Giles Ramsay lectures on Christopher Marlowe aboard The Queen Mary

well ladies and gentlemen a very good morning once again and a warm welcome back to illuminations we're this morning we are bringing you another one offer unspecial at presentation but this time as we're joined by a theatre producer and director now this gentleman has spent pretty much the entirety of his career in exactly that but here today with a talk all about Christopher Marlowe at poet and spy can we please at warmly welcome mr. Giles Ramsay thank you very much thank you okay I good morning and thank you very much for staying in the room or coming in the room to join me this morning I want to talk about this guy who had an absolutely astonishing life this might be Christopher Marlowe we're not actually certain this portrait was discovered in Cambridge in 1952 it was on a rubbish tip in those days you would throw away Elizabethan paintings and somebody then decided that might be Marlow cleaned it up if it's not Christopher Marlowe it could be Marlow should look like this elegant flaming hair sensuous mouth because Marlow was a man of deep appetites and this little motto up in the corner 1585 this painting was painted when he was 21 years old and it translates the motto translates as what feeds me will destroy me what feeds me will destroy me and it's remarkable in this Elizabethan Golden Age where everybody was reaching out to the New World capitalism was burgeoning everybody was sort of shoveling life into themselves but also life expectancy was remarkably short what feeds meat will destroy me should be Marlo's little motto now he was a direct contemporary of Shakespeare born exactly the same year 1564 and in his childhood had a very similar life which I'll come on to but what he also managed to do apart from becoming the leading one of the most leading and famous playwrights in his own lifetime was he lived in extraordinary political times and I'd like to link him to these four gentlemen you might remember the Cambridge spiring Anthony blunt Donald MacLean Philby and guy Burgess now these Cambridge educated men I'm afraid were the second plane bridge spiring the first one was Christopher Marlowe and a few others but like Marlowe these guys responded to the extraordinary political times of the Cold War and they also most of them had rather strange sexual peccadilloes which Christopher Marlowe has also been accused of so perhaps I could tell you about why Marlowe's times were extraordinary and give you a little history lesson just to remind you let's get back to this guy recently discovered a car park in Leicester not a very glamorous place for a king to end up but Richard the third and this guy it's a horse a horse a kingdom my kingdom for a horse no horse no Kingdom he's gone thus Henry Tudor comes onto the throne and becomes King Henry the seventh now Henry Tudor got what Clinton got it's the economy stupid he realized to stabilize a nation you have to stabilize the economy so he starts to put the economic affairs of England back in order and that's not because he's a nice guy it's because he's founding in dynasty and so his heir has to be married off to make alliances with foreign countries the power blocks of the German states France and Spain and so his heir his oldest son is married off to Catherine of Aragon who was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella who'd United the Spanish states trouble is this boy Arthur the heir apparent dies leaving the spare we have an heir and despair William and Harry have that's how we work our royal family and this guy was actually despair but when his brother Arthur suddenly dies you can't lose the alliance with Spain so he marries his brother's widow and comes the husband of Catherine of Aragon and by all accounts they have a very good relationship it was an arranged marriage that seemed to work problem though she has a daughter sorry ladies at this time this is not really what someone like him plans and wants you want a male heir to succeed so but the time Henry the seventh has died and Henry the eighth is the heir apparent the idea of having a son is very much in his mind as is the idea how can God curse me by giving me daughters and then sadly miscarriages from his wife it may be because he's broken divine law because he married his brother's widow which is a no-no and this good Catholic boy because he was an extreme Catholic he was given the title by the Pope defender of the faith he walked barefoot on the snow to the shrine at Walsingham a Catholic shrine before he married Catherine of Aragon he was a devout Catholic not he wants to arrange a divorce so he gets this guy involved those of you watching Wolf Hall will be now familiar with Wolsey but he has given the job to arrange the annulment the divorce from Catherine of our earth and Catherine of Aragon and the Rivera's problems arise with this now this guy you remember PG Woodhouse's Butler Jeebs yeah he's been described by some historians as Jeeves with attitude Wolsey was a fixer he kept the diary The Oval Office he arranged to saw and who didn't see the King's a powerful man and Henry is not used to the words no or sorry or can't do that but there's a problem Wolsey can't eventually arrange to get the divorce from the Pope because the Pope is under house arrest in Rome and he's been kept under house arrest by king charles v the holy roman emperor who was the nephew of catherine of aragon and he's not having auntie Kate booted off the English throne and have her daughter declared an illegitimate bastard so that's not happening Woolsey comes back with the answer no and very sensibly he's up in Lincoln in the Midlands of England and he's summoned down to see the court and he very wisely dies enroute does if you haven't died enroute you'd have died when he got there now there are other rumblings that have been going on in Europe and very quickly this guy was not best pleased with the way the Catholic Church was behaving he also had rather a nice interest in nuns here the nice line and nuns and maybe ones with American however the Catholic Church was running a hierarchical system to get to God to Christ you had to crawl up from the very bottom through the clergy the higher clergy Saints angels popes that was the way you got to God and this organization the Catholic Church at this stage made FIFA look positively blemish free so protests start taking place Protestants start asking for reformation of the Catholic Church and that's where we are and here we have Luther who in this cartoon produced a hundred years afterwards he is writing his theses which he nailed to the chapel draw at Wittenberg which was a normal practice this wasn't an extraordinary act and it was calls for reform ideas for change and you can see the plume of his pen because he's arguing that Scripture the written word is the way to salvation not to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and hear his plume is knocking off the miter of the Pope sitting on a lion because it was Pope Leo so this is just a cartoon commemorating it so those issues are burgeoning and the tensions are rising why is he also important because it was for your eternal salvation heaven or hell and this is not for a week it's not a little it's not a seven-day crossing it's for all eternity and therefore if the Catholic hierarchy is right then what the Protestants are preaching is day to get some people damned you do need a hierarchy you cannot do it yourself and if the Protestants are right the Catholics are actually preaching lessons that will get you sent to hell and that's why both sides eventually are prepared to kill and be martyred for their causes and this is how the Pope gets looked at by the Protestants this is the Pope as Antichrist so it is a good propaganda war that also gets into a covert war now moving quickly Henry dies and he leaves a son who's been brought up as an extreme militant Protestant Sir Henry had been Catholic he'd become Protestant invented the Church of England on the back of an envelope and then his son comes in and becomes a militant Protestant and then he will die and the air next up for line is Mary Bloody Mary Mary Tudor the daughter of Catherine of Aragon who had seen her Catholic mother pushed off the throne seen herself put under house arrest Mary is a militant Catholic and then when she dies Elizabeth the first the daughter of Anne Boleyn comes on the throne and she is a Protestant now I did some maths if you were born in 1509 you were born in England you were Catholics at the age of 20 because of Henry the eighth you were told you were Protestants at the age of 38 you were told you were fundamentalist Protestants and the age of 44 you were told you are now militant Catholics and all Protestants were evil and at the age of 50 you were suddenly told you were Protestants again are you going off religion we're getting extremes and we're getting the rise also of a much more dangerous thing because religion is politics at this time and it's the rise of the belief in atheism a plague on both your houses I'm not playing and when religion is politics you can't control people who don't believe in your system and opt out that atheism will become a very dangerous political issue as well now Elizabeth knows when she comes on the throne as a Protestant she cannot we can't keep having this flip-flop system and she knows therefore there has to be some taller brought back in after the horrors of Bloody Mary now what she think she can do she says I will not make Windows into men's souls I will not make Windows into men's souls its Don't Ask Don't Tell so you go to the Protestant church in the morning and you check the register and that's official and that's good and if you want to go for a secret Catholic Mass in the afternoon to be forgiven for going to the Protestant Church in the morning Soviet Don't Ask Don't Tell I won't make Windows into men's souls which is fine until the Pope puts a fatwa on to Elizabeth and the pope pius v puts this out that elizabeth is the pretended queen of england and the servant of crime and it is the duty of all catholics to come in back to england to assassinate elizabeth and return england to the catholic religion suddenly the stakes are massively high and suddenly Don't Ask Don't Tell ain't go to wash anymore everything has to tighten up and the threat is real Elizabeth knows the threat is real this is not some imaginary enemy over the seas because William the first Prince of orange is assassinated in 1584 Henry the 3rd of France is assassinated in 1589 and further into the future Henry the fourth of France will be assassinated in 1610 real monarchs do get assassinated by naughty Catholics so it's time to be afraid be very afraid and then this issue makes this is and I don't want to trivialize anything but this is a 9/11 moment in 1572 in Paris suddenly almost it seems from nowhere or probably organized by the Medicis but what happens is the Catholic suddenly turn on their neighbours the Protestants and start to Massacre them in Paris and in a few days about 5,000 are killed in Paris and then the violence spills out of Paris through France and it seems in the space of a few weeks up to 20,000 Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic neighbors people they had lived with for years before this is a Rwanda type moment where suddenly neighbor turns on neighbor and if you are sitting in London or in the Netherlands or anywhere in Europe and you hear about this Catholic atrocity you have now had direct evidence of what these Catholic militants might be capable of and you're not going to be trusting them too much not far off into the future just again to show that the threat was real of course the Spanish Armada is lurking around and does try and invade this is not paranoia these are real threats from outside real and present dangers so Elizabeth needs to know now everything that's going on and if you look at this dress there are eyes and ears sewn into this rainbow portraits Elizabeth needs to see all and hear all otherwise she's in risk of her life and her state and the man who is the man who provides the eyes and ears for Elizabeth the first is another Cambridge man King's College Cambridge Sir Francis Walsingham and he voluntarily takes on the role of spy master general and sets up an English surveillance state he funds it himself because Elizabeth was notoriously mean and therefore people out of loyalty to the crown would spend their own money he eventually died pretty much bankrupt but he did set up the first English secret service and he was a loyal Protestant and he was a loyal subject of the Queen so therefore all methods were justified to protect the realm and the monarch and the religion consequently we remember yes a few years ago all the debates over Iraq and torture is it morally right to torture to get the information that might save lives well Walsingham he's not interested in debating that issue you do anything you can to protect your queen so torture it becomes rife and if you're interested here's a 15th century engraving of waterboarding there's nothing new Under the Sun they're pouring the water down this poor man's throat to get the information now one of well seems great obsessions was Mary Queen of Scots a Catholic monarch if the Pope has said the Sasson eight Elizabeth and replaced her with a Catholic when we know who the prime number one candidate for that job is Mary Queen of Scots and Walsingham is determined to bring her down he sets up a few plots with his spies and it doesn't achieve it until he runs the Babington plot and I want you to remember these two names Robert Pearlie and Nicolas skiers because they are two agents of Walsingham and they become the middlemen in the plot to bring down Mary Queen of Scots what happens is Anthony Babington a Catholic start writing letters in code and sends them up to Mary Queen of Scots who's under house arrest asking her if we have a thought a revolution would you become the replacement for Elizabeth and then Mary writes back in code sending it back saying well maybe that's not such a bad idea etc and we'll eventually incriminates herself what Francis Walsingham has actually done is put his own agents into the middle of that chain of letter writing and he has two guys one of whom is the best seal breaker in England consul essentially a hacker and he can open up these letters and another trap who's the best forger can add other little questions that they want Mary to answer and then it's resealed and sent off and she is none the wiser but walsim has read every detail of that correspondence he's hacked into her account and Robert Polly described by his own peer group as he will be guile you of your wife or of your life and a very bad fellow a notable knave with no trust in him either an atheist or a heretic or both and his sidekick Nicolas skiers who ran a sort of extortion racket these two are some of the guys involved in Walsingham's plot against Mary Stewart's and remember their names they're gonna come back Mary of course does not come back she's gone in 1587 but the Armada is the and this is Walsingham spy network it was not just England it was international right the way through to Moscow to the New World you had to know everything that was going on and if I give you two examples of how clever he was the Armada was being built off the coast of Lisbon the finances in these days came from Venice and Wall Singh had a whole team of spies she managed to block the money supply from Venice to Madrid and consequently the Armada was delayed in its building for two years and the second example of how cold and calculating Walsingham could be was the fact the Ambassador from how'd you turn somebody into a spy you look for their weaknesses you find out their sexual peccadilloes you find out about their alcoholism and you put pressure on them and the ambassador in Paris was an alcoholic and a gambler and he had turned and started giving information to the Spanish he was working as a double agent Walsingham discovered this and did precisely nothing he left him in situ in Paris and fed him dud information which he then duly passed on to Spain which further delayed the building of the Armada he just sat back and turned the agent to his advantage now all across the known world here he has his agents and one of those agents was Christopher Marlowe now Marley was born in Canterbury as I say 1564 the same year as William Shakespeare was born in Stratford and his father Shakespeare's father was a Glover and Marlowe's far that was a shoemaker very similar skilled lower middle middle-class background so not poor not working-class comfortable and Canterbury is interesting Marlow grew up Stratford's a bit of a backwater but Canterbury it's the head of the Church of England the Archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral so religion is very much part of this city and secondly the largest number of immigrants from the continent the people fleeing from persecution from the Catholics the largest number came to London the second largest number came to Canterbury so he grows up in the religious center and he grows up hearing all the voices of huge earners and other exile of the Protestant faith he grows up knowing that these issues are around him he's a bright boy he goes to kings school canterbury one of the oldest boarding schools in the country it's still going and this is a good grammar school and he'll be taught as Virgil and his of it his Booker here dido and aeneas and tales of metamorphosis King Midas has masses as his ears this is the grammar school training and he gets all of that and he is for the first time in his life but not the last Marlo is talent spotted and he is given a scholarship a scholarship that had been set up by Matthew Parker who had been the Archbishop of Canterbury he's given a Scottish scholarship to Cambridge and he goes to Corpus Christi College Cambridge and starts having a rather good time most people who went to places like Cambridge were meant to then go into the church no more there's somehow forgot that bit and gets on with his life he starts writing poetry and rewriting poetry he rewrites Virgil and avi and comes up with some good verses he's becoming an aspirant artist young man at university and what he also does is not just rewrite these ancient writers he errata sizes them he suddenly popped in a whole lot of homoerotic imagery within the verses and this sells rather well this is quite naughty and exciting what Neptune gets up into in Marlowe's verses is not what Neptune should be doing with his Trident now he also starts writing plays he's becoming a known figure and this great play can blame the great she writes part one if you have a major success with part one what do you do you write part two so this becomes a two-hander of Tamburlaine the great which is the story of the Scythian shepherd who becomes the colossus by striding unknown world he just rides across invades and takes over greats waves of land think Genghis Khan and you've got Tamburlaine and look at this stage direction from at for scene three it says enter Tamburlaine drawn in his chariot by the kings of Trebizond and Soria with bits in their mouths he is conquered these other leaders and hit they are now drawing his chariot with bits in their mouths like horses reins in his left hand and in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them now that's a great visual image for the stage and the audiences loved it and other playwrights had not come up with his extraordinary visual imagery and Marlowe has been Johnson described him later is also the inventor of Marlowe's mighty line he gets rid of all the Diddley pom fiddly pom rhyme Diddley pom clearly poem rhyme two and a half hours of that you start getting wearisome he does something modern and feisty with the verse blank verse comes in get rid of the rhymes and push the action forward exotic images on the stage exotic names you're an apprentice working in London you're bored and suddenly on this stage you're travelling the world and there are names like Sir Adamas cigar neighs it's it's exotic and it's fun and it's vibrant and the public love it he's also managed to get his plays done by the leading company of the day and this is the leading actor Edward Allen and he is the guy who at plays all of Marlowe's great roles that we'll look at as we go through so Marlowe is now doing an awful lot of playwriting and purchasing and here's another success the next play the tragedy of the Jew of Malta and this has a lead villain the Jew of Malta Barabbas who will come out to the audience and tell them how evil he is how lazy you will have been not to be evil and the deeds he's going to do I am gonna do something wicked come and watch me and playwrights like Oh William Shakespeare spot this idea of how popular the overt villain is and we will see them pop up in later life as Richard the third Iago these villains who come out we will see consistently in their lives how Marlo and Schechtman were aware of each other and if we go to the Jew of Malta not only is the great villain Barabbas there is also the play begins opens with Machiavelli coming out to announce the prologue and I can see we've cut the side of that off but I'm just gonna read it to you Machiavelli comes out and tells the audience I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorant this is an atheist statement from Machiavelli at a time when religion is key to politics and this is put on the public stage birds of the air will tell of murders past I am ashamed to hear such a fool Aires many will talk title to a crown divine right that crowns can be owned what right had Caesar to the empire might first made Kings not God might first made Kings and laws were then most sure when like the Draco's they were ripped in blood this is the idea essentially forgets all the theology it's violence that makes power and this has been put onto the stage and as I say people like William Shakespeare will spot this and another link between Marlar and Shakespeare discovered which I like very much in January 15 93 at a small theater which is just behind where the present globe is in London now they were running some revivals and a Jew of Malta and a play called a massacre at Paris by Marlowe were on in the repertoire at exact at the same time as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Henry the sixth we have them from one month in London working in the same theatre they must have gone for a pint 1589 not content with stirring the pot about religion at a time when it's all about salvation marla puts a play on the stage that says don't care about salvation Faustus says I don't care about my soul I want glory and magic and power and he does his pact with the devil and sells his soul and will eventually be dragged down to hell but this is an extraordinary replay about atheism and again extremely popular the characters method awfully the pairs on the stage and his asked why he's left hell and he says to Faust I haven't left hell this is hell this world this earth is hell I am knocked out of it and the audience's to see Matt methis Stephanie's on the stage again extremely exciting and by the way just at the end of the Jew of Malta they had a great big prop of the cauldron and Barabbas is pushed into the cauldron at the end of the play and boiled alive on the stage visual and magnificent language with Marlowe's mighty lion-o under a fatwa on Queen Elizabeth so Marlowe writes a history play about edward ii ends with the murder of a monarch not necessarily the most helpful thing to pop onto the stage and also he presents k edward ii as an overt homosexual with his lover piers Gaveston which leads to the barons rebelling against the monarch and if you know the story event with the second edward ii is on the stage a large red hot poker is brought onto the stage and the rational lifting your imagination so exciting exotic plays and then as I say just 21 years after this Massacre of 20,000 people in France them some Bartholomew's Day Massacre what we have is Marlowe writes a play about it and in this play he has a character called the English agent the spy Marlowe is writing about what he knows and he here if you look down towards the bottom I here do swear to ruin eight that wicked Church of Rome that hatchet up such bloody practices and here protests eternal love to thee and to the Queen of England specially whom God hath blessed for hating papers tree Marlow was a very contemporary writer and he was not frightened of dealing with very contemporary controversial issues and he picked the information that he knew from his life as a spy because once you've gone to Cambridge someone talent spotted him for a second time and Marlowe gets recruited into the security services of Francis Walsingham Francis Walsingham nephew Thomas Walsingham was at Cambridge and was a similar age to Marlowe we suspect they will crop up together again in a moment but prophet Lee it was Thomas Walsingham who called up his uncle and said I think I've got a guy who might fit into your new little organization down in Westminster what we do know is Marlowe starts getting a reputation for talking a bit too overtly about supporting the Catholic cause and out of England because you can't train to be a Catholic priest now it's illegal out and the continent and places like dairy and Reims there are Catholic training camps for people to become Catholic priests to then come back in to England covertly to then give you guys Mass should you need it secretly and also to assassinate Elizabeth and restore England to the Catholic cause so that's all happening on the continent and Marlowe is allegedly mouthing off that he is going to go to Reims and stay there and train to be a Catholic militant in spy terminology this is known as deep cover you set it up for a nice long time so when you do go to Reims which Marlowe did then the people there the Catholics there have already heard his reputation going back a number of years that he is loyal to the Catholic cause and will betray England in fact it was deep cover and whilst he's in Reims there's a man called Richard Baines and his name will crop up again in a moment and Richard Baines was plotting to poison the well in the Reims Catholic training camp and thus poison all the militants all the Jesuits and that idea will pop up in the Jew of Malta in the play the idea of poisoning wells again Marlow takes what he had discovered this guy and Marlow didn't get on by all accounts and there's a rivalry that builds up remember that now we know from the butter ebooks which are the invoices of what you paid for eating and drinking you will get a buttery list at the end of this crossing and it'll be put outside your cabin and you'll have to pay it now with the butter ebook for Marlow there are great gaps he's away from the University too much of the time he's goes missing where well he's off in Reims and when he comes to get his degree awarded the University says you've been shouting off about being a Catholic this is a Protestant country you've been saying you're going to go to Rio Reims and betray the country and you actually have been missing from the University for large chunks of time you can't have your degree and then the letter arrives from the Archbishop of Canterbury the Lord treasurer and the Lord Chancellor now this has gone straight up to the Privy Council and they write to Cambridge and they say give Marlowe his degree for he has done her Majesty good service and he has been in matters touching the benefit of his country he and service good service means Secret Service so the monarch has advised her Privy Council to write to Cambridge to give this young man his degree so he has friends in high places and he's working for the Queen's espionage Network you also have to have an artistic patron his patron becomes Sir Francis Walsingham 's nephew Sir Thomas Walsingham here he has been knighted by the Queen who is also patron to Thomas nashe a Cambridge contemporary of Marlowe and Friends and Marlowe and so this is where now when Marlo needs to go on retreats to write or just be looked after and given financial support it is Sir Thomas Walsingham he goes to and Walsingham this is the ruins of his manor house Cadbury feathery manor in Kent not far from Canterbury and when an easy couple of days ride easy day's ride to London the quite a useful location few other people who were under the patronage of Sir Thomas Walsingham and spent a lot of time at scattering Manor were Ingram phizzer Nickolas skiers who we've already met and these two had now buddied up and they were known as coney captures and coney catchers were rabbit catchers but they weren't catching rabbits they were capturing young naive stupid gentlemen they would lend them money and then they would put the pressure on them say well actually no you have to pay that back immediately and more otherwise I'm afraid the people we deal with will come and kill you or that come and beats you up it's an extortion racket being run by these guys one of them skiers we've already met with Mary Queen of Scots were working with Robert Pirelli so good company that Marla is keeping in scam free manner under the protection of a Walsingham we know that Marla went to Flushing he got involved in a double agent game of counterfeiting which was illegal in England and so he is deported from Flushing if you counter fitted the Queen's coin and you could be hanged but he's deported from Flushing back to England and nothing happens to him somebody is protecting Marlow and then something happens that changes the game well in 1590 Francis Walsingham has died so his great mentor has been removed from the scene but Marla has continued in his writing and in his work for the government but then in May 1593 a libel an idea an idea the state doesn't want to have discussed is put up on a church near San Paul's Cathedral again normal practice you nail things up so people can read it lots of refugees have come into England because of the Catholic persecution and England is now Canterbury London has many Protestant refugees and the English start saying they're taking our jobs sound familiar and so there is a rumbling resentment against immigrants even though you are all Protestants and consequently this appears and it is encouraging people Englishmen to rise up and Massacre the Protestant refugees who are pinching your drums and push them out at a time such political tension in the realm the last thing the government needs is to have riots on the streets of London and people being massacred York and that could escalate and get out of control greatly so immediately they want to know who wrote this who's trying to stir up trouble and too little references in there start pointing the finger at Christopher Marlowe it refers to the Paris Massacre and it's signed Tamburlaine and suddenly it's usek court what's Marlowe being up to now Lord now he then puts a reward out for find out who wrote this libel encouraging and the rioting Thomas Kent was a leading playwright of the day he wrote a fantastic play called the Spanish tragedy which was the first revenge tragedy Hamlet is a much later version of the same plot and Thomas Kyd was also Marlowe's flatmate and possibly lover and Thomas Kyd therefore as the flatmate is arrested he is tortured because torture is fine and he says that oh the documents you found in my papers that imply that I am a heretic in the day theists actually are Christopher Marlowe's oh and by the way he he said this this and this would show that he was the man who wrote the Dutch libel so kid on the rack betrays his old friend flatmate possibly lover so a warrant is put out for mother's arrest on the 18th of May a chap called Henry maunder is sent to go and tell him to turn up in London so he goes down to scampering Manor and more there is given Oh two days to amble up to London for the pressures hardly on and then he does amble up to London and he's immediately put on bail and is allowed to go free and on the 30th of May his friends the cony capture extortion guy Ingram Fraser will invite him to lunch at Deptford in the East End of London now just before that lunch Richard Baynes pops up again he wasn't fond of Marlow maybe the widow's rival spies he suddenly writes a letter to the Privy Council revealing the table talk of Christopher Marlowe and he says that Christopher Marlowe used to say things like all Protestants are hypocritical asses at a time when mother was meant to be working for the Protestant cause that the woman of Samaria and her sister were and that Christ knew them dishonestly Bain says that's what Marlowe thinks of Scripture that's what Marlowe thinks of Jesus Marlowe said that said John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ now this is getting very very blasphemous and then one of the most famous quotes and Bains about Marlowe is that he just flippantly said that they all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools now Baines is very helpfully just dished and rubbish Marlowe's reputation with the Privy Council this is all getting rather tense so Marlow goes far River down the river turns to Deptford in the East End of London on the 30th of May 1593 he's going for a lovely lunch DEP wood is also the place where you would come down the terms change from a small thing a small boat onto a ship Deptford was a leaping off point for going either up to Scotland or onto the continent so it might've been Marla was planning to run away or go on a mission we will never know but he's now arrived for lunch in Deptford he gets out of his boat climbs up the water gates and goes not to a tavern not to a pub and in as many of the stories say but to a private house a private house where you could rent a room from the owner of the house and that owner of the house would then cook you lunch so you could have a nice relaxing relaxing lunch in a private environment and the owner of this house was a lady called Eleanor bull who was another cousin to the Walsingham's so all this Walsingham link is constantly coming together now who is having lunch with Marlow it's these three these are his lunch companions Ingram Fraser the extortion racket guy and his cohort Nicholas skiers from Skagway manner both of we're agents of the crown and a crown paid them pensions to work covertly and Robert Poli the utterly amoral untrustworthy spy who had setup with Nicholas gears the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots should we've got four spooks in a private room in the East End of London having lunch with a cousin of the guy who set up the secret service what could possibly go wrong well what goes wrong is they drink too much they have a nice lunch they walk in the garden and then they come back and Marla is lying on the sort of day bed they're playing some games and then the bill is brought and the bill is known as a reckoning as summing up the reckoning up and they argue over the bill and in the course of the arguing Marlow drags his dagger out because don't forget Elizabethan England was the Wild West everybody carries guns in the world worse than shootouts break out at any moment and people die so in Elizabethan England everybody carried swords or daggers this is normal Sam Marlowe takes out his dagger he's fed up with Engram freezer and he starts banging him on the head with the pommel freezer reacts knocks the knife back and it goes straight above Marla's eye and he drops dead on the spot Marlowe leading playwright and spy is dead and that's the official coroner's report that in an unheard-of fashion was written the next day coroner Court did not meet that quickly but on the 1st of June the coroner's Court meets and this is the official coroner's explanation for the death of Christopher Marlowe an argument over a bill an accidental death there are two possible other alternatives the great lovely can swell for a number actually one is of course Marlowe didn't die and run off and to become William Shakespeare but let's just forget that Marlowe had been invited down by these three spies under the strict instructions to take him out a wet job removed him Marlowe knows too much Marlowe's gone AWOL he's gonna cause trouble if there are any inquiries so he is assassinated I'm afraid once that's great I'm a great believer more in cock-ups and conspiracy I think we've got four drunk spies and then oops one of them's dead these are violent men these are immoral men for whatever Christopher Marlowe has been taken out of this world the coroner's report was only found in the 1920s but the full coroner's report explains the story I just described and these guys are given immediate pardons and Pensions from the government so they're told oh don't worry about killing him it doesn't matter have some money Marlowe sadly is dumped in an unmarked grave in depth what he's just there with no idea where he was buried and there he is finished not in recent years they put up an epitaph to him and they've taken a line from his own play dr. Faustus that to cut is the branch that might have grown full straight-cut is the branch that might have grown full straight if Marlowe had not died in 1593 what other mighty lines might she have written his own Cambridge Fellow and friend Thomas Nash described him as one of the wittiest names that God ever made Marlowe naughty frisky covert talented dead which left a gap in the market for a little-known actor from Stratford to them take on Marlowe his mighty line take the baton and carry it right the way on with the genius he eventually displayed but that ladies and gentlemen is another story thank you very much you

Channel: Giles Ramsay

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Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2015