Revising our view of Marlowe

In Stephen Greenblatt's superb study of the life and work of Christopher Marlowe, the England into which the poet was born was "a world apart". Quoting from both travellers' accounts and the diaries of Londoners, Greenblatt gives us a picture of a bleak, alienated, radically divided society. Crime was rife in a city where the most popular entertainments were animal fights and public torture and execution. While there was some evidence of urban finesse and grace, most of the city was a mess of dark, narrow and filthy streets, subject to visitations of the plague. Justice (or law) was arbitrary and cruel, Protestantism had led to violent iconoclasm, and London Bridge was decorated with the severed heads of those judged to have been traitors. Marlowe's birthplace, Canterbury, centre of the English church, was the scene in 1538 of Henry VIII's agents' violent despoliation of the tomb of Thomas à Becket. English scholarship lagged behind Europe, and the regime changes that followed Henry VIII's seizure of the church in England had given rise to "dark waves of conspiracies, suspicions, arrests, and executions". By 1580 the English monarch was nearing fifty, unmarried and heirless: although milder than her father's, her reign kept torturers and executioners occupied. Mary Queen of Scots had been in England in "protective custody" since 1568, and would be beheaded in 1587, after the discovery of a Catholic plot to kill Elizabeth.