On 5 May 1593, a series of anti-Protestant bills were posted throughout the city of London. One of the bills was written in iambic pentameter and included several references to the works of celebrated poet Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and was even signed ‘Tamburlaine’, a clear allusion to an atheistic character from one of his most famous plays. In this time of heightened religious tensions, when religious dissent was often equated with sedition, the Protestant government of Queen Elizabeth I of England (reign 1558 to 1603) took such posts very seriously.
On 11 May, English authorities arrested several men suspected of making the pamphlets including Thomas Kyd, a famous dramatist who, only a short time before, had shared a chamber with Marlowe. Already in grave trouble, Kyd’s situation grew more precarious when a three-page heretical tract was found amongst his papers. Under the threat – or perhaps even the effects – of bodily torture, the dramatist objected that the tract was not his, but Marlowe’s, and that it must have been mixed in with his papers when they had still been living together.
Kyd then provided Thomas Puckering, Keeper of the Privy Seal, with specific blasphemous statements that Marlowe had allegedly made – according to Kyd, Marlowe had been accustomed to “jest at the divine scriptures [and] gibe at prayers” and would “report St. John to be our saviour Christ’s Alexis”, another way of saying that Jesus Christ had had a homosexual attraction to Saint John (quoted in Cheney, 37). These accusations of blasphemy and atheism, serious enough on their own, had not been made in isolation. The previous summer, the dying poet Robert Greene had jealously and publicly called out Marlowe for “daring God out of Heaven with that Atheist Tamburlain’”, again referring to Marlowe’s well-known play. Another man, Richard Baines, attested that Marlowe had “scoff[ed] at the pretensions of the Old and New Testament” and had said that “Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest”. It did not help matters that Marlowe was associated with the so-called ‘School of Night’, a group of intellectuals centered around Sir Walter Raleigh (circa 1552 to 1618) who were widely suspected to promote atheistic ideas. According to Richard Cholmeley, Marlowe “read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others” (quoted in Cheney, 93).
On 20 May, Marlowe was arrested, charged with blasphemy, and ordered to present himself daily before the queen’s Privy Council until such a time as a trial could be held. A mere ten days later, he was dead, killed in what was ostensibly a barroom brawl. Reactions to his death were quite varied – while some mourned the death of a poet who had done so much for English literature, others were not sorry to see the loss of such an apparently wicked man. Thomas Beard, for example, saw the vengeance of God in Marlowe’s untimely death, and urged other wayward souls to “see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dog” (quoted in Cheney, 24). But was this reputation deserved? Certainly, the men who accused him of blasphemy in the months before his death were far from unbiased sources. Kyd had made his accusations under extreme duress, Greene out of professional jealousy, and Baines – who had fallen out with Marlowe after the pair had engaged in a failed counterfeiting scheme in 1592 – out of a personal vendetta. Since Marlowe was killed before having had a chance to defend himself, either publicly or at trial, is it even possible to ascertain the beliefs of the greatest English playwright before William Shakespeare?
The short answer, of course, is no. The passage of the centuries has left only a murky outline of the man that Marlowe might have been, a situation not helped by the mud his contemporaries had slung at his reputation. Despite his popular modern perception as a sort of Elizabethan ‘bad boy’ who defied the rigid societal norms of his time, there is little solid evidence that Marlowe was an atheist or, indeed, a homosexual man (a term that, many scholars argue, cannot even be applied to the Elizabethan Era since the modern idea of sexual orientation did not yet exist). That being said, there is much to be gained by looking at how such themes are portrayed in Marlowe’s work. As scholar Paul Whitfield White observes:
No poet-playwright of the Elizabethan age is more deeply implicated in his work than Marlowe…of course, we can never get back to the ‘real’ Marlowe and see inside his mind, but it is a useful exercise to speculate about what he believed and how he felt about religion, if only as a means of drawing some general conclusions about what his plays and poems collectively communicate to contemporary audiences and to us today on this complex topic.
(Cheney, 85)
With such a purpose in mind, the rest of this article will examine how the topics of religion and homosexuality are treated in the plays and poems of Marlowe – it will, then, be left to the reader to draw their own conclusions about Marlowe himself and the time in which he lived.
Marlowe and Religion
In the words of scholar G.K. Hunter, if Marlowe “was an atheist in the modern sense at all, he was a God-haunted atheist” (quoted by White in Cheney, 86). His work is seeped in religious language and themes, with his first great success, Tamburlaine the Great, questioning aspects of mainstream religious doctrine such as the idea of divine providence. The play – loosely based on the life of the historical 14th-century Turkic conqueror Tamerlane (or Timur) – often refers to its protagonist as the ‘Scourge of God’, an epithet that Tamburlaine himself adopts, proclaiming: “There is a God full of revenging wrath whose Scourge I am, and him will I obey” (quoted in Cheney, 71). The idea that Tamburlaine is God’s ‘scourge’, or agent, would have been familiar to Elizabethan audiences; as Paul Whitfield White observes, Protestant writings had popularized the idea that tyrants and conquerors like Tamburlaine were sent by God to punish sinful peoples and nations. But this notion is thrown into doubt by Marlowe, who depicts violence against innocents, as seen in the slaughter of the virgins in Tamburlaine Part One and the drowning of the citizens of Babylon in the second part. Even Tamburlaine admits that he has only adopted the identity of God’s ‘scourge’ to lend his conquests more legitimacy, hinting that he does not really believe in the idea himself. He states, “But since I exercise a greater name, / the scourge of God and terror of the world, / I must apply myself to fit those terms” (2 Tamb. 4.1.55-57).
Indeed, the hand of God seems entirely absent from the world that Marlowe lays out in Tamburlaine. In the aftermath of a battlefield defeat, one character asks another if he views the recent battle as the judgment of Christ, only to be met with the reply: “’Tis but the fortune of the wars, my Lord, / Whose power is often proved a miracle” (2 Tamb. 2.3.31-32). In other words, the battle’s outcome had been determined by the men who fought it and by pure luck, with no regard to God’s favor. In another particularly shocking scene, Tamburlaine burns the Quran while taunting the Prophet Muhammad to strike him down. Although the conqueror does experience physical pain shortly thereafter, a physician is quick to diagnose his ailment as a humoral imbalance rather than divine retribution. In another scene, Bajazeth, the emperor of Turkey, and his wife Zabina question their faith after having been taken prisoner by Tamburlaine. Bajazeth bashes his brains out against the bars of their cell leaving a horrified Zabina to cry, “Then is there left no Mahomet, no God?” before killing herself likewise (1 Tamb. 3.3.269). While these scenes have been viewed as an attack on Islam specifically, it can be argued that Marlowe was criticizing all institutionalized religion. At a time when Elizabethan theatre often included supernatural characters as well as a stage-heaven and stage-hell to emphasize moralistic themes, Marlowe conspicuously left those elements out of Tamburlaine, as if to underscore the point that God plays no role in human affairs. No wonder, then, that Robert Greene accused the playwright of “tempting God out of heaven” with this play.
Religion also features prominently in The Jew of Malta, which follows Barabas, a Jewish merchant who must navigate the complex web of Maltese religious politics. As White points out, it is interesting that Marlowe’s protagonist shares a name with the biblical Barabas, the thief that the Jews asked Pontius Pilate to release in exchange for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth; indeed, one of the blasphemous statements Marlowe was alleged to have made was that “Christ deserved better to die than Barabas and that the Jews made a good choice” (quoted in Cheney, 76). The Jew of Malta engages in many Jewish tropes that would have been familiar to Elizabethans and are often considered antisemitic today; but just as was the case with Tamburlaine, Marlowe takes the opportunity to criticize religion generally. The play opens with a prologue delivered by a character named Machiavel, a caricature of the Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, who refers to religion as “a childish toy” that ambitious men use to gain power. The idea of religious morality is a large theme in this play, as demonstrated through the actions of Ferneze, the Christian governor of Malta, who seizes half of the assets of the island’s Jews at the onset of the play. The theme of men being driven by religion to do evil things is further explored in Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris, which centers around the massacre of French Huguenots (Protestants) in the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Often dismissed as a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, the play certainly raises questions “about the cynical exploitation of religious authority and religiously induced fear in the pursuit of military force and political power” (White in Cheney, 79).
But just as Marlowe could criticize the effects of religion in his works, he was also able to understand its powerful effects on mind and soul. In Doctor Faustus – considered by White to be the most explicitly religious of his plays – the titular scholar sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange for magical powers. As White puts it, the play “suggests a passionate identification with the experiences of remorse, fear of damnation, repentance and worship” proving that if Marlowe was indeed an atheist, he still had respect for what religion is capable of (Cheney, 86). One particular passage, in which Faustus takes his leave of earth, has been described by scholar Stanley Wells as proving that Marlowe had “the imaginative power to project a profoundly religious state of mind” (92):
Ah Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually,
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come!...
The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him.
(Faustus 5.2.57-73).
Marlowe and Homosexuality
Of the many accusations levied against the poet by Richard Baines, one quote that Marlowe was alleged to have made continues to stand out in the popular imagination: “all they that love not boys and tobacco are fools” (quoted in Cheney, 36). Many have taken this quote to mean that Marlowe was homosexual or took part in same-sex relationships, a stance that seems supported by the fact that there is no recorded evidence that he was ever involved with a woman. The quote itself should be taken with a huge grain of salt, but the idea that Marlowe was homosexual – or at the very least appreciated same-sex love – can certainly be supported by his work. While the concept of homosexuality as a sexual orientation was unknown in Elizabethan England, homosexual acts were viewed as “an aspect of seditious behavior”, making it all the more interesting that Marlowe alluded to such topics in his works (David Riggs, in Cheney 35-36).
An example of homoeroticism in Marlowe can be found in one of his early plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage, possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe. The play opens with Jupiter ‘dandling’ the youthful Ganymede ‘upon his knee’ before tenderly speaking the words: “Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me: / I love thee well, say Juno what she will” (quoted in Wells, 80). In this moment, Jupiter is – in the words of scholar Sara Munson Deats – “a victim of passionate love, displaying the foolishness and excess conventionally associated with amorous seizures” (Cheney, 195). A more explicit example of homoeroticism – and one that may convey the author’s own feelings – can be seen in Marlowe’s dramatic poem Hero and Leander. While the poem itself is about the heterosexual romance between two young lovers, Marlowe spends a deal of time lingering over the androgynous beauty of his male protagonist Leander, writing that “some swore he was a maid in man’s attire / for in his looks were all that men desire” (Sestiad 1, lines 83-84). The poem also contains a passage where Leander swims across the Hellespont as the god Neptune, enamored by his beauty, swims between his naked limbs:
He watched his arms, and as they opened wide
At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide
And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance,
And as he turned, cast many a lustful glance,
And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye,
And dive into the water, and there pry
Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb,
And up again, and close behind him swim,
And talk of love. Leander made reply,
‘You are deceived, I am no woman, I.’
(Sestiad 2, lines 183-192).
Perhaps the clearest example of Marlovian homoeroticism can be found in the history play Edward II, which centers around the fall of King Edward II of England (reign 1307 to 1327) and focuses on his close relationship with his favorite, Piers Gaveston. As the play opens, Gaveston swoons over a love letter from Edward, and, in his eagerness to swim across the channel and be with the king, compares himself to Leander: “Sweet prince, I come: these, these thy amorous lines / Might have enforced me to have swum from France / And like Leander gasped upon the sand, / So thou wouldst smile and take me in thy arms” (EII 1.1.6-9). Gaveston goes on to daydream about a masque that he will throw to entertain the king:
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring…
(EII 1.1.60-65).
When Gaveston arrives at Edward’s court, the king showers him with gifts and titles and seats him beside the throne in the place usually reserved for the queen. This undue attention enrages the other lords at Edward’s court, who soon conspire against the king’s favorite. Of course, their disgust at Gaveston’s special treatment can be interpreted as stemming from homophobia. In one scene where the lords plot to murder the captured Gaveston, the villainous Mortimer Junior refuses to even raise his sword against him, considering it a “shame and dishonor” to have Gaveston “fall upon my weapon’s point”, a clear allusion to sodomy. After Gaveston is killed and Edward II imprisoned, the king meets his own death in a grotesque parody of sodomy by having a red-hot poker inserted up his anus. This has been interpreted as symbolizing the homophobia inherent in the actions of the king’s killers and the state itself, and may have perhaps served as a covert criticism of the society in which Marlowe himself lived.
Conclusion
The reputation of Christopher Marlowe as a boundary-pushing poet who redefined Elizabethan literature is certainly well-deserved. In more ways than one, his work changed the way plays were conceived and performed, paving the way for the likes of Shakespeare. While it cannot be said for certain that he was a radical atheist or a homosexual man himself, the treatment of such subjects in his works were another way that he stood out from his predecessors. Bold and defiant, Marlowe’s interest in writing about such topics helped cement him in the pantheon of great English writers.
