The sense I get is that Forest's trying to find an intelligible way of conveying intimacy as well as hierarchy without infodumping all over the shop: the physical closeness of 16th-century aristocrats to the servants (themselves gentry) who dressed them, accompanied them almost everywhere, slept in their rooms and often in the same beds. And that might well be magnified in the case of Essex, who has political reasons for creating a very close-knit household, bound by relationships of loyalty above and beyond even the high standard of the time. Poley's means of delivering Nicholas was calculated to attract personal attention and suspicion, and it worked.

My sense of the Essex/Southampton relationship is that Essex is (rightly) suspicious of the poet in political terms but also that Southampton's partiality for middle-class, grammar-school-educated company irritates his aristocratic amour propre. But Southampton isn't doing anything wrong in itself: patronage is an approved aristocratic function. Contemporary documents represent patron/protegé relationships in erotic terms--lots of kissing, embracing, perfervid dreams. That's all socially acceptable, except perhaps if your protegé has a reputation around town for actually having sex with men.

I think they've had this one out before, but been stymied--Essex doesn't know for sure that Marlowe's an agent, and Southampton can always defend himself by saying it's a nobleman's proper function to patronise the arts. What's new is they now know Marlowe was a spy, and that defence is exploded: Essex thinks he's got the upper hand and can tick off his younger friend good and proper for his indiscretions, but Southampton's high-minded artistic defence catches him on the hop and wallops him round the chops with the realisation that it wasn't a conventional relationship of patronage, or even Southampton enjoying a bit of rough: Marlowe was actually giving Southampton something that Essex couldn't: aesthetic bliss. (Of course, he must have known this at some level, but it's another thing to actually be told, as Unity Logan could probably tell you after her efforts on behalf of June White). And to be told in the presence of two small boys, all agog. Ouch.