The spy who brought sex to the English stage

Elizabethan England was a dangerous and blood-soaked place. The Queen and her councillors meted out arrests, torture and executions like councils hand out parking tickets today. Any position in the public eye – be it nobleman or a parish priest – was to live with an axe poised permanently above your neck. 

Ian McKellen playing Marlowe’s Edward II 

To be a risk-taker in the 16th century, one had to be mad, extraordinary and perhaps a touch suicidal. The playwright Christopher Marlowe, the subject of this astounding biography by the popular Renaissance historian Stephen Greenblatt, was a combination of all three.

The biography itself offers nothing new on a subject that has been pored over for centuries. But that’s no matter, it is compelling and readable.

The plays Marlowe wrote in his short life would redefine theatre forever. They were carnivals of eroticism, violence and debauchery on a scale never seen in Britain before. He pushed the boundaries of theatre, paving the way for his more famous contemporary, William Shakespeare.

Humbler origins could hardly be found. Born in Canterbury as the second of nine children to an illiterate cobbler, it was Marlowe’s genius that allowed him to shake off his background (with the help of scholarships) and land a spot at Cambridge. While there he was nearly kicked out for truancy, until a letter from the Queen’s privy council demanded the college give him his degree for ‘he had done her majesty good service’. Only one possible explanation exists for how a cobbler’s son received the Queen’s favour: spying.

Exactly what his role was is unknown, but there is little doubt that Marlowe was plunged headfirst into the murky world of espionage and duplicity that would define his plays.

To say these plays courted controversy when they first appeared on the stage would be a gross understatement.

Edward II was an explicit portrayal of gay love and lust. The play was a tragedy but despite the violent deaths of Edward and his lover, Marlowe doesn’t condemn homosexuality.

To so much as think about such things was enough to have you arrested. But to write them down and have them performed to thousands of Londoners was a risk of magnificent proportions. Just imagine the Village People trying to make it big in Saudi Arabia, or the Sex Pistols in North Korea.

No doubt the courts would have eventually taken him in for something or other, but before they did, he was killed in a brawl in an inn at the age of 29 – stabbed through the eye by one of his friends.

Greenblatt’s accessible biography leaves the impression that if Marlowe hadn’t been ‘too relentlessly destructive’ and continued to write as radically and brilliantly as he did, it would be Christopher Marlowe, and not William Shakespeare, recognised as the greatest writer in English history.