stands as stiff as he were made of steel,/And plays at peacock twixt my legs right blithe’. The fruitier bits of Kit’s translation of Ovid, and later poems such as Hero and Leander can be seen in this light, though he seems to have disapproved of masturbation, once rebuking the ‘tender churl’ who ‘mak’st waste in niggarding’ (Sonnet 1).
First suckes seems to have been inspired by an earlier work, I modi, sixteen prints of ‘postures’ of love-making, each accompanied by an explanatory sonnet. The book was banned in Italy and though hard to come by, highly popular in England among students and lawyers at the Inns of Court. The prints in I modi are by ‘that rare Italian master’ Giulio Romano, the poems by Pietro Aretino, whom Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller called ‘one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made’. When it was first published, I modi enjoyed extensive circulation among the upper clergy and was furiously suppressed by Pope Clement VII – to the extent that almost every trace of it was eliminated. By the mid-1850s, Count Jean-Frédéric-Maximilien de Waldeck, an adventurer and amateur archaeologist, who had fought for Napoleon at Toulon and in Egypt, then escaping the English had travelled down the east coast of Africa, and later to Chile and Guatemala, came up with ink-and-wash reconstructions of I modi, based on prints he claimed to have seen in a monastery in Mexico. These tallied with fragments in the British Museum. The accompanying sonnets surfaced in a copy of I modi that was found for sale in Italy in 1928 by Walter Toscanini, son of the famous conductor. Assiduously kept from public gaze by Toscanini, it is now in the hands of another private collector. From the same source in Italy, an American collector bought First suckes (which seems to indicate that the two volumes were once owned as companion pieces). He keeps his find just as jealously guarded.
Like I modi, First suckes comprises sixteen prints and sonnets; each one deals with the loss of virginity. In eight of the poems a maid is deflowered, and in the other eight a young man has his first sexual experience – though it must be said that in each case the focus seems primarily on male enjoyment. Also, whereas the women are sexual caricatures, the poems about men appear to be based on the true experiences of real people, probably friends of the poet. There is a further link with I modi in that a quote from one of the Aretino poems appears on a separate leaf (apparently included as a prologue), beneath a portrait of a pleasured maid:
Che per mia fé’ questo é, miglior boccone
Che mangiar il pan unto apresso il foco.
(I believe this is a tastier feast
Than eating larded bread before a fire.)
It is not known who made the prints for First suckes, but the poems have been attributed to Thomas Nashe. Sonnet 6 is evidently about Kit Marlin, and hints at his Catholic (or even atheist) proclivities. The young man in a gondola in the accompanying print bears a striking resemblance to the Kit of the Corpus portrait, and he is punningly referred to as ‘Merlin’ (cf. Robert Greene in Epistle to Perimedes, ‘. . . mad and scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlin’s race’). The sonnet tells how young Merlin is most capably projected into the realm of the sexually experienced by one Bianca, ‘a cunning whore of Venice’, and how she feeds him fat black olives, takes the pips from his lips, sucks them quite clean and threads them into a rosary, for protection against the pox. The young man is ‘not yet two score’, which, if he is Kit, would make the year 1583. ‘Bianca’ is quite possibly the same ‘La signora Bianca’ who is twice mentioned on a list of ‘public whores condemned for transgression of the laws’, and fined ten and then thirty ducats. Venice was famous for its courtesans – they had their own ghetto, the Carampane, where they paraded on the Ponte delle Tette (literally ‘Bridge of Tits’) naked from the waist up (the authorities thought the sight of bare breasts would help prevent sodomy). This was in singular contrast to conservative English attitudes. Contemporary English manuals such as Thomas Cogan’s The Haven of Health advised frisky young men to control their ardour by sitting on cold stone, plunging themselves into icy water, or dousing their genitals in vinegar. Yet in Venice there were catalogues and guides to pleasures and prices, and many a young Englishman’s first carnal thrash occurred between the canals. Sir Philip Sidney cavorted in Venice when he was twenty, though a young Sir Henry Wotton (one day to be British ambassador there), ‘not being made of stone’ fled the wicked ladies to the safety of academic Padua.
If Kit was busy losing his virginity in Venice in 1583, he would have had to have been quick about it. He was away from Cambridge for a maximum of seven weeks. Andrew Badoer, an envoy in a hurry in the early sixteenth century, made it from Venice to London in twenty-six days, riding ‘incessantly, day and night’ – though he was in his sixties, and grizzled ‘nor do I know what more could have been expected of a man at my age’. Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, called the Queen of Hungary ‘a virago’ because she rode from Augsburg to Flanders (part of a possible route between England and Venice) in thirteen days, ‘a distance a man could scarce do in 17’. In 1589 Henry Cavendish, admittedly travelling a long and leisurely route via Hamburg and down through ‘Jarmany’, took nearly a month to get to Venice. It could be that Nashe sets the event in Venice because of the racy, romantic image the city enjoyed, and that it in fact took place in the stews of London. On the other hand, Richard Lassels, a tutor who had been five times to Italy, lamented that the courtesans of Venice were such an attraction that some young men would ‘travel one month for a night’s lodging with an impudent woman’. Kit did have a rosary made of olive pits. He kept it for years, though it eventually ended up among the possessions of the enigmatic Elizabethan astrologer Dr John Dee, and was discovered in 1662 in a secret drawer of a cedar chest, by a confectioner called Robert Jones.
Fast travel and expensive living could only mean one thing: Kit had another source of income. The evidence is elusive and needs careful sifting, but it would seem that by 1583 he was already in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham, at first (in modern-day spy parlance) as an ‘irregular’ – used only occasionally, while his worth was being tested – but after 1584 as an active member of the network. His links with Sir Francis Walsingham could even have begun as early as 1581, when he was befriended by Thomas Watson and Thomas Walsingham in Paris. Also in Paris at the time was one Nicholas Faunt, who like the two Thomases was working for Sir Francis, and was a Bene’t man. Though his time at college pre-dated Kit’s, it is very possibly Faunt who made the first introduction to the Walsinghams. Recruitment in 1581 might explain Kit’s presence in Rheims that year, and would make more sense of that curious visit to Navarre. The English would have been interested in intelligence from Henri’s court. After the Duke of Anjou, Henri was next in line to the French throne, and though the champion of the Huguenots, he had briefly converted to Catholicism after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and was now being courted again by Catholics. We know that the agent Anthony Bacon was gathering information about developments concerning Henri, and passing it on to Walsingham in 1584. Kit’s nascent Catholicism would not have been a barrier to his recruitment. Indeed, Walsingham made something of a speciality of ‘turning’ Catholics, and had a number of supposedly Catholic agents spying for him. With all the trappings of a new convert, Kit was ideally placed to inform on the activities of the Jesuit missionaries who had newly arrived at Cambridge in 1581. Perhaps, also, it was Kit who was reporting back on Byrd’s circle at Harling-ton in the summer of 1582.
Kit had entered an uneasy world of duplicity and betrayal, a realm of cold falsehood and calculated hypocrisy, where trust had been sucked hollow by cynicism. Information was its currency, and worth was judged by tangible results. Just what moved him to such an existence? To some extent it was the sheer pressure of necessity: he needed the money. When his time at Cambridge came to an end, the cobbler’s son from Canterbury would have had few options (given that he already seemed intent on reneging on his scholarship obligation to enter the Anglican church). He could become a tutor perhaps, a secretary to some notable, or even a poet in an aristocrat’s retinue, traipsing along forever in the train of high society. But this was not Kit’s style. For a young man of ‘vaulting ambition’, who like Tamburlaine felt that he had ‘an aspiring mind’ and a soul ‘whose faculties can comprehend the wondrous architecture of the world … climbing after knowledge infinite’, who was restless, rebellious, willing to live on his wits and certain