Das Rechnung

I've been listening to a 3-part series on Radio 4 (and of course BBC Sounds. It is an intriguing ...

<autobiographical-note type="juvenilia">
(which brings to mind a character I never found a plot for, a spy named Baxter St Trigue [geddit?  – backstairs in... aw forget it])
</autobiographical-note >

...account of the death of Christopher Marlowe, based on and presented by the author of The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, whose subtitle makes it clear that in the author's view it was a bit more than just a death. It was interesting, although I found the rather portentous manner of the author a little trying, and it reminded me of a visit to Cambridge documented here, when I saw THAT PORTRAIT (you know the one, it's dredged up  whenever Marlowe is mentioned, and the book uses it, predictably, for its jacket). 

And the author sets a great deal of (uncritical) store by it; the first of the three episodes even takes the Latin motto (in translation) as a title. This is what he says in the preface to the book (repeated on the radio [probably verbatim, though I haven't checked]).

'A portrait', he writes,  assuming that it is a portrait of Marlowe. Well, almost everyone  does. 

 

And later he says (i.e. writes, with the same provisoes as before):

 

'The smyler with the knyf under the cloke', presumably.

 

But at that dinner back in 2015, in the sight of the painting in question, all the talk was of how the subject was almost certainly not Marlowe. In the Michaelmas 2014 edition of The Letter (formerly The Letter of the Corpus Association, and I can find no online version, I'm afraid) Professor Oliver Rackham, a former Master of Corpus Christi had written an article entitled...

<ducking-and-covering>
YES 'entitled', and I don't care what US style guides (and therefore the world of academe more generally, kow-towing to their demands) say. If you want a more reasoned argument, see the rant here.
</ducking-and-covering>

... 

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: a wish fulfilled

He starts with some fairly dry background about how it was found, and how it was repaired  ('but they [HD – the restorers] are long extinct, their archives are untraceable, and – deplorably – we kept no record of what exactly they did'...

 <parenthesis>
(isn't that 'deplorably' wonderful? In the world of First World Problems, the Groves of Academe have a whole continent to themselves.)
</parenthesis>

Then he describes the portrait itself:

The picture is by an accomplished artist, painted on two boards of best Baltic oak from Poland or Lithuania; unequal boards, so that the crack between them avoids the sitter's face, although the face is bisected by a later split. The subject, like the arti &st, is nameless. The sole hope of identification is from the words painted on the picture: ANNO DNI 1585 ÆTATIS SVÆ 21 Year of [Our] Lord 1585, of his own age 21' and the motto QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT 'What nourishes me destroys me'

People have argued that the 'ANNO DNI 1585 ÆTATIS SVÆ 21' clinches it; but it does nothing of the sort. Professor Rackham goes on:

The age doesn't fit

It was easy to make a rough calculation: 'Marlowe was born in 1564; he was aged 21 in 1585; therefore the picture is either of Marlowe or of one of 50,000 other Englishmen who were his contemporaries. The motto echoes a widespread sentiment of the time, although the actual words have not been identified anywhere else ....It might be the sort of motto that Marlowe might have had if he had had a motto. Feeble as this evidence is, it is all that links the picture to Marlowe. The College has never endorsed the attribution, but the reservation about 50,000 others gets weaker over the years. 

 

Reality is not so simple. Marlowe was not born in 1564. New Year's Day in  England at that time was 25 March –  as it still is for the income-tax year, which begins on 5 April, the equivalent of 25 March in the present calendar. Marlowe was baptized in St George's church, Canterbury, on 26 February 1563, so would have been born around 19 February. His baptism was the last-but-one event in the church register for 1563. Some meddling biographer emended his birth date to 1564 without saying so, and has been copied by all other biographers, creating false evidence.

If Marlowe was born (according to the reckoning of his time) on 19 February 1563, the first year of his age would have been 19 February 1563 to 18 February 1564.  The twenty-first year of his age (when he was aged twenty) would have been 19 February 1583 to 18 February 1584, not 1585. Therefore the portrait is not of Marlowe.

One hears the argument that the artist could have made a mistake over the date. This is clutching at a straw. It might be legitimate if there were some additional reason for identifying the sitter. If the picture contained his name, one might stretch a point over the date, provided there was no other man with that name who fitted the date better. But the date is the only link between the portrait and Marlowe. If the date is wrong, the picture could be of anyone of roughly the same age: Marlowe, or Shakespeare, or Fletcher ([who attended] Corpus [starting in] 1591), or Webster, Tom, Dick, or Harry.

In summary, Professor Rackham gives this order of events:

Our portrait was painted for some unrelated family and not labelled. Three or four generations on, they forgot who the sitter was. Somebody gave it to the college as a pretty picture, or an undergraduate left it behind in his rooms. It fell apart and was thought worth keeping but not worth repairing and was lost. In 1850, Marlowe was rediscovered as a member of the College. Later still, he re turned to fame. Marlowe's fans needed a portrait, and the College inadvertently supplied one.

Thus a scholarly joke was taken seriously and grew into a wish-fulfilment. There was never any chance that our portrait could be Marlowe... but the dates would fit Shakespeare, or some other of the 50,000 contemporaries of Shakespeare.

'A scholarly joke'.  But if you Google image: Christopher Marlowe you get (at least, I get – your search algorithms may vary) about 1,000,000  variations on more or less the same image...

<apologia-pro-approximatio-sua>
That is, nearly 2,000,000 all told, but some are of other images to do with the various ephemera surrounding the Marlowe cult; I'm assuming that about half of these are of the pseudo-Marlowe.
</apologia-pro-approximatio-sua>

...

The story is interesting, and the research it is based on seems on the face of it to have been thorough (if limited in the case of the portrait). But The Reckoning (the modern German Das Rechnung still has the sense of what was presented to the four men in Deptford before the killing, the bill or 'recknynge' for a day's browsing and sluicing [not my words, but rather good – as might be expected of Wodehouse]) is worth a listen.

What's next?

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