Christopher Marlowe: Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name: 27 Essays from the Marlowe Studies

By Cynthia Morgan

These essays from The Marlowe Studies give the Shakespeare authorship evidence for Christopher Marlowe that has been overlooked by traditionalists resistant to the idea someone other than the Stratford man wrote the works. While the authorship debate continues, the words of Shakespeare himself sit silent on the sidelines. The essays herein bring his words into the spotlight and interpret them within the Marlowe context, so readers can decide for themselves whose autobiography they voice. Whether or not we believe Marlowe was the man behind a pseudonymous Shakespeare name, no invention is needed to see that these sonnets and plays answer our questions about his character, Baines’s Note, a staged death at Deptford, Thomas Walsingham, and the bestowal of the pseudonym. The essays also offer a new explanation for cryptic Sonnet 112, new information about the man
who sued Marlowe for assault, a look at the literary similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare, an examination of the “heretical” papers in Kyd’s room, and an exploration of Marlowe’s Cambridge education that reveals how it shaped his plays and his ideas about religion. Signals for Marlowe being the true author of Shakespeare’s works are found in Ben Jonson’s authorship clues, the clues in As You Like It and Hamlet, and the eighteen clues in the Inductions to The Taming of a Shrew and The Shrew. Evidence is also given for Marlowe’s authorship of Venus and Adonis, the King Henry VI trilogy, and three anonymous plays: Edward the Third, The Troublesome Raigne of King John, and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663233356

Cynthia Morgan

Cynthia Morgan is a contented wife and mother of two teenage boys and lives in the Portland, Oregon area. Having inherited her love of the written word from her grandmother and mother, she's been writing since age twelve.

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Christopher Marlowe:

Every Word Doth

Almost Tell My Name

27 Essays from The Marlowe Studies

The Christopher Marlowe Library

Cynthia Morgan

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CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE:

EVERY WORD DOTH ALMOST TELL MY NAME

27 ESSAYS FROM THE MARLOWE STUDIES

Copyright © 2021 Cynthia Morgan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover and book design by Cynthia Morgan

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3334-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3335-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021924902

iUniverse rev. date: 08/08/2022

In memory of A.D. Wraight and Peter Farey, whose principled pioneering research laid the foundation for 21st century Marlowe/Shakespeare studies.

AND

To Alex Jack, another Marlowe trailblazer. Fourteen years ago Alex suggested I create a Christopher Marlowe website: hence, The Marlowe Studies.

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Whatever we are told or taught at first

is what’s believed for life (for best or worst)

unless our minds are changed by instant burst

of consequential light—belief reversed

like Saul of Tarsus suddenly unhorsed

by blinding evidence divinely sourced—

or finding facts through study in due course.

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Excerpt from The Marliad by David More

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INTRODUCTION

1. The Sonnets of Exile

Cynthia Morgan

2. The Misshapen Image

Cynthia Morgan

3. How I Got Hooked on Marlowe’s Story

Details of a Staged Death

Cynthia Morgan

4. Deconstructing Marlowe

A Summary of David Riggs: Cynthia Morgan

5. Claudius: O Wicked Wit and Gifts

Alex Jack

6. Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford?

Cynthia Morgan

7. Marlowe and the Age of Reason

Cynthia Morgan

8. Ben Jonson’s Clues

A Summary of Daryl Pinksen with Further Commentary: Cynthia Morgan

9. Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name

Cynthia Morgan

10. The Profound Abysm of Sonnet 112

Cynthia Morgan

11. Marlowe’s State Plays

Cynthia Morgan

12. Reconsidering Corkyn v. Marlowe

Cynthia Morgan

13. Marlowe v. Kuriyama

Cynthia Morgan

14. Marlowe’s Cambridge Portrait

A Summary of A.D. Wraight and Park Honan: Cynthia Morgan

15. Marlowe’s Venus and Adonis / Hero and Leander

A Summary of John Baker with Further Commentary: Cynthia Morgan

16. Marlowe/Shakespeare Literary Similarities

Alex Jack

17. The Clue in the Shrew

Isabel Gortazar

18. Was Shakespeare an Atheist?

Gary Sloan

19. Did the Pseudonym Come Before the Front Man?

Cynthia Morgan

20. Hamlet: Courtier, Soldier, Scholar

Alex Jack

21. Marlowe’s Edward the Third

A Summary of A.D. Wraight with Further Commentary: Cynthia Morgan

22. Marlowe’s Style in Edward the Third

A Summary of A.D. Wraight: Cynthia Morgan

23. Rejection of Marlowe’s Edward the Third Authorship

A Summary of A.D. Wraight: Cynthia Morgan

24. Marlowe’s Authorship of King Henry VI: Parts 1, 2 and 3

A.D. Wraight

25. Groatsworth

A Brief Summary of Wraight’s Groatsworth: Cynthia Morgan

26. Stephen Greenblatt’s Marlowe

Cynthia Morgan

27. What Tamburlaine’s Sources Tell Us About Marlowe

Excerpts from A.D. Wraight’s A Dramatist of History

AFTERWORD

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Most of the rare photographs in this book come from A.D. Wraight’s In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography, text by A.D. Wraight and photography by Virginia F. Stern. Much gratitude to A.D. Wraight’s daughter, Virginia Waterhouse, for her permission to use these photos.

The entrance to Thomas Walsingham’s Scadbury estate

Marlowe’s childhood home in Canterbury

John White watercolor of Algonquian with bow

John White watercolor of Algonquians fishing

John White watercolor of Algonquian campfire

John White watercolor of Algonquian village

Painting of Henry Percy, the Wizard Earl

1550 painting Jacob’s Dream

St. Pauls

The beech tree on Thomas Walsingham’s estate

Christopher Marlowe’s initials carved into the beech tree

Student’s room at Cambridge

Likely the view from Marlowe’s Cambridge room

Archbishop John Whitgift

The ruins of St. Augustine’s Abbey near Marlowe’s home

The Shakespeare bust over the monument’s inscription

Painting of The Chess Players

Torture rack

The entrance to Canterbury’s King’s School

Canterbury Cathedral cloisters

The Dark Entry

George Chapman

The mysterious tomb on Thomas Walsingham’s estate

Scadbury Manor

The moat around Scadbury Manor

Sir Francis Walsingham 1530?-1590

The page of Massacre at Paris in Marlowe’s handwriting

Christopher Marlowe’s signature

The signatures on Katherine Benchkin’s will

Mercery Lane in Canterbury

Pilgrims leaving Canterbury

Marlowe’s Cambridge portrait before repair

The cliffs of Dover

Composite of First Folio Shakespeare/Marlowe

The Hampton Court portrait of William Shakespeare

Shoestrings in William Herbert’s ear

Droushout engraving William Shakespeare

London inn where plays were performed

The Rose, the Hope, or the Globe

Effigy of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral

Edward Alleyn

Effigy of King Henry IV and his Queen Joan of Navarre

The West Gate towers, Canterbury

Will in the World book cover, Chandos portrait

Choir area in Canterbury Cathedral

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INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most disputed of all collections of poetry in the English language. This is not surprising, for they are personal and intimate poems written to individuals, which would tell much of Shakespeare’s life if only some facts about them could be indisputably established.

G.B. Harrison: Editor, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint

W hile the Shakespeare authorship debate continues, the plays and sonnets sit quietly offstage as if they have nothing to say about the matter. Although many of the sonnets read like autobiography, we are unable to connect them to the Shakespeare from Stratford. Some scholars have concluded he must have made a conscious choice to put nothing of his life in his works. Ralph Waldo Emerson epitomized this circular reasoning when he wrote of Shakespeare, It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. ¹ It is also true to say the essence of poetry springs from the visible, embraces the past, and affirms all history; therefore, we can just as reasonably conclude the Stratford Shakespeare has not been found in the plays and sonnets because he is not there.

Should we choose to look for a concrete life in the Shakespeare works, it is Christopher Marlowe’s autobiography we find. Whether or not we believe Marlowe was the man behind a pseudonymous Shakespeare name, little ingenuity is needed to interpret many of the sonnets addressing his feelings leaving England on his way into exile, his truth about the informer Richard Baines, his acceptance of the William Shakespeare pseudonym, his loneliness in exile, and the disgrace he felt because of the method they used when feigning his death at Deptford so that his patron’s employee, Ingram Frizer, would get off on a plea of murder in self-defense. The sonnet interpretations brought forth in these essays are reinforced by the dialogue in several Shakespeare plays.

As evidenced by their writing, few traditional scholars have held a willing suspension of disbelief for the span of time it would take to look at the Shakespeare plays and sonnets in search of possible answers to questions about Marlowe’s character, the informer Richard Baines’s accusations, and the death or non-death at Deptford. The following essays from The Marlowe Studies bring the sonnets and plays into the spotlight, where they speak the lines that tell his story. Novelists have had a field day recreating Marlowe’s life through their imaginations. It is time to hear what the Shakespeare works themselves have to say.

In Who Wrote Shakespeare? John Michell concludes, Were it not for the record of his early death Christopher Marlowe would be the strongest of Shakespeare candidates. ² The first problem is Marlowe was supposed to have died, and yet we find the author of Shake-spears Sonnets telling us repeatedly he is dead to all the world and it is someone else whose name from hence immortal life shall have, someone else who still shall live when all the breathers of this world are dead because of the virtue of my pen. The essays, Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name, and, The Profound Abysm of Sonnet 112, address this issue.

The second problem is that the assessment of Marlowe’s character has been detrimentally affected by the informer Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd’s testimonies because they seem to be corroborated by the coroner’s report on his death, i.e., the alleged violent quarrel in which he’d cowardly struck his killer, Ingram Frizer, from behind with Frizer’s own dagger. Yet we find the author of Shake-spears Sonnets identifying himself exactly thus:

my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife . . .

Many scholars believe the coroner’s report was fictionalized and just as many have not been persuaded by the testimonies of these two men, including traditionalists John Bakeless and Charles Nicholl. Bakeless, who authored the first extensive biography of Marlowe, wrote, As witnesses, both Baines and Kyd command very little confidence. ³ Nicholl, author of The Reckoning, wrote:

We do not know how much truth there is in what Baines says. Everything about the man, and everything about the circumstances of the Note suggest that it is, at least, a grotesque distortion of Marlowe’s position. It is a piece of propaganda by an experienced practitioner of (in his own words) fiction and dissimulation. ⁴

The essay, Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford? addresses Baines and Kyd, and the essay, How I Got Hooked on Marlowe’s Story, addresses the possibilities and probabilities around the idea Marlowe’s death was feigned.

The third and fourth problems are the lions at the gate: the Shakespeare monument and the First Folio. We have Shakespeare telling us in Sonnet 81 someone else’s monument shall be my gentle verse. Is it mere coincidence Ben Jonson wrote the following lines at the front of the First Folio?

Thou art a Monument, without a tomb . . .

The Stratford Shakspeare had a tomb/grave, yet Jonson is telling us the Shakespeare who wrote the First Folio did not—as Marlowe, if he lived beyond Deptford, did not. Jonson says the Shakespeare who wrote the First Folio does, however, have a monument. Peter Farey has found Marlowe’s name embedded in the verse’s cryptic riddle etched on the monument:

Stay Passenger, Why Goest Thov By So Fast?

Read If Thov Canst, Whom Enviovs Death Hath Plast

With In This Monvment Shakspeare: With Whome,

Qvick Natvre Dide: Whose Name, Doth Deck Ys Tombe,

Far More, Then Cost: Sieh All, Yt He Hath Writt,

Leaves Living Art, Bvt Page, To Serve His Witt

The verse’s second line asks us to read, if we can, who it is death has placed with in this Shakspeare monument. The following line gives a clue, telling us this person’s name is on Shakspeare’s tomb (grave). The only name on the tomb is Jesus. Farey says, Whose name is ‘Jesus’? There can be only one possible answer—it is the name of ‘the anointed one,’ Jesus Christ. He goes on to say there is no reason for such an answer to the riddle to be hidden, so we should take Christ as only part of the name, the rest should be found in the four words that follow: Far More, Then Cost. Farey moved these letters around and found the words Far More contain the letters o, f, e and r:

Christ+ofer=Christofer

Using the riddle tools of synonyms and anagrams, he found the complete name CHRISTOFER MARLEY embedded in Far More, Then Cost. Marlowe’s record of baptism shows him as Christofer, and his father signed his surname as Marley., Farey found the odds of these letters coming up by accident to be one in over twenty million. The essays, Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford? and Ben Jonson’s Clues address the issues of the monument and the First Folio.

♦♦♦

The purpose of The Marlowe Studies is to give authorship evidence overlooked by an academia mainly composed of traditionalists resistant to the idea someone other than the Stratford Shakespeare wrote the works and to mend misinformation perpetuated by their assumptions not backed up with evidence. Essay 2, The Misshapen Image, shows how a negative view of Marlowe has been foisted into the literary realm by academic traditionalists.

In spite of this, research into Marlowe has continued to grow into the 21st century. In 2016 the New Oxford Shakespeare was published by Oxford University Press with Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 no longer listed as having been written by Shakespeare alone. The title pages of these plays now say, By William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Since I put The Marlowe Studies online in 2009 there have been more than 3,000,000 visitors. The highest percent of emails the site has received have been from students whose interest in Christopher Marlowe is growing in colleges and universities around the world. Perhaps it is they who will put a dent in academia’s fossilized conceptions of Christopher Marlowe. Academia as a whole has so far ignored the conclusions of intelligent men who took the position there is something incredible and absurd about the Stratford Shakespeare being author of the plays and sonnets: Henry James, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Sigmund Freud. The authorship question is most often voiced by those who are very familiar with Shakespeare’s works and are concerned not only that the true author receives the credit he is owed, but that the plays and sonnets cannot be correctly interpreted until we have the right author. Still, academia looks upon those who ask the authorship question as biting the hand that feeds them.

As the publisher of The Marlowe Studies I have had the opportunity to read the research of many current Marlovians. While I wrote most of the essays in this book, some of mine are summaries of their work so that readers can get a broader look at Marlowe than is currently taught in the universities. I’ve also included five complete essays by other Marlovians and one essay by traditionalist Gary Sloane.

British punctuation marks have been changed to American for consistency. The terms orthodox, traditionalist, and Stratfordian refer to those who believe the man born in Stratford was the author of the Shakespeare plays and sonnets. The Stratford Shakespeare never spelled his name this way. Henceforth, I will be using the spelling on the Stratford monument Shakspeare for his name to stave off confusion between the man and the author of the Shakespeare works. You will notice other writers use different spellings for his name, such as Shakspere or Shaxper. I have rarely modernized the quoted Elizabethan material. Until Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 the English people were not consistent in the spelling of their names or anything else, so the reader can expect variations. Often, you will find the i=j, v=u, and u=v.

THE ESSAYS

♦ The Sonnets of Exile gives the reader sixteen of A.D. Wraight’s thirty-seven exile sonnets with a brief explanation of each. Seven of these sonnets seem to be letters to Thomas Walsingham.

♦ The Misshapen Image tells of the company Marlowe kept and shows how negative assumptions are applied to Marlowe by some biographers and commentators. It includes part of A.D. Wraight’s Riposte to Charles Nichol.

♦ How I Got Hooked on Marlowe’s Story examines the evidence for a feigned death in detail. If the name William Shakespeare is a pseudonym for Marlowe in exile we would expect certain things to be true regarding the evidence.

♦ Deconstructing Marlowe is a summary of David Riggs’s chapter Thinking Like a Roman from his book, The World of Christopher Marlowe. Riggs has written a thorough description of Marlowe’s Cambridge education that reveals how it shaped his thinking, therefore, his playwriting. Some scholars have suggested Marlowe projected his own attitudes into his characters; we learn from Riggs it was his education that shaped his ideas.

♦ Claudius: O Wicked Wit and Gifts is a chapter from Alex Jack’s Hamlet. It shows how Marlowe crafted King Claudius after his nemesis, Archbishop John Whitgift.

♦ Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford? gives Peter Farey’s interpretation of the cryptic words on the monument and hypothesizes the informer Richard Baines was the real author of the Dutch Church libel. Evidence is offered from 16th century letters and the Shakespeare sonnets for Baines operating in collusion with the ecclesiastical faction of the government to create heretical charges against Marlowe. Baines’s counterfeiting accusations against Marlowe a year earlier in Flushing are examined in detail to see if his motive was related to his later allegations.

♦ Marlowe and the Age of Reason asks the question, Did Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh think Christian ideas must be reconcilable with human reason? It explores the heretical papers The Fal of the Late Arrian found (or planted) in Kyd’s room, shows Raleigh questioning Reverend Ironsides, What Is the Soul? and asks the question, Was Raleigh’s poem ‘The Lie’ written to Christopher Marlowe?

♦ Ben Jonson’s Clues is a summary and further commentary of Daryl Pinksen’s chapter, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, from his book, Marlowe’s Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Pinksen probes Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humour and Shakespeare’s As You Like It finding contradictions to the sentiments Jonson expressed in the First Folio and evidence in both plays pointing to Marlowe as the true author of the Shakespeare works. For those who believe Marlowe was using the name William Shakespeare as a pseudonym in exile, Jonson’s role in the First Folio was merely part of the cover up.

♦ Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name translates the meaning of Sonnet 76 to be Marlowe telling us he is embedding his true identity in the Shakespeare plays by implanting previous lines from the earlier works under his Marlowe name. This is why we find no allusions to any sixteenth century writer except Marlowe in the Shakespeare plays. Included in this essay are twenty of Calvin Hoffman’s parallel passages showing their birth under Marlowe’s name and where they did proceed under the Shakespeare name, Sam Blumenfeld’s Marlowe’s Code, and Tucker Brooke’s Marlowe parallelisms and repetitions.

♦ The Profound Abysm of Sonnet 112 offers a new interpretation of this cryptic sonnet contrasted against the traditional interpretation so fair comparisons can be made. It shows five problems with the traditional sonnet editors’ alteration of line 14, reveals 112’s relationship to Sonnet 111, finds both sonnets to be letters to Thomas Walsingham, and gives the evidence for Thomas Walsingham’s creation of the Shakespeare pseudonym.

♦ Marlowe’s State Plays gives the evidence for his writing Edward II, Massacre at Paris, and several more plays for his patron, Thomas Walsingham, and for Sir Francis Walsingham.

♦ Reconsidering Corkyn v. Marlowe introduces the discovery in the Canterbury archives of Corkyn’s court records revealing him being sued and suing others fifteen times in the span of eight years.

♦ Marlowe v. Kuriyama begins with the Introduction to academic Constance Kuriyama’s book, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, in which she says, Biographers, like all writers, inevitably bring cultural and personal biases to their work, and, consequently, what they write often reveals more about the author than about the subject. This essay shows Kuriyama’s biases are revealed by what she chooses to alter, add, and leave out of the documented evidence she presents concerning the 1592 court cases Corkyn v. Marlowe and Marlowe v. Corkyn.

♦ Marlowe’s Cambridge Portrait tells the story of how Cambridge graduate student Peter Hall saved what many consider to be Marlowe’s portrait from the rubbish bin in 1952. It gives the reasons why this is most likely Marlowe’s portrait.

♦ "Marlowe’s Venus and Adonis / Hero and Leander is a summary and further commentary of John Baker’s Hero and Leander All Marlowe and his Marlowe’s Authorship of Venus and Adonis." It explores the images and setting of Venus and Adonis, revealing they are not of Shakspeare’s Warwickshire but of Marlowe’s home territory, Kent. As A. L. Rowse states, The poems are full of echoes of each other, theme, arguments, phrases, whole passages.

♦ Marlowe/Shakespeare Literary Similarities is Alex Jack’s comparison of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s line and verse, style, characters and plot, structure, comic scenes, ideology and universalism, female characters, the supernatural, theology, biblical references, vocabulary, staging, props, classical sources, specialized knowledge, diction and imagery, familial influence, registration dates, image clusters, and more.

♦ The Clue in the Shrew is Isabel Gortazar’s exploration of the Inductions to both The Taming of a Shrew and The Taming of the Shrew. She reveals eighteen clues to Christopher Marlowe’s non-death at Deptford May 30th, 1593.

♦ Was Shakespeare an Atheist? has traditionalist Gary Sloane giving many examples in the Shakespeare plays which reveal the dramatist to be unshackled by The reigning superstitions of the time, addicted to no system of bigotry: Popish or Protestant, Paganism or Christianity.

♦ Did the Pseudonym come before the Front Man? explores the meaning of the William Shakespeare pseudonym and its relationship to Marlowe’s friends Thomas Walsingham and Thomas Watson. This essay hypothesizes Thomas Walsingham created the pseudonym.

♦ Hamlet: Courtier, Soldier, Scholar is a chapter from Alex Jack’s Hamlet, which shows the resemblances between Marlowe and Hamlet.

♦ "Marlowe’s Edward the Third" is a summary and further commentary on Chapter 3 of A.D. Wraight’s Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn: An ‘Armada’ English History Play. It gives the sixteenth century documented evidence from Marlowe’s contemporaries for his authorship of this play. Wraight was the first to see the play’s patriotic Armada connection, and she shows the play lines that reveal it.

♦ "Marlowe’s Style in Edward the Third" presents both traditionalist and Marlovian reasons for believing Marlowe wrote this anonymous play.

♦ "Rejection of Marlowe’s Edward the Third Authorship" presents the arguments for Marlowe not writing the play.

♦ "Marlowe’s Authorship of King Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3" is Chapter IV from A.D. Wraight’s Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, in which she writes about Marlowe’s authorship of the trilogy. Wraight wrote this book in 1993, twenty-three years before the New Oxford Shakespeare put By William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe on the title pages of these plays.

♦ Groatsworth is a brief summary of A.D. Wraight’s evidence for Shake-scene in Robert Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit as representing the famous actor Edward Alleyn and not William Shakspeare from Stratford.

♦ Stephen Greenblatt’s Marlowe is an exploration of academic Stephen Greenblatt’s interpretation of Marlowe through the lens of his play Tamburlaine.

♦ "What Tamburlaine’s Sources Tell Us About Marlowe" explores the sources Marlowe used for Tamburlaine. This essay shows how his sources reveal he was not projecting his personality into Tamburlaine’s character. It also looks at his deviations from these sources, where we do find what Marlowe projected into the play from his own character.

Cynthia Morgan

Publisher of The Marlowe Studies

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1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Writers and Books. Emerson’s Literary Criticism, ed. Carlson (University of Nebraska Press 1979) p. 172.

2. Michell, John: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Thames and Hudson 1996) p. 239.

3. Wraight, A.D: The Story That the Sonnets Tell (London: Adam Hart LTD 1994) p. 300.

4. Nicholl, Charles: The Reckoning, Chapter 34 Marlowe’s Liberty. (The University of Chicago Press 1995) p. 322.

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THE SONNETS OF EXILE

Cynthia Morgan

O good Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.

Hamlet 5.1

T he following sonnets seem to be telling the story of what happened to Christopher Marlowe during and after that fateful day at Deptford. It takes no stretch of the imagination to interpret these sonnets as addressing the 29 year-old Marlowe’s loneliness and terror leaving England, the accusations in Baines’s Note which were about to bring charges of heresy down on him, and the disgrace brought to his name because of the method they had to use when feigning his death at Deptford. Many of these exile sonnets read like letters to the man who would have overseen the feigning of his death, most likely his patron, Thomas Walsingham.

Shake-speares Sonnets were entered at the Stationers’ Register on May 20, 1609, the anniversary of Marlowe’s appearance before the Privy Council ten days before his death at Deptford. The hyphen in the Shakespeare name indicated it was a pseudonym. Due to heavy-handed censorship, late sixteenth century political writers often used a pseudonym and employed a hyphen in the name, such as Mar-prelate, Curry-knave, and Tell-truth.

Thorpe’s 1609 edition of the sonnets was suppressed soon after it was published. The sonnets were not included in the First Folio. There was no reprint of the 1609 edition until 1640, after everyone involved in Marlowe’s story had died. Only thirteen copies of the 1609 edition have survived; a note on the title page of one original edition tells us the great actor who played Marlowe’s leading characters, Edward Alleyn, bought a copy in June 1609 for one shilling—right before the book of sonnets was suppressed.

Were they suppressed because Marlowe’s contemporaries would plainly see what is not easily seen today, the many references to his story that would reveal he did not die at Deptford? Many of these exile sonnets read like letters to the man who would have most likely managed the staging of his death, his patron, Thomas Walsingham. Although a great deal of ambiguity is necessarily used in these sonnets, to have them in circulation would have put Walsingham in a dangerous position with the government.

At first glance, the wide range between the exile sonnet numbers seems to defy their relatedness to each other; however, when A.D. Wraight reassembled the sonnets by putting them into theme groups she discovered the largest group, thirty-seven, dealt with a period of cruel separation from the poet’s former life and friends, a journey into what can only be likened to a state of exile. ¹ Wraight found the original sonnet sequence had been rearranged to deceptively disperse this theme of exile, rather as a dramatist might take a sub-plot and interweave this with his main dramatic theme, with the difference that here the purpose is not to tell the story but to obscure it and prevent easy detection of its import. ²

To illustrate Wraight’s hypothesis, early in the sequence we find sonnets that would seem to have been written later in the poet’s life, such as Sonnet 31 which contains these lines:

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,

Which I by lacking have supposed dead;

And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,

And all those friends which I thought buried.

And Sonnet 33, which contains these lines:

Even so my sun one early morn did shine,

With all triumphant splendour on my brow;

But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,

The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.

To our ears the intimacy of these sonnet letters speaks of a sexual relationship between the poet and the patron, however, homosexuality was disdained at that time and most likely would not have been exhibited publicly through the medium of poetry. In his essay, Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England, Alan Bray describes male friendships in late 16th century to be much more physically intimate than male friendships are today. He says, It was not uncommon then for platonic male friends to exhibit strong emotional bonds between each other, to share beds, kiss, or embrace in public. Such bonds grew out of an extra level of respect. A bedfellow’s word was trusted above all others, and a bedfellow’s advice was held in the highest possible regard. ³ Loyalty to a friend was valued highly at that time.

A.D. Wraight and Virginia Stern

image002.jpg

The entrance to Thomas Walsingham’s Scadbury estate in Chislehurst, Kent. If Marlowe did not die at Deptford, this is the road upon which he began his journey into exile.

♦♦♦

What is astonishing about the sonnets, especially when one remembers the age in which they are written, is the impression they make of naked autobiographical confession.

W.H. Auden: Introduction: The Sonnets, Signet Classic Shakespeare edition

♦♦♦

Shakespeare’s Sonnets can be read biographically despite all the confusions and difficulty inherent in such an approach. There is, indeed, much in them too specific to be explained away by any general reading.

Leslie A. Fielder: Some Contexts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

♦♦♦

The pith and puissance of the sonnets have been unappreciated and unperceived. They have been read as imagery alone, images painted on air and not founded on facts, without any grasp of the meaning which the images were only intended to convey and heighten, whereas the value of Shakspeare’s images lies in their second self, and this has so often been invisible to the reader."

Gerald Massey: Shakspeare’s Sonnets Never Before Interpreted (1868)

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SIXTEEN SONNETS OF EXILE

Sonnet 50 may be the first sonnet Marlowe wrote after the decision he leave England. It tells of his mental state leaving his patron and friend, Thomas Walsingham, as he began his journey into exile.

♦50

How heavy do I journey on the way,

When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,

Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,

‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’

The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,

Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,

As if by some instinct the wretch did know

His rider lov’d not speed being made from thee.

The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,

That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,

Which heavily he answers with a groan,

More sharp to me than spurring to his side;

For that same groan doth put this in my mind,

My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.

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Still on his journey into exile, the last line of Sonnet 27 speaks of the risk Marlowe and Walsingham have just taken. This might have been the first sonnet letter to Walsingham.

♦27

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

But then begins a journey in my head

To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:

For then my thoughts—from far where I abide—

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

Looking on darkness which the blind do see:

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,

Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.

Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,

For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.

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Sonnet 34 seems to be another sonnet letter to Thomas Walsingham. It tells us Marlowe was not at Deptford for the staging of his death, which makes sense because it would have been necessary he leave England as soon as possible after Baines’s Note reached the Privy Council. The raw emotional tone of this sonnet suggests it was the first one written after he was told about the manner in which they staged his death. Marlowe is not happy about the way they made him out to be a coward who would strike another man from behind so that Frizer could get off on murder in self-defense.

♦34

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,

And make me travel forth without my cloak,

To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,

Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,

To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,

For no man well of such a salve can speak,

That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:

Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;

Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:

The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief

To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,

And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

Thomas Walsingham would have most likely been the man who made Marlowe travel forth (leave England), the brave man who had promised Marlowe his risky action would lead to a beauteous day; instead, base clouds overtook Marlowe and their rotten smoke hid this man’s bravery (rotten smoke=the disgrace of the coroner’s report that states Marlowe was a coward who grabbed another man’s knife from behind his back). Walsingham’s bravery was a salve that healed a wound—the wound of heresy charges which would lead to literal wounds such as hanging—but this salve that would allow Frizer to get off on a plea of murder in self-defense cures not the disgrace of Baines’s Note, it adds more disgrace.

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Sonnet 74 gives the reason his death had to be feigned (that fell arrest without all bail shall carry me away), and reveals how he died (The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife). This is one of several sonnet letters to Thomas Walsingham, who, according to this interpretation, managed the saving of his life by having his employee Frizer agree to be the killer in the coroner’s report (The very part was consecrate to thee). Again he speaks of the method they used to get Frizer off on murder in self-defense (The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife, Too base of thee to be remembered). In Sonnet 34 he states this method added more disgrace to his name. In Sonnet 74 he states this method was base.

♦74

But be contented when that fell arrest

Without all bail shall carry me away,

My life hath in this line some interest,

Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

The very part was consecrate to thee:

The earth can have but earth, which is his due;

My spirit is thine, the better part of me:

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,

Too base of thee to be remembered.

The worth of that is that which it contains,

And that is this, and this with thee remains.

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Sonnets 111 and 112 are here interpreted as a pair of sonnet letters written to Thomas Walsingham not long after the Deptford event. In 111 Marlowe is requesting his life be renewed after the feigning of his death. Sonnet 112 answers how his life was renewed. These two are explored further in the essay The Profound Abysm of Sonnet 112.

♦111

O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand: [The one who dies hand]

Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed;

Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink

Potions of eisell ‘gainst my strong infection;

No bitterness that I will bitter think,

Nor double penance, to correct correction.

Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,

Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

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Sonnet 112 begins where 111 ended. The traditional sonnet editors have found 112 the most difficult of all the sonnets to interpret, therefore, they have deleted the y’are in the last line so that it will make sense to them. The Marlowe Studies believes by doing this they have erased the answer to the riddle the poet presents in line 13. Below is the original 1609 sonnet before sonnet editors erased the y’are and replaced it with they are in the last line.

♦112

Your love and pity doth th’impression fill,

Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow,

For what care I who calls me well or ill,

So you ore-greene my bad, my good allow?

You are my All the world, and I must strive,

To know my shames and praises from your tongue,

None else to me, nor I to none alive,

That my steeled sense or changes right or wrong,

In so profound Abysm I throw all care

Of others voices, that my Adders sense

To critic and to flatt’rer stopped are:

Mark how with my neglect I do dispense.

You are so strongly in my purpose bred,

That all the world besides me thinkes y’are dead.

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Sonnet 36 is another sonnet letter to Thomas Walsingham (So shall those blots that do with me remain, Without thy help, by me be borne alone).

♦36

Let me confess that we two must be twain,

Although our undivided loves are one:

So shall those blots that do with me remain,

Without thy help, by me be borne alone.

In our two loves there is but one respect,

Though in our lives a separable spite,

Which though it alter not love’s sole effect,

Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,

Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,

Nor thou with public kindness honour me,

Unless thou take that honour from thy name:

But do not so, I love thee in such sort,

As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

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Sonnet 33 speaks of how his early triumph as a dramatist was taken from him by heaven’s son, who, in the sonnet’s context, would seem to be Archbishop John Whitgift. This conclusion is derived from the Shakespearean homophones suns and sun in the couplet’s last line, here taken to mean sons and son.

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♦33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

With ugly rack on his celestial face,

And from the forlorn world his visage hide,

Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:

Even so my sun one early morn did shine,

With all triumphant splendour on my brow;

But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,

The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

When suns and sun are taken to mean sons and son we get:

Sons of the world may cause dirty marks that are not easily removed

When heaven’s son causes dirty marks that are not easily removed.

In Sonnet 34 he states the method they used to feign his death added more disgrace to his name, in Sonnet 74 he states this method was base, in Sonnet 33 he again refers to this method, and this time he seems to be expressing his resolution to it: Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth. The full explanation of Sonnet 33 can be found in the essay, Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford?

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Sonnet 125 tells us Shakespeare was most impeached by a suborned informer. To be most impeached is to be hung or forced to become dead to all the world and, therefore, no longer under the control of the informer Richard Baines. For a broader interpretation see the essay, "Why Is the Shakespeare Monument in Stratford?

♦125

Wer’t aught to me I bore the canopy,

With my extern the outward honouring,

Or laid great bases for eternity,

Which proves more short than waste or ruining?

Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour

Lose all and more by paying too much rent

For compound sweet, forgoing simple savour,

Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?

No; let me be obsequious in thy heart,

And take thou my oblation, poor but free,

Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art,

But mutual render, only me for thee.

Hence, thou suborned informer! a true soul

When most impeached stands least in thy control.

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Sonnet 29 tells us Marlowe is in exile alone, now an outcast.

♦29

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

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Sonnet 81 indicates Shakespeare is a pseudonym because it tells us someone else is taking credit for Shakespeare’s works. Whoever Shakespeare was, he will be forgotten while this other person will have immortal life through his work.

♦81

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 lie.

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.

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Sonnet 121 speaks of the two informants, Baines and Drury.

♦121

‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,

When not to be receives reproach of being;

And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed

Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing:

For why should others’ false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own:

I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;

By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;

Unless this general evil they maintain,

All men are bad and in their badness reign.

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Sonnet 25 speaks of Marlowe being brought down by one event, Baines Note, and now he is erased from public honor, even though he has had many successes. It is Marlowe who is The painful warrior famoused for fight, who, After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite.

♦25

Let those who are in favour with their stars

Of public honour and proud titles boast,

Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars

Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.

Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread

But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,

And in themselves their pride lies buried,

For at a frown they in their glory die.

The painful warrior famoused for fight,

After a thousand victories once foiled,

Is from the book of honour razed quite,

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled:

Then happy I, that love and am beloved,

Where I may not remove nor be removed.

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On the surface Sonnet 76 is a love sonnet, below the surface Marlowe is telling us we will find him in the Shakespeare works. He is purposefully dressing old words new, i.e., putting allusions to his plays written before exile into the plays under his Shakespeare name (Spending again what is already spent). This is why scholars see so many allusions to Marlowe’s works in the Shakespeare plays. He repeats this more specifically by telling us he is keeping invention in a noted (famous) weed (garment). When he writes, That every word doth almost tell my name he is literally telling us the reason he is keeping to his famous style is to stamp his identity into the plays no longer bearing his name. The way he will accomplish this goal is by Showing their birth, and where they did proceed. In other words, he is putting allusions to his known dramas and poems (showing their birth) into his later pseudonymous Shakespeare plays, but he will do variations of the original lines, hence showing where they did proceed. Calvin