London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
Today’s London story begins with a knife going into a man’s eye in a room in Deptford.
Not metaphorically.
Actually.
A blade above the right eye. Two inches deep. One inch wide. Straight into the brain.
And just like that, at about six o’clock on the evening of May 30th, 1593, Christopher Marlowe – playwright, poet, government agent, atheist, blasphemer, genius, thug, magician, maybe spy, maybe traitor, maybe all of them at once – pitched face first into immortality.
Twenty-nine years old.
Shakespeare was still only warming up.
And London had just lost the most dangerous writer in England.
Now here’s the thing.
For centuries people got this wrong.
They said it was a tavern brawl.
It wasn’t.
They said Marlowe was stabbed in a drunken street fight.
Wrong again.
The killing happened in a respectable house in Deptford Strand belonging to a widow called Eleanor Bull. Not some gin-soaked dive but a proper establishment run by a woman with court connections and respectable family ties. They spent the whole day there. Walking in the garden. Eating. Talking. Sitting in a private room.
Four men.
Christopher Marlowe.
Ingram Frizer.
Nicholas Skeres.
Robert Poley.
And if those last three names sound like characters from a Jacobean thriller, well, they practically were.
Skeres was a conman.
Poley was a professional spy. A really serious one. The sort of man governments use when they want dirty work done quietly.
Frizer worked for Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron.
So. Three shady operators. One explosive genius under investigation by the Privy Council.
And they all just happen to spend an entire day together before one of them kills him.
Hmm.
The official story is that they argued over “the reckoning” – the bill.
That’s the exact word in the coroner’s report. “Le recknynge.”
Marlowe got angry, grabbed Frizer’s dagger, struck him on the head, and in the struggle Frizer stabbed upward in self-defence.
Case closed.
Except…
well…
you can see why people have raised an eyebrow for the last four hundred years.
Especially because Marlowe was in very hot water at the time.
Only ten days earlier he’d been ordered to appear daily before the Privy Council.
Daily.
Think about that.
One of the most brilliant writers in London effectively on police bail.
The authorities had him under watch because accusations were swirling around him like smoke.
Atheism.
Blasphemy.
Sedition.
Heresy.
Homosexuality.
Counterfeiting.
Espionage.
Honestly, if Marlowe were around today he’d need three podcasts, a Netflix series and a parliamentary inquiry.
And the really astonishing thing is this: quite a lot of it was probably true.
He was born in Canterbury in 1564, son of a shoemaker. Same year as Shakespeare. But where Shakespeare often seems elusive and careful, Marlowe arrives in the historical record like a firework thrown into a library.
Violent.
Brilliant.
Combative.
Dangerous.
He wins a scholarship to Cambridge. Studies the classics. Ovid especially. Ovid the sexy one. Ovid the troublemaker.
And while he’s there something odd happens.
His attendance becomes irregular.
He disappears for stretches.
Rumours spread that he’s heading to the English Catholic seminary at Rheims in France.
That was serious business. England and Catholic Europe were glaring at each other across the Channel with murder in mind. Rheims was viewed by the English authorities as practically a production line for traitors and missionary priests.
But then the Privy Council steps in.
And this is extraordinary.
The council writes to Cambridge saying Christopher Marlowe has “done her Majesty good service” and should receive his degree.
Good service.
What sort of service?
They don’t say.
But the implication is obvious.
Spy work.
Intelligence work.
Sneaking about in dangerous circles gathering information.
And suddenly Marlowe’s whole life takes on this double quality.
Playwright by day.
Something much murkier by night.
He knew spies. Government agents. Informers. Double dealers.
He moved in that world.
And you can feel it in the plays.
Tamburlaine explodes onto the London stage in the late 1580s and changes English theatre overnight.
Before Marlowe, the stage tended to creak.
After Marlowe it thunders.
Blank verse suddenly becomes this muscular, magnificent thing.
Ben Jonson later called it “Marlowe’s mighty line.”
And audiences had never heard anything like it.
“Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment…”
Boom.
You can almost hear the floorboards shaking.
Then comes Doctor Faustus.
The story of a man who sells his soul for knowledge and power.
And honestly, if ever a play felt written in blood from personal experience, this is it.
Faustus is intoxicated by forbidden knowledge.
He wants more.
More power. More reach. More understanding.
That hunger feels Marlovian right down to the marrow.
And meanwhile the rumours grow.
One informer says Marlowe declared that
“all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.”
Another says he claimed Moses was a conjuror.
Another says he mocked the Bible.
Another says he could argue for atheism
better than any clergyman in England could argue against it.
Now we should be careful. Some of these accusations came from professional informers and sneaks trying to save their own necks.
But even allowing for exaggeration, Marlowe clearly loved danger.
Loved provocation.
Loved seeing how far he could push things.
Thomas Kyd – himself arrested and probably tortured – later said Marlowe would “jest at the divine scriptures” and mock prayer.
This was not safe behaviour in Elizabethan England.
Not remotely safe.
People got executed for less.
And all the while he’s writing masterpiece after masterpiece.
The Jew of Malta.
Edward II.
The Massacre at Paris.
Hero and Leander.
That last one especially astonishing. Sensuous. Luxurious. Seductive. The poetry practically glows in the dark.
And through all of it runs this current of appetite.
For power.
For beauty.
For experience.
For extremity.
Marlowe never feels cautious.
Shakespeare contains multitudes.
Marlowe burns.
And maybe that’s why his death still grips us.
Because it feels horribly appropriate.
Of course Marlowe dies violently.
Of course it happens in a room full of spies and fixers.
Of course there’s a dagger.
Of course there are unanswered questions.
It fits the shape of the life too perfectly.
And London still has the geography of it.
Deptford.
Now there’s a place.
Today you get the Overground.
Cafés. River views. Docklands redevelopment.
But in Marlowe’s day Deptford was dangerous river-country.
Shipyards. Sailors. Smugglers.
Government business. Taverns. Rope. Tar. Violence.
The wet edge of London.
A place where things could happen quietly.
And somewhere near Deptford Strand stood Eleanor Bull’s house.
The little room.
The great reckoning.
The end.
Marlowe was buried the next day at St Nicholas, Deptford. Unmarked grave.
Nobody knows exactly where.
And then Shakespeare carried on.
That’s another haunting thing.
Shakespeare outlived him by twenty-three years.
What would Marlowe have become had he lived?
Would he have surpassed Shakespeare?
Impossible to know.
But Shakespeare clearly felt the shock of the death.
In As You Like It he writes of “the dead shepherd”.
And then he slips in a line that sounds like a private shiver of recognition:
“It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”
There it is again.
The reckoning.
Not just the bill on the table in Deptford.
The reckoning of a life.
Christopher Marlowe.
The shoemaker’s son from Canterbury.
Government agent.
Poet.
Brawler.
Heretic.
The man who kicked open the doors of English drama and let the lightning in.
And who died, fittingly enough, as if he were one of his own characters.
Too bright.
Too dangerous.
Too much.
Fin.
See you tomorrow.