The Poisoned Lemon
On Writer-Murderers and Revenge Tragedy
Fictional Poison
The playwrights of Jacobean London loved a good corpse. As T.S. Eliot wrote, channeling the spirit of the genre,
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
Of course they were also interested in the great tragic questions: the interplay of fate and free will, the pull of competing obligations, the infinite aspirations of finite creatures. But they wore that interest lightly, alluding to it in prologues or an occasional soliloquy. Their real passion was bloodshed, the more ingenious and improbable the better. A wicked Duke tricked into kissing the poisoned skull of a woman he had wronged. An executioner poised to kill a pair of innocents, who, at the last minute, brings his axe down on his own head. They described botched triple suicides with misfiring guns, strangled children, waxwork corpses, and erotic masques in which the cupids shot real arrows into audience. In these plays—as in the works of Euripides, Seneca, and many others—horror, not sorrow, was the core of tragedy.
So when I say that even by the standards of the genre, Barnabe Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter (1607) is a remarkably violent play, I’m making a strong claim. But I’m confident that anyone who bothers to read this competent but by no means brilliant relic of the Renaissance stage will agree with me. It’s because of its violent plot, and its equally violent author, that it’s so interesting. As much as any play in the period, it provokes questions about the relationship between crime and bloodshed in literature and life, both then and now.
First the play. The Devil’s Charter is the story of Pope Alexander VI’s quest for power, alternately aided and hindered by his two monstrous children, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. It’s a very loose version of real events. As in: it begins with Alexander making a pact with the devil and it ends with him being dragged to hell. In between, virtually every major character is murdered. It’s part Marlovian morality tale, with hordes of devils, a contract written in blood, and a ticking clock to damnation, as in Doctor Faustus, which Barnes had obviously read carefully. And it’s part Machiavellian fantasia: unusually for an Englishman, Barnes knew Machiavelli firsthand—we have his annotated copy of Il Principe—though Italian realpolitik is filtered through the lurid sensibility of the stage.
Portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, attributed to Battista Dossi
But Barnes’s innovation may be less in what he puts in his play than in what he leaves out. Which is to say, more or less everything, aside from violence. Often, in revenge tragedies, there are at least a couple of characters with ambitions of a different kind: love, perhaps, or the tranquil possession of power. These aims are gradually thwarted as the villains gain ground, until the play turns into a slaughterhouse in Act 5 (often, to be fair, it’s Act 3 or 4). There’s none of that in The Devil’s Charter: no lovers, no moments of confidence, optimism, or ease. It’s the revenge play pared down to its purest, darkest essence, with scene after scene of characters plotting murders and carrying them out, and very little else. Its closest analogue may be Macbeth, which was performed by the same company just six months before The Devil’s Charter. But it’s a Macbeth stripped of philosophy and psychology—and with even more murders.
Because it’s a play about political intrigue set in Italy, and because it features Lucrezia Borgia, a lot of those murders involve poison. The play has a poisoner-for-hire who is killed by another of Alexander’s henchmen when he becomes inconvenient: “Rascal, thou confectionary villain: where is your sublimatum now sir? Where is your Ratsbanatum now? Now where are your poisoned pullets in stewed-broth?” his assassin asks. In a nod to Cleopatra’s death, Alexander places an asp on the breast of two young brothers, his lovers, as they sleep. Lucrezia is killed by toxic makeup. And Alexander himself dies from drinking poisoned wine when the devils switch his cup with his intended victim’s. “Thou for the poisoning of thy daughter poisoned / He for the murthering of his brother murthered,” the devils say, summing up the tidily chiastic logic of the revenge plot. It’s all very silly. In any other author, this kind of thing would seem like pure entertainment, maybe even black comedy. But in a play written by a man with Barnabe Barnes’s sordid history, it’s hard to read it just as a joke.
Real Poison
Less than a decade earlier, in 1598, Barnes had been prosecuted in Star Chamber for an attempted poisoning. In March of 1597, Barnes had become acquainted with one John Browne, who had come to London from Berwick, near the Scottish border, where he held the post of town recorder.1 After getting on friendly terms with Browne, Barnes gave him a lemon as a gift. But Browne, for whatever reason, didn’t eat the lemon. Instead, he passed it to his friend, the clerk William Waad. It seems that the lemon was “tainted and venomed with some subtle poison” (177), intended to kill by smell alone, or at most a single taste. Apparently, though, the poison wasn’t strong enough. When Waad ate the lemon, it gave him a painful, lingering headache, but it didn’t kill him.
Not to be deterred, Barnes tried again. Later that day, he purchased mercury sublimate at a grocer’s, a strong poison with a sweet flavor that resembles sugar—and one that is alluded to in The Devil’s Charter. He then pressed Browne to join him for a drink, ordering claret and sugar in a tavern. What followed was a comedy of errors. First of all, Barnes tried to persuade Browne to drink the claret in a single draught. Browne refused, but he still tasted the claret, and immediately became ill. Barnes urged him to drink more. Browne said that he thought it had been tampered with, and suggested that Barnes should try it himself, which he of course refused to do. At that point, you would think the game was up. Still, just to be absolutely certain, Browne had two other men try the wine; predictably, they also became ill. In a last, misguided attempt to deflect suspicion, Barnes agreed to take a sip of the claret, but “reserved the most part… in his cheeks,” and turning his back on the company, tried to spit it out secretly—an awkward bit of acting that clearly deceived no one. Browne became dangerously ill, and Barnes was prosecuted later that year.
By all rights, Barnes should have been executed. In Renaissance England, poisoning was an especially serious crime, placed in a separate category from most other forms of violence. It was extremely difficult to detect, so poisoners had a decent chance of getting away with it—at least, poisoners more competent than Barnes. Unexplained deaths, especially of important people, were often rumored to be the effect of poison. And in an era prior to forensic medicine, who could say that they were not? As a result, it was treated as especially pernicious, capable of secretly undermining the foundations of civil society. Even though Browne ultimately recovered, Barnes’s crime should have earned him the death penalty. And it certainly would have, if Barnes had really been acting on a “private grudge” against Browne, as the prosecution alleged.
But Barnes’s crime wasn’t personal. As the scholar Mark Eccles revealed in a brilliant bit of detective work, both Barnes and Browne were pawns in a much bigger game. At its center was a struggle for power over the wild, dangerous territory of the borderlands between Scotland and England by two members of the aristocracy, Lord Euer and Henry Widdrington. Their feud had already flared up several times, causing brawls, attempted murders, and one death. It wouldn’t end until Euer was dismissed from his post two years later. In trying to poison Browne, an ally of Widdrington, Barnes was clearly acting under the instructions of Lord Euer. But Euer was too high to prosecute, at least for a crime of this nature. The affair was hushed up, and Barnabe Barnes went on to write The Devil’s Charter.
Writers and Crime
Barnes isn’t the only Renaissance writer who committed, or tried to commit, an act of violence. When I started making notes on the biographies of 600 Renaissance literary writers, I didn’t think to include a category for crime. It’s an omission I now regret, both because the demographic history of crime is so interesting and because the anecdotes are so good. So far as I can recall, Barnes is the only English Renaissance literary author prosecuted for poisoning, though at least one author was a victim of poison. But others killed or were killed. Marlowe was stabbed to death in 1593. In 1598, the year Barnes attempted to poison Browne, Ben Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel. That same year, the playwright John Day, author of The Parliament of Bees, among others, killed Henry Porter, author of The Two Angry Women of Abington. The Restoration theater brought further murders. All things considered, the early modern theater seems to have been almost as sordid and dangerous a world as its enemies alleged.
It was almost certainly more violent than the modern literary world. Leaving aside military service, we can all think of a handful of 19th and 20th century writers who killed someone. But they’re few and far between. And in most cases, their crimes don’t look like the murders of the Renaissance theater, motivated by professional rivalries, drunken brawls, or political intrigue. Rather, they’re domestic crimes that take place within the nuclear family: Louis Althusser and William S. Burroughs, for instance, both killed their wives; Mary Lamb killed her mother.
If modern writers are less likely to commit murder than their Renaissance predecessors, that’s probably in part because their societies, as a whole, are less violent. The homicide rate in England (and in Europe at large—America, alas, would have to be treated separately) has gone down between the Renaissance and the present, though it's not easy to say precisely how much. In this case as in others, long-run statistics are difficult to amass, and still more difficult to interpret. That’s because even at the worst of times, homicides are comparatively rare, so missing a small number of deaths has the potential to throw calculations way off—a big problem in an age of unreliable recordkeeping. In addition, modern medicine has lowered the rate of violent deaths sharply: many wounds that would have been fatal in the Renaissance are now easily treatable injuries. It’s a great testament to the progress of science, but doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the human propensity for violence.
Still, the overall trend is clear. According to Lawrence Stone, the rate of homicides has fallen from about 7 in 100,000 in the sixteenth century to less than 1 in 100,000, with the most precipitous drop occurring from the late seventeenth through eighteenth centuries.2 There’s only one category where the homicide rate has held steady over the centuries, and that’s homicides committed within the family, usually domestic violence against women—the crimes of Burroughs and Althusser. Crimes against strangers or rivals, by contrast, have become much more infrequent. The Elizabethan period, Stone speculates, may have seen an unusually high number of such crimes. Personally, I think that’s likely: in the 1590s, England’s population was the youngest it would be until the early nineteenth century. This was also the decade when the wages of ordinary people had the least purchasing power of any point in English history. Youth and poverty, especially in London, could be a combustible mixture.
But if part of the story applies to the wider society, part of it, it seems to me, is specific to literary history. Renaissance playwrights and poets were ambiguous figures, who brawled, informed, and intrigued. Like Barnes, they traveled to the Continent, acquiring new languages, fashions, and a dangerously flexible ethics. They gathered intelligence for noble patrons and formed part of their entourages. As a number of recent studies of the Renaissance theater have shown, the plays and poems such writers produced didn’t just reflect this world. They were thoroughly part of it, playing a vital role in new modes of intrigue, which could easily shade into real violence. There was a reason that Lord Euer kept his own troupe of actors.
It’s not easy to keep this context in mind when watching Renaissance theater. Although we might realize, thanks to the work of scholars, that at least some members of the audience would have seen the dilemmas of revenge tragedy as more pertinent than we do, it’s very hard to put ourselves in the place of their violent protagonists. We see ourselves as romantic heroes and heroines, or as potential victims, but not really as revengers or murderers. I can and do tremble with the Duchess of Malfi, but I’ve never really tried to put myself in the shoes of Bosola, the play’s assassin—and, incidentally, the character with the most lines. Most of us sympathize with Hamlet’s existential angst without identifying particularly deeply with the specific problem of when and how to enact a murderous revenge. But maybe we should try a little harder to do just that. After all, what the playwright and would-be assassin Barnabe Barnes reveals is that those apparently dissimilar vocations could, in fact, be two sides of the same coin.
Mark Eccles, “Barnabe Barnes,” in Charles J. Sisson, Ed., Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933). All details are taken from Eccles’ splendid account, though I’ve modernized the spelling.
Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal violence in English society 1300-1980,” Past & Present 101 (1983): 22-33.