filled with gold. Never was there cobbler’s son so full of pride. Immediately he did something that no-one in his family had ever dreamed of doing, something that at once showed soaring insolence, announced his arrival in society, and cryptically boasted about what he was up to. He had his portrait painted.
The old Master’s Lodge at Bene’t College housed a wood-panelled gallery dedicated to the display of paintings depicting important national figures, notable college academics and other worthy alumni. With astonishing hubris for someone of such youth and humble origins, when he left the college in 1587 Christopher gifted his picture to the Master – and indeed in the years that immediately followed, his success in London made him arguably one of Bene’t’s living luminaries, perhaps warranting a portrait prominently on show. After the incident at Deptford in 1593 and his public disgrace, Christopher Marley’s painting suddenly disappeared. It resurfaced at Cambridge only in 1953 (a numerical anagram that some scholars find intriguing in itself). A passing student noticed two panels of wood sticking up out of a pile of builders’ rubble when the Master’s Lodge was being renovated. Though faded, scratched and splattered by rain, they bore the shadow of a Tudor portrait. This fact was later confirmed by the National Portrait Gallery, and restoration work began. The Canadian scholar Calvin Hoffman was the first to suggest, in 1955, that the portrait was of Marlowe, and subsequent research using a computer programme that ages faces, convincingly connects the subject of this portrait with that of the painting (known as the Chandos portrait) made of him in his forties (see Appendix II).
Poets and players of the period did sometimes hire painters to record their likenesses for posterity – or rather to contrive an image of themselves and project it into the world, showing them in the way they wanted to be seen. Like successful merchants, they commissioned portraits to show that they had arrived in their particular profession. Even people involved in seamier activities had paintings made as mementoes of significant moments in their labours. In 1586 the plotter Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators posed for portraits on the eve of what they thought would be the toppling of Elizabeth and the raising of Mary Queen of Scots to her rightful position. Kit, at the age of twenty-one, was brazenly celebrating his arrival in society, and hinting perhaps that he was in the secret service. He posed with his arms folded, not a common posture in Elizabethan portraits. Sir Roy Strong interprets this as indicating a fashionable melancholy, the humour of the disappointed lover and those of artistic temperament. But it can also indicate that the sitter has something to hide. A. D. Wraight suggests that the pose imparts the message ‘I am one who is entrusted to keep secrets.’ And Charles Nicholl goes so far as to wonder whether he has a dagger up his sleeve, no doubt to ‘stab, as occasion serves’. An ideal posture, then, for the dreamy young poet who has entered the world of espionage.
Two inscriptions appear in the top left-hand corner of the Corpus portrait. The one, ‘ætatis suae 21 1585’ gives Kit’s age when the picture was painted. The other is a motto that reads ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit’ – ‘That which nourishes me destroys me’. Some take this as a statement of the consuming passion of unrequited love. Others see it as a confession of Kit’s predicament at Cambridge – he is under obligation to the Parker Scholarship, which is paying his way, to take holy orders, while the thought of life as an Anglican priest appals him. But the motto is also eerily prescient. It reflects the paradox of Christopher’s new world, a life (as we have seen) simultaneously fuelled and consumed by deception. He is beginning a brilliant new career, but one that by definition is infected with the germ of his downfall. As he moves deeper into the world of espionage, he comes closer to the moment where someone wants him dead, a step nearer to Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford. He seems to have a disturbing premonition of what he is letting himself in for. The motto recurs decades later, in a sonnet Kit wrote not long before he died, in which he seems to regret the youthful fury that, if it did not cause his death, very nearly destroyed his life:
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it is nourish’d by [my italics].
(Sonnet 73)
Kit stares out of the painting with eyes rather darker than in later portraits and an insolent, supercilious expression, matched by a half-curled smile. It is just a twitch short of a sneer. He is pale, almost pallid, but with a touch of youthful colour (or is it the flush of temper?) in his cheeks. A downy moustache tops a wispy ‘mouse-eaten’ beard that ‘groweth but here a tuft and there a tuft’, softly following his jaw line. His folded arms give him a slightly defensive look, but a full lower lip adds an air of sullen defiance, an edge of spoilt child, of someone who knows he can offend and has the protection of people more powerful than the viewer.
And he certainly was transgressing. He is blatantly defying both university dress regulations and the Sumptuary Laws. His bouffant hair is nowhere near the ‘polled, notted or rounded’ style that university authorities required. The open-throated shirt he wears, with its flopping collar of gossamer-fine linen, ‘a falling band of cobweb lawn’, is at the absolute peak of fashion in 1585. So is his magnificent doublet – close-fitting with prominent ‘wings’ on the shoulders and big padded sleeves, narrowing ‘bishop-style’ to a tight wrist. It is made of black fabric slashed to reveal a reddish velvet lining, and adorned with a dazzling set of huge, decorative gold buttons, up each sleeve as well as down the front – in substance, style and splendour contravening every rule of sober dressing. Here is a young man who is not only breaking the law, but has the defiance to have himself painted while doing so. A young man who goes even further and publicly hands over this evidence to the very authority who should discipline him. A young man who is certain of the protection of very powerful friends.
He is also a young man on a spree.* His spending in the buttery in 1585 spiralled from a few paltry pennies a week to a heady 18d and 21d extravagances. The portrait is a flash of prestige, its very existence a boast; it is painted on high-quality oak, sawn radially on the tree – better than most other paintings of the period in the college. His doublet, Charles Nicholl estimates, even second-hand would have cost thirty shillings or more (about £750 by today’s reckoning). Perhaps the only reason for the folded arms is to show off as many as possible of its forty oversized gold buttons.
Once again all is not what it seems. Kit had borrowed the doublet from a fellow novice spy, Roger Walton, who had been a page to the old Earl of Northumberland, and like Kit moved in the circle of Henry Percy, the young ‘Wizard Earl’. By 1586 Walton was working in France for Sir Francis Walsingham, and a short while later the doublet (no longer quite so fashionable, but still worthy of remark) would again be captured for posterity when the English ambassador in Paris complained to Sir Francis of a young man who sounds remarkably like Kit himself, but whom the ambassador thinks is Roger Walton. This young disrupter ‘to some … showeth himself a great Papist, to others a Protestant, but as they take him that haunt him most, he hath neither God nor religion, a very evil condition, a swearer without measure and tearer of God, a notable whoremaster … a little above twenty, lean-faced and slender, somewhat tall, complexion a little sallowish, most goeth appareled in a doublet of black carke, cut upon a dark reddish velvet’.
We know Kit himself was in France during his second long absence from college in 1585, in the late summer. He appears momentarily at the baths at Plombières, which suggests he had again been at Rheims or possibly in Strasbourg, where Walsingham also ran agents and which was a popular destination for troupes of English comedians.* This is the first hint we have of what was to become a lifelong predilection for public bathing. At times the reason for this may have been plain lust – the vapour baths or ‘stews’ of London were notorious brothels for both sexes – but house rules at Plombières stated quite clearly that: ‘All prostitutes and immodest girls are forbidden to enter the said baths, or to approach the same within five hundred paces, under penalty of being whipped at the four corners of the said baths …’. It seems more likely that one of the ‘untold virgins’ that followed Bradstriet’s players had not been so virginal after all, and that despite the protection of the olive-pip rosary