History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt

inoculation) plunges it into a fountain, creating ‘a seething bath, which yet men prove/Against strange maladies a sovereign cure … I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,/And thither hied, a sad distempered guest,/But found no cure.’ In Sonnet 154 he once again goes for a cure to a bath that is ‘a healthful remedy/For men diseased’, but finds that neither treatment nor disease diminishes his ardour: ‘Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love’. Was he suffering from the more dangerous, often fatal, syphilis? In later life he shows a good knowledge of the disease and supposed cures, such as ‘villainous saffron’ in All’s Well That Ends Well; or mercury fumigation, as Doll Tearsheet undergoes in Henry V. Timon displays a detailed awareness of such symptoms as baldness and disintegration of the nose when he berates Phrynia and Timandra in Timon of Athens; and Lucio in Measure for Measure makes one of the earliest references in English literature to the disease being transmitted by a drinking vessel.

      The glimpse we are given of Kit’s visit to Plombières is through a document written by an unnamed secretary of the essayist Montaigne, noting a conversation held in the seething waters between ‘an Englishman T. Larkkin’ and his master. The same secretary had, during an earlier visit, helped Montaigne write up his journal when the essayist was too ill to do so himself. That document survives, but the fragment mentioning Larkin appears to be part of a second journal, now lost.* Montaigne had just finished his second term of office as Mayor of Bordeaux and was taking his family wandering, as he put it, to avoid the plague. Five years earlier, while on a grand tour of the spas of Germany and Italy in an attempt to cure his gallstones, he had especially enjoyed Plombières, and was back for more – astonishing regulars who came only to bathe by also drinking four pints of the waters every morning. He particularly liked the sweet, cool waters of the Queen’s Bath, which he said tasted of liquorice with a faint tang of iron. Montaigne and his man stayed at the Angel, where the cooks were good but the wine and bread bad, and where the chambers had private galleries that gave access to the baths. Kit’s lodgings were less grand.

      The pair took to the waters in their regulation skimpy briefs (Montaigne notes that although the baths were mixed, it was considered ‘indecent for the men to bathe otherwise than quite naked, saving a little pair of drawers, and for the women, saving a shift’), sitting on the steps of the large oval principal bath, separated from each other by stable-like bars and sheltered from the sun by slatted planks. Hot water bubbled up from underground springs, as cooler waters from across the valley flowed in ‘to temper the bath according to the wish of those taking it’, and Kit, who had dipped into the new edition of Montaigne’s Essais, eagerly pestered the older man into conversation.

      At first he singularly failed to engage the philosopher, but after a confession of his own ‘painefull pissing’, managed to elicit a long monologue on the nature of Montaigne’s stools, ‘voiding gravel, black threads and bubbles that are a long time in bursting’, ‘wind about the groin’ and the benefits of various purges and waters, all faithfully recorded by the secretary. (Further details of Montaigne’s ailments are expounded at length in the journal of his travels in Italy.) But buoyed by his feats with Bradstriet’s men, Kit appears to have tried a different approach, posing as a successful poet of the new drama. This had a little more success, provoking a discussion of the ‘great conflict and power of imagination’, and of the quest of the writer:

       Mont: It is … le passage! To examine the verie movement of the mind, and ye the Poet should pierce and usurp the senses of other men.

       Lark: Are not Actors but the ciphers of the tale?

       Mont: The sacred inspiration that stirs thee as Poet unto a choler, unto griefe, unto fury and beyond thyself, shoulde by thee strike and enter into the Actor and thus the multitude …

      The following day, Kit was, according to the secretary, given the customary viewing of Montaigne’s famous medal, struck on one side with the inscription, Que sçais-je? – ‘What do I know?’ – and on the other, in Greek, ‘Restraint’ – a virtue which did not at that time hold much appeal for him. They spoke of doubt and knowledge, the master exhorting his disciple to question and re-question, urging that it was ‘but his thinking that made the taste of good or bad’, and that he should look to within himself to find truth – advice that the fledgling spy was not perhaps ready for. The secretary records that his employer was ‘animated by the spirit of young Mr Larkkin’, who spoke in both Latin and French, but the dialogue seems to have run aground on the subjects of sensuality and affection – on friendship, physical beauty and the love permitted by the Greeks. On the third day Montaigne was reluctant to speak. On the fourth he appears to have relented, but began on safer ground with tales of the Indians of Brasil who had lived thousands of years before Adam, disappointed that Kit had not read his essay ‘On Cannibals’. Once again Kit seems to have offended the Frenchman, and after that there is silence.

      By April of 1586 (during yet another lengthy absence from Cambridge), Kit was back with the English comedians.* This time not with Bradstriet’s company, but with a troupe that followed the Earl of Leicester, into the bowels of battle in the Low Countries. No doubt Leicester thought the players appropriate to his prestige as self-styled governor-general, though it was not unknown for musicians and actors to accompany military leaders to war. The composer Claudio Monteverdi travelled as maestro di cappella with the Duke of Mantua into battle with the Turks in 1595, a harrowing experience he recalled vividly for decades, and which emerged in his madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi or ‘Madrigals of Love and War’, in his setting of battle scenes from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata