Hello, everybody, and welcome to a little bonus episode of the Classic English Literature Subcast. Now, the subcast is usually the place where rhyme gets even more reason, but today’s session is a little bit different. This is my tabloid episode, full of gossip and surmise, unsubstantiated rumor, wild speculation, and just enough evidence to make the whole thing deliciously plausible. Perhaps even true.
Well, what is it? What news on the Rialto? I wonder if some of you, having listened to the previous two episodes on Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, wondered why I never mentioned the allegation that their rivalry was more than artistic. That the violence and betrayal they cast upon the stage would come to their real lives.
Yes, I’m here to spill the tea. Is that still a thing kids say? Spill the tea? Means “tell me the gossip.” Curious phrase. Seems to have originated in the queer community, maybe back in the 1980s, then made its way into Black culture. It turns up in print for the first time in a 1994 novel: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In this reference, “T” is just the capital letter, meaning truth, so “spill the truth.” Almost inevitably, the idea of spilling gets associated with a liquid, then a beverage, then tea the drink.
Now the “spill” part is mildly interesting, too. That probably is kind of cognate with the saying “spill the beans,” which means largely the same thing. If you mouse around on the WWW, you’ll see lots of explanations claiming that “spill the beans” goes back to a voting system in ancient Athens. This is almost assuredly bollocks, not least because the first attestation of the idiom comes from the United States in 1908. A better explanation is that the word “spill” meant to destroy originally, then acquired the meanings of the related word “spoil,” which gives us the connotations of disclose or divulge in this instance. Spill doesn’t mean to let a liquid loose until the 14th century. “Beans” had become a metaphor for information in the previous century. Why? Lost in the mists of time, I’m afraid.
So, given all that, if any cool kids can hear my voice, please drop a message on the social networks and let me know if “spill the tea” is still an up-to-the-minute way of saying “tell me the news.”
Of course, if you are listening to this podcast, and were interested in the foregoing digression, you are ipso facto probably not a cool kid. I’m sorry, but that is a fact. You are probably quite nice, compassionate, have a lovely personality and a warm sense of humor. You clearly are intelligent. But cool you are not. But would you please pass this on to anyone cool kids you happen to know? Cheers.
Right, so let’s take the Way-Back machine to the year 1593, an annus horribilis in London. Foul whisperings were abroad that Spain may attempt another invasion. The economy weakened and unemployment rose. The Elizabethan police state stepped up its campaign against recusant Catholics and Jews, nonconforming Protestants, and atheists. Plus, the weather was simply ghastly! And, the plague made its last major tour stop of the 16th century, killing upwards of 1000 people a week over the course of several months. About 15,000 people died in a city of probably about 100,000, so this outbreak touched every one. Authorities imposed quarantines, which means, for our purposes, the theaters were shut down. Wary and terrified Londoners, as people often do in times of crisis, began to search for scapegoats, conspiracies to explain the unexplainable. Immigrants and refugees became those scapegoats, especially the estimated 4300 French, Dutch, and Belgians who resided in London.
In lieu of crypto-fascist news outlets and websites, the Elizabethans had pamphlets and broadsides, which were basically pamphlets printed on one side of a large piece of paper and thereby suitable for posting in public places. In May of that year, a bit of xenophobic doggerel (a term that here means quite bad poetry) appeared on the door of the Austin Friars’ Dutch Church. It begins:
Ye strangers that do inhabit this land
Note this same writing, do it understand,
Conceit it well for the safeguard of your lives,
Your goods, your children, and your dearest wives.
The diatribe goes on to complain of foreigners destroying our economy, taking our jobs, forcing the raising of rents, instigating wars, and every other libel we can still hear today from nativist populists.
“When Holland sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The poem ends as chillingly as it began:
our swords are whet, to shed their blood
And for a truth let it be understood:
Fly, Fly, & never return.
What makes this otherwise sadly run-of-the-mill bit of hate speech remarkable is how it was signed. The author signs the piece “Tamberlaine.”
Despite London’s general malaise in 1593, Christopher Marlowe, the author of a smash hit play called “Tamburlaine,” was having a rather good year. His new play, The Massacre at Paris, was set to debut at the Rose Theatre, he was a young famous man of some wealth, reputation, and influence. The only thing that could spoil his day was that somebody might not be charmed by his insouciant and iconoclastic demeanor, especially where religion and politics were concerned. And then some smart-aleck signed that damn poem “Tamburlaine.” God!
You see, given the constant threat of Catholic Spain, the weak economy, and the Pope’s excommunication (which permitted anyone to kill her), Queen Elizabeth was quite happy to have an influx of continental Protestants. She didn’t need anyone scaring them off and emboldening her enemies. Furthermore, Marlowe’s reputation as an atheist not only marked him as a heretic (a crime at the time) but also as a traitor, given that the monarch headed both church and state under the 1558 reinstatement of the Act of Supremacy. The last thing Good Queen Bess needed was some deviant celebrity mouthing off about the damn foreigners.
So . . . next day, agents of the Privy Council arrested Thomas Kyd. Yeah, Kyd . . . not Marlowe. Why? Alas, who can fathom the bureaucratic mind? There was a general feeling among the great and powerful that theater-folk were all a bunch of atheists and homosexuals, so round up the usual suspects! The two writers had been roommates for a bit back in 1591 when they had shared a wealthy patron: Earl Somebody or Other, no one’s really sure who, and there had been something of a falling out since then. Kyd believed he had been ratted on by an informer, maybe a grass named Thomas Drury. Kyd’s lodgings were ransacked and, lo and behold, no libels were found. But, there was an “Arianist tract” and that was good enough to prompt a bit of torturing – no, uh, enhanced interrogation.
Arianism, by the by, is an early form of nonorthodox Christianity, from the third century, that maintains that Jesus Christ is subordinate to God the Father and not equal to him. A rather poor understanding of Greek also led to the charge that the tract asserted Jesus’ homosexuality.
Anyway, they presumably put Kyd on the rack, after which he affirmeth he had the tract from C. Marley. This C. Marley was a right bastard, says Kyd. He held “monstrous opinions,” and would “jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at princ[es], and strive in argum[en]t to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or wrytt by prophets & such holie men.”
Oh, my!
That’s not all! “He would report St. John to be our savior . . . and . . . that Christ did love him with an extraordinary love. . . . bedfellow to Christ, and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom.
He said Jesus was gay for John! Outrageous!
Oh, there’s more! He says Moses and St. Paul are frauds, Christ was illegitimate, the sacrament would be better in a tobacco pipe, that if you don’t love tobacco and boys, you’re a fool, that he could make great counterfeit coins, that the angel Gabriel was a pimp, Mary a harlot, and the Holy Spirit her trick.
Seems like Kyd was throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, but the agent Richard Baines took all this down and presented it as evidence. Hmmm. . . . C. Marley. Christopher Marlowe. Near as dammit!
The Privy Council summoned Tamburlaine’s author but, before he could be questioned or tried, he was killed in that rather unlikely and completely uncoordinated brawl in Deptford. The surprising turns life takes.
Reminds me of a little thing that happened when I was about 6. I’d been given a box of 64 Crayola crayons and I unleashed my inner abstract expressionist upon the freshly sheetrocked and painted bedroom walls. My mother, evidently a philistine, did not appreciate the homage to Jackson Pollock and threatened me with the 1970s version of the rack – the pussywillow switch. I immediately confessed that the vandal was my little brother Joshua! “You signed your own name!” my mother furiously pointed out. I don’t recall anything after that.
I imagine that Marlowe was a bit cagier than my 6 year old self. Why would he post something designed to disturb the populace and bring the forces of law and order down upon him, refer to his own works, like the new Massacre at Paris, in it, and then sign it as his most notorious character? Mind boggled, but the bureaucratic mind is boggle-proof, ladies and gentlemen.
Kyd never recovered from the experience. He had already lost his patron. Now, his body and spirit broken, his reputation shattered, he died deeply in debt in 1594. To add insult to injury, the church in which he was buried burned in the 1666 fire of London. Nobody bothered to rebuild it.
A strange story indeed. We’ve never found out who was responsible for the Dutch Church Libel, but even a cursory knowledge of poetry would reveal the author was not of either Kyd’s or Marlowe’s caliber. Though I have to say, like, if we were sure it was one of the two, and I had to pick, I’d say Kyd. There’s a bombastic declamatory style, the irregular mixing of rhymed and unrhymed lines, the use of repetition as rhyme. Not fingerprints, surely, not DNA evidence. But there are some vague similarities. Yes, Marlowe’s blank verse too could be thundering, but he was able to lend it a smoothness better than was Kyd. But bureaucrats are hardly known for their poetic sensibility and probably presumed, like all people of an older generation regarding the art of the younger, that “it all sounds the same anyway.”