ever-willing Will Shakespere, who while Kit had been away had made no progress at all in his attempts to relinquish acting and theatrical odd-jobbing for the heady world of writing plays.*
Using his old foul papers of The Tragedy of the Duke of Guise - a blood-and-bombast piece, written largely from news pamphlets and his recollection of Oliver Laurens's account of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and originally performed on the Continent by Bradstriet's men - Kit hastily reworked the play as The Massacre at Paris, giving shades of Machiavellian subtlety to the character of Guise, and closing the action with the death of Henry III (which had occurred while he was in Italy). He was taking a chance that distance, rewriting and a name change would prevent any objection from Bradstriet, and none seems to have been forthcoming, though curiously Henslowe in his diary refers to the play first as 'gvyes' and 'Gwies' before using the title 'masacer'. The play comes down to us in a fragmented and butchered form, but even so, it is clear that it has been quickly cobbled together.
More care appears to have been taken over that other guts-and-gore piece (also originally written for English comedians on the Continent), Titus Andronicus. Despite its violence and spectacle it has moments of fine verse, and could very well belong to a later period. We can only surmise that Kit was reworking it along with other early pieces at the beginning of the 1590s. Like most of his plays from this time, its first performance is hard to date - first records of some of the dramas occur up to forty years after we know they must have been performed. It would also appear that he worked again briefly with Tom Nashe on Dido, Queen of Carthage, a play they had begun years before while together at Cambridge. The poets embroider their source, Virgil's Aeneid, considerably, with moments of love interest and gratuitous violence. Kit's relish for his Paduan Bardasso is evident in the opening lines as Jupiter woos the boy Ganymede with 'Come gentle Ganymede, and play with me,/I love thee well, say Juno what she will', and a Bardasso's acquisitive petulance is discernible in I would have a jewel for mine ear,/And a fine brooch to put in my hat,/And then I'll hug with you an hundred times' (Dido I i 1-2 and 46-8). The brutality with which the King of Troy's hands are amputated in Dido provides a prototype for the even more sensational string of amputations in Titus.
A number of new plays appear, too, with a rapidity which indicates the assistance of his Johannes factotum. It would also appear that at least some of the scripts belong to the time Kit spent in Italy, and that he had somehow managed to rescue his belongings from Padua. There is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the commedia dell'arte-inspired The Comedy of Errors, as well as The Jew of Malta and The Taming of a Shrew - though none of these can be accurately dated: the first recorded performance of Two Gentlemen, for example, is nearly a hundred years later, in 1672. 'A Shrew' is a possible precursor to the better-known The Taming of the Shrew, itself a slipshod piece (at least in the version we have now), which begins with the drunken Sly, of whom we never hear again after Act One Scene I, and where the 'taming' of Kate is subordinate to a limp story of the love of Lucentio and Bianca. The heavy hand of Will Shakespere is certainly evident here. The august critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who harrumphed that to call The Taming of the Shrew a masterpiece was to bend criticism into sycophancy and fawning, has spotted in its elaborate stage directions another hand (he calls it Hand B), that of 'an actor of some kind', who is also to be found at work in The Comedy of Errors. Admittedly, it is a matter of speculation as to whether Will Shakespere also had a hand in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The primary source for the story of Julia in the play is Jorge de Montemayor's romance Diana Enamorada, which at the time the play was written was available only in the original Spanish and in a French version, neither of which languages Shakespere knew.
Kit was living at a furious pace and increasingly summoning the help of 'Hand B' to ease his workload. It was not just the need to turn plays into money that drove him; he cannily cultivated new friendships and was on a constant look-out for patrons. One such carefully nurtured benefactor was Ferdi-nando Stanley, Lord Strange, whose company of players performed many of Kit's early tragedies, including The Jew of Malta and Titus Andronicus, and which, incidentally, boasted in its number the clown Will Kempe, with whom Kit had worked in the Low Countries. Possibly it was Kemp who effected Kit's introduction to Strange's milieu, though it was more likely to have been Tom Nashe, who was intimate enough with the young nobleman to dedicate to him his obscene poem The Choice of Valentines (also known as 'Nashe's Dildo'). By 1592 Kit could claim that he was 'very well known to both the Earl of Northumberland and my Lord Strange'.
These two cultured, intelligent Catholic peers shared a number of young poet friends. With 'unmuzzled thoughts', and bristling with dangerous ideas gathered at debates in Padua, Kit was enthusiastically welcomed back into the mystic, intellectual circle of the 'Wizard Earl' Northumberland and Sir Walter Ralegh. At the same time he also sparkled in the set that surrounded Ralegh's glamorous rival, the Earl of Essex - or, more specifically, that of his brilliant and witty sister Penelope Devereux, who, exploiting Elizabethan celebrity culture, used her brother's fame to establish a small court of wanton poets, pleasant wits and musicians around him. It says something for Kit's charm and social dexterity that he flirted successfully with both bitter rivals. This was something that did not go unnoticed by Sir Robert Cecil. Nor did Kit's extravagant tastes and need for money. In the tug between Cecil and Essex to control the spy network after Walsingham's death, Cecil secured Kit as an informer not only in Essex's court, but in the cultured circles of the Catholic Lords Strange and Northumberland, who were both high in the order of succession and (whether or not they welcomed it) were looked to as figureheads by Catholic rebels.
Just how Kit justified this betrayal is hard to know - though perhaps he thought he could get away with supplying what a modern spy would call 'chicken feed', apparently useful but actually harmless information, which would fill his purse without unduly endangering his friends. He may have realised that it was Cecil and not Essex who would eventually triumph - or maybe Sir Robert simply paid more. Whatever Kit's justification for the deception, it is clear from subsequent events that his conscience supplied a threshold to duplicity, beyond which he would not go. And that reluctance was to prove very dangerous.
Of course, not every step Kit took was tainted by treachery. Oliver Laurens's descriptions of visits to Thomas Walsingham at Scadbury, of singing 'melodious madrigals' together, and of Kit's near worship of Tom Watson, tell of a capacity for truer friendship. And Kit was passionately in love. The rumours Will Shakespere heard soon after he arrived in London that 'Marloe had tumbled on the bed of my Lord Hunsdon's mistress', told only part of the tale. Kit had met the love of his life, a feisty woman who could match him in conversation and parry his sharp wit, Emilia Bassano.
The illegitimate daughter of Baptiste Bassano, one of family of Italian musicians who had served at Court since the time of Henry VIII, Emilia was proud to the point of tyranny, exotic, temperamental, musical and extremely clever. She was Bianca, the beautiful Venetian courtesan whose rosary of sucked olive pits Kit still carried, but Bianca with brains. Her eyes and hair were raven black; her dark beauty threw men off balance. In 1587, when she was just seventeen, Lord Hunsdon took her as a mistress, but the old Lord Chamberlain was in his sixties, and nimble Kit Marloe deftly out-manoeuvred the 'crooked-pated old cuckoldy ram' behind his back. But loving Emilia was no simple business: 'Alas that love, so gentle in his view,/Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!' (Romeo and juliet l i 167-8). Toyed with, spurned and ultimately rejected, Kit wrote some of his finest sonnets to her - poems not intended for publication, but, like his other sonnets, compact verse letters which were read by a few friends and collected and printed only in 1609.
Soon after returning from Italy, he was firing off sonnets in Soon after returning from Italy, he was firing off sonnets in quite another direction. The object of these passionate (and often quite suggestive) missives was the pretty young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley - known as 'Rose' to those who dared. (Martin Green convincingly argues that the family name was pronounced 'Rose-ly', and points out the use of heraldic roses decorating the Southampton seat, and the allusion in Sonnet 95 to 'thy budding name'.) A locket miniature by Nicholas Hillyard shows the earl, who was just sixteen when Kit met him, as a 'beauteous and lovely youth' (Sonnet 54), more lovely and more temperate than a summer's day, unripe, 'the world's fresh ornament' (Sonnet 1). 'Small show of man was yet upon his chin;/His phoenix-down began but to appear/Like unshorn velvet on that termless skin' (A Lover's Complaint). His bouffant hair curls into a long lovelock that drapes down over his left shoulder; his eyebrows, thin and arched, appear delicately plucked; his 'tempting lip' petulantly pursed, his alabaster complexion tinged with the faintest of flushes. The long lovelock was something of a Southampton trademark. We see it again in a later portrait of him as gallant knight, posing with sucked-in cheeks in an 'I'm a teapot' stance, beside an outrageously ornamented suit of armour, complete with burgeoning panache of ostrich plumes. Ambrose Willoughby, an Esquire of the Body, once pulled a large chunk of the lord's locks out during a huffy scuffle that ensued when he interrupted a card game between Wriothesley and Ralegh.
We know now that 'Rose' Wriothesley liked to dress as a woman. A recently identified portrait at Hatchlands Park in Surrey shows him with his familiar long tresses of hair and pouting lower lip, but this time with lipstick, rouge and elaborate, looping double earrings. He is wearing a dress with a very expensive Venetian lace collar (which helps date the portrait to between 1590 and 1593), and his hand is draped camply over his heart. Perhaps the oddest thing about the portrait is that it was painted at all. The earl seems to desire a permanent record of his transgression - rather like Kit, who, while at Cambridge, had had his own portrait painted in clothing that flouted current social rules. Rose's transvestism did not bother Kit, who was, after all, friends with many a boy actor that played women's roles. On the contrary, he appears rather to have liked it:
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the Master-Mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion . . .
(Sonnet 20)
He does go on to acknowledge that Nature 'has pricked thee out for women's pleasure' with a 'thing to my purpose nothing', but this may be read simply as a statement of Kit's sexual preferences - his 'purpose' with this Rose is not 'love's prick', but what he once termed 'the melting buttock'.
Kit's passion for the dainty earl inspired other poems than the sonnets. Three in particular are a public profession of what the sonnets confessed in private. In Venus and Adonis (which is dedicated to Southampton) he departs from Ovid in making Adonis almost a child, of 'hairless face'; and in focusing on Venus's desire for him opens the myth to a strong homoerotic reading. In the far superior Hero and Leander the astonishingly beautiful boy Leander fires lust and confusion in gods and men, from a frisky Neptune to a Thracian soldier who simply cannot resist him. Kit describes Leander's 'dangling tresses that were never shorn' and notes 'Some swore he was a maid in man's attire,/For in his looks were all that men desire'. And we again sense Wriothesley's androgynous appeal in A Lover's Complaint when we encounter a youth who reigns 'in the general bosom . . . Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted', and in the beauty 'Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth' (Sonnet 20).
It was, we may surmise, love at first sight - instantaneous, without reason:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
(Hero and Leander)
Kit would repeat that famous last line word for word in As You Like It (III v 81). But although the relationship was a lasting one, in which Southampton (albeit indirectly) became patron as well as lover, yet again Kit found he could not command constancy. Southampton was passionately attached to the Earl of Essex, another devotee of same-sex relationships, and both enjoyed the attentions of minions. The soldier William Reynolds writes in a letter to Robert Cecil, during Essex's Irish campaign, how Southampton (who more than once followed Essex abroad) lavished favours on one Piers Edmonds, whom he invited to sleep in his tent and would 'clip [embrace] and hug him in his arms and play wantonly with him'. (We can perhaps compare the affection Southampton lavishes on Piers Edmonds with the king's doting on Piers Gaveston in Edward II - 'He claps his cheeks and hangs about his neck,/ Smiles in his face and whispers in his ears' (Edward III ii 51-2). But then Kit was no stranger himself to frolic thoughts and lusty deeds. He may not have been one of those men who loitered too long in Pissing Lane, fumbling furtively with his codpiece - the ones that arrived singly and left in pairs. Nor was he party to the secret, sweaty trysts that took place in walled gardens on the edge of town, though he did perhaps take his pleasure (in John Donne's words) with the 'plump muddy whore, or prostitute boy' in busy taverns near the theatres, where ingles (rent boys) could be seduced with hard coin and trinkets. By the early eighteenth century such taverns had grown into 'molly houses' - public inns or private homes like the famous one run by Margaret Clap, where men could be found 'fiddling and dancing and singing bawdy songs, kissing and using their hands in a very unseemly manner', or going out 'by couples into another room on the same floor to be married, as they call it'. A scandalised observer gives us a glimpse of a party at a molly tavern that (though it took place in a very different cultural milieu) one can imagine appealing to Rose Wriothseley:
The men [called] one another 'my dear' and [were] hugging, kissing, and tickling each other as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, and assuming effeminate voices and airs; some telling others that they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently . . . Some were completely rigged in gowns, petticoats, head-cloths, fine laced shoes, furbelowed scarves, and masks; some had riding hoods; some were dressed like milkmaids, others like shepherdesses . . .
There is no direct evidence that such places existed in Kit's London, but Margaret Clap's house did not fall from heaven. Alan Bray detects a 'line of continuity' between the eighteenth-century molly houses and the male brothel-taverns of Elizabethan Southwark, where boy actors and Master-Mistresses, married merchants and Bacchanalian blades, catamites and men like Kit, frolicked with their friends, sported upstairs or toyed in the inglenooks. This was not yet a distinct subculture, but a fellowship of outsiders, a zone for mixed predilections, where nothing was declared, still less admitted, but the world was permitted.
Not Essex, Southampton nor Kit Marloe would have identified themselves as 'homosexual'. That, as Bruce Smith points out, 'is a clinical, scientific coinage of the clinical, scientific nineteenth century'. Nor did 'bugger' or 'sodomite' quite fit the bill. 'Buggery' was also used to refer to bestiality, and 'sodomy' included heterosexual acts. The Elizabethans saw both practices not as indicators of exclusive sexual preference, or a lifestyle, but as vices from the darker end of a continuum of debauchery, sins (according to the Puritan writer John Rainolds) to which 'men's natural corruption and viciousness is prone'. As Alan Bray puts it: 'The temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot, be it never so abhorred.' Buggery and 'sodometrie' formed part of a package of wickednesses, with sorcery, atheism and treason swept up into the bag. Dally with one, and you might find yourself accused of the lot. Excess, promiscuity and rebelliousness were also likely to set Elizabethan tongues tutting with accusations of sodomy, which marked one out as a wanton sinner but did not imply a separate homosexual identity.
Even 'bedfellow' was a common term in an age when beds, at home and in inns, were frequently shared, and does not imply (though nor did it preclude) romping between the sheets. Bray argues that in homes where rooms casually led into each other and masters mingled with their servants, whom one shared one's bed with became a public fact, and a meaningful one, as 'beds are not only places where people sleep: they are also places where people talk. To be someone's "bedfellow" suggested that one had influence and could be the making of a fortune.' He sees Anne Bacon's letter to her son Anthony complaining 'your brother . . . keepeth that bloody Perez, as I told him then, yea as a coach-companion and bed-companion' in that light, and he views as sexually innocent Archbishop Laud's dream of his patron, the Duke of Buckingham, ascending into his bed 'where he carried himself with much love towards me, after such rest wherein wearied men are wont exceedingly to rejoice; and likewise many seemed to me to enter the chamber who did see this'. But beds are not only places where people sleep and talk, they are, of course, also places where people have sex, and we can safely consider this to be true even of Elizabethan times. To strip 'bedfellow' of any association of rumpus is to deprive it of an important layer of meaning. It would make nonsense, for example, of the accusation later levelled at Kit that he said that 'St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to C[hrist] and leaned alwaies on his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sod-ama.' Suggesting that St John 'had influence' with Christ is no scandal at all.
Likewise, interpreting the Earl of Southampton's wanton playing with Piers Edmonds on the battlefield as merely an expression of the 'daily conventions of friendship', part of a 'placid orderliness' which is 'set a world away from the wild sin of Sodom', runs the risk of being disingenuous. The image of the masculine friend, sans overtones of buggery, is indeed a common one in Elizabethan literature, and intense male bonding of course took place without sexual correlates - we have an example of this in the relationship between Kit and Tom Watson, and perhaps even more so in his friendship with Thomas Walsingham. Men did kiss in public and use the word 'love' without sexual import, but the reverse was also true, and we should not allow literary fastidiousness to blind us to the fact.
The law against sodomy, which had been repealed under Mary, was reinstated in Elizabeth's second Parliament (at the instigation of indignant Parliamentarians rather than of the Crown). But, as Bruce Smith points out, the law was seldom put into effect. During the forty-five years of Elizabeth's reign, and the twenty-three of James I's, only six men are recorded as indicted for sodomy in the Home Counties assizes, and only one was convicted. Indictments for bestiality outnumber those for sodomy six to one. Convictions generally involved rape, underage sex, or were the result of a shady political agenda. 'Unless one were famous and had powerful enemies,' Smith argues, 'one could be indicted for sodomy only by forcing another male (more likely than not a minor) to be the passive partner in anal sex.' In other words, not much different from the situation in many Western countries today. Sexual relations between masters and minions - their pages, 'Ganymedes', 'catamites' or 'ingles' - were openly talked about. Male stews and taverns where ingles plied their trade were rife; and players especially had the reputation of being promiscuous and predatory, seducing stage-struck young men to the ways of Sodom.
But it is a disrespect to the hearts and minds of men to presume that all this stopped at lust, and that desire and love between same-sex couples did not exist, simply because no-one had given it a name. It existed, the world knew it existed, but in a society where marriage was both a business and the grist of social status, it had acquired no label of its own. As Smith puts it: 'The question confronting a young man in [Elizabethan times] was not, am I heterosexual or am I homosexual, but where do my greater loyalties lie, with other men or with women.' The answer for Eat was 'with both'. The torque of turning loyalties impelled his life; the tensions and conflicts this presented played themselves out in his dramas.
Bruce Smith sees Kit's examination of master and minion in Edward II, which was written at this time, as showing the beginnings of 'a specifically homosexual subjectivity', and the Sonnets as moving beyond this expression of desire into previously unmapped artistic and emotional territory. This reflects a wider and more far-reaching shift in Kit's dramatic technique and aesthetic perspective. In the words of the biographer Anthony Holden: 'Marlowe [was] breaking free of the plodding, one-dimensional archetypes of the medieval tradition'. For the first time in English theatre, the figures in dramas became more than symbol-laden cut-outs, and can rightly be called 'characters'. As the players' acting style changed from declamation to 'personation', they found the material they were offered to work with more subtle and more realistic. The making of a play was a two-way process. In Faustus Kit is at a half-way point - a Good Angel and an Evil Angel are external representations of the Doctor's warring conscience. Flawed though the rest of the Shrew is, Kate (at least) shows some sign of internal conflict and resolution. The manipulative streak evident in the character of the Duke of Guise in The Massacre at Paris burgeons in The Jew of Malta into a full-blown Machiavellian protagonist, the prototype for later villains in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Though Kit's astute theatrical instinct drove him to create a stereotypical stage Jew, a deeper dramatic integrity tempered this with real knowledge of Jews from Padua (there were so few Jews in London at the time it is highly unlikely he would have gained his insights there). Though the villain of the piece, the Jew Barabus does to some extent engage our sympathy, as his plight is caused by Christians who are hardly more morally attractive than he is.
Even in the frenzy of writing for quick money, Kit was strengthening the foundations for a whole new superstructure of Elizabethan drama. He was beginning to respond to the advice given him years before by Montaigne in the baths at Plombieres, that he should examine the 'movement of the mind' and 'pierce and usurp the senses of other men', so that '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'. In the new amphitheatres in London, where the minds of multitudes could be moved by actors' speeches, Montaigne's words came to life. 'Poets had never before been able to grasp the opportunity of moving the "affections" of three thousand packed and willing hearers at one time,' writes the theatre historian Andrew Gurr. 'Marlowe was the first poet to grasp that chance.' Together with the players with whom he was working, he was looking at character in an entirely new way, one that involved not just morality, but the bumps, ditches and unexpected turns of a personal psychology. His blank verse had already given Elizabethan theatre its rhythm; his new perspective now gave it depth.
Edward II was the first play in which Kit used as a source Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which included a complete history of England, published in 1577. Thomas Walsingham had given him the rather expensive second edition, which came out a decade later, the year he graduated with his MA. Holinshed was to form the background to a radical new direction for Kit, 'a theatrical feat never previously attempted . . . assigning character and motives, thoughts and feelings to historical figures still fresh in the national mind . . . holding them (rather than divine will) responsible for the consequences of their own actions . . .'. Starting with Edward II he embarked on a series of history plays which, though not written in chronological order, covered events in the reigns of Henries IV, V and VI and Richards II and III. (Titles were never Kit's forte. In an age that produced such snappy box-office draws as Gammer Gurton 's Needle and The Roaring Girl, he - to the end of his career - often opted simply to name his play after its leading character.)
After Edward II came the Henry VI trilogy, in which Kit possibly still collaborated with Tom Nashe. He certainly made use of the services of Will Shakespere to transcribe his foul copy and, given Will's eager persistence, allowed him to pen the more workaday scenes. Norlet Boyd maintains that Shakespere's contribution to the plays was more than as a mere scribe, and that the lad from Stratford brought an earthiness to the shepherds, huntsmen and other more rumbustious country characters that the university-educated, city-loving Marloe disdained.* This does tally with Shakespere's own strutting as a writer around this time. And Kit needed the help as much as ever. Poetry and spying, mistress and inamorato, grubbing for money and glittering in grand households, all combined to make 1591 a very busy year. Yet he could not have foreseen how essential this help was to become as 1591 led in to 1592, which from the outset was for Kit an annus horribilis. The year began with his arrest in Flushing.
* Boyd, Two's Company p. 42.
* Boyd, Two's Company, p. 45.