ABSTRACT
Like Maliverny Catlyn, Christopher Marlowe was an educated man who seems to have been employed in France and the Low Countries, after which he returned to England, more than likely as a prisoner. A clearer pattern emerges when the case histories of Catlyn and Marlowe are compared with those of other spies that Conyers Read and Lawrence Stone have documented. Marlowe may have served as a messenger between France and England during or shortly after the composition of Edward II sometime in 1591–1592. Bad as Edward’s rule may have been, Marlowe depicts Elder Mortimer’s usurpation as worse. Marlowe’s play renders any easy distinction between the natural and the unnatural impossible, opening a space for homoerotic desire that is seemingly tangential to transgressions of hierarchy. Marlowe’s handling of the queen mother exhibits the anxieties over the mixing of political power with female sexuality that animate Sidney in the New Arcadia.
