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London

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Academy, May 16, 1895.
ELIZABETHAN. (Wednesday, April 15.)

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FREDERICK ROGERS, Esq., in the chair.-Mr. J. M. Wheeler read a paper on "Marlowe and the Tudor Humanists." The paper went fully into the heresies of the period, the visit of Giordano Bruno to England. and the society of Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Brooke, and others, who discussed with closed doors. Referring to the statement of Greene about a companion of Marlowe in blasphemy who perished miserably, the views were given of four heretics who were burnt at Norwich-Hamont in 1579, Lewis in 1583, Cole in 1587, and Kett in i 1589. As a Norwich man Greene would know all these cases. Kett, a fellow of Marlowe's own college and an antitrinitarian mystic, may have given an impulse to heresy; but Marlowe was no follower of Kett. The views attributed to Marlowe by Bame were nearer those of Hamont, but still more pronounced. Bame's document represented information to be proved in a law court.-Mr. Bullen said it was a comfort to know Bame was hanged; but an accident of that kind might happen to any one in those days. Bame was a B.A. of Cambridge, educated at Christ's College at the same time as Marlowe. He probably set down the most offensive things heard from Marlowe's reckless tongue. His charges were the exaggerations, not the inventions, of an enemy. A warrant was out for the arrest of Marlowe when he was killed in a Deptford tavern. This was the bare fact. That it was in a drunken brawl, and that gaming or a lewd love was the occasion, were suggestions of the Puritan mind at the death of an infidel playwright. It was quite possible that Archer was a constable, or that Marlowe, a fugitive, knowing his life was at stake, took his assailant for one who would arrest him, and in the scuffle was killed.-Mr. Wheeler threw out the fancy that something of Marlowe may have been embodied by Shakespere in his Mercutio, and con tered that Sonnet 86 referred to Varlowe and

not

George Chapman.-The usual dission followed

THE WORKS OF

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

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