Oliver slipped back into the United Provinces, no doubt to meet up with his fellow courier William Wayte and collect whatever correspondence it was that the pair carried to London in order to receive their £15 payment in March. Curiously, in November that year William Wayte petitioned in a suit for sureties of the peace against Will Shakespere, 'ob metum mortis' - 'for fear of death' - an unsolved riddle which appears to indicate that he, too, was exposed to the poseur's unpleasantness.
Oliver took with him to England Kit's sole output for the previous two years, the play we now know as King Henry TV Part I, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a farce of some gusto that shows every sign of being based on a piece written for Brodribb and his company. The play refers to the knighting of a 'Duke de Jarmany' [Germany] (IV 3 and IV 5), in reality Maurice's neighbour, the Duke of Wurttemberg, who was petitioning Queen Elizabeth to be admitted to the Order of the Garter at the time. The story that Queen Elizabeth so enjoyed a performance of Henry TV that she requested a play 'showing Falstaff in love', which Shakespere produced in ten days, is pure myth. There is absolutely no evidence to support the tradition. (Nor, incidentally, is Falstaff really in love in the play.) Though if the story were true, Will would have had no difficulty in speedily producing a play that had already been written. In the event, Kit's timing was unwittingly bad, as this knockabout comedy appeared as the first play Shakespere wrote after the death of his infant son Hamnet.
Very little of The Merry Wives is in verse, which perhaps reflects the influence of the tubby old trouper Brodribb's pithy prose. Although Kit had been the first, in Tamburlaine, to popularise drama in blank verse, he was also an innovator in mingling prose with poetry in his plays. Up until his time, drama had been almost entirely in verse. A manuscript in prose is easier to alter, and this is the first play in which Will Shakespere dared insert his own lines - a practice that was to so enrage Kit as time went on, but one that he was powerless to stop. The indefatigable scholar Leslie Hotson has argued that the foolish character of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives is based on William Wayte's stepfather, who was also embroiled in the suit against Shakespere, which if true would indicate Will's vengeful hand in the first scene of the play.
Will Shakespere was intent, as the biographer Katherine Duncanjones puts it, on seeking 'worldly recognition on the world's terms'. He wanted not merely fame as a poet, but irrefutable social status, and had 'a larger plan to turn himself into a gentleman'. This quest became more urgent when it appeared that the supply of plays from Kit was drying up. Will set about acquiring a coat of arms, then securing (with the purchase of New Place in Stratford in 1597) a suitable residence on which to display it. Both these moves were expensive - especially buying the patent for a coat of arms on absurdly fragile grounds, from a distinctly dubious official - raising the suspicion that some sort of blackmail of Tom Walsingham was again involved. Income from the plays at this point would not have been sufficient, though Will did display a coldly astute business sense in managing the money he had, purchasing shares in the Chamberlain's Men and later in the Globe theatre, dodging taxes, and hoarding grain at a time of famine in Stratford. His 10 percent share of takings at the Globe would alone eventually earn him several hundred pounds a year, a considerable fortune.
The coat of arms he designed was supremely tacky, wildly over-detailed (including a falcon shaking a spear) and almost entirely covered in gold and silver, itself a considerable expense, as ordinary colours were much cheaper when it came to making the escutcheon. The motto - in medieval French, to imply ancient lineage - was 'Non sanz droicf ('not without right'), which Ben Jonson wickedly sent up as 'Not without Mustard' in Every Man out of his Humour, in which Sogliardo, a country bumpkin, is ludicrously proud of his new, highly coloured coat of arms with a crest depicting 'a boar without a head, rampant' and silly motto - the 'mustard' was probably a reference to the excess of gold leaf in Shakespere's arms. Kit, too, could not resist a stab at Will's pomposity, in the character of the foolish, socially overweening Malvolio, who is so enjoyably humiliated in Twelfth Night. As Duncan-Jones demonstrates, Malvolio's cross-gartered yellow stockings visibly mimicked the Shakespere coat of arms, an effect that must have been 'exquisitely ridiculous' as Malvolio, a firm believer that 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em' (II v 158), gets his comeuppance - and especially so if (as is quite possible) Will himself had to play the part.
Kit's journeys had purged him of his melancholy (unlike Jaques, or John Dowland), and his return to Antwerp was effected with ease. The Alleman family seem to have held no hard feelings against him, and to have kept his possessions safe, and within a month or two he was settled back in his old chambers. Pieter Bellerus, his former employer, was less forgiving, however. There is no record of Kit's having rejoined the firm. Oliver notes that Kit instead took up work as a proofreader with Bellerus's rivals at the 'Gulden Passer', the famed publishing house of Christophe Plantin. This is quite feasible, though difficult to verify. Plantin was dead, and the company was now in the hands of his son-in-law, Jan Moretus. Both Moretus and Plantin are known to have employed freelance workers to help translate or rewrite texts, and to assist in some of the tasks of proofreading; but, unlike his predecessor, Jan Moretus did not record their names in his livres des ouvriers unless their work or pay was for some reason out of the ordinary. Kit may also have received books in lieu of pay - Plantin remunerated some authors in this way.
Proofreading was a high-status job, done by top scholars and graduates. At the Plantin-Moretus press readers had to be competent in a range of languages to cope with multilingual texts, so Kit certainly had the required skills - and he did develop a detailed knowledge of printing. At a lecture at the Stationers' Hall in 1933, Captain W. Jaggard (a descendant of the printers of the First Folio) presented some 500 quotations, from All's Well through to The Winter's Tale, as evidence of the author's specialist knowledge of printers' trade expressions, technical words and workshop habits.
At the Gulden Passer, each permanent proofreader was assigned to check the output of three presses, though at busy times even family members helped out. Plantin's daughters are known to have done so, and his grandson Christophe (in a letter describing his 'occupations for this day', written one icy winter as punishment for being 'proud, stubborn and wilful') reveals he was sulky about having to read proofs of Libellus Sodalitus with his cousin Raphelingius. Young Christophe was probably acting as a lector, reading aloud while his cousin was corrector. The proof-readers usually worked in tandem, and the mood in their room (which was kept warm, but not so as to cause drowsiness, with sloping desks hard up against the windows) was convivial, and enlivened by educated banter - perhaps at times a little
Kit would surely have enjoyed working with the proof-readers, and he was certainly in the Moretus milieu. This is evident from a fragment of a letter, recently discovered on the reverse side of a pen sketch (attributed to the young Rubens) when it was removed from the frame it had occupied since the late seventeenth century.* Dated November 1597, the letter identifies the figures in the drawing as 'Hooghius, Lipsius and his dog Mopsus', and begins to quote part of a public dialogue between Hooghius and Lipsius. Mopsus was indeed the much-loved pet of the humanist philosopher Justus Lipsius (Joest Lips). Peter Paul Rubens, who turned twenty that year, was a boyhood friend of Jan Moretus's son Balthazar, and did sometimes illustrate his letters with sketches. Balthazar had once been Lipsius's amanuensis. The scholar's books were published by the Plantin-Moretus press, where he was often resident. And Hooghius and Lipsius had much to talk about. too jolly. Strict rules, written in Latin in Jan Moretus's hand, demanded of proof-readers that 'they do not laugh when in very large type, not only letters but entire phrases have been omitted', and warn that 'drunkenness must be carefully avoided; it is like a shameful illness, and very bad for the body and for the eyes'.
Lipsius was the world expert on Seneca and Tacitus. In 1591, he had left his long-held post at the University of Leiden to move back to the Spanish Netherlands, taking up a professorship in Leuven (Louvain) near Antwerp, where he took in a number of 'contubernales' (live-in students). His relationship with his publisher went beyond a simple business arrangement. He had been close friends with Christophe Plantin, and after Plantin died, became increasingly friendly with Jan Moretus, becoming in a sense resident author at the Gulden Passer, with his own study. When Plantin's widow died in August of 1596, Moretus moved from his house on the Kammerstraat into larger premises at the Gulden Passer, and very soon invited Lipsius to visit. Lipsius had reluctantly declined as he had six contubernales to look after (his reply exists, though not Moretus's original invitation). It would appear from Rubens's sketch and letter fragment that Lipsius later took up the offer, and a gap in his correspondence with Moretus between October 1597 and January 1598 indicates he was in situ at the Gulden Passer.
His study was an intimate room on an inner courtyard, hung with a tapestry depicting 'Proud Cleopatra when she met her Roman on the swelling river Cyndus', and lined with embossed leather (though not the priceless sixteenth-century guadamacil - gilt leather from Cordoba - that is there today. This was moved from another room in the late seventeenth century). 'Hooghius' and Lipsius, perhaps with Mopsus at their feet in his collar with gold stitching, talked long of Tacitus, Plutarch and Seneca. Kit had read Plutarch in both Greek and in English (in Sir Thomas North's influential 1579 translation, one of the books he had brought from England), but knew Seneca in Latin. Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus, and to some extent Richard III all bear the stamp of Seneca's bloodthirsty, ghost-ridden tragedies, and the power of Kit's blank verse owes much to what T. S. Eliot called 'the solemnity and weight of the Senecan iambic'.
Lipsius reawakened Kit's interest in classical Rome. Julius Caesar was one of two plays Oliver took back with him after a visit in late 1598.* The other was Much Ado About Nothing (the second part of Henry iVhad probably been sent through Jacques Ghibbes's illicit courier service, though no record exists). Kit relied heavily on Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch as a source for Julius Caesar, at times rather lazily taking over entire passages, much as he would do with his later Roman plays. On that visit Oliver brought Kit a copy of Hero and Leander, published 'posthumously' under Kit's own name by their mutual friend Edward Blount, with a dedication (addressed to Tom Walsingham) that mentions Kit as a 'man that hath been dear to us, living an after-life in our memory'. Blount himself would feature in a more curious dedication a year later, in Kit's new translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, which was published by Oliver's employer in London, Thomas Thorpe:
Blount, I purpose to be blunt with you, and out of my dullness to encounter you with a dedication in the memory of that pure elemental wit, Christopher Marlow, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walking in the Churchyard in at least three or four sheets.
Methinks you should presently look wild now, and grow humourously frantic upon the test of it.
Thorpe's reference is to the Stationers of St Paul's Churchyard, with a pun on ghostly winding sheets and sheets of paper, but there is here perhaps the first clue that he knew (or at least suspected) the truth, in the hint that Blount (to be blunt) if he 'tested' this ghost would 'grow humourously frantic' (become wildly excited) by what he found.
Kit's revival of interest in Lucan (who was Seneca's nephew) and the epic Pharsalia may well have been a result of his friendship with Lipsius, or simply an exercise to keep his working Latin up to scratch. As it was well known that Will Shakespere had 'small Latin and less Greek', the work obviously could not be passed off as his, so it became another 'posthumous' publication. A number of early works already known to a wider public as Kit's were published around this time, but there is no record of who benefited financially. It is to be hoped that Kit did see some of the money, as he was in sore need of it. He was scraping by in economically depressed Antwerp, and producing little in the way of English plays to supplement his income.
Although Kit was beginning to write again by the end of 1598, his first two years back in Antwerp had been relatively unproductive, perhaps because of the unfamiliarity of working without a theatre company at hand. He had bombarded Southampton with sonnets, urging him to take his guardian Lord Burghley's advice and marry, and had come up with a sequel to Henry TV, but very little else. In an attempt to consolidate his position, Will Shakespere had not only made himself into a gentleman, but was continuing (despite the flop of Love's Labour's Won) to put out his own work - a second-rate city-comedy called The London Prodigal, which was registered in 1598, and an anthology of stolen poems (including one or two of Kit's sonnets) published as The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, with his name on the title page. Even more cheekily it included Kit's poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love', which had been popular as a song (though not published) long before 1593
News of this irked Kit less than the knowledge that Shakespere was altering the plays he sent over to London without truly comprehending them. Kit felt impotent, anonymous and ill understood. Later he would accuse Will of 'dulling my lines, doing me disgrace' (Sonnet 103). He wryly alludes to the situation (and to his 'death' in Deptford) in As You Like It (III iii 9): 'When a man's verses cannot be understood . . . it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.' This would have been very much an in-joke as, it may be remembered, lle recknynge' formed no part of contemporary accounts of Kit's 'death' at Deptford and was only to be found in the inquest report (rediscovered by Leslie Hotson in 1925), so the allusion would have meant little to those not in the know. It is spoken by the court fool Touchstone, who later thoroughly confuses a poor yokel called William, from the Forest of Arden (which was in Warwickshire, near Stratford). Touchstone is married to Audrey, a country girl, by a vicar called Sir Oliver Mar-text whose shortened name (Ol Mar) can be turned into Mario. Calvin Hoffman sees the marriage as an allegory: Mar-text (Marlowe's text) marries Touchstone (Marlowe) to Audrey (the Elizabethan audience), dismissing William the rustic from Arden. That would perhaps be wishful thinking on Kit's part, but whatever the interpretation of this intricate set of references, it is clear that Kit is rather acidly making a point.
In addition to their interest in classical culture, Kit and Lipsius shared a passion (and perhaps a need) for healing waters. On at least on occasion, in July of 1599, they travelled together to the baths at Spa, a few days journey south-east of Antwerp. Pliny the Elder had known of the medicinal properties of the mineral springs there, and in the course of the sixteenth century, Spa had become a fashionable resort (subsequently contributing its name generically to thermal baths the world over). King Henry VIII was an early visitor, and the baths were much frequented by aristocrats and intellectuals. Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, was there that summer, ostensibly to heal a sore on his leg, but mainly to cock a diplomatic snook at the Spanish, who had refused him the Governorship of Flanders, partly on a pleasure tour, and - it transpired - also on something of a culture-raid. By the time he left for Italy in the autumn (having also visited Brussels and Antwerp) he had recruited to his court in Mantua the man reputed to be the best portrait painter in Europe, Franz Pourbus; he had also lured south Peter Paul Rubens (a promising but obscure young artist whose only known work hung in his mother's house); and one of the musicians travelling in his retinue, Claudio Monteverdi, had (according to his brother Giulio Cesare Monteverdi) picked up a new style of song, 'canto alia francese', for Mantuan import. At the end of 1599 Pourbus and Rubens were preparing to leave Antwerp, Peter Paul's brother Philip Rubens was already at the University of Padua, and Lipsius was planning to travel to Rome. (He had been invited there for Holy Year 1600, though later abruptly changed his mind.) Kit decided to join this migration south. He was thirty-five (in full Elizabethan middle-age), had always loved Italy, and had himself been given an invitation by the duke to join his court, as a singer. What is more, his artistic life had reached a crux.
When Oliver Laurens visited Antwerp one last time, to try to dissuade Kit from leaving, Kit had given him a play that he had been working on and reworking for years. It was a tragedy, one that would mark him as 'the alchemist of eloquence' - a transmuter of thought and emotion into verbal gold, who had distilled his isolation and despair, his own confrontation with killing, into purest poetry and brilliant theatre. The play was Hamlet. His old script, written in Elsinore and stolen back from Robert Browne, had been transformed by the lessons in prose he had learned from Harry Brodribb and the perceptions into soliloquy he had been given by John Dowland and lifted to another level entirely by the trauma of Deptford, and the anguish of the years that followed. Anthony Holden writes:
The dizzying display of poetry and philosophy, wit and insight, finds its central focus in one man, one very mortal man, perhaps the most complex creation in literary history, in whom every subsequent generation has found multiple reflections of itself... As [Hamlet] lurches from comedy to tragedy, high art to low, violence to stillness, love to hatred, confusion to redemption, it tells the story of Everyman as never before or since, distilling as much individual and collective experience as can be contained in one frail, confused man of action, a poet-philosopher confronting all our own everyday problems while trying to solve one none of us will ever have to face.
Hamlet marked a shift in Kit's psychological and aesthetic bedrock, and sent out the tremors that made new ground for the creation of Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. The critic Frank Kermode writes of 'a new inwardness, almost independent of dramatic necessity', noting that the years 1599-1600 marked a time when a poet who was already the author of several masterpieces 'moved up to a new level of achievement and difficulty'. With Hamlet something fundamental had changed. Kit's earlier plays had been closely interrelated - the structure of Richard II and Edward II is identical; The Merchant of Venice grew out of The Jew of Malta, and at times he even quotes himself in subsequent works. Compare 'Holla ye pamper'd jades of Asia!/ What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day' (2 Tamburlaine IV iii 1-2) and 'hollow pamper'd jades of Asia,/ Which cannot go but thirty miles a day' (2 Henry 7VII iv 155-6); or Sir Hugh Evans singing 'To shallow rivers, to whose falls/Melodious birds sing madrigals; There will we make our beds of roses,/ And a thousand fragrant posies', which (excuses made for the odd mistake and his Welsh pronunciation of 'beds') is from Kit's earlier poem The Passionate Shepherd to his Love {Merry Wives Hi 15-18, and Passionate Shepherd 7-10).
Now, on the eve of his move over the Alps, the only play he ever set in northern Europe heralded a departure on more than one level.
Since 1593, life for Kit had been purely a matter of survival; now it was something he valued. Completing Hamlet had made him acutely aware of his own mortality - or ephemerality. To his peers and posterity, he was voiceless and invisible. Will Shakespere's posturing was risible, the changes he made to Kit's work infuriating, but it was he whose name would live on, while 'Chrisopher Marlowe' would forever be associated with a brawl at Deptford, and a few early works. After Hamlet, Kit valued his art, and his abilities, quite differently. Attached to the manuscript was a sonnet for Will Shakespere. It was a moving admission that whichever of them died first ('Or [whether] I shall live your epitaph to make,/Or you survive when I in earth am rotten'), Kit's pen would make the name Shakespere immortal, his verse would be Shakespere's monument, and as spoken drama it would even live on 'in the mouths of men', while all Kit could expect was to be forgotten in 'a common grave':
Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall live.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
(Sonnet 81) [my italics]
On 8 May 1600, after the burgomaster of Antwerp had issued documents certifying that the travellers were in good health and the city was free of plague, Kit joined the party of Peter Paul Rubens to set off across the Alps, on horseback to Mantua.
* Now held in a private collection.
* Rosine, Oliver Laurens, p. 354.