But is it Marlowe?

In late 1952, builders working in the Old Court of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, removed two boards from under an old gas fire and threw them into a skip. The student living in the room, Peter Denyer Hall, asked if he could take them out because he wanted some wood to build a hi-fi unit. When the builders said yes, Hall noticed that the boards formed two halves of an ancient, decayed and badly faded portrait. He took it to Patrick Bury, the college librarian. Bury had the picture photographed, and in March 1953 sent it to the London firm of Holder and Sons for cleaning and restoration.

The restored portrait shows a soft-featured young man with abundant light brown hair, and traces of a beard and small moustache. He is wearing a sumptuous black padded doublet, slashed to reveal a red and gold lining or undergarment, and decorated with red and gold buttons on the front and sleeves. His arms are crossed, and his expression is at once self-possessed and slightly wary. There are two inscriptions at the top left-hand side of the picture. The upper says: ‘ANNO D[OMI]NI 1585 ÆTATIS SVÆ 21’ (‘Year of our Lord 1585, of his own age 21). And the lower: ‘QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT’ (‘What nourishes me destroys me’).

Bury’s son suggested it could be a picture of Christopher Marlowe: he had attended Corpus, and lived in Old Court, between 1580 and 1587; the date and age on the portrait seemed to fit; and if the violent, sexually transgressive, atheistical and generally self-destructive Marlowe had had a motto, then ‘What nourishes me destroys me’ would have been more than appropriate. The find was particularly exciting because if this was an image of Marlowe, then it was – and remains – the only one known.

The motto seemed the best hope of identifying the anonymous sitter, though G.K. Adams at the National Portrait Gallery advised Bury that ‘inscriptions on Elizabethan portraits very rarely help in identification.’ Two Marlowe biographers, F.S. Boas and John Bakeless, said they had never seen the motto before. Rosemary Freeman at Birkbeck was more encouraging: she said she had seen similar devices in books of emblems. The motto ‘Quod me alit me extinguit’ (‘What feeds me extinguishes me’) could be found in Samuel Daniel’s 1585 translation of Paolo Giovio’s Imprese, and the same device is repeated in Shakespeare’s Pericles (1609). Freeman had not, however, seen the unusual words ‘nutrit’ and ‘destruit’ in such a context before.

No further progress was made in the next fifteen years. Noel Purdon, writing in the Cambridge Review in 1967, admitted he was baffled, but made a few helpful observations:

This is a most unusual motto; it belongs to no crest of arms, has no heraldic significance. It is rather a personal emblem, one chosen by the sitter himself as an indication less of his public symbolism than of his private drama.

None of Marlowe’s recent biographers has identified the exact wording. In 2014, Oliver Rackham, a sometime Master of Corpus, observed: ‘The motto echoes a widespread sentiment of the time’ – as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 – ‘although the actual words have not been identified anywhere else.’ And the portrait’s Wikipedia page (for now) says: ‘This wording has not been found in other texts.’

In fact, it appears (in French) in George Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civil Discourses, and Diana Shklanka pointed out the possible Marlowe connection in her marvellous 1987 edition for Routledge. Whetstone (1550-87) was a prolific and moderately successful Elizabethan man of letters, and the Heptameron (1582) is a series of seven fictional conversations set over seven days in an Italian palazzo. The passage including the motto occurs quite early in ‘The First Day’s Exercise’ (I modernise all spellings), when Signor Phyloxenus, the owner of the palazzo, shows Whetstone’s representative, Ismarito, the glories of a ceiling:

The roof … was alabaster plaster, embossed with many curious devices in gold, and in sundry places in proper colours was engraved his device, which was A Holly Tree, full of red berries: and in the same, a fluttering MAVIS fast limed to the boughs, with this posie in French, Qui me nourit, me destruit: and, in very deed, the berries of the tree feedeth this bird, and the bark maketh lime to fetter her. But I afterwards learned Signor Phyloxenus used this ensign as a covert description of desire: whose sweet torments nourisheth the mind, but consumeth the body to the grave.

(A mavis is a song thrush; birdlime, as E.S. Turner once put it, is a ‘sticky abomination which was outlawed in 1925 … and traditionally made from holly bark and mistletoe’.) The extreme rarity of the wording makes it fairly certain that this is the passage which the sitter in the portrait read. He translated the sentence into Latin – perhaps he thought it more appropriate for a formal portrait – but otherwise the wording is identical, notably ‘nourishes’ and ‘destroys’ rather than the more common ‘feeds’ and ‘extinguishes’.

In an endnote, Shklanka mentions that the Corpus portrait may represent Marlowe, and asks: ‘Did Marlowe appropriate from the Heptameron a motto that Whetstone had encountered in France or Italy?’ An excellent question, which has lain unnoticed by Marlowe scholars for nearly forty years.

The claim that the sitter in the portrait discovered his motto in Whetstone is strengthened by the way the emblem used to illustrate and interpret the motto is echoed in the picture. The Elizabethans referred to this kind of combination of motto and emblem as an ‘impresa’. In the late Renaissance, inquiry into the universe was thought of in terms of reading and decoding rather than probing and quantifying, and the rich and intertwining symbolism found in an impresa was just one case of the rich and intertwining symbolism found throughout the universe. A motto without its emblem, or vice versa, was incomplete.

Although Phyloxenus’ emblem does not accompany his motto in the portrait, elements of the sitter’s self-presentation and costume seem to draw inspiration from Whetstone’s description, which may go some way towards explaining both the sitter’s folded arms and his extraordinary doublet – I have not been able to find a similar pose and costume in any comparable Tudor portrait.

The only colours explicitly mentioned by Whetstone are red and gold, which are the colours of the sitter’s buttons and doublet-lining. The feathers of a song thrush are cream and light brown – colours found in the sitter’s collar, and echoed in his face and hair. The buttons not only resemble berries but are arrayed in the shape of a tree, while the scores of elaborate slashings have the shape (if not the colour) of narrow-leaved holly leaves. This is not an obvious or literal presentation of the emblem but a set of delicate allusions, to be understood and enjoyed by those who knew Phyloxenus’ impresa.

Seen this way, motto, costume and pose form a unified whole: the picture is not only a portrait, but a kind of impresa – the symbolism of the picture illuminating the words, and the symbolism of the words illuminating the picture.

Peter R. Roberts has suggested that the portrait’s motto might express ‘no more than a frustrated lover’s self-pity’. But Phyloxenus makes clear that his impresa is not a temporary symbol for sighing lovers, but a general and permanent representation of the relationship between desire and death.

The emblem that normally accompanies the more familiar forms of the motto – ‘Quod me alit me extinguit’ and its variants – is ‘a burning torch that’s turned upside down’, as Thaisa puts it in Pericles. But Phyloxenus’ motto and emblem suggest something altogether darker, nastier and more permanent: not ‘extinguishes’ but ‘destroys’; not a torch but a bird stuck in birdlime. An inverted torch can be righted or relit, but a dead thrush cannot be revived.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was first performed on the London stage in 1587-88, and one of his main indirect sources for the play was Pedro Mexía’s Silva de Varia Lección (1540), a popular Spanish collection of reflections and stories. In 1552, Claude Gruget translated the book into French as Les Diverses Leçons de Pierre Messie, and this formed the basis of two English versions. In 1571, Thomas Fortescue translated and published less than half of Gruget’s book (although he included the Tamburlaine story) as The Forest or Collection of Histories; and in 1586, Whetstone – who seems not to have known of Fortescue’s book – translated and reordered the Tamburlaine story, which he spread through three chapters of The English Mirror, a collection of morality tales illustrating the dangers of envy. ‘It has been convincingly demonstrated,’ J.S. Cunningham writes, ‘that it was Whetstone’s version of Mexía that Marlowe used, rather than that of Thomas Fortescue.’

Whetstone had already mentioned Mexía and Tamburlaine in the Heptameron, at the beginning of ‘The Sixth Day’s Discourse’:

Ismarito … in a quiet place, was reading in Peter Mesiere his Chronicle of Memorable Things: The rare History of Tamburlaine the Great, surnamed Flagellum Dei [The Scourge of God], where he much admired, the virtues of the man, who of a labouring peasant, or (in best degree) of a poor soldier, by his virtues and invincible valour, became a great monarch: yea, and while Tamburlaine lived, was as much feared as Alexander. But Ismarito, more lamented, that so mighty a monarch, erected by the father, should end, by the envy, and civil dissension of the children.

Marlowe probably began writing Tamburlaine in 1586, and must have finished it by 1587-88. It is therefore possible that the summary of Mexía’s Tamburlaine chapter in Whetstone’s 1582 book prompted him to seek out the complete translation in Whetstone’s 1586 book.

In Fortescue’s translation of Mexía, the epithet ‘Flagellum Dei’ is applied to Attila the Hun, but Whetstone is the only one of Marlowe’s known sources who applies it directly to Tamburlaine. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, in a self-defining moment, applies it to himself:

But since I exercise a greater name,
The scourge of God and terror of the world,
I must apply myself to fit those terms,
In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty.

Marlowe here puts into Tamburlaine’s mouth a phrase translated from Whetstone, and suggests that his hero intends to live up to the phrase, to make it true, rather than merely use it as a description of what he is already like. His last words are: ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.’ Marlowe also uses the epithet in the subtitle of the published play:

Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shepherd, by his rare and wonderful Conquests, became a most puissant and mighty Monarch. And (for his tyranny, and terror in the War) was termed, The Scourge of God.

Whetstone and Marlowe shared a printer, too. In 1578, Whetstone had published Promos and Cassandra, a play in two parts of five acts each. The printer, Richard Jones, decided to issue it in one volume – the first time this double-play format had been tried – and advertise it on the title page as ‘Divided into two Comical Discourses’.

When Jones came to publish the two parts of Tamburlaine in 1590, he decided to issue them in a single volume as one play in two five-act parts, and entered it in the Stationers’ Register as ‘two comical discourses’. This may have been a slip or it may have been deliberate. Whatever the reason, the complete Tamburlaine’stitle page – presumably with Marlowe’s assent, and possibly at his insistence – describes the play as being ‘Divided into two Tragical Discourses’. I have not discovered any other plays published in 16th-century London with the same format and ‘divided into two … discourses’ self-description.

The well-informed play-reader in 1590 could thus see that the complete Tamburlaine not only relied on Whetstone’s English Mirror (and possibly Heptameron) for its subtitle, but also drew much of its content from the English Mirror, and modelled its format, presentation and self-description on Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra.

The source of the motto on the Corpus portrait has been established; its associated emblem is alluded to in the portrait; and the whole impresa derives from an author who was of considerable significance to Marlowe in the years following 1585. As it stands, this evidence slightly increases the possibility that the man in the portrait is Marlowe, though it hardly amounts to proof. It does however open up several fresh lines of research – into both Marlowe and the portrait – which may make the identification more definite.