The World of Christopher Marlowe

Rating:
Summary: Some Thoughts
Review: Riggs' The World of Christopher Marlowe offers a less than candid view of a mysterious man-a not quite straightforward attempt to shape a difficult biography. Its considerations of some of the environmental factors known to have surrounded Marlowe are all colored dark, adroitly slanted toward negative conclusions. We aren't shown any person he loved who influenced his 29 years. This is shaky stuff, shot through with misunderstanding, and in some places it approaches diatribe. The author hews to a line, though; in each chapter he attempts to dismember Marlowe, pointing the reader towards the man's final destruction. The strongest tool Dr. Riggs uses is smooth-flowing character defamation, achieved though innuendo and dialectic argument, exhibiting Marlowe in different situations as an unregenerate criminal opportunist. Since Dr. Riggs, prosecutor, gives slight attention to any reflective, humanistic defense of Marlowe and also omits a good deal of known biographic material, a reader may be moved to rebuttal:
Reading assertions of Marlowe's "immorality" steady-on is like watching a beating; the process becomes offensive. Again and again, Riggs labels Marlowe a double agent: "By commissioning Marlowe as a double agent..." "Both options remained available to a skilled double agent." There seems to be some serious confusion in this author's mind about the meaning of the term. Henry S.A. Becket, in his Dictionary of Espionage, Spookspeak into English, tells us: a double agent was someone who worked for one secret service and then changed his allegiance to a rival, purporting to serve both his conflicting masters. Marlowe was never a double agent. (He seems to have worked on several dangerous counter-espionage missions-not the same thing at all.)
Riggs' treatment of Marlowe's "long criminal record" is close to amusing. (Close, but no cigar; there's no humor in this book.) Riggs' offering of Marlowe's criminal career can be summarized in three court documents plus a letter from the governor of Flushing. Although part of each document is shown or described, sometimes surrounded with Riggs' interpretation, no in-depth or alternative scenario is suggested. In each of these troublesome situations there was no conviction-not even a trial for Marlowe in three of them-and Riggs admits this.
In the first case, a serious sword fight in Norton Folgate with no known motive, Marlowe was jailed on suspicion of murder, but the court decided it wasn't his fault; he was exonerated. In the midst of the fight, the aggressor had turned to Marlowe's friend, and according to the record, said, "Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee!" (Riggs' text omits the last sentence of this speech.) Marlowe's friend took on the aggressor, killing him in self-defense, and was acquitted.
The second trouble, in January 1591/2, was probably about a secret service investigation by Marlowe into a counterfeiting operation at Flushing. During the job, he was betrayed by a man named Baines whom Marlowe had trusted as a co-worker. There was no court case.
Next came a case, in May, 1592, about a disturbance of the peace on the street near the Theatre. Marlowe and friends might have been weaving home late at night from a nearby tavern, singing or shouting, and when the constables came up his friends could have run away, leaving him because his club foot (he was born with it) made it hard for him to run. He was not tried but released on promise to pay a £20 fine if he failed to keep the peace towards the constables, whom he'd threatened, or if he didn't appear at the next General Sessions of the Peace for Middlesex County in October. Riggs leans on the fact that no record of Marlowe's appearance exists, but Marlowe was delayed in Canterbury at least until Monday, 9 October, because of the next case.
The last proceeding on Riggs' docket is a civil suit at Canterbury in September, 1592: £5 to pay for a jacket damaged in a knife fight between Marlowe and an old friend, William Corkine. This case is surrounded by so much biographic material reported by other reputable authors that it's odd Riggs restricted his own report to the court details, ending with, "settled out of court during the first week of October." The suit was amicably settled, on Monday the ninth. Today, a rose Corkine put in the plea book over the place where the case was re-recorded (soon after Marlowe's death in 1593), is kept there in a container. Years later, Corkine or his son published in his Second Book of Ayres an instrumental arrangement of Marlowe's poem, Come Live with Me ("a sweet new tune"). Perhaps by omitting these known facts, Riggs is better able to make an indictment. Biography suffers.
There are other oddly constructed places in the work. When Marlowe was interrogated by several members of the council late in May 1593, as evidence of his heresy or atheism two papers were brought forth. One was a long sheet filled with jottings-16 flippant opinions on a variety of subjects, all said to have been expressed by Marlowe, and a concluding 17th item: an accusation by a third man who claimed Marlowe persuaded him to become an atheist. This paper is known as the Baines' Note, signed by the very man who'd betrayed Marlowe at Flushing in January 1591/22. The second paper in evidence was a three-page MS copy of an excerpt from a book published years before and given to Queen Mary Tudor: a work by John Proctor entitled The Fal of the Late Arrian, refuting the heretical beliefs of an earlier writer. The three pages, "found" among the papers of Kit's friend Tom Kyd, are thought to provide the basis for a talk Marlowe gave to a group of Northumberland's scholarly friends, a talk later labeled the Atheist Lecture.
But-this is curious-Dr. Riggs tries to make the reader believe that the scurrilous Baines Note is in fact the outline of the Atheist Lecture. The Note is fed to us with its items prefixed by Riggs' own comments, such as, "the atheist lecturer knows..." "the lecturer says..." "the lecturer contended that..." "the lecturer mocks...." And then, "In the last part of the lecture..." These pages of Dr. Riggs' text are truly astonishing. Surely he sees that the bits of banter in The Baines' Note, Baines-embroidered-black, and signed by Baines, bear no relation at all to a coherent lecture.
Through hundreds of pages, Riggs tirelessly tries to make his readers feel his distaste for the protagonist, but by the time he makes his peroration, which includes a re-assertion that the queen decided to condemn Marlowe to death, sub rosa, at least one reader is ready to rebel. Think it over: would Elizabeth-ever-bother to arrange a secret death for Marlowe? Archbishop Whitgift legally controlled all cases ecclesiastical. Whitgift headed the council interrogating Marlowe, and he hated Marlowe. Simply to let him have his way would have been easy.
Contrariwise, looking at Marlowe's world in Riggs' text, we can see between the lines that the queen would have been more likely to save her-poet-agent than to condemn him. She needed his ingenious undercover service abroad. Clever woman that she was, aided by her State Secret Service and several devices of her own, she got what she wanted, in spite of the intransigent archbishop. She managed.
(Roberta Ballantine. [e-mail])


Rating:
Summary: For Renaissance Scholars
Review: This book seemed very interesting at first. But as it veered away from Marlowe's life and toward abstruse Roman philosophy and Renaissance theology, it became ponderous. Your average fluffhead would have a hard time wading through it. The book is very well written, and if you are a scholar of Elizabethan verse, it is a must-read. But for the casual reader, it's heavy going. I also found the themes of the poetry rather off-putting, as I found I was learning more about certain Elizabethan practices than I had any need or wish to know.