but it cannot be doubted that his personal reputation, even in the free-living Elizabethan London, did not stand high. He is clearly the 'famous gracer of tragedians' reproved for atheism in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592) and it is probably to him that Chettle alludes in his apology when he says, 'With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted and with one of them I care not if I never be' (cf. App. C, Nos. xlviii, xlix). The charge of atheism doubtless arose from Marlowe's association with the group of freethinkers which centred round Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1593 these speculative tendencies brought him into trouble. About 1591, while writing for the players of a certain lord, as yet unidentified, he had shared a room with Thomas Kyd (q.v.), who was then in the service of the same lord. Certain theological notes of his got amongst Kyd's papers and were found there when Kyd was arrested on a charge of libel on 12 May 1593. On 18 May the Privy Council sent a messenger to the house of Thomas Walsingham, at Scadbury in Kent, to arrest Marlowe, and on 20 May he was ordered to remain in attendance on the Council. There exists a 'Note' drawn up at this time by one Richard Baines or Bame, containing a report of some loose conversation of Marlowe's which their Lordships could hardly be expected to regard as anything but blasphemous. But, so far as Marlowe was concerned, the proceedings were put a stop to by his sudden death. The register of St. Nicholas, Deptford, records that he was 'slain by Francis Archer' and buried there on 1 June 1593. Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598) tells us that he was 'stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewde love'. Somewhat different versions of the story are given by Thomas Beard, The Theater of God's Judgments (1597), and William Vaughan, The Golden Grove (1600), both of whom use Marlowe's fate to point the moral against atheism. There are some rather incoherent allusions to the event in verses affixed by Gabriel Harvey to his A New Letter of Notable Contents, which is dated 16 Sept. 1593:
Sonet
Gorgon, or the Wonderfull yeare
. . . The fatall yeare of yeares is Ninety Three:
. . . Weepe Powles, thy Tamberlaine voutsafes to dye.
L'envoy
The hugest miracle remaines behinde,
The second Shakerley Rash-swash to binde.
The Writer's Postscript; or a friendly Caveat to the Second Shakerley of Powles.
Slumbring I lay in melancholy bed
Before the dawning of the sanguin light:
When Eccho shrill, or some Familiar Spright,
Buzzed an Epitaph into my hed.
Magnifique Mindes, bred of Gargantuas race.
In grisly weedes His Obsequies waiment
Whose Corps on Powles, whose mind triumph'd on Kent,
Scorning to bate Sir Rodomont an ace.
