[13] In Virgil's 2d. Eclogue Alexis is a beautiful youth beloved by the shepherd Corydon. This therefore amounts to a charge of homosexuality.
[14] This important document was discovered by Mr. F. K. Brown in 1921 and is described in The Times Literary Supplement (London), June 2, 1921, p. 335. It is finely facsimiled and accurately transcribed in Dr. W.W. Greg's Literary Autographs from 1550-1650. See also my book, op. cit., pp. 38, 41-44, 52.
[15] This probably alludes to the felony with which Marlowe was charged in 1588. (See Professor Hotson's essay, "Marlowe among the Churchwardens," in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1926, vol. 138, pp. 37-44.)
[16] The Acts of the Privy Council, May 20, 1593.
[17] That Marlowe was a spy in the service of the Queen and of Sir Francis Walsingham we know from the labors of Professor Hotson (cf. the work cited, pp. 63-4) and of Miss Eugenie de Kalb (cf. "The Death of Marlowe," in The Times Literary Supplement, May 21, 1925, p. 351).
[18] Cf. The Dictionary of National Biography.
[19] Thomas Harriott, one of the "three magi" who frequently attended the Earl of Northumberland in the Tower, had acknowledged himself to be a deist He was a member of Walter Ralegh's group of freethinkers.
[20] Walter Warner, the distinguished mathematician, another one of the Earl of Northumberland's "three magi," was also one of Ralegh's group. Some think that Kyd may have meant William Warner, the poet, the author of the highly praised Albion's England.
[21] Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford and Lord Great Chamberlain, was one of the most talented, eccentric, extravagant, irresponsible, and intersting men of the Age of Elizabeth. He was born in 1550 and died in 1604. He was inordinately quarrelsome, temperamental and reckless, and therewithal endowed with a high degree of musical talent and literary ability. Men of letters found him friendly and helpful, and he was the patron of a company of actors. He was as erratic in his relations with the Queen as with others, and in 1592 he fell out with her because she refused to grant his petition for a monopoly to import into England certain oils, wool, and fruits—a refusal which doomed him, for financial reasons, to live in retirement. This is the man who, in the opinion of some writers, was the "real Shakespeare."
[22] This was the "wizard Earl," as he was popularly known, whom the Roman Catholics had instigated to assert and fortify his claim to the English crown and who fearlessly protested against King James' severity in his treatment of Ralegh. He was, in all probability, the first owner of the famous Northumberland Manuscript. For an interesting and entertaining account of this eccentric patron of the arts and sciences, consult the Dictionary of National Biography.