THE GREEKS

ATHENS, 534 BC

Nothing changes. In the highly competitive world of West End and Broadway theatre, amid the arguments about funding and casting, and the audience complaints that the plays are too long, too short, too serious, not serious enough, too political, too musical, too difficult or too idiotic, spare a thought for the Greeks. Theatre as we know it, with actors, scripts, and the rest, started as a competition, the Great Dionysia. Every year in Athens, at a specially built auditorium near the Temple of Dionysis, three playwrights (the Greek word originally meant ‘teacher’) were pitched against one another. Each had to write, produce and perform not one but four plays, three tragedies (the word ‘tragedy’ meant ‘goat-song’ but nobody knows why) and a satyr play, known collectively as a tetralogy.

Up to 20,000 people (all men) crammed into the auditorium (supposed to seat only 14,000) each spring for the biggest annual gathering in the Greek world: the entire male population would turn up to see the plays as well as to receive honours and celebrate their good fortune. Greek architects perfected a method of design that allowed a word to be spoken on the stage and heard at the back of the enormous auditorium, a trick that has never been replicated in our own time.

Drama means a ‘doing’, or an ‘enactment’, so the actors couldn’t just speak to the audience as in a poetry reading, but also had to move, sing, dance and interact with each other. Greek drama used ancient myths and stories, all with female characters, although, of course, there were no female actors. The actors played Gods and kings, with a traditional background of a chorus, who were the narrators, storytellers representing the common people.

Drama flourished in the fifth century BC and many playwrights competed for the honour of the first prize. But there were three who competed against one another in the Great Dionysia whose work we still see performed in our own theatres – and all three died in a strange manner. They lived in an Athens devoted to the competition of the plays and the individuality of expression.

Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC) was the first. He began competing in 499 BC and won his first victory in 484 BC, eventually winning a total of thirteen competitions with thirteen tetralogies. He may have written as many as ninety plays; the titles of 83 have come down to us, with seven plays and many fragments surviving. The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy of Greek tragedies that we know were produced together.

Sophocles (496–406 BC) was the golden boy of Greek theatre. Charming and handsome, a prodigious lover of men and women, a politician, soldier and ambassador, as well as a great personal friend of the ruler, Pericles, he boasted a popularity such that, in the weeks prior to his first playwriting competition, excitement in Athens reached fever pitch. To prevent a riot, the panel of judges had to be replaced by a council of generals. Sophocles was awarded first prize at the competition, even defeating Aeschylus.

His success as a playwright was not, however, matched by his skills as an actor: while most dramatists took part in their own productions, Sophocles was forced to abandon the stage when audiences complained that his voice was thin and reedy. Although he completed more than 120 tragedies, only seven survive, of which Antigone is the earliest.

Euripides (480–406 BC) was a different kettle of fish altogether. He wrote about real people and their problems, even though his stories, like those of his compatriots, were of heroes and victories. In his own lifetime, he was the least successful of the three men, winning first prize at the Dionysia only four times. Yet more of his plays have survived than those written by Aeschylus and Sophocles combined.

He was undoubtedly the bad boy of Greek tragedy, and his plays are modern in a way that those of Aeschylus and Sophocles are not – he was an acute observer of human nature, and the father of the psychological drama. Sophocles said that, while he himself depicted men as they ought to be, Euripides depicted them as they really are. Euripides is arguably the darkest and most disturbing of the Greek playwrights. He questions authority and is fascinated by the oppressed: women, barbarians and slaves are more than just background on the Euripidean stage. His was the unwanted voice of conscience in his age – a man unafraid to point out the lies with which a civilisation comforts itself. He was not, of course, very popular with his fellow Athenians. In the end, the frenzied descent into chaos he so often imagined was truest to Athens’s fate. Infighting and dirty politics compromised the city’s good name, and Athens fell to her hated enemy, Sparta, just a few years after Euripides’s death.

All three playwrights met improbable fates, Aeschylus’s being the most bizarre. He died aged 68 in Gela, Sicily, where he spent time at the request of a friendly tyrant, Hieron. It was said that an eagle grasping a tortoise flew high into the air and, mistaking Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock, accidentally dropped the tortoise on his head, killing him.

Sophocles lived to a great old age, ninety, which was almost unheard of in the fifth century BC. Shortly before his death, his son, Iophon, took him to court, claiming that his father was too mentally infirm to manage his own affairs. Sophocles decided to prove his sanity by reciting a portion of Oedipus at Colonus, which he was composing at the time. ‘If I am Sophocles,’ he said, ‘I am not senile, and if I am senile, I am not Sophocles.’ The court was so moved by his recitation that the case was immediately dismissed but soon after, flushed with his success in court, and giving an ill-advised public reading of Antigone, he tried and failed to recite a fatally long sentence in a single breath. Rather than take a breath in the middle of a sentence, he expired on the spot. Not a bad way for a poet to go.

And poor old Euripides? He, as usual, got the worst of it. In 408 BC, feeling unloved and unwanted by his fellow Athenians, and having lost the Dionysia yet again, he left Athens for the court of King Archelaus of Macedon and there wrote his masterpiece, The Bacchae. The story of his death in 406 BC, the same year as that of Sophocles, is probably a myth but a compelling one, as it gained currency among the Athenians and gives an insight into what they thought of him. A vengeful woman, whether a mistress or a wife is unknown, is said to have set a pack of wild dogs on him and they tore him to shreds.

As a postscript, after his death his son brought Euripides’s last three plays, including The Bacchae, back to Athens for production. There, at the Great Dionysia, the same festival where Euripides had lost to now-forgotten playwrights so many times, The Bacchae and its companion pieces won first prize.

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH AND AFTERLIFE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

ELEANOR BULL’S ROOMING HOUSE, 1593

Of all the pretenders to the throne of Shakespeare, by far the most exciting is Christopher Marlowe. As a playwright, Kit Marlowe was the first to use English blank verse, later taken up by Shakespeare, and both playwrights were writing for the same company of actors, the Strange company, at the same time. They were friends, colleagues, and, as was the custom of the time, they stole from anywhere they could whenever they could get away with it. The influence of one upon the other is obvious in the writings of them both. But is there a stranger story to explain that?

Born on 6 February 1564, the eldest son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Marlowe was from all accounts a brilliant scholar. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself picked him out as a deserving boy and provided a scholarship to Cambridge University, clearly intending to groom him for a high-flying career in the church. But Kit had other ideas.

As soon as he completed his education in 1587, he moved to London to be the dramatist for an acting company of the Lords Strange and Admiral – the Admiral’s Men. Marlowe’s most significant plays – The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine the Great, Edward the Second and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus – were all written between 1587 and 1593, along with a number of poems, dramatic odes, political reports, translations from Latin and what we might today call journalism. His most ambitious work was the heroic epic Tamburlaine the Great, a play in two parts, of five acts each. This was composed in poetic form, which was not unusual, but it had the distinction of being the first play written in English blank verse. Where Marlowe led, Shakespeare followed.

But Kit was more, much more, than just a writer. He was one of the brightest lights of his generation, although Shakespeare’s literary prestige eclipsed his during their lifetimes and has far outstripped him since their deaths. Much of what we know about him is, at least, highly coloured and often unreliable, but then he was one of the most colourful characters of his age, with a finger in many pies.

He was certainly both a spy and a common criminal. He was, for example, expelled from Holland for counterfeiting gold coins. As early as 1580, when Kit was only sixteen, he took leave from his studies in Cambridge to take on a secret mission for the Queen and, for the rest of his life, whenever he got into hot water, he would be mysteriously released by intercession from ‘on high’. In 1589 he was charged with the murder of William Bradley and sent to Newgate Prison, but was acquitted after two weeks. It was not the last time the quick-tempered author was arrested and jailed, however: in 1592 an injunction was brought against him because of a street fight in which a man was killed. He got off that one, too.

Marlowe dabbled in alchemy, reportedly converted to Catholicism, was openly homosexual, even writing a same-sex affair into his Edward II at a time when suggesting a monarch was or could be guilty of what was seen as deviant sexual activity – and, remember, the monarch at the time was the Virgin Queen herself, Elizabeth I, whose affairs were many and notorious – was treason. He had powerful enemies but, for most of his life, even more powerful friends, such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Walsingham, head of the secret service, whose brother was probably one of Marlowe’s lovers.

He was accused of atheism, blasphemy, subversion and black magic, and, finally, it was the charge of atheism that might have done for him if the authorities had been able to find him. The rumours had become too insistent to be ignored. The agents of the Queen’s Privy Council went to his lodgings to arrest him yet again. He was out, so they took his friend and roommate, Thomas Kyd, and tried to get him to incriminate Marlowe. Under torture, Kyd declared that a document in their apartments denying the divinity of Christ belonged to Marlowe (see also ‘Thomas Kyd and the Bridewell’).

Two notorious sayings, either of which would have been grounds for arrest, and famously attributed to Marlowe by a contemporary, were, ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’ – in other words, that Christ himself was a homosexual – and ‘they that love not Tobacco & Boies [boys] are fooles’. Even then, none of this got to the Teflon Marlowe.

Many have complained that Kit never left an authentic autograph, nor a folio so that his work could be authenticated, and never had his work published. Many of his existing works are in fragments, and proving he wrote them is difficult if not impossible.

But why should he have done so? He was only 29 years old on 30 May 1593, and had every reason to believe he would live long enough to write much more. He was in considerable trouble, certainly, but his friends and his quick wits had always saved him before, and surely would again. Yes, he was ducking the Privy Council, but a man needed to eat, and he had a meeting with three of his friends, all dodgy, and all connected, as he was, to the secret service.

They met at a lodging house above a tavern in Deptford, owned by Eleanor Bull. In addition to Kit, there were Ingram Frizer, a known con artist and moneylender, Nicholas Skeres, a fence and Frizer’s frequent accomplice, and Robert Poley, an occasional courier/spy for Her Majesty’s secret service, who had boasted of his ability to lie convincingly under any circumstances.

Exactly what happened that night is still unclear, despite hundreds of scholarly papers and forensic investigations, but sometime after the four friends and co-conspirators had consumed a good deal of food and drink, a brawl broke out between them and, by the end of it, Marlowe was dead, stabbed through the eye. His killer, Frizer, was quickly pardoned by the Queen on grounds of self-defence, and his employers did not fire or take any other action against him.

According to the records of the coroner’s inquest, Marlowe and his friend Ingram Frizer had begun to wrangle over payment of the bill. Marlowe wrenched Frizer’s dagger from its sheath, and struck him twice about the head with it. In the struggle Frizer got the dagger. ‘And so it befell, in that affray,’ the official record tells us, ‘that the said Ingram, in the defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye.’

But what really happened? Was he murdered on the orders of the Earl of Essex, the Queen’s current lover? Or was his death ordered by foreign powers who thought he knew too much? Or was the deed commissioned by a gay nobleman fearful that Marlowe’s recklessness would result in the unmasking of his sexuality? Then again, could this have been political murder organised by Sir Francis Walsingham, whose man Frizer was following an adventure that had gone wrong.

Most intriguingly, was Kit really dead? Because of the timing of his death and the lack of retribution against the killer, some scholars believe that the playwright’s demise was faked and that he took up a new identity. But why? There are several possibilities, including a desire to escape the Privy Council and a wish to engage in further spying activities for Walsingham.

But could this new identity be that of William Shakespeare? It is certainly true that Shakespeare’s greatest works were created after the ‘death’ of Christopher Marlowe. Kit had the education that Shakespeare did not and had travelled widely all over Europe on spy business and was therefore familiar with settings for the plays, settings such as Venice and Verona, where Shakespeare never went. He was himself a brilliant playwright and would have known the Elizabethan theatrical territory through which Shakespeare had to navigate. Suppose, just suppose, that Shakespeare was, after all, just a middle-class grammar school boy from Stratford-on-Avon who became an actor and then a figurehead for the political ne’er-do-well, Christopher Marlowe.

The records show that Christopher Marlowe was buried in the churchyard at St Nicholas’s, Deptford, three days after the brawl that killed him.

Maybe . . .

THOMAS KYD AND THE BRIDEWELL

CITY OF LONDON, 1594

The theatre has its share of happy breaks and dazzling careers but it also has plenty of incidences of bad luck, of talent unfulfilled, of wrong turnings . . . One such, which came to a brief and bloody end, was that of the playwright Thomas Kyd, who was born in London in 1558, but died broken and destitute at the age of 36 (which was young, even by Elizabethan standards) in December 1594. The man laid to rest in a poor man’s grave should have been wealthy, successful and alive. What went wrong?

Hardly remembered today outside academic circles, in his time Kyd was at least as important a writer as his friends, Marlowe and Shakespeare; and he should have lived to leave a similar legacy.

Kyd was the author of several influential plays, including the enormously popular Spanish Tragedy (1589), with its gallons of onstage blood, and Hamlet (c. 1587), not to be confused with Shakespeare’s famous play of 1603. However, when Shakespeare wrote his version of the story of the Danish prince, his play drew heavily (not least in its title and central character) on the Thomas Kyd play, which is referred to today by scholars as the ‘Ur Hamlet’.

Kyd’s Hamlet and Shakespeare’s have some obvious similarities: the plot involves death and double-dealings at a foreign court; it has a central figure (a murder victim) called Horatio, and a character who, like Hamlet, seeks revenge for his relative’s death and does so while pretending to be mad. There’s also a play within a play, during which in Kyd’s case the villains arc murdered, whereas in Shakespeare’s version Hamlet’s guilty stepfather, Claudius, merely watches a play that mirrors his own crime. Both plays were based on, and inspired by, Seneca’s Roman tragedies.

Moving as of right among the theatrical elite, Kyd shared rooms with his friend, the playwright Christopher Marlowe (the writer of such classic plays as Tamburlaine, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta), who also met an early death. Indeed, the two deaths were probably (though unprovably) related. And that, as it turned out, was probably Kyd’s problem. In his association with Christopher Marlowe he flew too near the sun like the mythical Icarus and was destroyed in the process.

Marlowe was a highly controversial figure as well as a glamorous, intelligent and sexually attractive one (see ‘The Mysterious Death and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe’). He made little secret of his blasphemous and atheistic views, relying on his Court connections to get him out of trouble if trouble arose. Among the utterances that would have got a lesser man into the Tower without delay were the two we met in the last story, which would have set the teeth on edge of any Elizabethan churchgoer, especially the Puritan ones: ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and ‘they that love not Tobacco & Boys are fooles’. Strong stuff, and not necessarily the views or the predilection of Thomas Kyd, despite the shared digs. It