Kit Marlowe Quotes

Thank you, Captain Obvious." "I'm on the Senate," he reminded me. "It's Lord Obvious.

A gentleman would have announced himself!” I told him, pressing against the side of the tub. “And a scoundrel would have joined you.” -- Kit Marlowe to the witch Gillian (shortly before joining her in the tub!)

For a brazen Libertine, an adulterer, a sodomite, an atheist, a fornicator, rakehell, heretic, godless playmaker and debaucher of innocents, you’re a sorry state of affairs.

And man, fuck Shakespeare anyhow. Give me Christopher Marlowe any day. Now he was a badass. Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? Hell, if it weren’t for him, there wouldn’t even be a Shakespeare. Kit Marlowe came first.

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

I had always loved Christopher Marlowe, and I found myself thinking a lot about him, too. “Kind Kit Marlowe,” a contemporary had called him. He was a scholar, the friend of Raleigh and of Nashe, the most brilliant and educated of the Cambridge wits. He moved in the most exalted literary and political circles; of all his fellow poets, the only one to whom Shakespeare ever directly alluded was he; and yet he was also a forger, a murderer, a man of the most dissolute companions and habits, who “dyed swearing” in a tavern at the age of twenty-nine. His companions on that day were a spy, a pickpocket, and a “bawdy serving-man.” One of them stabbed Marlowe, fatally, just above the eye: “of which wound the aforesaid Christ. Marlowe died instantly.” I often thought of these lines of his, from Doctor Faustus: I think my master shortly means to die For he hath given me all his goods … and of this one, spoken as an aside on the day that Faustus in his black robes went to the emperor’s court: I’faith, he looks much like a conjurer.

You have your magic for solace, but I am not fully alive without him. All poetry flies from my mind when he is gone, and only Matthew can see what little good I have in me. Leave him to me. Please.

Lucifer’s eyes sparkled. He tilted his head, lovelocks drifting against the exquisite curve of his neck. Enjoying the game.

My sin is love in that I love my sin too well to wish to repent of it.

He couldn’t quite manage the defiant glance over his shoulder and the lift of his chin he would have liked, but his voice stayed steady and that was a victory in itself.

Golden wings, golden eyes, a dream of memory and warmth as Kit dropped to his knees, body clenched around a scream he was still too proud to give voice.

There are reasons it’s not encouraged,” Will said, understanding. “What is not encouraged?” Murchaud was looking down now, leaning ever so slightly forward into the put and watching the light flicker on its damp mortared wall. “For elf-princes to love mortal men.” The lantern swung lower, revealing a blessedly empty pit. Will breathed a shuddering sigh and let the rope go slack, his hand falling to rest at his waist. A faint smile softened the elf-Prince’s face, half concealed by his fine black bard. “So our Kit is learning,” Murchaud said, turning to look at Will. “You are breaking his heart, Master Shakespeare.” Will began pulling the lantern up. “And I should leave such tasks to you, Your Highness?” “It’s a heart, I think, has been broken enough.

What about thy Prince? Or the Fae Queen who come to muse thee in thine illness?” “My Prince?” Will smiled at Tom. “Kit’s Prince, you mean. You know, I rather suspect he’s watching us now: I would be, were I in his place.

Does a Prince of Faerie love a mortal man?” “It’s not encouraged.

It might lack of warmth, confort, and sartorial splendor, but Kit was happy simply to be clothed.

He turned to face Murchaud, and bit his lip on the smile he wanted to taste.

Kit felt the heavy lift and drop of the Prince’s shoulders, the swing of his cloak, and spared a moment for his own patchwork cloak.

In his second night in his room in the Salt Tower, Kit had tried to make his escape through the reflections in the narrow windows; he’d been unable to touch the power of the Darkling Glass at all, and he had wondered at how easily the iron rings on his fingers quelled all the strength he knew he had in him.

The windows were small, but a small man might slide through them. Far below he could see lights scattered around the Tower precincts like flower petals on the sheets of a marriage bed.

The cold wind tugged Kit’s hair, a sensation like the caress of Lucifer’s feathers.

Or perhaps all that white served to mark him as a virgin sacrifice, which was a thought worth a slightly hysterical giggle.

The quaver in his voice was less showmanship than he would have wanted it to be.

Mehiel, Kit reminded, my Power may be chained and my magic shorn from me, but I am a bard, a poet, and a warlock too. And there’s a warlock too. And there’s a half-completed Bible in Tom Walsingham’s study that says that my God has as much claim on the world as the God of Richard Baines and…Lucifer.

He wanted to close his eyes at the declaration, remembering the heat of a crimson iron close enough to curl his lashes. The hand that did not hold his cane tightened on a bit of silk in his socket, and something pricked him. The enchanted nail Kit had given him, and Will drew strength from it.

Kit hesitated in the half-crumbled archway, the torches failing to illuminate the darkness beyond.

Baines came up behind him, a hulking form, breathing softly. He smelled of soap and wine and rosewater and lightly of fresh sweat.

A companionable hand on his shoulder made him shiver.

Kit caught the glitter of flirelight on marble, heard the slow drip of water spattering against stone.

Richard Baines turned his back at the sound of stones shifting and held up on meaty hand to help over the rocks, handing him down like a lady out of a carriage.

Dripping water freckled his shoulders and tapped against his hair.

Come on, puss. We’ll need a canopy to keep the brazier dry. Come and help me set it up. Pity it’s my lord and master who will have the shaping of thy power tonight: I would have liked it for myself, thou knowest.

They stripped him only to the waist, and left his feet free when they bound him standing between two pillars, and not helplessly prone on some clammy altar.

He tossed his head to flick his dripping hair from his eyes, and then wished he hadn’t, because Baines climbed up the three swaybacked steps to the dais and smoothed the muddy locks back with thick gentle fingers. Kit flinched from the touch as if it burned him, and in his heart he heard an angel whimper.

The bindings were calculated to do him very little harm, no matter how struggled.

He closed his eyes and leaned into the poetry as he leaned into the cloths that bound him, and his lips moved slightly.

No. He would. He would not repudiate Kit, on his deathbed for any reason.

Kit hid his flinch as Will’s gloved fingers tightened on his arm.

He heard Will’s startled gasp, the long slow rattle of his breath permitted to slide back out.

Kit turned to fix Ben with a glare, but the wry bemusement on the young poet’s face turned a searing glance into a sideways shrug. One that made Ben cough again, and then burst out laughing, both hands over his face.

Kit wondered if they were real fey animals, or if they would disappear into dried leaves and twists of straw with the down’s advent.

Poetry, he realized, in watching Will’s face. A furious brightness sparked in Kit’s breast, equal parts pride and fury. Even now, he comes back with poetry.

His true voice rang Kit like a bell, with a sensation of flying. Or falling.

Pure white light enfold him and he smiled at the lie.

Tis in thy hands, Sir Poet.

His poet would never disappoint him.

Of course I love him. I made him. And he came back through history to unmake me. You don’t get to fall out of love with the Devil.

Marlowe patted Matthew on the shoulder, and Matthew found himself grinning in naked relief; notorious rakehell, sodomite, and playboy he might be remembered as, but lately Christopher Marlowe was the only person who seemed willing to touch Matthew without some implication lying predatory behind it.

It was an old sick power, rich and nauseous and irrestible as any unhallowed love he’d ever known. It ran shivery caresses up the inside of his skin, weighed a stone like desire in his gut and groin.

Wrath held him silent long enough for the corner of Morgan’s mouth to twitch with discomfort.

He shivered no longer, Mehiel’s power warming his shoulders like a feathered cloak.

No, I know the Fae and their fondness. Fondness would not keep you from spilling my blood.

Kit bit his cheek on tired laughter, all his irritation draining away. Perhaps I’ve just been used too much to care any more, he thought.

His laugh smelled of juniper and loam, and Kit’s confused expression showed; it made the little elf laugh the harder.

Hush, puss,” Baines said in a low tone that nevertheless carried. “Or I’ll yet see thee in that bride thou dost hate.

He didn’t look at Baines, even as Baines leaned close enough to him that Kit felt his breath hot on his skin.

In a moment, the heat would touch him. Kit braced himself for the pain, tilting his chin down to this chest and imagining that his weight flowed like water through his pelvis and down his legs, anchoring him to the floor.

He sailed forward, the dark iron in his hand burning like a spear of light, a voice like a choir of falcons bellowing Lucifer’s name somehow rising in his throat and everything a fury of gold-barred black and searing light.

A timely rescue, gentlemen. Now find me a pair of trousers, and we’ll see if we can manage a timelier one.

I wish you’d told me because I could have told you that I didn’t mind,” I say. “I don’t mind that you’re a girl. I like girls. That is, I like them, too.” It’s the first time I’ve admitted it out loud, this confusion I’ve felt since I loved Marlowe, then others like him, who turned out to be nothing like him at all, only to go and involve myself the same way with girls. “I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter, at least not to me, and I don’t know how else to explain it. All i do know is that I liked Kit the boy, and I can’t stop thinking about Kit the girl. Kit the person.

Baines’s smirk gave the words layers Kit did not care to think about.

Pussycat. Isn’t it time thou didst admit where thou dost belong?

Is this the side thou’rt choosing, then, sweet poet? After all the kindness of the Fae to thee?” “Kindness?” Kit snorted, not caring that Baines could see this lips. “Is that what thou callest it, my Queen?

He blinked, his expression the strangest blend of grief and hurt betrayal; Kit saw it with a clarity which made a mockery of the ten feet between them.

She reined her mare in close enough that Gin could lean a shoulder on her to be comforted, and slid her own arm around Kit’s waist, seeming not to notice that it took all of his flickering strength of heart not to shy and buck.

The crown of shadows that capped his golden hair seemed to draw a rich dark tint from the crimson velvet of his breeches, and his eyes caught more light than the sunset sky had to offer.

Kit held his breath as Lucifer came to him, tilted his chin up with a wing-tip touch, wordlessly eased open his tight folded arms with a brush of gentle feathers.

The Devil’s lips hovered over Kit’s, satin as rose petals, the warm brush of breath on Kit’s skin and the warmth of a presence clos enough to stir the fine hairs on his cheeks.

Kit drew breath in an agony of anticipation, felt Mehiel’s surrender in the coldness of his brands.

The wall stood firm behind him; his hands flattened on the stones, but they gave him no purchase and less strength.

The Fae should know better than to love mortal men.

Oh, Kit. Were you ever priveleged to love where love was not given first elsewhere? Even once?

God protect the halt and the lame,” he muttered. “Also the purblind fools. And one Kit Marlowe, wherever he may be.

The Master of Shakespeare, by A. W. L. Saunders, after citing many of the above details, hung its hat on those similarities of poetic style while arguing that Greville, a famously amiable patron, had been the master of a long-standing collaboration marketed as “Will Shake-speare,” whose contributing members included Mary Sidney, Tom Nashe, Francis Bacon, Kit Marlowe, George Peele, and Samuel Daniel.

What is a holy mass, Tom, if not a play? A wedding? A coronation? do you wish to know why I am a playmaker? Because I know that, at every moment, we are in the midst of some play. Only in an arena that calls itself theater may we stand outside the real theater - our lives - and we see them in all their truth, Tom. By which, if course, I mean their tragedy.