Propaganda Wars and the English Succession Crisis

Abstract

In the Elizabethan era, an age lacking electronic technologies for surveillance and war, human assets were crucial. Necessary assets were soldiers, mariners, and spies, but also men educated well enough to help perform the intellectual work of government such as research and propaganda. Christopher Marlowe, critics have speculated and often unjustifiably presupposed, was one of the human assets. For decades scholars have been pondering what precisely was the ‘good service’ that Marlowe did for the queen mentioned in the 29 June 1587 PC certificate ordering Cambridge University to give Marlowe his M.A.¹ Scholars typically write that he was a ‘government spy’ or ‘government agent’ (see Breight 1993), but what does this mean? Clearly the regime understood the uses of education and this is why Oxford and Cambridge, as well as theInns of Court, expanded so much from about the middle to the end of the sixteenth century.² The government recruited many servants from the universities such as Marlowe’s dangerous acquaintances, Robert Poley and Richard Baines, who both matriculated at Cambridge in 1568 (Nicholl, 133–4). But while Poley and Baines have not left us any writings other than intelligence oriented information, Marlowe has given us perhaps the most intense output of political drama ever produced in so short and outstanding a life. Poley and Baines are demonstrably members of an active surveillance underworld of agents provocateurs and prison spies. They are in the trenches, Baines as an infiltrator of the English seminary at Rheims, and Poley as the key inside man in the Babington Plot.³ Marlowe, on the other hand, has not been connected to surveillance in these ways. Marlowe was an intellectual. He apparently called himself a scholar (Wernham 1976, 345). He knew French, Latin, and Greek (Hardin, 388), and possibly other languages. He wrote plays and poems, and did translations. Marlowe’s scholarly talents would make him valuable not as a field agent but as an intellectual asset inside the Cecilian apparatus.

Yow unto whome hee that rules sea and land

of lyfe and death grants the lawgiving hand

puft up and sullein hawty lookes forbeare

That wch from yow the meaner man doth feare

the same to yow, a greater lorde doth threate

All power is under heavyer power sett:

He whoe of coming day was lofty fownd

him the departing day saw on the grownd

let no man trust to much to seasons fayre

let none cast down of better tymes despayre.

‘Translated out of Seneca’

(from Thyestes, 607–16), in The Poems of Robert Sidney, p. 270