LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Christopher Marlowe: St John
built 627 days ago
How proud Catherine Marlowe must have been when her son returned home daily from his studies, clad in his scholar's black gown, foreshadowing the apparel of the priest! She must have had maternal visions of the lad following her father's example, and filling a place in the pulpit as he had done; perhaps becoming--who knows how far a mother's proud affection may aspire?--even an archbishop, as had the sons of fathers in as lowly a position as John Marlowe--as, for instance, Archbishops Parker and Peckham--or, at any rate, reivalling the dignity of his supposed kinsman, John Marlowe, the Canon of Westminster, whose reputation was doubtless a household word in the Canterbury home. Perhaps at times the lad's quaint hauteur, or his studious eccentricities of temper, may have caused her misgivings, but, if so, like Mary of youre, she would doubtless have 'kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.'
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This is all the more remarkable because Marlowe (1564-93), unlike Shakespeare, is not the writer to comfort an audience with a jolly evening in the theater. A contrarian of epic stature, he's most often celebrated as an embodiment of rebellion in every form: a cynic about all received ideas of society and religion; almost certainly a homosexual; most likely a government spy; probably an atheist; possibly even a dabbler in the occult; and, to round off the list, a glorifier of violence who died in a tavern brawl. Much of the eyewitness testimony we have of Marlowe was supplied by people anxious to depict him, for their own petty reasons, as an evil influence: he is the man who supposedly said that Jesus' mother was "dishonest" and that "all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Among Renaissance bad-boy artists, he ranks in the top echelon, along with his equally notorious Italian contemporary, the painter Caravaggio.
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In both cases, Marlowe is accused of espousing a variety of dangerous beliefs, of which homoerotic sentiments are simply part of a continuum of blasphemous ideas. The notorious statements attributed to Marlowe in the Baines libel that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma" and "That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles" are tellingly interspersed with atheistic and seditious claims.
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