Abstract
I am assuming in what follows that Marlowe was gay. Since this is a judgement about Marlowe’s experience (rather than a fact in his biography), it’s not the sort of thing you can prove to everybody’s satisfaction. Richard Baines, who gave the Privy Council a spectacularly unfavourable appraisal of Marlowe’s character, attributes to him the saying ‘that all they that love not tobacco & Boyes were fooles’.1 And Marlowe’s written work is often as outrageous, though not as flippant. In Hero and Leander, the opening description of the young woman, Hero, is encumbered with frustrating layers of clothing and allegorical decoration; the first view of Leander, the paragon of male beauty, is by contrast a vigorously naked appeal to the senses of sight, and touch, and taste. The most moving love affair in Marlowe is a bond between two men: the king and Gaveston in Edward II. These and other instances are something else than proof; but they seem to me persuasive signals of an orientation that today would be called homosexual.2
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Notes
The testimony of Baines, made shortly before Marlowe’s death on 30 May 1593, is printed in full by C.F. Tucker Brooke in The Life of Marlowe and the Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (London: Methuen, 1930) 98–100. R.B. Wernham points out, citing documentary evidence in ‘Christopher Marlowe at Flushing in 1592’, English Historical Review 91 (1976): 344–5, that Baines and Marlowe had known and disliked one another at least as early as January 1591/92, when Baines provided information leading to Marlowe’s arrest for ‘coining’ a single counterfeit shilling of pewter.
The term ‘homosexual’ of course didn’t exist in the early modern period, and its absence is used by Foucault to argue that the phenomenon of a distinct homosexual identity (as opposed to homoerotic actions and attractions of various kinds) is a nineteenth-century invention. ‘As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes’, Foucault writes, ‘sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridicial subject of them.’ But in the nineteenth century, the medical discourse of sexuality changed all that: ‘Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species ’. See The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978) 43. Foucault’s extreme nominalism has led many subsequent scholars to use ‘sodomy’ as the general term for same-sex attraction in the early modern period, on the grounds that ‘homosexuality’ is anachronistic. But even scholars who recognize the difficulty of treating ‘homosexuality’ as a trans-historical category find it impossible to do without it; see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982) 13–32, and Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: a Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 14. For a persuasive critique of the view that homosexuality is a relatively recent (that is, nineteenth-century) invention, see Joseph Cady, ‘Masculine Love”, Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth, 1992) 9–40. For an intelligent summary of the controversy, see Michael B. Young, James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 3–6, 36–50.
See Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 2, 3rd edn. (1901; Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1928) 43.
See Mario Praz, ‘Christopher Marlowe’, English Studies 13 (1931): 209–23; Harry Levin, The Overreacher: a Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952) 158–9, and ‘Marlowe Today’, Tulane Drama Review 8 (Summer 1964): 26–7; L.C. Knights, ‘The Strange Case of Christopher Marlowe’, in Further Explorations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965) 85–7; Brian Morris, ‘Comic Method in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander’, in Christopher Marlowe: Mermaid Critical Commentaries, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968) 123–9; Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 220; Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Sodomy and Society: the Case of Christopher Marlowe’, Southwest Review 69 (1984): 371–8; Joseph A. Porter, ‘Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Canonization of Heterosexuality’, South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 127–30; Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) 126–7, 131; Gregory Woods, ‘Body, Costume, and Desire in Christopher Marlowe’, in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth, 1992) 69–84; Michael Hattaway, ‘Christopher Marlowe: Ideology and Subversion’, in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) 210–11; and Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999) 33–41. See also the particular studies of Edward II cited in note 10 below.
Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer orAnvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980).
Fred B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) 16–17. The source of both images is Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586).
For a highly intelligent reading of the structures of authority in this text, and of Barabas’ problematic location in relation to them, see Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) 87–96.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper, 1977) 492.
L.G. Mills read the relationship as one of pure friendship in ‘The Meaning of Edward II’, Modern Philology 32 (1934–35): 11–31; given the date of this essay, it is difficult to know whether Mills meant friendship and nothing more, or whether the discourse of his time didn’t allow him to name the sexual aspect of friendship in a scholarly context. In more permissive decades, the relationship has been read as principally sexual; see Leonora Leet Brodwin, ‘Edward II: Marlowe’s Culminating Treatment of Love’, ELH 31 (1964): 139–55; Purvis E. Boyette, ‘Wanton Humour and Wanton Poets: Homosexuality in Marlowe’s Edward II’, Tulane Studies in English 32 (1977): 33–50; Claude J. Summers, ‘Sex, Politics, and Self-Realization in Edward II’, in ‘A Poet and a Filthy Play-Maker ’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich et al. (New York: AMS Press, 1988) 221–40; Jennifer Brady, ‘Fear and Loathing in Marlowe’s Edward II’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson, Studies in Renaissance Literature 10 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991) 175–91; Stephen Guy-Bray, ‘Homophobia and the Depoliticising of Edward II’, English Studies in Canada 17 (1991): 125–33; Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991); Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 57–60; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) 105–26; Catherine Belsey, ‘Desire’s Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello’, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992) 84–8; Viviana Comensoli, ‘Homophobia and the Regulation of Desire: a Psychoanalytic Reading of Marlowe’s Edward II’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1993–94): 175–200; Mario DiGangi, ‘Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism’, in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitefield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998) 195–212; and McAdam, The Irony of Identity 198–231. Jarman’s book is the screenplay for his movie adaptation of Edward II; it includes personal commentary by Jarman and some of his associates, much of it motivated by a belief that homosexuality should be openly celebrated. For an intelligent critique of Jarman’s interpretation (in print and on screen), see Thomas Cartelli, ‘Queer Edward II: Postmodern Sexualities and the Early Modern Subject’, Marlowe, History, and Sexuality 213–23.
Toby Robertson (interviewed by John Russell Brown), ‘Directing Edward II’, Tulane Drama Review 8 (Summer 1964): 177–8.
See Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971) 50–2.
For intelligent commentary on this scene see Nicholas Brooke, ‘Marlowe the Dramatist’, in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 9 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966) 103–5, and Boyette, ‘Wanton Humour’ 47–9.
‘Directing Edward II’ 179.
Edward A. Snow, ‘Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire’, in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan, Selected Papers from the English Institute ns 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 70–110.
All references are to Michael Keefer’s edition of the A version (1604). The relationship between the two early texts of Doctor Faustus (A 1604 and B 1616) is a complicated question in textual history that impinges on many other concerns: the authorship of the play, its theatrical history, its governing theatrical assumptions, and so on. Recent scholarship has shown that the arguments advanced by Greg (in DoctorFaustus: 1604–1616, ed. W.W. Greg [Oxford: Clarendon, 1950]), to the effect that B is the more authoritative text and that A is a faulty memorial reconstruction of B, are no longer tenable. The relevant evidence is cited by Keefer (Introduction xi-xxi, lx-lxix) and discussed at great length by Eric Rasmussen (in A Textual Companion to Doctor Faustus [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993]), who concludes that A is ‘the text with primary authority’ while B ‘appears to be at many removes from Marlowe’s hand’ (93). For an ingenious interpretation of the doctrinal and cultural differences between the two versions, see Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996) 38–62.
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Huebert, R. (2003). Tobacco and Boys: Christopher Marlowe. In: The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503168_2
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