The papers from his own pockets, with his name written upon several of them, he had dropped near one of the out-stretched hands upon the carpet. There seemed no possibility for the body to be buried under any name but that of Christopher Marlowe. He readjusted the misfitting hat, extinguished the candles, opened the door, and closing it after him, stepped into the hall.
The old life had closed. So far as the world should know the first adventurous pilot upon the ocean of English blank verse [[note 17]], the mighty Marlowe, was among the immortal dead.
THE APPREHENSION OF ANNE.
Was that the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
—Faustus, by Marlowe, Scene xiv.
Why she is a pearl
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships
And turned crowned kings to merchants.
—Troilus and Cressida, ii, 2.
Eighteen years before the date fixed for the beginning of this narrative, a daughter of Manuel Crossford, alderman and mercer, was born in the town of Canterbury. This child was christened Anne, and, as the sole offspring of the house and only companion of the father, whose wife had soon after joined the silent majority, her welfare became his chief concern. At sixteen years of age she had developed into a girl of such beauty that Christopher Marlowe, son of the clerk of “St. Maries” of Canterbury, a graduate of Cambridge, and resident of London, had fallen desperately in love with her. It was during a temporary visit to his native town that this occurred.
Well authenticated stories of Marlowe’s five years of dissipation in London, after the termination of his scholarship at Cambridge, caused Manuel Crossford to look with disfavor upon his attentions. There was the chapter in which he figured as a common player of interludes, or, in other words, as a vagrant actor, forming part of the unwritten biography of the suitor; and the father of the maiden could not forget the account of Marlowe’s having broken “his leg in one lewd scene, when in his early age,” as was expressed some time later by a malignant rhymster.[19]
This latter report had been clearly disproved, but it had raised a prejudice which could not be overturned. Then again, Crossford was a devout Brownist, and it was too well known to admit of doubt that Marlowe was an avowed freethinker. Had he not written in one of his plays:
“I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no crime but ignorance”?[20]