What Allen knew, Baines could only suspect. He was certain Kit had a role in his exposure, but then he had also been indiscreet with a fellow seminarist to whom he offered untold wealth (quite unjustifiably, on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham) to join him in his treachery. So he could not be sure who had caused his downfall. Nevertheless, in his lonely cell he had plenty of time to fuel his loathing. Years later, Kit would secretly mock him in The Jew of Malta, in which Barabas the Jew is said ‘to go about to poison wells’, succeeding (unlike Baines) in doing away with an entire nunnery: ‘Here’s a drench to poison a whole stable of Flanders mares: I’ll carry’t to the nuns with a powder.’ (The Jew of Malta III iv 113–14). There are also shades of Baines in Hamlet’s camp, contemptible Osric, the verbose courtier who presides as a referee over the rapier fight in which Hamlet dies – taking the name ‘Osric’ from an earlier play, A Knack to Know a Knave, which is something Baines most certainly did not display at the time. In his dank dungeon, with no proof of Kit’s hand in his predicament, Baines could only silently seethe.
He was to have his revenge.
Kit was back in Cambridge by Michaelmas 1581. It had been a whirlwind tour of the Continent – just four or five weeks, much of the time would have been spent in transit, and at least part of this on horseback. The players had a wagon, but once Kit left them for Rheims, travelling by horse rather than walking was an expensive choice, which seems to indicate that (unless his time with the players had been especially lucrative) he was being funded by someone else.
College life was surely dull by comparison, just a little less hard and humdrum than a day at St John’s College described by the preacher Thomas Lever in the 1550s:
There be divers there which rise daily betwixte foure and five of the clocke in the morning, and from five until sixe of the clocke, use common prayer with an exhortacion of gods worde in a common chappell, and from sixe unto ten of the clocke use ever either private study or commune lectures. At ten of the clocke they go to dinner, whereas they be content with a penye piece of biefe amongest .iiii. having a fewe porage made of the brothe of the same biefe, with salt and otemell, and nothinge els.
After this slender dinner they be either teachinge or learninge untill v. of the clocke in the evening, when as they have a supper not much better than their diner. Immediatelie after the whiche, they go either to reasoning in problemes or unto some other studye, until it be nine or tenne of the clocke, and there being without fire are faine to walk or runne up and downe halfe an houre, to gette a heate on their feete whan they go to bed.
Lever was probably painting a heroically severe picture to impress his congregation. Kit didn’t have to run up and down to warm his feet before going to sleep, but he was cooped up with his fellow scholars – the senior Robert Thexton hogging the big bed, while he and Thomas Leugar slept on hard ‘truckle-beds’ that slid out from underneath, in a room that smelled of burning animal fat from the rushlights they worked by after dark. Though not quite as dissolute as the dramatist Robert Greene, who admitted to ‘consum[ing] the flower of my youth’ at Cambridge ‘amongst wags as lewd as myself’, Kit liked a jovial cup in the company of the bacchanalian blades who came up to college almost on a part-time basis, with no intention of taking a degree but simply of filling in time before studying law in London, or travelling on the Continent – ‘a wild and wanton herd … of youthful and unhandled colts’ who spent their time fencing and dancing, whose behaviour resulted in an increasing number of vice-chancellor’s injunctions against playing football, going to bear-baiting and plays in the town, and whose first element of knowledge was ‘to be shown the colleges, and initiated in a tavern by the way’.* They were a Babylonical bunch with insatiable appetites, but unlike them Kit had a thirst for learning as well as revelry, and the ability to indulge all his cravings at once.
In his first year, the rigid Cambridge curriculum officially confined his studies to Rhetoric. After that he could look forward to a year of Logic, then one of Philosophy, and later Greek, drawing and astronomy before moving on to a Masters degree. His quick mind raced beyond such limits, and he responded to academic circumscription with tangents of intellectual adventure. Cambridge allowed this. Attitudes to study underwent a radical change in the years before Kit arrived. Instead of merely lamenting the fact that lectures were so poorly attended, the authorities addressed themselves to the reason for the decline, and realised (about 100 years after the event) that the accessibility of printed books meant that students were no longer reliant on lectures for basic information. This revelation led to a new approach in which college tutors (rather than lectures) played an increasingly important role in a student’s education, and good tutors turned their charges’ minds and eyes to studies outside the curriculum, to books that brought them up to date with contemporary thought, and skills that would equip them for modern life. So Kit studied modern languages: French (in which he was already fluent) and Italian (which he became desperate to master), and read the controversial logician Ramus (who gets a brief critique, and is then gorily killed in The Massacre at Paris), Machiavelli (who delighted him) and, hot off the press, essays by Montaigne. Gabriel Harvey sourly noted the subversive course Cambridge studies were taking, complaining ‘You cannot step into a scholar’s study but (ten to one) you shall lightly find open either Bodin’s De Republica or Le Roy’s exposition upon Aristotle’s Politics or some other like French or Italian politic discourse’.
Much to Kit’s chagrin his curriculum did not include music, as it might have done at Oxford, and he could not afford the usual recourse of a private tutor. Ever since Thomas Bull had picked him out to sing in the Canterbury cathedral choir, and all through his time at The King’s School, Kit had a passion for music. As he later put it: ‘The man that hath no music in himself,/Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/The motions of his spirit are as dull as night,/And his affections dark as Erebus./Let no such man be trusted’ (The Merchant of Venice V i 83–8). The young malcontent Kit Marlin, in some turmoil over religion, full of rage and questioning, fired by new learning and excited by new friends, found counterpoise in ‘the sweet power of music’ – on at least one occasion in the home of the great composer and organist, William Byrd.
It is tempting to accept that the musician once dubbed as homo memorabilis is the ‘William Byrd’ who is paid 10 shillings in Bene’t College accounts, and who was a university wait. ‘Waits’ were municipal musicians – originally watchmen who played their instruments to assure citizens that all was well, but by the sixteenth century they performed at civic occasions and hired themselves out privately. Byrd’s biographer Edmund Fellowes refutes the possibility of this being the same William Byrd, pointing out that the name was a common one, and the position at this stage of his career too menial. Intriguingly, another William Byrd (alias Borne) was a close friend of the actor-manager Edward Alleyn, became a shareholder in the Admiral’s Men (the company that staged Christopher Marlowe’s plays), and was paid for his additions to Doctor Faustus. (It is thought that he used the alias Borne to disguise his identity on religious grounds.)
But it seems Kit’s contact with the composer Byrd came through theatre and his new friend from Paris, Tom Watson. Byrd composed music for Ricardus Tertius, a play by the Master of Caius, Thomas Legge (‘an horrible papist’), which was staged a number of times in the early 1580s. Tradition has it that it was at a performance of Ricardus Tertius that Kit first met the young Earl of Essex, who was at Trinity, and that both men disliked the play. Whatever the truth of this, it is evident that Kit thought he could do better than Legge, and would use the same subject matter to much better effect in one of his very first history plays.
Kit was already familiar with Byrd’s work – as a choirboy in Canterbury he had enjoyed singing from the composer’s Sacred Songs, which Byrd had published with his tutor Thomas Tallis in 1575, so delighting the Queen that she granted them a countrywide monopoly in printing church music. But it was at Cambridge that