I was about twelve or thirteen when I first encountered the name Christopher Marlowe, on the spine of my father’s mouldering paperback edition of Doctor Faustus. Intrigued by the image on the cover – of Ned Alleyn as Faustus, in his circle of black magic symbols – I brought the book to my father, who proceeded to tell me everything he could remember about its author: the mysterious death in Deptford, the charges of treason, heresy, sodomy. The Baines Note. ‘All they that love not tobacco & boyes are fooles.’ Edward II. He never said it in so many words – nor did I have the words to express it myself at the time – but I gradually realized that the person he was describing was someone like me: proof that I was not alone, and that others had existed even centuries before my time. Kit Marlowe was my first queer ancestor.
Later in life, as I entered academia and began to study Marlowe as a subject, I discovered that his queerness, however you define it, was hotly contested. Although in this century Marlowe has been largely accepted as a part of the queer canon, even now some scholars shrink away from the topic of his sexuality altogether, or argue that, in the absence of rock-solid proof requiring nothing short of a time-machine, heterosexuality should always be assumed as the default of our forebearers. And then there are those who apply the circular logic that, although queer behaviour has surely occurred since the dawn of humankind, the concept of sexual identity had first to be invented in order for queer people to exist, effectively nullifying any sort of queer history that pre-dates the early twentieth century. Oscar Wilde famously said that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, and academia, I’ve found, is where he goes to kill it.
I knew well before I graduated my doctoral programme that I did not belong in academia, much as I truly did enjoy it at times. I wrote the first draft of Lightborne and my dissertation simultaneously, often exploiting the resources I used for the latter to write the former. And yet, all the research I collected over the years, the letters, legal documents, pamphlets and registers, told only a fraction of the story, the visible tip of a measurelessly immense iceberg. Queer history is often about chasing the stories for which no material evidence exists: stories never written down, never spoken of, never witnessed outside of those who lived them. It is the study of lost things.
Lightborne is largely a story about silence, suppression, the violence of the ‘closet’. It is also about loss: the loss of life, in every sense, when survival requires a betrayal of the self. Even four hundred and thirty years later, LGBTQIA+ people everywhere still face this daily, frightening reality, as evidenced by ever-mounting attacks against gay and trans people across the globe. We are murdered and abused, harassed into silence and suicide, legislated into the shadows even where, so recently, we’d stepped into the light. But we do have one key advantage over our ancestors: we know we are not alone.
A note on the title: there are two spellings of ‘Lightborne’ found in the earliest printings of Marlowe’s Edward II (1594, 1598, 1612), either with or without the ‘e’. Modern editions of the play often spell ‘Lightborn’ sans ‘e’, but I feel this rendering sacrifices some of the name’s polysemic qualities.
I have tried to limit references that would be obscure to modern readers, although Marlowe can’t help but make a few. On page 67, his papers refer to a ‘Jesuit Stephens’ who was, in fact, the Jesuit Thomas Stevens, one of the first English missionaries to settle in India, in 1579. Stevens’s writings on Indian culture and Hinduism bolstered growing interest in the subcontinent back home, which eventually culminated in the East India Company’s establishment at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
On page 67, the lost Arabic treatise Marlowe mentions is On the Prophets’ Fraudulent Tricks by the tenth-century physician, philosopher and scientist Abu Bakr al-Razi, or Rhazes as Marlowe would have known him. He is sometimes controversially credited as one of the pioneers of humanistic thought.
On page 175, Marlowe quotes a Latin inscription from his own Doctor Faustus which is itself drawn from Ptolemy: ‘Through unequal motion with respect to the whole.’ He follows with a Latin quote from Tycho Brahe’s book on the 1572 supernova, De nova stella, in which Brahe rails against fellow astronomers who dismissed the implications of this celestial event: ‘Oh gross wits! Oh blind watchers of the sky!’
The English translation of Marlowe’s inquest report which appears on page 419 is adapted from a translation by Constance Brown Kuriyama, which can be read in full in her book Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, along with a trove of other documents related to the events in this novel and beyond.
While many of the events in this novel are fictional, all of the main players were real people, most of whom went on with their lives past the last page. Thomas Walsingham did in fact rise to a life of respectability, achieving both his desired seat in Parliament and a knighthood, despite the fact that his marriage to Lady Audrey was plagued by rumours of adultery well into the following century. It was, in fact, Lady Audrey’s alleged lover Robert Cecil who may have precipitated Dick Topcliffe’s eventual fall from grace, by exposing the torturer’s habit of making sexual remarks about the Queen shortly before her death in 1603. Richard Baines’s fate is uncertain: a Richard Baines was hanged at Tyburn in 1594 for thievery, but the name was common enough at the time that there’s no guaranteeing this was our man. Thomas Kyd died shortly after his release from prison. Nick Skeres eventually became entangled with the Essex Uprising and likely died as a political prisoner in 1601. Ingram Frizer, by then a gentleman of some means, assumed financial care over Nick’s orphaned children.
Despite having murdered Thomas Walsingham’s friend, Frizer continued in service at Scadbury. Briefly, he acted as a fixer in Nick Skeres’s coney-catching schemes, though without any great success. Later in life, he advanced to the lucrative role of property manager for Lady Audrey’s extensive, Crown-let farmlands around the village of Eltham. Survived by his daughter Alice, Frizer was buried on 14 August 1627. His exact age remains unknown.
Robin Poley served the Privy Council off and on until July 1602, when a letter from him to Secretary Robert Cecil seems to suggest that he had fallen on desperate times:
you said to me I never made you good intelligence, nor did you service worth reckoning… although I much desire my endeavours might please you, my necessities needing your favour.1
He had intelligence to offer: the Jesuits were running a smuggling operation along the Thames, aided by spies embedded within the Privy Council’s own men. One of the Jesuits’ agents was, of all people, Thomas Phelippes, now working for the enemy.2
It was the last letter on record that Poley ever sent. He thereafter vanished without a trace.
Edward II remained reviled and obscure until 1903, when a heavily censored production was mounted with Harley Granville-Barker in the titular role. The first known production to make full use of Marlowe’s text did not occur until 1969, with Ian McKellen as Edward and James Laurenson as Gaveston. Fittingly enough, during a live-televised rehearsal in Edinburgh, ‘all hell broke loose’ and police were summoned to the studio following Edward and Gaveston’s kiss – only the second gay kiss ever seen on British television.3 The recorded production’s US debut in 1975 featured the first kiss between two men on the American small screen.
I like to think Marlowe would have been pleased.
Hesse Phillips