Ever since the portrait of a man with puppyish eyes and rogueish beard was discovered in the 1950s at Christopher Marlowe’s old college, scholars have clung to the idea that it depicts the dashing Elizabethan playwright, poet and spy.
It is the only image that exists of Marlowe... unfortunately, it is almost certainly not him.
Research by a Marlowe expert and a former fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where the painting was discovered in 1952 beneath a gas fire, suggests that the Marlowe would have been the wrong age, would not have worn such fine clothes and would be unlikely to have commissioned a portrait at all.
The portrait, painted in 1585, captured the imagination of Marlowe enthusiasts because it was not only found near Marlowe’s rooms at the college, but features a Latin inscription: “Aetatis sua 21.” Most authors of Marlowe books have interpreted this to mean that the sitter was 21 years old — the same age as the playwright — but this is a misreading.
Peter Roberts, reader emeritus in history at the University of Kent, Canterbury, wrote in the Corpus Christi in-house magazine that the inscription means that the sitter was in his 21st year, and therefore 20 years old. “This was the convention observed in contemporary portraiture: the subject is described as in the Nth year of his age, and not N years old,” he wrote in The Pelican.
He noted that according to the Julian calendar, which was the standard system in Marlowe’s lifetime, the playwright’s birthday in February 1563 would mean that he attained his 21st birthday in 1584. “There is no overlap between Marlowe’s 21st year and AD 1585.”
The remaining evidence for the portrait being Marlowe is at best circumstantial, including a claim that the sitter’s hands are hidden in an allusion to Marlowe’s work as a spy — part of a career that also included writing Dr Faustus and Dido, Queen of Carthage before his sudden death at the age of 29 in a fight at a boarding house in Deptford.
Another inscription on the painting is the motto, Quod me nutrit, me destruit (what nourishes me, destroys me) — which may or may not have influenced Angelina Jolie when the actress had the same phrase tattooed on her midriff.
Dr Roberts wrote that the motto has been used by “the credulous” as further evidence that the sitter must be Marlowe. “They see it as reflecting the melancholy self-knowledge of an ambitious youth who was destined to create... the ground-breaking dramatic character of ‘overreacher’ in the protagonists of his plays. Art historians, on the other hand, have interpreted the many similar imprese from this period as usually denoting no more than a frustrated lover’s self-pity.”
Marlowe was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker and relied on financial support from the college. In Dr Roberts’ view, Marlowe’s limited resources and low social standing are not consistent with commissioning a self portrait, especially in such sumptuous clothes.
Another consideration is that such self advertisement would have been unwise for a young man who was probably an “intelligencer” in Elizabeth’s spy network.
George Metcalfe, chairman of The Marlowe Society, said that the portrait would probably still be used despite the evidence against it. “It just adds to the mystery. The reason I’m involved with the Marlowe Society is that I love the mystery attached to Christopher Marlowe. I love the fact he was a James Bond of some kind.”
In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe describes Helen of Troy’s fatal attraction as “the face that launched a thousand ships”. That well-known phrase is immortal, but, if this new research is correct, we no longer know the face that penned the line.
