Christopher Marlowe
Created | Updated Oct 9, 2004
What strikes me most about the murder of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford in May 1593 is the irrelevance of it all. All that effort for so little gain.
According to Charles Nichols’ biography of the Elizabethan playwright and poet (The Reckoning ISBN 0-099-43747-3), Marlowe was murdered by a clutch of evidence fakers, who had all subscribed themselves to producing intelligence for their taskmasters, regardless of its truth, veracity, or even the slimmest credence, to the end of getting some cash from a group of higher ranking individuals who wanted to see the end of Sir Walter Ralegh. That seems to sum it up. His argument is convincing. The relationships claustrophobic. The end result of their efforts meaningless.
How we look at the grand affairs of state in retrospect is simply this – no one gives a shit. That’s the plain and honest answer. The death of Kennedy, the Brighton bomb, IRA hunger strikers… no one ultimately cares. Footnotes. Life evolves itself; we go out and do our shopping, have a meal, a drink, a gossip, and events move on. For better or worse. No one man or woman – regardless of the titles they give themselves or are given – makes any real difference by not being there. Regardless.
What is disturbing is that in the Golden Age of Elizabeth, when England saw off the Armarda, produced Shakespeare, and became a world power, is the myriad of liars we harboured in our shore is amazing. So what of the Babington Plot that eventually lost Mary Queen of Scots her head? Made up. A group of dissident Catholics nudged into a few words of treachery they were never really in a position to carry out; Mary gives them the thumbs up, and away they all go. Hung, drawn and quartered. Mary killed with her little dog shivering under her long dress. But that’s not all – every document relating to Mary’s acquiescence in the Babington scheme was a copy. All written up by government paid spies – all the spies mean little men who lived their lives on the edge of starvation and would have done anything for money. No original documents were used in the trial whatsoever. And you don’t get paid for duff results. Hmmm, somehow I can’t see the CPS thinking that one’s got any legs to it. Even a knackered Duty Solicitor would be able to kick that bugger out of court. And yet men and women were killed on the word of proven and consistent liars, whose testimonies were ‘not worth a frieze jerkin’.
And it’s such absolute and irredeemable liars, with their falsehoods and ‘lewd designs’, taken to be and adopted so smugly as being the truth is what truly rankles. The hypocrisy of it all. Reading through the evidence from the days of Gloriana, and applying it to our own times – because, despite the cod-pieces, ruffs, doublets or whatever, people are essentially the same – it’s not Religion that’s taken as a cloak for the edicts of the state (which opinion forms one element of the charges of atheism levelled against Marlowe just before his death), but the Truth. The Lies we’re made to believe, the Truth that’s discredited. That’s the tragedy of it all.
