Why This Is Hell

There is a portrait of a young man, aged 21, which was found by chance in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Because Christopher Marlowe was there and would have been that age, it is clearly a portrait of CM. I am very taken by the portrait, which sometimes appears on editions of his work, but it seems unlikely that someone would have commissioned the work then - unless there is some Da Vinci Code-style shenanigans which would mean he was a secret hero rather than a hapless double agent.

There is another portrait, known as the Grafton portrait, of a 24 year old, now in the John Rylands Library, which might be the same sitter as the Corpus Christi one, but which has been thought of as a portrait of Shakespeare. Short of (whuh-whuh whuh-whuh) some pretty darn tooting conspiracy, such as Shakespeare being Marlowe (and why would Corpus Christi have a portrait then?) or vice versa, there is clearly something wrong here.


A third portrait exists, the Janssen, but unfortunately the painting has been overpainted with a bald head, and is thought to depict Sir Thomas Overbury.

Then there is the Chandos portrait, authenticated by the National Portrait Gallery as dating from about 1610, and therefore of being Shakespeare.

Pause to see portrait of me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mike_stiffed_out_fs_air.jpg

Recently Stanley Wells has announced the existence of the Cobbe, which looks rather like Overbury, but is being declared as Shakespeare.

Yesterday Germaine Greer waded into this in the Grauniad, noting of the "Marlowe" and Grafton portraits that "the sitter in both portraits is dressed with a degree of magnificence that neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe could have managed." Isn't this rather missing the point - that these are paintings, not photographs? Leaving aside the borrowing of robes, it may be a face placed on an existing portrait. (I have no evidence for this, aside from the two portraits from the Laing Gallery which seem generically close in jewellery, posture and flow of dress, and the thought that it is surely quicker to get an apprentice to do the easy stuff whilst the master does the face). It is a Marlovian overreach to have a portrait done in robes that the vestment laws of the time would probably have prevented him from wearing. I still doubt it's him.

Greer also points to the Jonson portrait in which the playwright is "not dressed as a courtier but as a scholar". Yes, this is also true of the Grafton portrait - but the little Latin and less Greek grammar school boy was hardly perceived as a scholar in the same way as Jonson courted that.

My own feeling - it seems unlikely to me that any of these would be a portrait - it is much more likely to have happened once he retired to Stratford and grew rich on land.

I've not read this play since, ooh, probably about 1990, but this was not the week to do so - although it was entirely suitable to watch a play about an academic selling his soul to the devil. The curious thing is that, having gained power to do want he wants, Faustus merely kicks Charles V in the arse, spits at the pope, snogs Helen of Troy and sells someone a soluble horse. It's not exactly a twenty-four year Reich.

This was an amateur production with a cast of about thirty, most of whom were an ensemble of pyjama-clad post holders (stake holders?) who we first glimpse on stage humming before the start of the play, whilst a (black, female) prince of darkness stalks around like a refugee from Cats at the <ahem> Marlowe Theatre. Each of them doubles as students, deadly sins, popes, kings, people who want to buy non-soluble horses and so forth, but mostly they lumber (sorry) around the stage, sometimes being walls with their posts, sometimes being trees, sometimes (a nice touch) being stairs, and other times <gak> drowning out the dialogue by hammering on the stage. The battle with Alexander the Great was neat though.

Faustus didn't double but, although Tom Hughes is to be commended for remembering so much "dialogue" (I'll return to this), I never believed he was a smart man, never believed he was in agony and never cared he was damned. I'm sure you're meant to. He also botched his first entrance - although there were some kids who were very late so he might as well have started again. Mephistofeles, Lucifer and the prince of darkness were the one part played by their respective (female) actors.

When you cast the Devil, two fallen angels and all seven deadly sins as female and all the mortals (excepting Helen of Troy and Alexander's girlf) as male you wonder if there's a subtext.

As I haven't read the play since the 1990s I can't tell how far it was cut or reshaped (I can't say if it was A or B text even) but what struck me was it was more comfortable with spectacle than drama, with the posts dominating the stage and slowing things down (just short of 90 minutes, without interval). Faustus has monologues, rather than even soliloqies, and responses which I suspect were put in the mouths of named characters who came and went in the text are given to the chorus - save for the odd moment when they change pyjamas and became named characters. I wonder whether Marlowe was more exposed to masques than plays at King's School and Cambridge. (There surely must have been guild based mystery plays in the 1570s and 1580s - brisingamen would know - and they did have characters interacting.) Marlowe's tendency is to go for the long speech - stuffed with Latin and allusion - and clanks in comparison to the relative Pinteresque naturalism of Shakespeare (that Pinteresque is a joke, but only just). Most of the time, though, the iambs didn't pent.

In the end, then, disappointing: a Brechtian experience without even the consolation of much sense of thought being provoked.