of ready wit – a response he would recall years later when he wrote Edward II:
. . . you must cast the scholar off,
And learn to court it like a gentleman.
’Tis not a black coat and a little band,
A velvet-cap’d cloak, fac’d before with serge,
And smelling to a nosegay all the day,
Or holding of a napkin in your hand,
Or saying long grace at table’s end,
Or making low legs to a nobleman,
Or looking downward with your eyelids close,
And saying ‘Truly, an’t may please your honour,’
Can you get any favour with great men.
You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,
And now and then stab, as occasion serves.
(Edward II II i 30–42)
It was not deference that would get you high friends and favour, it was spark. Not for Kit the making of low legs to noblemen, the downcast eyes and ‘May it please your honour’. He was proud and resolutely cocky, but a charmer. The lanky lad with a sharp wit and a ready retort made friends easily, even, it soon became clear, across social barriers that were not usually breached. The stabbing part (‘now and then stab’) was to come later.
At the same time Kit shed his Puritanism. What replaced it? A curious and previously unnoted interlude in his first year at Bene’t gives us a clue. Urry hints at it when he reveals that: ‘In 1581 one William Peeters, during Marlowe’s absence, was granted Marlowe’s food, which was charged against him in his absence …’. Other biographers have simply let this pass, but what young Kit got up to in those weeks has a curious link with the murder in Deptford twelve years later, and casts some light on the course his life was taking. People he met during this short absence from Cambridge were one day completely to redirect his life. The evidence lies in two unexpected places: an archive in Belgium, and the Vatican.*
William (or Willem) Peeters was from Flanders. An erstwhile student of the University of Leiden, he arrived in Cambridge as an ‘instrumentalist’ with a group of travelling players. This is not unprecedented. Strolling troupes did pass through the town, and foreign musicians were not uncommon. Two broad types of theatre were performed at the university in Kit’s time. The colleges staged performances as instructive academic exercises, mostly in Latin, sometimes in Greek, and occasionally venturing lighter fare in English; wilder, wickeder and more exciting drama came in the form of comedies and satires performed by commercial players. The authorities frequently tried to discourage such wanton revels. Lord Leicester’s Men, whom Kit had already seen perform in Canterbury, had been prevented from performing in Cambridge in 1579. The following year, Lord Burghley, who was chancellor of the university, recommended that his son-in-law the Earl of Oxford’s men come to Cambridge. Though the company had just performed for the Queen, the vice-chancellor politely scotched Burghley’s request, pleading the dangers of plague at public assemblies, and sniffily stating that commencement (the time of conferring degrees) was upon them and this ‘requireth rather diligence in stodie than dissoluteness in playes’. Even the Queen’s Men, three years later, were sent off with a payment of 50 shillings for not performing, ‘forbidding theim to playe in the towne & so ridd theim cleane away’.
But other troupes did perform, and English plays were becoming wildly popular with student actors too. We know that Gammer Gurton’s Needle was performed at Christ’s College and the lively satire Tarrarantantara wowed audiences more than once at Clare. At Trinity, Kit and Thomas Nashe enjoyed Pedantius, which scoffed at the Puritan Gabriel Harvey, who was a Fellow of Trinity Hall and a mutual enemy of theirs. The players mimicked Harvey’s mannerisms perfectly and, said Nashe, ‘delineated [him] from the soale of the foote to the crowne of head’. Another play, Duns Furens so lambasted ‘the little Minnow his Brother’ Richard Harvey that, according to Nashe, ‘Dick came and broke the Colledge glasse windows’, and was put in the stocks till the show was over, and for most of the next night too. Furious fenestraclasm seems to have been a favourite mode of dramatic critique. In 1583 Trinity paid ‘for lv foot of newe glasse in the hall after the playes’, and subsequent to that took the precaution of ‘taking downe and setting vp the glasse wyndowes’ for the duration, while St John’s paid for ‘nettes to hange before the windowes of ye Halle’, before giving up on such flimsy protection and following Trinity’s lead. ‘Stage-keepers’, sometimes armed and often equipped with visors and steel caps, were employed to try to keep order. But audience participation remained energetic. Sir John Harington, who was a ‘truantly scholar’ at King’s around 1580, noted that the antics of the stage-keepers often made matters worse, as they went up and down ‘with vizors and lights, puffing and thrusting, and keeping out all men so precisely, till all the town is drawn by this revel to the place; and at last, tag and rag, fresh men and sub-sizers, and all be packed in together so thick, as now is scant left room for the prologue to come upon the stage’.
In the Bene’t college accounts for 1581, we find a payment of 10d ‘made to one Lamb and Porter’ ‘for making houses at the Comaedie’ and another ‘In Largeis to the Actors for a Beaver [visor]’. Was this perhaps the company William Peeters was with, unused to rumbustious Cambridge audiences, and having to provide themselves with a ‘stagekeeper’? Certainly Peeters joined a company of English players in Leiden early in 1581, and was back at the university in late 1582.* Printed bills announcing English players are mentioned in a Dutch document from 1565, and organised groups of professional players from England became increasingly common on the Continent from the 1580s onwards. The troupes managed to travel through war zones, and indeed accompanied military leaders, sometimes appearing to perform for soldiers and citizens on both sides of the conflict. Such troupes would play an important part in Kit’s life over the next few years.
Just how Kit made contact with William Peeters is uncertain, though it is conceivable that his prowess with the Dutch language, picked up in Canterbury, provided the introduction, or possibly it was his interest in drama. It would certainly seem that despite the implicit reprimand he had received reading his friend Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, Kit’s enthusiasm for the theatre was very much alive. He was quickly giving up on Stephen’s Puritanism. ‘Will not a filthy play,’ ranted a Puritan preacher, ‘with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred?’ That, for the future playwright, was precisely the attraction.
Obscurity surrounds the arrangement Kit made with Peeters, but whatever it was, it would appear to have had the blessing of the college authorities. Students were supposed to stay up at university full time, though with permission they could absent themselves for four weeks a year. The malapert Marlin appears to have persuaded the college to allow a similar arrangement to that practised by students at the Inns of Court, who would pay someone else to be at the meals that were a compulsory part of attendance requirements.† Perhaps he convinced them that he could benefit from a period of study at Leiden, temporarily taking Peeters’s vacated place, and thus effecting one of the world’s first ever student exchanges. Certainly the famous university at Padua welcomed a great many foreign students, often from middling or lower ranks, who did not register officially for the ‘studium’, but followed courses of study on an informal basis for a short period of time. Perhaps Marlin convinced the authorities that he was going to do the same at Leiden. In any event, the college tolerated his absence, and charged him for Peeters’s meals. But Leiden was not his destination. In the late summer of 1581, he was in France.
We get glimpses only of Kit on his first journey abroad. It would seem that he travelled with the players as a musician – most likely a ‘singing-man’ – and under Peeters’s name. This was daring, but would have obviated the need for a passport. The English, unless they were merchants, had to obtain a licence to travel to foreign countries. This was issued by a