APPENDIX A Post Mortem. I. It was 1593. The first of Marlowe's contemporaries known to have mentioned his death was George Peele. His poem in Honour of the Garter is dated the 26th of June. written to commemorate the investure with that decoration of certain worthies, including Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. After addressing that nobleman as 'The Muse's love, patron, and favorite,' because 'other patrons have poor poets none,' now that 'liberal Sidney' and 'virtuous Walsingham are fled to heaven,' Peele continues: 'And after thee Why hie they not, unhappy in thine end, Nashe (who subsequently, in reply to one of Gabriel Harvey's attacks, denied that he had ever abused Marlowe), in the Epistle prefixed to his Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem, published in 1593, sorrowfully exclaims, 'Poore deceased Kit Marlowe!' and in other works spoke of him admiringly. Shakespeare is supposed to have written A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1593 or 4, and there evidently recalled to his 'mind's eye' his partner in dramatic lore, when he thus apostrophises that dead friend and fellow-worker as the poet whose fiery zeal and lofty ideals brooked no restraint or remonstrance: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven : And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.' 152 No more appropriate and appreciative allusion to Marlowe was ever or could ever have been uttered than those lines by Shakespeare, who again, in As You Like It, gently refers to his deceased friend, in quoting a line from Hero and Leander: 'Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?'163 George Chapman, however unequal to wage rivalry with Marlowe, still a man of genius, in 1598 published a continuation of his friend's Hero and Leander. In dedicating the composition to Lady Walsingham, wife of Sir Thomas, referred to as 'my honoured best friend,' Chapman apologises for putting his signature to a subject 'On which more worthinesse of soul hath been shewed, and weight of divine wit,' and in his work expresses the hope that he may 'Find th' eternal clime Of his free soul whose living subject stood In the same year a youthful poetling, not possessing the divine fire himself, although able to appreciate it in others, also had the temerity to publish a continuation of the dead shepherd's death-song. The verses and the very name of Henry Petowe had perished had they not been combined in typifying the reverential feelings of even the veriest versifiers of the age towards the idol of their worship. One short extract will suffice: 'Marlo admired, whose honney-flowing vaine Marlo, late mortall, now framed all divine, Oh, had that king of poets breathed longer, Then had faire beautie's fort been much more stronger! No bastard æglet's quill, the world throughout, What mortall soule with Marlo might contend, The Chorus Vatum grew stronger and brighter, even Ben Jonson being heard to say that Marlowe's 'mighty lines were examples fitter for admiration than for parallel.' 156 The admiring utterances of Marlowe's contemporaries, the men who knew him, admired him, and were never known to whisper a syllable against the character of 'kind Kit Marlowe,' may fitly finish with the lines of Michael Drayton, in his Epistle to Henry Reynold's Of Poets and Poetry. They are evidently reminiscent of the above-quoted verses of Shakespeare, and show that Drayton knew to whom the words referred : 'Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, All ayre and fire, which made his verses cleare; For that fine madness still he did retaine, Which rightly should possesse a poet's braine.'157 Post Mortem. II. But others than those who knew, loved, and reverenced the deceased poet, could now have their say. Gabriel Harvey, 'sonne to the halter maker,' as Nashe spitefully styled the ropemaker's offspring, does not appear to have had any real reason for venting his venom on 'kind Kit Marlowe,' unless that saying Nashe fathered on him was the poet's, that Richard Harvey, Gabriel's brother, 'was an asse, good for nothing but to preach of the Iron Age.' This Gabriel was an unscrupulous calumniator of the dead. He gathered garbage from every dust-heap with which to disfigure the graves of the defenceless dead. He had not dared to splutter much about Marlowe living, beyond comparing him with a peacock, but for him deceased he prepared his customary obituary. He was the first to gloat over the poet's loss. In some cryptic verse he vindictively refers to Tamburlaine's' death from the plague, evidently deeming 'the hawty man' had been carried off by the prevailing epidemic. His marvellous epistle, the Newe Letter of Notable Contents, is dated September 1593. No further unfriendly allusion to Marlowe is discoverable until 1597, four years after his death. In that year Thomas Beard, one of the so-called Puritans, issued a farrago of everything unsavoury that he could scrape together, his compilation being, as he says in his Epistle Dedicatory, 'partly translated out of the French, and partly collected by mine owne industrie out of many authors,' and not, therefore, from his own knowledge. This he issued to the world as The Theatre of God's Judgements. Not only is the volume one of the filthiest of the evil-minded school to which it owes its origin, but its superstitious stories are utterly inane. Amongst its examples of God's judgments against atheists is one of a man, who having sold his soul to Satan for a cup of wine, Satan flies off with his bargain in full view of the surrounding company. Other equally edifying tales are told, especially of the wearers of the Papal tiara, several of whom, besides having committed unnameable misdeeds, were, according to Beard, reputed to have been punished for atheistic utterances. Another example, Rabelais, is stated to have been deprived of his senses, so that he might die a brutish death; various poets, for their folly in writing verses, perished miserably, whilst lastly Marlowe served his turn to adorn a tale. Beard's story is : 'Marlin, by profession a scholler. . . but by practise a playmaker and a poet of scurrilitie, who by giving too large a swing to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reines, fell (not without just desert) to that outrage and extremitie, that he denied God and his sonne Christ, and not onely in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it, affirming our Saviour to be but a deceiver, and Moses to be but a conjurer and seducer of the people, and the holy Bible to bee but vaine and idle stories, and all religion but a device of policie. But see what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dogge! 'It so fell out, that in London streets, as he purposed to stab one whome hee ought (owed) a grudge unto with his dagger, the other party perceiving so avoided the stroke, that withall catching hold of his wrest, he stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort that notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could be wrought, he shortly after died thereof; the manner of his death being so terrible (for hee even cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth), that it was not only a manifest signe of God's judgement, but also an horrible and fearefull terror to all that beheld him. But herein did the justice of God most notably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne hand, which had written those blasphemies, to bee the instrument to punish him, and that in his braine which had devised the same.' 158 Even this account, circumstantial as if taken down by an eye-witness, does not persuade the impartial mind from preferring the evidence of the church register: from believing that Marlowe instead of dying by his own hand was slain by Francis Archer. It may be mentioned that when a second edition of Beard's bestial book was published fifteen years later, the words 'London streets' were omitted. In 1598 was issued another 'hotchpotch' of various marvels of all kinds, relating to celebrated persons and collected |
