ABSTRACT
One interesting revelation in the letter is that Christopher Marlowe’s ‘chamber fellow’ in Flushing, and the man who actually informed on him, was the spy Richard Baines, who a year later provided the authorities with a detailed list of Marlowe’s alleged heresies and blasphemies – the notorious ‘Baines Note’. Marlowe’s elegies are thought to be early works: certainly earlier than 1592. As to why W. H. Davies might have chosen a Dutch printer to publish his epigrams, the reason is much the same as with Marlowe’s elegies: the probability that an English edition would not get past the censor. Despite the actual existence of Middelburg printers, however, the consensus view about the provenance of the Epigrams and Elegies is that the Middleborough imprint is a decoy, designed to conceal the circumstances of an unlicensed printing, in England, of poems considered too salacious, to be issued in more regular fashion.
