PREFACE

FOR upwards of three centuries the brightness of Marlowe's name has been dimmed by libel and slander. One writer after another has copied the legends of his predecessors, generally adding his own myth to the mixen, until a long list of authorities can be adduced as testimony against the poet; but repetition is not confirmation, and the only basis for imputing 'hellish sins' to him is puritanical malice-supported by libel and forgery.

The following pages will show that the remembrance and references of every one who knew Marlowe personally are favourable to his character. He is seen moving in all that was best, noblest, and most intellectual of English society of those days. Received as a friend in the Raleigh and Walsingham households; mixing with the scientific and learned men of the time; on intimate terms with Chapman, Drayton, and such men of honoured and honourable position; apparently working with, and certainly deeply admired by, Shakespeare, and respected

or envied by his literary contemporaries. Could such a man, 'haughty man,' as the vapid Gabriel Harvey styles him, have been leading a profligate life, disregarding the decencies of society, and herding with rogues, vagabonds, and outcasts, such as were the associates of Robert Greene? During Marlowe's lifetime Greene alone ventured to try and depreciate his merits, and then only by innuendo and sneers. The slanders on his fair name were invented by succeeding generations.

Biographers of Marlowe have been startled and unnerved by the term of Atheist,' applied so freely to the poet by those who hated his freedom of thought and speech. All who read in the literary and political writings of Elizabeth's reign must know how lavishly this appellation was bestowed upon opponents by all sects and parties, irrespective of belief, and that to deny any dogma of the Church as by State established, was atheism and treason; and either crime punishable by death.

Although not an atheist Marlowe was a freethinker, a would-be-reformer, and, by the mouths of his dramatis persona, dared to say what others scarcely ventured to whisper. He was no respecter of persons: even 'the round and top of sovereignty' did not shield the wearer from his keen shafts; nor did he falter when priestcraft was in question. He represents the revolutionary spirit of his age.

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My purpose is not to deck the poet in the garb of the Pharisee, but to cleanse a noble character from the slime with which libellers and forgers have besmirched it. Of late years a revulsion of feeling has set in with respect to the estimate of Marlowe's personal character, a change which if not initiated has certainly been accelerated by my paper, A New View of Marlowe,' in the Universal Review for July 1889, wherein new data were given and a different complexion put upon the old; but the recent outburst of admiration for Marlowe's genius has--who can doubt it?-been largely instigated by the glowing eloquence and critical acumen which our greatest living poet has displayed in his recognition of its pre-eminence.

'Marlowe and his Associates' may be considered the most descriptive title for this work, much of the volume being concerned with his contemporaries, but my aim all through has been to represent the poet as he was as I feel he must have been-as the companion, the compeer, and the admired of all that was best of his time; and my references to other men, to their words, their works, or their deeds, are only intended to give a better insight into the characteristics of the period and to infuse more contemporary colouring into the narrative.

'Conjectures,' says Fuller, 'if mannerly observing their distance, and not imprudently intruding them

selves for certainties, deserve, if not to be received, to be considered.' Biography, like history, must owe something to conjecture. Reason requires that from the known we adduce the unknown, and suggests how certain given causes produce certain results. Into this work my idea has been to introduce such inferences only as shall really illustrate the poet's personality and place his mental quite as much as his incidental career before the reader.

Necessarily the information herein given has been derived from authorities, consequently quotations are numerous. In nearly every instance the books, deeds, letters, registers, manuscripts, and places referred to have been personally inspected by me, so that I have not only been enabled to confirm but in many cases to correct and considerably modify the information furnished by my predecessors and, after several years of patient research, to give much fresh material, chiefly from manuscript sources, which will be new to all, even to the most experienced students and bibliographers. Amongst the material now first published, special attention may be drawn to the information furnished about the King's School, Canterbury, and its scholars contemporary with Marlowe; to the facts of the poet's university career, and to the Wills given in Appendix C: that of the poet's mother is not only interesting on account of the relationship of the testatrix to the poet,

and as evidence of her social position, but from the realistic picture it presents of the home life of the period.

There is no known portrait of Marlowe : the truly 'counterfeit presentment,' which has done duty for some years past on the title-page and cover of Colonel Cunningham's edition of Marlowe's Works as one, is a likeness of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the eccentric Elizabethan nobleman.

My impugnment of the authenticity of the Harleian MSS. referred to in the course of this work, may furnish matter for controversy, but before any one attempts to defend the genuineness of those documents, it is trusted that full consideration will be given to the many reasons now adduced for doubting it.

Readers are requested not to overlook the fact, as it vitally affects many circumstances in this narrative, that money in the reign of Elizabeth was worth eight or ten times as much as it is at the present day.

In taking leave of the work which has for several years occupied so much of my mind and time, it is requisite that I should offer my grateful thanks to the many kind correspondents who have borne with my inquiries and have endeavoured to comply with my requests. For information derived from printed works my obligations are manifold, and, in addition to the acknowledgments made in various parts of