Auckland writer Olivia Hayfield* explains how she resurrected 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe to star in her new novel, Sister to Sister. 

Olivia Hayfield is a pen name. Real name: Sue Copsey. 

When I’m planning my modern retellings of historical tales, I read widely on the characters and see who leaps out at me. I try to dig beyond the two-dimensional personalities historians often give us (because most historians were men, and they gave us that version of history we got at school, the one that bored us rigid, the one with dates and battles and acts and treaties). Then I imagine what those personalities would be like if they lived today.

Not only did Christopher Marlowe leap out at me, he grabbed me by the throat and hasn’t let go since. This man, who I initially saw as a peripheral character in Sister to Sister, my retelling of the early years of Elizabeth I’s rule, would settle for nothing less than centre stage.

Occasionally a historical character strikes me as seeming out of their time. Anne Boleyn is one – ambitious, forward thinking, sparky. But 16th-century women were expected to be gentle, submissive, and very good at embroidery. (The ladies of court seemed to do little else. You were basically fucked if you couldn’t sew.)

Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, also seems not of her time. Marriage? I think not. Marriage would have meant giving up power, deferring to a man. Not Elizabeth. Her advisers lined them up – princes, emperors, even Ivan the Terrible – and she found reasons to say no.

Marlowe is another. In 16th-century England, it really mattered if you were Protestant or Catholic, and Marlowe was known to be neither. He was an atheist (or at least, he rejected religious dogma), at a time when it really wasn’t a good idea to say so.

But intriguing as he is, Marlowe probably never met Elizabeth. So how did he come to be a main character in Sister to Sister? My first book, Wife After Wife, was bursting at the seams with compelling personalities. Henry VIII, all the Catherines, the Annes, the mistresses, the Toms.

Not so when it came to the sequel. Elizabeth was famously alone. Unmarried. Not one single husband. Childless. Her brother was dead; her sister, Queen Mary (Bloody Mary), locked her up in the Tower, and only just held herself back from beheading her. And as for Elizabeth’s cousins – they were mostly seen as threats, especially that Scottish one.

So who could I populate this book with? A lover – Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was Elizabeth’s favourite and probably her lover. (The Virgin Queen? Maybe not.) Who else? She needed some friends. Who were the famous Elizabethans? Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake? What do we know of them? Bringer of tobacco and potatoes. Circumnavigator of the world. But their personalities didn’t leap off the page. I made them girls, because there are so few famous Elizabethan girls.

Shakespeare, of course. Although he was writing towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, time is malleable in my stories so I’d make him Eliza’s age and they could meet at Oxford, and she would bag his talent and use it to expand the family media giant, Rose Corporation, to include a new TV drama arm, like Netflix. And what about that other playwright who was around at the same time. Christopher Marlowe.

I knew little of Kit (he’s often called Kit – an androgynous name, so I used this for my 21st-century version, as my boy doesn’t care too much about gender). All I really knew was that he wrote Dr Faustus, about a man who sold his soul to the devil, and that there were conspiracy theories about him. Didn’t he die in a pub brawl? This seemed like a promising start, so I began to research him. Oh. [Sits up straighter, eyes widening.]

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s biography of him begins: “Spy? Brawler? Heretic? Learn more about this mysterious playwright … ” Research those other Elizabethans and there they all are, plenty of information on Shakespeare, Raleigh, Drake. Marlowe, not so much. He’s peripheral, mysterious, in the shadows. A genius, for sure, but his personality? A brawler; possibly gay; “rakehell” was one (wonderful) word used to describe him, a mouthy atheist, calling Jesus a “bastard” and Jesus’s mother Mary “dishonest”. And yet … one of the few first-hand descriptions calls Kit “kind”. This seemed contradictory to everything else I was reading. How intriguing.

Little is known about Marlowe’s life, but the facts are eerily similar to Shakespeare’s, and this gives weight to those (largely debunked) conspiracy theories that claim they were in fact the same person. Will and Kit were born within two months of each other. Both were first sons, and were from similar backgrounds – Will’s father was a glover, while Kit’s was a shoemaker. Both lads went to their local grammar school. Will took himself off to London in his 20s, where his star rose, and rose. Meanwhile, at the age of 16, clever Kit won a scholarship to Cambridge, then he too went to London where his star also rose – but quickly crashed and burned.

During his time at Cambridge, Kit was often absent, and it’s highly likely he was on the Continent, working as a spy for Elizabeth’s government (Cambridge was ever a place for spy recruitment). The evidence is pretty strong. When it was time to award him his degree, there were complaints that he’d been absent for too long, that he hadn’t earned it. But a letter from Elizabeth’s Privy Council put them right. Kit had been away on “matters touching the benefitt of his Countrie [sic]”. He’d clearly been On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Kit got his degree.

Another big clue as to his secret (service) life was that while at Cambridge, he spent lavishly on wining and dining. His income was far greater than that of a scholarship student.

Kit was living life large, and he didn’t stop when he left Cambridge. In London, he wrote seven plays in quick succession – so quick that scholars are unsure as to their correct order – and they were a huge hit. Kit rocketed to fame, and rumours of his secret spy life didn’t hurt his image. Kit was brilliant, sexy, dangerous.

But what of Marlowe’s work? At a time when it was the done thing to write plays in rhyme – anything else was inferior – Marlowe wrote instead in blank verse, and in the process freed drama from its stiff, formal constraints. The Poetry Foundation says, “English drama was never the same again.”

At this time of profound religious change, there was much scholarly debate about predestination – whether God has already decided who’s going to be saved and who’s going to hell. In other words, is there any point in fighting against Fate; is free will in fact not a thing? This debate influenced Marlowe’s writing, and it tied in beautifully with my own themes of reincarnation and redemption, of events playing out according to Fate, of history repeating itself.

A few of Marlowe’s famous lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships …

Make me immortal with a kiss …

Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove …

Whoever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight (this one is also in Shakespeare’s As You Like It – that was apparently Shakespeare quoting Marlowe, as a tribute)

And my personal favourite: You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute. And now and then stab, as occasion serves. So very Kit.

Marlowe loved a good brawl (see above) and got into hot water a few times. He called protestants “hypocritical asses”, and was denounced for his “Damnable Judgement of Religion, and scorn of gods word [sic].” He was playing with fire – literally. The penalty for such views was burning at the stake. But not only did Kit manage to avoid this sticky end, after being arrested on charges of blasphemy, he got away with only having to report each day to a court officer.

But it was only a matter of time before he was back in deepest trouble. It’s thought he was a member, along with Sir Walter Raleigh, of The School of Night, the modern name given to a secret society (also called The School of Atheists) of scientists, poets and intellectuals. One theory about his death is that Raleigh organised it to protect members, worried, after Marlowe was yet again arrested, that he might divulge their names under torture.

Kit’s death, at the age of 29, is as mysterious as his life. Famously, he “died in a tavern brawl”. But no, he didn’t – there was far more to it than tempers flaring after too many bevvies. He’d spent the day meeting with two men who were almost certainly secret agents, in a private room in the tavern, which was a “safe house”. Apparently there was a dispute over the bill, which quickly turned into a knife fight, allegedly started by Kit, in which he was stabbed above his right eye. He died instantly.

It’s highly likely this was an assassination. Mei Trow, author of Who Killed Kit Marlowe? describes how the “brawl” was an elaborate fabrication to cover up Kit’s murder, citing a manuscript discovered in the British Museum that indicates certain members of Elizabeth’s council were atheists, and that Marlowe knew who, and had the evidence. They decided to silence him. Tellingly, the man who stabbed him was pardoned after pleading self-defence.

There’s another theory – that it was a fake death; that Marlowe, knowing his time was up, escaped to Europe, lived on and wrote under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. Gotta love that idea. This theory has been largely dismissed by scholars. But! In recent years it has become more widely accepted that Shakespeare collaborated with Marlowe, on Henry VI parts one, two, and three.

I found myself wondering, how could such a wild boy, who seemed to live for danger and infamy, write such beautiful words? There are also hints in Marlowe’s plays of his fascination with “homosexual desire”, though definitions of sexuality in Elizabethan times were very different. Scholars don’t seem to know for sure about his sexuality.

The more I pondered on Kit and these apparent contradictions, the more vivid my modern-day version became. Kit. I didn’t need to change his name – I immediately saw him as androgynous. Marley seemed a good adaptation; he’d enjoy a smoke. Famously Marlowe said, “All those who love not tobacco and boys are fools.” Probably gay, then. Or bi. Or just … everything. An experimenter. So not really boyfriend material, when it came to Eliza, though I wanted them to have a close relationship, so I made him Eliza’s soulmate. He’s prescient – that musing on Fate – the only character in my books who realises what’s really going on. And I had so much fun with the competitive-erotic relationship between Will and Kit, who eventually … but that would be telling.

Sister to Sister, by Olivia Hayfield (Hachette, $34.99), can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. 

Levin GP Glenn Colquhoun talks with books editor Catherine Woulfe about his new collection of poetry, Letters to Young People.

Glenn Colquhoun is an acclaimed and accomplished poet. He has published four collections, including Playing God, in December 2002, which sold a massive 10,000 copies. He’s won a clutch of Montanas and the 2004 Prize in Modern Letters (which at $60,000 was the sweetest pot in New Zealand writing, until it stalled after just four rounds); he also writes children’s books and essays, often about medicine, occasionally for The Spinoff.

Colquhoun hasn’t been publishing as much lately. Nine years ago he helped to set up the Horowhenua Youth Health Service, a free one-stop-shop for people aged about 10 to 24. He is the only doctor working there, with a nurse and a receptionist. “We’re only open three days a week,” Colquhoun tells me. “We’ve grown now to the point where we have to close our books most of the time because there’s more kids than there are us. So we’ve worked really hard in the last two or three years to try and convince the DHB and anyone who’ll listen that we need more funding to open fulltime.” The service deals with any primary healthcare need, and he reckons that divides roughly into thirds: contraception and sexual health, mental health, and then everything else. But lately Colquhoun has noticed mental health is bleeding into just about every consultation. 

He knows this because he knows the kids’ stories, because the way this clinic works is extraordinary.

“It’s a huge lie in primary healthcare that you can see someone in quarter of an hour, it’s the greatest, most perverse lie of primary health care. I’m furious that GPs across the country don’t stand up and say, ‘This is a lie, this cannot be done, it is not done, and we miss heaps’. We’re bent over by a financial model and we’re fattened up by it and we don’t call it what it is.

“At the clinic we’ve just said, ‘No, we’re not going to do it like that.’ The shortest appointments are for 30 minutes and we’ll regularly spend longer than that, and sometimes up to an hour and a half. And often when a young person enters the service we’ll spend a few hours with them every week until we untangle some pretty big stories, to be honest. And then, if and when a relationship has grown and you’ve seen what is really going on in a person’s life and what the real issues are, then you can have 10-minute consultations because that kid knows that if they need longer they’ll get longer. And you’ve got a plan and you’re just working on this little bit today.” 

The team bakes cakes for kids’ birthdays, sends them birthday cards with $1 scratchies inside. Huge hit. There’s lots of flexibility, lots of texting. “It’s easier sometimes for the young people to talk in that way … And when you go to lockdown for example, it’s so easy. Half the kids have got our phone numbers so we just gave it to the other half.”

He says it’s like having 600 nieces and nephews. It’s proven to him “that the old medicine, of setting up somewhere and staying there, is a great medicine. And there’s huge efficiencies in it.”

And another remarkable thing: sometimes, having fired all his “medicine bullets” at a patient, Colquhoun will sit down and write them a poem. Letters to Young People showcases a few dozen of those poems – ‘To you a young person finding the journey difficult’, ‘To a young man haunting himself’, ‘To a young woman raped by a friend’ – as well as a poem to a niece beginning her nursing career, and one for his daughter, Olive.

Colquhoun tried to contact all the young people he had gifted these poems to. Many asked for their name to be attached to their poem. Some, Colquhoun was unable to contact. “I like to think those poems wait here for them to return one day nonetheless,” he writes in the introduction.

We spoke ages ago, one evening in late October.

The Spinoff: What does it feel like for you, putting all these gifts, all this energy, into one volume and sending it out into the world?

Glenn Colquhoun: It’s been a very tender experience, is the word that comes to mind. Most times I finish a book of poetry I kind of don’t want to look at it for a couple of years because you have to reread it so many times, you sort of obsess about whether you use “and” or “but” or a comma or no comma and you’re just so tired of looking at the writing. But I still like picking this book up. It’s like looking at a photo album and reminding me of the kids that have come through the clinic and the connections to them. We’ve had spectacular failures but they have been, by and large, very tender intimate interactions, you know? Listening to young people’s stories and their vulnerabilities and trying to find ways to connect with them really, and ultimately to let them know that you think they’re worth heaps. And that they’re unique and that you can see the uniqueness in them. And the kids have a way of forcing an honesty from you.

When I’ve failed [as a doctor] over the years I’ve gone away and thought “I wasn’t in that consultation in the way I needed to be, I was using something from another consultation, or I was carrying an energy from somewhere else into that, or taking it for granted, or taking it lightly and not giving each person the space that they deserve” … so you know, you go back and you try and do that. 

That’s exactly the same as writing a poem. It’s like, how do I keep my spirit open enough to be moved and touched by this thing I’m looking at? How do I not bullshit when I have a facility with words and I can get away with bullshit. How do I not bullshit, when I’m a doctor and I’ve got slick at a whole lot of things, how do I not bullshit?

Above all else don’t bullshit.

So how did the poems come into your medical practice? Do you remember the first time you wrote for a patient?

I do, I do. It’s a poem called ‘An attempt to prevent the suicide of a young woman’, it’s the second poem in the book.

I do not want

you to die

today, Anna.

Perhaps

I seem

stubborn.

I have my

reasons

of course,

but they will only

make us argue …

She was a young woman who was really intelligent and insightful and had been, out of the blue really, struck down with a depression. She had a strong desire to stop existing. Most of the young people I’ve talked with don’t really want to die, they want to stop feeling bad feelings. And they want the shittiness to go away. But this young woman was really challenging about why, if her life was so unhappy, she should be prevented from not existing. And you know, she got all the traditional treatments, but I just became deeply, deeply fond of her and also challenged to answer her, as a human being. Like: why is life worth living? And the part of me that was a poet was challenged to write a poem about that: what would I say?

I shared it with her and she said, you know – I still love it – she said, “Thanks so much for that, I really appreciate that you thought about things from that perspective and took the time to write something for me, but I don’t know what it means. And it doesn’t make me feel any different.” (Laughs.)

It was great, she put me in my place. But I think it’s all relationship building as much as anything. She got through that period of time and she moved away and we’ve had contact through the years. 

I wrote another couple and then I thought, what if I just kept writing? I’d started to see the usefulness from a medical point of view but it was also a nice poetry problem: how do I write a poem to a kid with focal segmental glomerulonephritis, you know? How do I write something pretty but also understandable for a young person? They became long thin letters, most of them. I don’t know when the poetry project took over from the medicine project, they kept weaving around each other, but I knew I wanted to take each poem back and give it to the young person. That it wasn’t finished until that was done.

Were you actually printing them out or texting them through, or what?

I would print them out when I thought it was finished and I would text the young person or call them and say, “Hey can you come in and see me?”

And of course every time a doctor calls a patient, everybody in my experience thinks they’ve got cancer, so I’d say “No it’s alright, you don’t have to stress, I’ve just written you a poem and I want to give it to you”, and they would just be gobsmacked. If I could have caught the looks on faces eh. They were just completely “What the fuck?”

Then I’d insist on reading it to them and then I’d give it to them, and yeah. Tell them that they are awesome and that if nothing else, if this is a pain in the arse then if nothing else I thought about them and what they were going through, and that they moved me and touched me as human beings, and they’re worth heaps to me. And send them on their way. 

Most of them I think just took it as a gift. Sometimes it opened up new channels for us to talk. Some were really moved and it really did add another layer of shine to the connection and others were like, “Oh man, thanks”, or “Oh, sweet”, and they’d sort of shuffle off a bit shy and not really knowing what to make of it. Or they’d change the topic and talk about something else pretty quick to get away from the awkwardness.

Did it get properly awkward? You must have been having to think carefully about boundaries. 

Yeah, that’s true in any area of medicine and particularly in youth health. But I think sometimes we in medicine, you know, we use that old chestnut “Be careful of your boundaries” to stop the power of relationships. Same in education. “I don’t want to break boundaries” can become a way of just saying “I don’t want to put the work in”. I think boundaries are there for very very good reason and I don’t take them lightly ever, but also, you know, it’s hard to walk away from a kid who’s opened up to tell you something. It’s like there’s an unspoken thing sometimes for a young person: I tell you to see if you stay. They’re looking to see what happens next. I think you can stay, in lots of ways, and maintain boundaries.

[Sharing the poems] brought intimacy. Was it awkward? Yeah man, but some of the biggest moments in medicine are awkward. It’s awkward when people die, when they vomit, when they wet themselves. Being sick is awkward, and it’s like holding the energy of that awkwardness and saying you know what, we can get through a bit of awkward, eh. 

Has anyone come back to you down the track and said that their poem did leave a mark?

Yeah, there’s heaps of ongoing tenderness. So that poem ‘Via Dolorosa – to a young woman and her remembering’, for Bree, the big long poem in 14 parts, I can barely read that without crying. 

Why?

It’s about a young woman that I’ve had a conversation with most days of my life for the last five years. It’s like a five-year-long consultation that’s still unwinding. She also has a huge story, such as no young person should have to go through, and she spent her whole adolescence from the time she was a little girl, you know, of six, untangling that tangling, and trying to find meaning in her life. I fired all the medicine bullets and it didn’t really do any good and so we just held on. We go for long walks around the streets of Levin and chat.

That’s a poem really about the boundaries of medicine: what is the end of medicine, where do we stop, you know, where does the connection stop?

My friend, here we are.

What is wrong, we know,

it sits like a mountain

risen up from the plain.

Its height, we know

and the number of days

it will take to walk around it …

It’s about walking off the path and starting to go up the mountain with a kid and not leaving them, but also not screwing them up. One of the things I’ve seen a bit is that in situations like this, sometimes people do graft onto people and it’s OK to bond to them for a while. Just like a plaster cast allows the leg to sit within it until the leg is strong again, and if we deny that part of ourselves as human beings or doctors to form, then we ignore a powerful medicine.

It was a very soothing book to read. I mean obviously some of the backstories of these young people are grim, but there was something about the rhythm of the poems and the care that you took – as I read I found that my thinking had taken on the same rhythm as your writing, which was a really peaceful way to finish a day, so thank you for that. 

The image I use a lot for what happens there is you just try really hard to be still. I think always of that image – it’s a bit prosaic – of a handrail going down a set of stairs. The stairs can wobble and the kids wobble, and you just keep running beside them, keeping the same distance, not too close so that you’re doing everything for them, not too far away so that they can always put their hand out. And you’re never far away.

Sometimes they cling on for three or four steps then let go for a while, then 10 steps later they just quick touch again. Sometimes they walk down the whole stairs with their hand on the rail, there have been relationships like that where they’ve become almost part of the family. Other times just once or twice and you’re away. They’re bowling down the steps by themselves. It’s keeping still, because their heads are aswirl. Whatever’s happening, there is a stillness.

And it took me a while to find that letter-writing rhythm, stylistically. It took me a few poems to think they need to be long, thin letters, not too many words in a line, not too dense for them, just little, and gentle, like you’re writing to somebody encouraging them, telling them that they’re worth something or that you’re there or that you thought of them.

The book feels a little bit like a wrapping-up, is this a you’re moving on from medicine moment, or … ?

No, no, no, no, no … I know that it’s right to hold the stories for longer, you know?

There’s beautiful doctors out there, colleagues and mentors for me, but I reckon as a profession we’ve bolted from the story, we’ve bolted from patients in pain, we go back to leafy suburbs and we don’t stay in the hard streets, and our kids don’t go to the same schools. We leverage our social power to get the fuck out of there. And we don’t sit and hold the story, not just with individuals, but with communities. You know, and yet that’s such brilliant medicine.

I interviewed a surgeon once who is campaigning for a more compassionate approach to medicine and he sent me research showing that if you are in medicine and you take that compassionate approach consciously and consistently, you come out in a better place as well. That it reflects back at you.

Oh Jesus Christ yes. The kids have saved me, you know. I had a very compromised relationship with medicine.

In the book you call it “a wide ocean of miserable medicine”!

Yeah that pretty much sums it up, you know. (Laughs).

There’s a poem at the end about love, it’s like when you fly over the sea on the way to another land and you come down, skim the waves, and you think “I can’t stop I’ll drown, I’ve got to keep going” – and one day you stop, and you start to drown, until you realise that you can breathe this, you can breathe underwater, and that what you get back from patients gives you oxygen.

So my life has much more energy in it now. That’s the irony. It’s like, I can breathe this. There’s days you feel like holy shit, but I don’t feel drained, I feel filled up. It’s an amazing bittersweet human feeling, like this is what it must be like to be a teacher in a community for a long time. And this is what it must be like to be a doctor in a community. The community feeds us.

Letters to Young People, by Glenn Colquhoun (OldKing Press, $35) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland. One dollar from each copy sold will go to the Horowhenua Youth Health Service.