Front cover image for Christopher Marlowe : poet & spy

Christopher Marlowe : poet & spy

Park Honan
"Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed picture of Marlowe's life in over fifty years. Based on years of meticulous research, Park Honan's biography contains many new findings, including details of Marlowe's home life and schooling, his time at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and his reading, teachers, and early achievements. A newly-discovered letter has provided information on the famous putative portrait at Cambridge, while the Latin writings of Marlowe's friend, Thomas Watson, are used for the first time to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a spy. There are new accounts of his espionage on the continent, including in particular his arrest in Flushing." "This is also the first biography to investigate thoroughly Marlowe's relationships with fellow playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare, and his chief patron, Thomas Walsingham. With closer views of Marlowe in relation to the Elizabethan stage than ever before, Honan examines in detail his aims, mind, and techniques as exhibited in all of his plays, from Dido, the Tamburlaine dramas, and Doctor Faustus through to The Jew of Malta and Edward II." "Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on Marlowe's friendships and homoeroticism. Fresh information is brought to bear on his seductive use of blasphemy, his street fights, his methods of preparing himself for writing, and his atheism and religious interests. The book also explores his attraction to scientists and mathematicians such as Thomas Harriot and others in the Ralegh-Northumberland set of thinkers and experimenters. Finally, there is new data on spies and business agents such as Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, and a detailed account of the circumstances that led up to Marlowe's gruesome murder in Deptford."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2005
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005
Biography
xv, 421 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780198186953, 9780199232697, 0198186959, 0199232695
60931407
I. A Canterbury youth
1. Birth
Canterbury events
Silverlings
A shoemaker's son
2. Petty school and the parish
The freeman's house
Katherine's child
After petty school
3. The King's School
The Jews of Canterbury
Mr. Gresshop's rooms
Questions
II. Scholar and spy
4. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
The inland sea
Beds, buttery books, and elegies
The Queen of desire
5. Into espionage
"Aetatis suae 21"
The Walsinghams
Tom Watson after France
A government man
III. With Shakespeare, Kyd, and the Ralegh Circle
6. The Tamburlaine phenomenon
Tamburlaine the Great
Part two of Tamburlaine, and rumours and changes
Shakespeare of Stratford
7. Doctor Faustus
Heaven and hell
Imprisonment
Sir Walter Raleigh and the wizard
8. A spy abroad
A room with Kyd
The Jew of Malta
Spying in Flushing and discovering in France
IV. Sexuality and reckonings
9. The keen pleasures of sex
Shakespeare and new fields
Sexual acts
Love in a cold climate
10. A little matter of murder
A great house in Kent
Mercury in the form of Mr. Maunder
The rive at Deptford
Epilogue
Appendices : Family trees : Marlowe, Arthur, and Moore relationships ; the families of Jordan, Cranford, and Graddell
Richard Baines on Marlowe
The coroner's inquest of 1 June, 1593
Kyd's letter to Puckering concerning Marlowe, circa June 1593
Kyd's unsigned note to Puckering, circa June 1593