With a dagger, in the bedroom

Felix Pryor

In one of his letters, Keats describes how he is sitting with his back to the fire,

with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet,

and goes on to wonder

in what position Shakespeare sat when he wrote 'To be or not to he'.

Needless to say, we don't know. The only contemporary anecdote that survives about Shakespeare is a rather dubious story about his rivalry with Richard Burbage for the favours of a citizen's wife (punch-line: 'William the Conqueror was before Richard III').

,The record for Marlowe is a little fuller. We don't, of course, know in what position he was sitting when he wrote 'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?', but we do at least have a record of how he spent one day of his life (even if he does not appear to have done much writing that day). This brings us closer to the quotidian Marlowe than we get to Shakespeare. Trivia exerts its own fascination.

The day in question was 30 May 1593. In the morning, Marlowe is recorded as hav- ing met three men at Widow Bull's house in Deptford Strand. They spent the morn- ing indoors in conversation (the room hav- ing, we are told, a bed, a table and a bench). They then had lunch (what they had to eat is not recorded), and afterwards walked in the garden. In the evening, at about six, they came in from the garden, and had supper. Afterwards, Marlowe lay down on the bed (a good Keatsian touch that), while his three companions remained seated at the table with their backs to him, After whieh, a quarrel ensued and Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye, dying instantly. The dagger had an estimated value of twelve pence: as (in auction house cant) 'an object of literary association', it might be worth more now.

This information comes from the coroner's report; and this forms the core of Charles Nicholl's fine book. Nicholl is not the first to bring the findings of the report into question. Ever since it was unearthed in 1925, it has caused eyebrows to be raised. After all, the man who did the stab- bing was a loan shark (Nicholl describes him, in a characteristically vivid turn of phrase, as 'upwardly mobile', with the brittleness and effort which that term suggests), and it was his dagger that did the killing (he claimed, of course, that he was acting in self-defence). Added to which, the two witnesses were both Government spies, as was Marlowe himself. And they were the only witnesses.

Nor does Nichol] claim to be the first to try to untease the various strands forming the knot that the twelve-penny dagger was to cut. But he does do his unteasing with greater thoroughness than anyone hitherto. He clears up many problems along the way, my own favourite being his convincing sug- gestion that a seemingly inexplicable allu- sion to Marlowe's death of the plague, supposedly made by someone who should have known better, in fact refers not to Marlowe at all but to 'one of those self- publicising Elizabethan oddballs who found their way into the popular imagination', one Peter ShakerIcy. Here Nichol] confess- es that, when first faced with this conun- drum, began to think that there was clear evidence here of some kind of cover-up': and it may well be that there are other Shakerleys lurking behind Nicholl's conjec- tures waiting to refute him, But this does not really matter. Exactly what happened after supper that day is not something that is ever likely to be pinned down. The truth is too slippery. As Nicholl puts it:

An event like this, which echoes on through the centuries, takes just a few seconds to hap- pen. Once it has happened, it is gone.

Nicholl's main achievement — and it is considerable — is that he comes close to capturing something intangible, a tone of voice almost. Whatever fresh discoveries are made, his study is likely to have an enduring value.

For those wishing to learn more about spying and counterspying during the period, about plots and counterplots, and rivalry in high places, Alan Haynes's survey can be recommended. His subject matter is pithily summed up by John Webster (in a manuscript fragment first quoted in these pages a few years ago):

Are not all your statesmen great intclli- gencers, and without this intelligence can there be anything done in this common- wealth? Why, it is the spectacles wise men put on to read others' lives, and how they should direct their own acts ...

Sound though Haynes's survey is, his publisher's choice of dust-jacket seems odd (by contrast, the illustrations for Nicholl's book, especially in their generous selection of primary manuscript sources, are exem- plary). Haynes's jacket shows a detail from 'Queen Elizabeth in Court'. by Frank Moss Bennett RA (1874-1953), a painting very much of the Edwardian Good Queen Bess school: an image which slights Haynes's scholarly attainments, but which does, per- haps, reflect something of his resolutely old-fashioned narrative approach.

'There are insults and there are insults.'