Shakespeare – HESSE PHILLIPS

Research Diaries #2: Hell is empty & all the devils are here.

Content Warning: this post discusses historical cases of violence against women, including r*pe.

Hi. This is me poking my head out of my writing cave, wanting to talk about a work-in-progress for a minute – perhaps an incredibly foolhardy thing to do, because after all, there are no guarantees that any work-in-progress will ever come to aught. It’s Schrodinger’s book, as it stands. But with any luck – and a lot more work – perhaps it will one day step out of the box, alive.

For now, at least, I’m calling it The Devils of Denham Manor.

Like my first book, Lightborne, it is based on a true story of a crime which has gone unresolved for centuries. The case was well-documented in its time, though nearly forgotten today. At the heart of “The Devils” lies a sex scandal, which unfolded at the remote country estate of Denham Manor over the winter of 1585-6. For some eight months, an underground group of Catholic priests forced three teenaged girls to feign demonic possession before paying audiences of Catholic sympathizers and the morbidly curious. The priests’ stated purpose, in a nutshell, was to “prove the truth of” their faith through demonstrations of the supernatural powers it bestowed on them. Powers such as the ability to exorcise of “all the devils of hell.” They also undoubtedly made a lot of money.

By the early 17th century, the Denham “demoniacs”, and the names of their supposed resident demons, were so infamous that Shakespeare quite cheekily dropped them a reference in a famous scene of King Lear:

Bless thee, good man’s son, from
the foul fiend! Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of
lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of
stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and
mowing, who since possesses chambermaids and waiting women.¹

Just two years earlier, a book recording the women’s ordeal at Denham Manor had been published to enormous success: an instant bestseller, you could say. Such was due in part to the book’s sensationalist and often comic tone, lingering on the salacious details of three girls held captive, “used and abused,” by a group of older men. If the women did not become household names, their “demons” certainly did: Modo, Maho, Flibbertigibbet, Hobbidicut, Hobberdidance.

As so often happens in the aftermath of a scandal, many contemporaries – evidently, Shakespeare among them – sought to turn the whole episode into a joke, and the women into collaborators in their own abuse. Some of the events that went on at Denham were indeed ridiculous, and the exorcisms themselves sometimes had the audience in stitches rather than cold sweats. There were dirty jokes, grotesque dances, songs, and ribald jabs at the Protestant Queen Elizabeth and her ministers. But reading the testimonies of the victims paints a very different and far darker picture.

The youngest victim in the Denham case, a chambermaid called Sarah Williams, was only fourteen or fifteen when her exorcisms began. As an adult reflecting on her experiences, Sarah claimed that her captors frequently enhanced her performances through the use of intoxicants, plus physical and psychological torture. While Sarah herself never explicitly alleged sexual abuse – for, of course, the legal language to make such an accusation did not exist at the time – her recollections of the “exorcisms” to which she was, remember, publicly subjected, quite clearly describe acts of sadism, sexual aggression, and even rape.

I want to spare you the details. Broadly speaking, Sarah’s exorcisms involved a range of bodily violations, from the forced ingestion of “potions” and inhalation of “fumes,” to the “Laying-on of Hands,” in which a priest fondles, pinches, or even wounds the possessed, supposedly in order to “chase” the devil through her body. Most horrifically, Sarah alleged that the priests of Denham would often squirt caustic liquids or insert objects – including human bones, or relics – into “her priviest part.”²

The first page of Sarah Williams’ testimony, published in *A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures* by Samuel Harsnett, 1602. (Internet Archive)

Sarah’s story may be 400 years old, but it feels like a wound that might easily have been opened only yesterday. With the Epstein Files still dominating the news cycle, not to mention online discourse; the mass-rape Pelicot Case still unresolved; the egregious institutional failures at the heart of the UK “grooming gangs” scandal leaving survivors feeling abandoned; the fact that a convicted sexual abuser now holds one of the highest positions of power on the planet… The list goes on. If 2017 was the Year of MeToo, then you might rightly call 2025 the Year of the Rapist.

One wonders whether much really has changed since Sarah was abused before a crowd of willing (and paying) spectators in 1586, or since she described her abuse to a panel of lawyers and churchmen in 1603. Then as now, rape largely went unreported and unpunished. Although Elizabethan legal experts often classified rape as second only to murder, earlier laws determined rape to be more a matter of property loss for a woman’s male relatives than a serious offence against the body of a woman.³ (I don’t say “bodily autonomy,” because the concept did not exist, less so when pertaining to women and children.) The few rape cases that did make it to court rarely resulted in convictions against the rapist, and even occasionally resulted in the accuser being penalized for slander, adultery, or indeed “fornication.”

Moreover, according to medieval statutes dating back to the 13th century, a woman who had been raped was obligated to make a spectacle of her own anguish if she had any intention of seeking justice:

She ought to go straight away and with Hue and Cry complaine to the good men of the next towne, shewing her wrong, her garments torne, and any effusion of blood[.]⁴

In other words, she had to present herself as “the perfect victim” – an all too familiar scenario in today’s discourse. She had to object loudly and early, be visibly distraught, disheveled, and damaged; she had to show contrition for “her part” in the crime and “seek for Everlasting Night,” as one poet put it.⁵ She could, by no means, become pregnant, as pregnancy was then believed to only result from consensual sex. Her life and her world came to a screeching halt.

Perhaps this is why accusations of rape were so rare, amounting to just 274 in the 142-year period from 1558 to 1700. Out of those 274 cases, a mere 45 resulted in convictions.⁶ For comparison, it is estimated that some 900,000 people over 16 were sexually assaulted in England and Wales in 2024. From June 2023 to June 2024, 69,184 rapes were reported to UK police, of which a mere 49% resulted in a conviction. That’s nearly 70,000 prosecutions in one year, versus just 274 over a period of more than a century.

But Sarah Williams and her fellow “devil-girls” of Denham Manor were not among those 274 litigants. For the Elizabethan authorities, rape ranked low amongst the crimes of their abusers, several of whom were tried and executed for attempted regicide. In fact, after the exorcists’ ring was broken up, Sarah, as well as her sister Frideswood “Fid” Williams and another girl, Anne Smith, all endured months in prison for their presumed complicity in treason. Upon release, all three spent the next seventeen years of their lives either laying low or in and out of trouble with the law, begging for audiences with religious and political figures or avoiding them like the plague, torn between a desire for safety and a need for justice, a need to be heard. To be believed.

I’m sure this is why, when I stumbled upon Sarah’s story while researching something unrelated, I felt immediately compelled to tell it.

Unusually for her day, Sarah’s record of abuse survives, mainly because the powers-that-be found it politically expedient to sensationalize it. By 1602, when Sarah, Fid, and Anne received their summons, Queen Elizabeth’s health was failing, and the heir apparent to the throne, James VI of Scotland, had shown leniency towards Catholics in the past. For those who hoped England would remain Protestant after the queen’s death, a wild story about three innocent girls tortured and raped by a gang of Catholic priests was everything they could have hoped for: a way to push sanguine English Catholics back into the shadows, and make certain the incoming James would know his place.

For that reason, some scholars have discredited the women’s testimonies over the centuries, proclaiming them to be only another clever piece of anti-Catholic Elizabethan propaganda.⁷ But details of the exorcisms had been reported in earlier depositions given by both Sarah and her sister. Who are we to believe? Men for whom such testimonies, if proven true, would be disastrous, or women for whom the giving of that testimony was itself a disaster – a sacrifice of their privacy, security, and peace?

For over 400 years, Sarah’s story has existed only as her inquisitors saw fit to record it, not in her voice, but in the third-person. The tragedy in this is that Sarah’s abusers at Denham had also denied her a voice, claiming that any sound she uttered or move she made came not from her, but from the devil inside her. In one instance, as Sarah implored one of the priests to stop the exorcisms, he

cast his head aside, and looking fully upon her face under her hat, said, ‘What, is this Sarah or the devil that speaks these words? No, no, it is not Sarah, but the devil.’ And then [Sarah], perceiving that she could have no relief at his hands, fell a-weeping, which weeping also he said was the weeping of the evil spirit.⁸

This is another form of rape, I think, of the kind that leaves no marks. But then, every rape of the body is also a rape of the mind, the soul. It is a form of possession: the demon that takes up residence, and robs the host of all credibility, empathy, and humanity. Telling the story is a flawed form of exorcism, as anyone who’s ever had to tell such a story knows: incomplete and arguably performative in its own way, so desperate to be witnessed, to be believed. But it’s something.

I hope I can do Sarah, Fid, and Anne some justice, for whatever that’s worth.

William Shakespeare, King Lear, IV:1, 2312-9. ↩︎
Descriptions of Sarah’s torture can be found in Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, 1603, pp. 78, 110, 120, 175, 181-3, 185. ↩︎
Julia Rudolph, “Rape and Resistance: Women and Consent in Seventeenth-Century English Legal and Political Thought.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2000, pp. 157–84. ↩︎
Nicholas Brady, The Lawes Resolution of Women’s Rights, 1632, p. 392, quoted in Bashar, p. 35. ↩︎
Nicholas Brady, The Rape, Or The Innocent Imposters, 1692. ↩︎
Bashar, p. 35. ↩︎
See F.W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham Manor, University of Delaware Press, 1993. ↩︎
Modern English transcription by Kathleen R. Sands, in Demonic Possession in Elizabethan England, Praeger Press, 2004, p. 104. ↩︎

The Historical (Fiction) is Political

On the eve of the US presidential election, this historical fiction writer has some thoughts.

CW: Racism, medical abuse, SA

I keep thinking about the several weeks this past summer, just before Joe Biden announced his intention to drop out of the US presidential race, when social media became absolutely flooded with appeals for a return to “precedented” times. Even now, type the word “precedented” into any search bar, and you’ll get thousands of hits, all expressing the same mixture of exhaustion and dread: Free us from nonstop whiplash. Give us boring and predictable.

I understand the sentiment. Our particular historical moment feels uniquely dire. But every time one of these posts pops up in my feed, I can’t help but think that all times have been both precedented and unprecedented, that we exist just as our ancestors did and our descendants will, putting one foot in front of the other as we trudge the treadmill of history. The shape of our times, and of our little lives within them, will inevitably be decided by those who outlive us – a hazard of being situated on the inside rather than the outside of a story.

Were we capable of peeking into future history books, what we’d read about the early 21st century would likely surprise and bewilder us. Possibly, we’d barely recognize ourselves – as would our ancestors, were they privy to our contemporary take(s) on them. Just as myths and folklore evolve over eons – as old tales are rewritten, lost, and rediscovered – history changes wildly based on who is telling the story, and when, and for what purpose. Whether times are precedented or unprecedented is not a matter of fact, but point-of-view.

Still, we, the players on that stage, are not helpless. Our work is in the making of those future historians – in the shaping of that point-of-view. Here and now, we decide what truths will be self-evident in the decades and (hopefully) centuries to come.

Take J. Marion Sims, for example: medical doctor, known as “the Father of Gynecology,” immortalized in statues, medical schools, and public buildings all over the United States. For most of the 130+ years since his death, Sims was lauded as a champion of women, having revolutionized a profoundly neglected field and led the vanguard in techniques ranging from fistula repair to anesthesia. It’s only within the last few decades that Sims’ use of enslaved Black women and girls as test subjects for his agonizing experimental procedures – performed without anesthesia, due to his belief (which many in the medical field still absurdly hold today) that Black people cannot feel pain – began to overshadow his previously spotless legacy.

J. Marion Sims statue located in Columbia, South Carolina. Wikimedia Commons.

The reason why it took so long is that prior to the 1990s, Sims was mainly written about by white men, occasionally white women, for whom Sims’ well documented anti-abolitionist stance, Confederate sympathies, and medical (and possibly sexual) abuse of enslaved women and girls simply made him “a man of his times.”

It took Black women scholars like Durrenda Ojanuga and Harriet Washington to shine a light on the harrowing stories of girls like Anarcha, a thirteen-year-old fistula patient on whom Sims operated without sedation more than thirty times, often before an audience comprised of both medical students and morbidly curious looky-loos. But even prior to these scholars’ work, Anarcha was not some deeply buried secret in Sim’s story. In his memoirs and diaries, Sims himself had painstakingly – and proudly – documented his own mistreatment of Anarcha and other young Black women.

A self-evident truth in the worldview of Sims, and many – too many – who came after him, was that Black lives mattered less. All Black researchers did was simply ask that Anarcha be given full consideration in the story – that she be treated as a human being, not merely a tool for the “hero” to make use of on his journey to immortality. Nowadays, the women and girls who suffered under Sims’ knife are more frequently depicted as the main characters of their own story, appearing in documentaries, plays, paintings, and even, at last, a monument installed in Montgomery, Alabama in 2021, dedicated to “The Mothers of Gynecology.”

Here’s the point: the history we learn about Sims now, in 2024, is immensely different from what was taught just 30 years ago. The past, obviously, did not change. The way we see and understand the past changed, in large part thanks to a wider diversity of voices involved in the researching and shaping of history, and culture in general. Such has led to a slow shift in the way humanity views itself: a long overdue upheaval of who fully “counts” as human in the Western world.

The infuriating truth of the matter is, we are still only at the very beginning of that revolution in thought. The powerful and privileged still look much the same as they did 30 years ago, 130 years ago, 230 years ago, only a tiny minority of whom have plucked up the raw ore of the idea that humanity is a trait equally and innately shared by all human beings, none more or less deserving than any other, and are puzzling over what to do with it. How does this idea fit into their worldview? What’s in it for them?

[Historical fiction] brings you up against events and mentalities that, should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past – it is its obscenity.
Hilary Mantel, The Guardian, 2009

I can’t be the only historical fiction writer who is also a disillusioned former academic. In a sense, all history is historical fiction, in that all historians make decisions about what to highlight and what to suppress. But there’s a spectrum between “truth” and “straight-up bullshit.” Whether you’re writing literature or academic history depends on where in the spectrum you land, or at least aim to land, which itself depends (rather a lot more than some would like to think) on who you are and what you believe.

Even the most impartial and considerate historian can rarely ever hope to get much further than halfway from bullshit. Read too deeply into almost any subject and you’ll soon discover that “experts” are frustratingly fallible people, prone to contradicting themselves, repeating falsehoods, confusing conjecture for empirical fact, encoding bias into praxis, cherry-picking their sources, etc., etc. It certainly doesn’t help that the field of History has been so long dominated by men first, white men second, and wealthy white men third – demographics generally adverse to challenging one another in any way likely to disturb the overall homogeneity of their precious worldview.

Title page of Thomas Bowdler’s infamous *The Family Shakespeare* (1818), a heavily expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays which omitted “words and expressions… which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Wikimedia Commons.

The Victorians did immeasurable damage in their time, committing just about every academic fallacy under the sun, shoehorning all the terrible and beautiful chaos of human history into prissy parables about the virtues of piety and obedience. It’s frankly criminal that much of the Elizabethan history I studied in school came secondhand from those Bowdlerizing little creeps, forcing me to waste many hours in simply peeling back layer after layer of bias and bullshit in order to reach a kernel of truth, if any had managed to survive. And yet, the Victorians were only “men of their times,” working in the grand tradition of a field developed in service to the moral and martial instruction of aristocratic young boys. “Close your book, Master Algernon, and tell me: what was Xerxes greatest mistake at Salamis?”

Don’t get me wrong – I loved studying history (theatre history, specifically), but decided to write historical fiction instead because I saw a potential in literature to do what scholarship could not: to somehow transcend the narrative imposed by generations of Ivory Tower greybeards and recover the fugitive now-ness of the past, at the point when it was still present. The raw, churning, messy humanity of it all.

Maybe the potential is there, but achieving it is a pipe-dream. Firstly, because books are meant to be enjoyed. For the sake of the modern reader’s comfort (and sanity), the only way to bridge the gap between, say, 1593, when my novel Lightborne is set, and 2024 is to bring 2024 to 1593, and not the other way around. Characters might speak in an approximation of period dialect; certain events might have to be simplified or ignored; the broad concerns of a person alive in that specific time and place will have to be selected based on their relevance to the story and their relatability to the modern reader. In historical fiction, the “now-ness” of the past is an illusion, refracted through the now-ness of, well, now.

Secondly, as I tried to illustrate above with the case of Sims and Anarcha, historical truth is political. Unfortunately, we novelists are as human as anyone else, each of us with our own little agenda, which is often secret even from ourselves. Nowadays we say that “the personal is political,” meaning we are obliged to examine our biases, and correct them to the best of our ability; meaning also that, for some of us, our personhood, our mere existence, is politicized whether we like it or not. Quite naturally, this effects how we write, and what we write about.

Some writers might aim for a neutral view of humanity – a so-called “universality” – but I’m afraid there’s no such thing. Just as true political centrism is a myth, a “neutral” view of humanity presupposes that there is a single, standard, immutable shape, size, color, and kind of human being. Nearly always, this true “neutral” human is presented to us as white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male, Christian, and “middle-class” (another myth).¹ When authors and literary critics employ terms like “universal” to describe stories or characters, they are often (perhaps unknowingly) doing the work of white supremacy.

Those awful Victorians owe much of their awfulness to the fact that they lived in a time and place where the definition of humanity was about as narrow as it gets. Worse, as historians, their profession obliged them to be ruthless guardians of those borders. Prior to the egregious intellectual and cultural wrongs inflicted by early anthropology and psychology – not to mention eugenics, whose poisonous influence on the western world cannot be understated – history was the scholarly field most responsible for shaping the way humans viewed themselves. Therefore, it bears enormous responsibility for our still-blinkered view of the past as a string of white men’s accomplishments, in a world utterly devoid of queer, Black, non-European, non-Christian, disabled, and/or women’s ingenuity, innovation, or simple relevance.

Essentially, every human story is political – because politics determine, firstly, who gets to be human.

So much of human history is selecting what to remember, deifying or reifying some aspects and forgetting others. I’m not suggesting the past haunts us, but until one comes to terms with it, the past will be a haunting – something you can’t shake.
Toni Morrison, interview with BRICK, 2003

Two months ago, many of us were shocked and horrified by images of hundreds of books piled high in dumpsters at the New College of Florida, the former contents of its recently dissolved Gender and Diversity Center. But few of us who had been following the US book bans closely, or who know our history, were surprised to see the inevitable fruits of the right-wing war on free speech and free thought. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in their excellent article, incidents of mass book removal, disposal, and/or destruction go back far enough to demonstrate a chilling pattern:

Would-be tyrants have been destroying books for centuries, and once you start destroying books, it’s usually not long until you treat groups of people the same way.

As the infamous Nazi burning of the library at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology made terrifyingly clear, it is a remarkably short step between burning books and burning people.² And yet, for all that the extreme right’s rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and dehumanizing over the past few weeks, major media outlets such as The New York Times are seemingly twisting themselves into ever more Gordian linguistic knots in effort to normalize the, excuse the phrase, utter batshittery of what is being said and done. Meanwhile, even historically “apolitical” types are looking over their shoulders, wondering, Are we at the point of no return yet? Has it gone that far?

Reader, I guarantee you: in 1933, people were asking themselves the same question.

The presumptive architects of an American autocracy have made their plans freely available to read online. Those of us who like to know what our enemies are plotting can now recite highlights from the Project 2025 playbook point-by-point. The apparent goal is to “take back” the United States to some illusory, simpler time, when humanity was uncomplicated and unalloyed, when white was white and black was black and never the twain should meet – a vision not far from that of those accursed Victorian moralists. But the “perfect,” homogenous nation of obedient, pious and patriotic white, Christian, patriarchal households for which the right desperately longs can only be imposed through violence. Humanity was never thus, and never will be. America was never thus, and never will be.³

By banning LGBTQ+ books and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which is simply uncensored US History), the right is testing our endurance for violence. For the destruction of books, and the denial of the right to an education, are indeed acts of violence. In the right’s perfect world, we will be told what to accept as “truth,” and forbidden to question it. There will be no historical fiction, only fictional history.

… he who has been treated as the devil, recognizes the devil when they meet.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

It’s no accident that history and literature are often among the first targets of tyrants. Throughout the tumultuous Tudor era, in which my novel Lightborne is set, theatres, schools and universities became political and sometimes literal battlegrounds as each new religious binge or purge rocked England’s foundations. With the country swinging from Protestant to Catholic to Protestant again, artists and educators frequently found themselves caught in the crosshairs for failing to obey the current dogma, whatever it happened to be. Some conformed, but others suffered horrendous fates. Lightborne is, of course, about one of the most famous dissenters of that age: queer poet, possible spy, and accused heretic, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe is now often known for the goriness of his plays, but what truly defines him as a writer was his obsession with power: how it was obtained, defended, employed as a hammer against ordinary people; how power, in its fierce need for ceaseless expansion, could crush whole civilizations in its path. Contrary to the ruling doctrine of his day that power was a gift endowed by God upon those most deserving, Marlowe’s plays suggested, rather, that power was a deadly weapon, won not through one’s innate virtue but through greed, megalomania, venality, and bloodshed.

Under the rule of Elizabeth I, who, as both Head of State and Head of the Church, demanded cultish devotion from her subjects, this was an extremely dangerous position to take, and one that may very well have cost Marlowe his life. Perhaps it was his experiences in espionage that “radicalized” him, as we might put it today; or perhaps it was simply his life as a queer man working in the rough-and-tumble world of the Elizabethan theatre – not the glamorous lifestyle we might think of now, but a precarious, marginal existence, likened in its day to sex work. Either way, Marlowe, like so many who came both before and after him, would have often found himself forced to choose between living freely, or simply living another day.

I dearly hope that one day, we’ll no longer have to concern ourselves with the same fears our ancestors faced 400 years ago. I hope for a future with fewer impossible choices in the name of basic survival.

But that hope feels more tenuous by the day. The Tudor monarchs and Donald Trump may bear little resemblance to one another at the surface, but both arise out of the same vicious impulses: to crush dissent without mercy, to villainize the vulnerable, to pander to grotesque wealth, to self-style as demigods, to reward violence and cruelty, to criminalize critical thought, to censor art and education, to undermine fact, to enforce religious conformity, and to make brutal examples of any who oppose them. Different yet equally terrifying tyrants, with different yet equally ridiculous hair.

Now, in our minute and perishing present, we risk becoming the intellectual property of bigots and autocrats, who will ensure the future remembers us as best suits their narrative. For many, this means losing access to our own humanity, a distinction which far too many human beings are still denied. To be Black or brown, queer or trans, an immigrant, non-Christian, disabled, working-class, unhoused, or certainly, Palestinian – to be in any way distant from historical power and privilege – is to be rendered into historical fiction while you are still alive, written out of your own story and into the shadows of some grand, artificial narrative, at best as villains and bogeymen, at worst as silence, as the blank spaces between words.

What greater threat is there to humanity than the desire to erase our history, our curiosity, our creativity, our defiance, our resilience, our joy? What greater evil is there than dehumanization?

And what are we going to do about it, while we still can?

If you’ll forgive me nerding-out here for a sec, the notion of class universality in literature goes way back as well. Take Everyman, a play printed in 1530 but possibly much older. As the title suggests, audiences are meant to interpret the main character as a universal representation of “man,” although in the play he is clearly depicted as a person of wealth and resources – much unlike the vast majority of people alive in in the 16th century, who existed in a state of indentured servitude. ↩︎
I’m echoing Heinrich Heine here, whose book Almansor was among those burned, and contained the words, “Where they burn books, they’ll burn people too.” ↩︎
“No,” you’ll say, “‘America’ is in fact a nation built upon the blood and bones of colonized and enslaved peoples” – but of course, those people were here, and still are, and are more than their suffering. We can care about justice for the dead without being apathetic to the living. ↩︎

Claiming Christopher Marlowe’s place in Queer History

It’s LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which means I’m thinking about Christopher Marlowe – again – even after spending half my earthly existence writing a novel about him. Despite having been a major influence on Shakespeare, an innovator of English poetic form, a writer of numerous homoerotic verses, and the author of the 1^st English play to feature an explicitly homosexual relationship between men, Marlowe is often left off the Queer Historical Figures roundups that come out around this time of year. Which, y’know, really bugs me.

So what happened? Who was “Kit” Marlowe, and why is he still important?

Marlowe’s story is often likened to that of a tragic rockstar: the flame that burned bright, and much too fast. After sailing to the highest tier of English poets at just 24 years old, Marlowe’s life came to a violent end before he turned 30, in 1593. His murder continues to baffle historians, and is a huge topic all its own. But right now, I’d rather talk about the circumstances that led up to it, and what they mean for his legacy.

Scholars disagree as to exactly how much trouble Marlowe was in at the time of his death, or what exactly put him on the wrong side of the law. Nevertheless, 10 days prior to his murder, Marlowe was placed under arrest and ordered to make daily reports to the Privy Court in London. Just 6 days after that, Richard Baines, a spy with whom Marlowe had once spent an ill-fated winter abroad, handed in a document to the English authorities accusing Marlowe of sedition, heresy, and sodomy, and suggesting he might have been guilty of far worse.

But it wasn’t Marlowe’s actions that were of concern to the powers-that-be. It was his words.

A section of the “Baines Note,” showing the most infamous of Marlowe’s alleged quotes: “all they that love not Tobacco & Boies are fooles.” Image by The British Library Board.

The “Baines Note,” as it is now known, allegedly records things that Marlowe said, albeit abstracted from any context. Did Marlowe ever say, as Baines claimed, that John the Baptist and Christ were lovers, or that “all they that love not tobacco & boys are fools,” or – very dangerously for the time – that the world was far older than Adam & Eve? We don’t really know, and some scholars dismiss the Baines Note as mere slander. But Marlowe had stoked controversy before. One year prior to Marlowe’s death, his fellow playwright Robert Greene had even made veiled references to Marlowe’s “atheism,” saying, “he hath said… ‘There is no God.'”

Was Marlowe, as accused by Baines and Greene, an “atheist?” Maybe not, at least in the modern sense. He was, however, prompting people to ask questions about the religious doctrine by which the laws of the land forced them to abide. He was poking fun at dogma, and by extension, mocking the queen.

We tend to think of pre-20th century history as dominated by rampant queerphobia, and therefore might expect Marlowe to have been persecuted mainly for his sexuality. But in fact, it was his heresy that made him more dangerous to public order. Marlowe’s England was ruled, above all, by religion. Even now, the myth of the peaceful, progressive Elizabethan Golden Age persists – a myth that was formulated while Elizabeth I still ruled. But in fact, the reign of Elizabeth was marked by war, rebellion, and religious strife, leading her government to impose still harsher strictures than her predecessors on anyone caught deviating from the Protestant Church of England, of which Elizabeth herself was the head.

To so much as voice doubts about “her Majesty’s church” in any form was not merely heretical, but potentially treasonous. Do it loudly enough, and the punishment was death.

Although heresy was the deadliest of the accusations levied against Marlowe, the crime of sodomy also technically carried a death sentence, and had since the time of Henry VIII, with the passing of the “Buggery Act” in 1533. But it would not be until later, with the rise of Puritanism, that this law would be enforced in the extreme against gay men and gender nonconforming people.

During Marlowe’s lifetime, certain forms of homosexual behavior were tacitly condoned, so long as they fell within strict parameters determined largely by class, race, and age. The sexual use (and abuse) of servants by masters, or underage prostitutes by wealthy men, went broadly unprosecuted. Loving, committed same-sex relationships, on the other hand, brought certain dangers, which Marlowe explored thoroughly in his play Edward II.

There’s a group of academics out there who argue quite adamantly against including Marlowe in the queer canon, despite the queer themes found throughout his body of work. Largely, these scholars’ reluctance is based in the fear that Marlowe’s queerness somehow feeds into the feverish speculation that surrounds his life, and to a greater extent, his death. To claim Marlowe as queer, in short, would be unseemly. Hysterical. Melodramatic. Playing into conspiracy.

Whether or not Marlowe was queer is not really the point. Marlowe never married, maintained long-term, intimate relationships with other men for the entirety of his adult life, and was surrounded by rumors of homosexuality both during his lifetime and afterwards. But what really matters is that Marlowe wrote queer stories – was, in fact, among the first English writers to do so, and do so consistently. Marlowe gave queer stories, queer love, queer desire a seat at the table, to an extent that no one would dare do again till centuries later.

So why, in queer history, is Marlowe so often left out of the conversation?

Well, Elizabethan propagandists were extremely successful in destroying Marlowe’s reputation, aided later on by good ol’ Victorian Comstockery. Mere months after Marlowe’s death, moralists and mouthpieces of the state mounted a smear campaign against him, maligning him first of all for his heretical beliefs and, in time, for his rumored sexual “deviance.” The archival discovery of the “Baines Note” in the 1780s led to a firestorm of disapproval in the decades that followed. By the 19th century, performances of Marlowe’s plays were often heavily censored, and accompanied by withering caveats about the author’s “degenerate character.”

To put it in modern terms, Marlowe was “cancelled.”

By the 20th century, Marlowe, once known as “the Muses’ darling,” had become a dark, controversial figure, dogged by a “bad boy” image, overshadowed by his longer-lived and less incendiary contemporary Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: Marlowe’s life was short and violent, but in fact not unusually violent for his time (see: Ben Jonson, actually killed a guy!) Some deride Marlowe’s plays as loud, garish gorefests, but Shakespeare frequently outpaces him in blood n’ guts, and frankly, the perception that Marlowe’s language was overblown or bombastic probably says more about our mania for comparing everything written in this time period to Shakespeare than it actually does about Marlowe as a writer.

Drawing comparisons between Marlowe and Shakespeare does both authors a disservice. Shakespeare built an incredibly successful career on not ruffling feathers (for the most part, see: Essex Rebellion), nostalgia, populism, and sentimentality. Marlowe was a very different writer, drawing on a proto-camp sensibility to tell stories that subverted the jingoistic myths of Elizabethan England. His theatre was political, jarring, irreverent. It was Charles Ludlam, not Andrew Lloyd Webber; John Waters, not James Cameron.

This is why I spent so… damn… long writing a novel about Marlowe, and why I feel like it’s high time he took his rightful place in queer history, as one of our ancestors. I hate all this self-promo stuff as much as any writer on the Internet, but if I look upon the task ahead as promoting Marlowe, and his story, it gets a little easier to show up and do my little dance.

Marlowe lived in a time of moral panics, global strife, and cultural upheaval, not so alien to our own. His story has a lot to reveal about our world today.

Don’t take my word for it: read Marlowe’s Edward II – a devastating play about a king who loves his male lover much more than his kingdom, and pays the ultimate price for his devotion. Read Hero & Leander, an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking pansexual romp about sexual awakenings and love – or lust – at first sight. Read about his riotous, glorious, tragic life.

Or if you wanna make this humble scribbler’s day a little brighter, preorder my book LIGHTBORNE, coming Oct 22nd 2024 to the USA – or if you’re in the UK, head to your local booksellers or buy online.

(This post is modified from a thread originally posted on Threads, 5 Feb 2024. It was last updated on 14 Oct 2024.)