ABSTRACT
Marlowe has been a significant figure in the refiguration of the English Renaissance, the working-class/outsider/spy/sodomite who gives the lie to the Elizabethan World Picture and a whole complex of traditional assumptions about the aims of English Renaissance drama. My argument here, however, is that the transgressive Marlowe is largely a posthumous phenomenon. I begin with the portrait that hangs in the hall of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, (figure 14.1) though with no conviction that it is in fact a portait of Marlowe. It was discovered, badly damaged, in a heap of builders’ rubbish during the renovations of the Old Court of Corpus in 1952, and was then thoroughly and conservatively restored. It is inscribed with the date 1585, and the sitter’s age, twenty-one, and a motto, to which I shall return. All that could be determined about its previous history was that it had been nailed to a wall in the Master’s Lodge; the Lodge was built in the 1820s, and there is no way of knowing when after that the picture was installed or where it hung before that, or when it came into the possession of the college—there is, in short, no record of its existence before 1952, though it is certainly an Elizabethan painting. 1 The suggestion that it is a portrait of Marlowe was made in 1955, not by anyone connected with the College, which does not claim it represents Marlowe. Nevertheless, it keeps being reproduced as the only extant portrait of the poet. The problems with this identification are manifold: Marlowe certainly was twenty-one in 1585, but if this is Marlowe, why would a Cambridge undergraduate, a scholarship boy from an artisan class background, have commissioned such a portrait? If somebody else—some admirer or patron—commissioned it, who was he (or, less likely in Marlowe’s case, she), and why did the painting end up in the possession of the college, rather than of the patron or the sitter? Charles Nicholl, who is eager for the portrait to be Marlowe, and uses it on the cover of his book about Marlowe’s murder, The Reckoning, has suggested that the college itself commissioned the picture of its famous alumnus. This strikes me as inherently implausible, given both the youth and the presentation of the sitter, and the fact that in 1585 Marlowe was not at all famous, but utterly obscure. Nicholl cites as corroborative evidence the portrait of Spenser hanging in the hall of Pembroke College, which was certainly commissioned by the college; but the comparison is surely disingenuous. Figure 14.2 is the Spenser portrait: it is an eighteenth-century painting, said to be a copy of an earlier painting of unknown date, now lost. It shows Spenser as a mature man in the years of his fame, not as an undergraduate; it is, if anything, an argument against the idea that the college would have commissioned a portrait of Marlowe at twenty-one. If the sitter could be shown to be Marlowe, of course, it would tell us something important about how his erstwhile colleagues wanted to remember him—not, that is, as a distinguished poet like Spenser. And whoever commissioned the painting, what is the signi-ficance of the outfit? The rich velvet jacket is liberally adorned with buttons that either are or look like gold, and is slashed to show an orange silk lining. The collar is a simple band, but covered with the finest transparent lawn. Why the exceedingly rich garment, rather than an academic gown or something a scholarship boy might reasonably have worn? And—a logical corrolary to all these questions—if the painting is not Marlowe, why did anyone ever think it was? Portrait of a young man said to be Marlowe, 1585. By permission of the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315811666/460db41f-0680-44bd-8856-afe684a5dbad/content/fig14_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Portrait of Edmund Spenser. Eighteenth-century copy after a lost original. By permission of Pembroke College, Cambridge. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315811666/460db41f-0680-44bd-8856-afe684a5dbad/content/fig14_2_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
