A dead man in Deptford
Research for Unlawful Things
The skull and crossbones leered down from the gateposts, stony guardian of the dead. ‘Let’s go in,’ I said lightly, as we passed the church of St Nicholas at Deptford Green, Easter 2009. I’d lived nearby for a decade, but not taken the time to step inside before. It’s no exaggeration to say that visit changed my life.
I didn’t find God, but I did find Christopher Marlowe, and with him the subject of my first novel. There’s a plaque in the church yard, which reads: ‘Near this spot lie the mortal remains of Christopher Marlowe, who met his untimely death in Deptford on May 30, 1593. Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. Doctor Faustus.’
I knew Marlowe, of course. I’d studied Doctor Faustus, his best-known play, as an English literature student, admired the soaring rhetoric of Faustus’ final speech and wondered why anyone thought Elizabethan clowning was funny. I’d seen productions of the play, with its age-old story of the man who sells his soul to the devil and lives a charmed life, until Mephistopheles comes to collect his soul.
But I knew almost nothing about the playwright. Now, I was intrigued. We popped into the church while on a walk from London to Canterbury, in the footsteps of Chaucer’s pilgrims. When we arrived at Canterbury three days later, I discovered that Marlowe had been born in the cathedral city. That sealed my fate. I set out to find out what had happened to bring about Christopher Marlowe’s ‘untimely death’.
I wasn’t alone. The story of the shoe-maker’s son from Canterbury, who wrote six acclaimed plays and sundry erotic poetry and was stabbed to death in Deptford at the age of 29, has been irresistible to writers and historians for centuries. It was this story of a talented trouble-maker from the age of Shakespeare that was to form the backbone for what eventually became Unlawful Things.
Where to begin? With the plays and poems, then the biographies, of which there are many, even though the man himself left only a few tantalising archival traces. Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe is the ur-text for anyone interested in Marlowe’s murder, and he’s done the heavy lifting of research into the inquest and the teeming network of conspirators and spies. David Riggs The World of Christopher Marlowe set the scene for the period. I read these, then chased down myriad rabbit holes into the secret service, the world of Elizabethan theatre, Marlowe’s patrons and associates. To save listing all the books, I’ll link to the Marlowe Society’s suggested bibliography, which contains enough about his life, death, and whether he was really Shakespeare to make your head spin. This was before Ros Barber’s masterful verse novel The Marlowe Papers was published (I almost gave up when it was, it’s so good).
Secondary sources are great, but for the novel I’d begun writing I needed more. I visited Corpus Christie College in Cambridge to see Old Court, where Marlowe spent years as a student. Marlowe was almost sent down in disgrace because the university authorities suspected his frequent absences as being a sign he was about to defect to the Roman Catholic seminary at Rheims, like other rebellious young student – except he was actually a spy, working for the Elizabethan secret service, probably reporting on his fellow students. (Really. I’m not making this stuff up.)
I toured the college’s Parker Library, which housed treasures that Marlowe might have seen himself, and the little garden with a mulberry tree, wondering if Marlowe had ever eaten its fruit.
I went to Canterbury (more in the next post) to see the remains of the church where he was baptised and the school where he studied. And I saw a production of perhaps his goriest play (crowded field), The Massacre At Paris, presented in the remains of the theatre where it was first shown, back in 1592.
The foundations of the Rose Theatre were rediscovered in 1989, close to the remains of The Globe, during excavation for an office block. The offices were built but the foundations preserved after a heroic campaign by the Rose Theatre Trust to prevent the site being destroyed. It’s used occasionally as a performance space while archeological work continues. Watching a performance of a Marlowe play, in the space where it was first performed, was spine-tingling. I couldn’t resist putting it into the book.
But how did anyone know Marlowe’s plays were first performed at the Rose? One of my most jaw-dropping moments was discovering that the most important historical archive of Elizabethan theatre was held at a school down the road from me.
The owner of the Rose was Philip Henslowe, who kept a meticulous document usually described as his diary, although it was more of a ledger and accounts book. It contains accounts for the Rose (right down to the cost of the nails and actor’s costumes) as well as records of which plays he bought from which playwrights, how much he paid for them, which plays were performed on which dates, and how much money they took. From that record book we know that he was an enthusiastic Marlowe fan, producing among others Tamburlaine The Great (parts 1 and 2), Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, as well as The Massacre At Paris. He also bought plays from Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and more.
Henslowe’s daughter Joan married one of the leading actors at the Rose, Edward Alleyne. Alleyne was a superstar of Elizabethan theatre, the man who first played Tamberlaine and Doctor Faustus on stage. He also made money from owning taverns; enough to retire to the countryside and buy himself a manor. He decided on the rural bliss of Dulwich, where he set up a school for poor boys of the parish. The school, Dulwich College, now has the highest fees of any in Britain and alumni include PG Wodehouse (and less happily, Nigel Farage).
The school holds Alleyne’s archived papers, including Henslowe’s diary and Alleyne’s letters to and from Henslowe while the acting company was touring, including the year of 1593, when plague closed the London theatres and the troupe took to the road, no doubt spreading germs around the country as they went.
I got in touch with the college. Was it possible to see Henslowe’s diary and the letters of 1593? It was. Amazed, I presented myself at the school reception and was taken to the inner sanctum of the library, where the archivist unboxed the precious papers. Not surprisingly, you can’t take them out of the room. Sadly this rule wasn’t enforced in the nineteenth century, and the documents are full of holes where Victorian autograph hunters snipped out the signatures of the giants of Elizabethan theatre, where they countersigned for their payments.
The originals are hard to read, so I referred to the official transcripts as well. But as I worked back and forward around May 30 1593, I was struck by something odd. There was not a single mention in any of the letters of the sudden, scandalous and potentially disastrous death of Christopher Marlowe, the star playwright of the Rose Theatre.
At the start of May, Alleyne wrote affectionately from Chelmsford and asks after his ‘mouse’ (his pet name for Joan) and their children. No letters for the rest of May, or in June. In July, Henslowe wrote to Alleyne sombrely of the toll of death from plague among their neighbours, concluding with the words ‘All else is well.’ But was it?
Later that month, Edward Alleyne wrote asking his wife Joan to dye his orange stockings black (probably a good call) and to plant parsley in the spinach bed. But the death of their money-spinning playwright? Not a word.
Why not? For someone constructing a mystery novel, this was the dog that didn’t bark. Eagerly I wove it into my plot. By that point my novel was growing monstrously in all directions at once, but at the heart of it was a literary sleuth, Helen Oddfellow, and her quest for a lost final play by Christopher Marlowe. A play which contained a secret so important that some people would kill for it, even today…
But the root of my story, I decided, wasn’t in Deptford, where it ended. It was in Canterbury. And more of that next time.
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Absolutely loving ‘The stories behind the story’ - and missing Helen Oddfellow… maybe she holiday in the Lakes amongst the literati there?!
A little slow to the party but this was a fantastic read.