Did Marlowe Die in Padua in 1627? by Peter Farey

One of the stories dear to the hearts of many Marlovians is one from Calvin Hoffman which concerns a man from Padua—Pietro Basconi—who claimed to have nursed an exiled recluse called Christopher Marlowe when he was terminally ill in Padua in 1627. Unfortunately, it has only very recently come to light that on 23 April 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, something appeared which seems to show that this whole story is a myth.

According to an item in the Guardian newspaper of 11 July 1983, Calvin Hoffman had been left some notes about it in the will of a journalist friend of his. Here is what it says:

"CALVIN HOFFMAN, probably the most indefatigable friend the Elizabethan playright (sic) Christopher Marlowe ever had, will travel to Italy next week in what he hopes will be the conclusive phase of his 30-year campaign to prove that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare.
This is to follow up written evidence indicating that documents could exist showing that Marlowe lived in hiding in Padua, creating the entire Shakespearean cannon (sic), for 34 years after his supposed death in a tavern brawl in 1593. The evidence is in the form of notes which Mr Hoffman, aged 75, an American former theatre critic, received this year from the will of a journalist friend. These say that a 16th century Paduan, Petro (sic) Basconi, left papers stating that an English writer named Marlowe lived with him as a recluse until dying in 1627, 11 years after Shakespere's (sic) death. The notes add that the writer had "had to leave England." The papers were passed down the Basoni (sic) family and were said to have been shown during the 19th century to a British ambassador to Italy, who is said to have commented that he was "afraid to tamper with a matter so dear to the English heart." ... "Mr Hoffman does not know where to begin looking in Padua."

He did in fact go there and succeeded in finding a 17th century grave for someone called Merlin, a name used for Marlowe when he was at Cambridge, only to discover that it is quite a common name in Padua. He found nothing else.¹

It is too good a story to just be left alone, however, and other Marlovians have tried to see what truth there might be in it.

In his 2001 film Much Ado About Something, after hearing of the Guardian account from John Hunt, Michael Rubbo also discovered the existence of a 1983 letter from Hoffman on the same subject, and showed that it mentioned Washington Irving (US Ambassador to Spain, 1842-6, who had apparently seen the relevant document) and Whitelaw Reid (US Ambassador to the UK, 1905-1912). Mike discussed the story with the archivist at Mantua, Dr. Ferrari, but—not really surprising as Padua is over 50 miles from there—found nothing.

In April 2003, Christian Lanciai reported to an internet newsgroup that he had visited three different archives in Padua, finding only (in the Archivio della Stato) that nobody with a name like Marlowe appears in a record of all the deaths in Padua from 1626 to 1651. He did find a Merlini who had died there in 1647, but "no confirmation at all in the city archives of Padua...that Christopher Marlowe had died there in the 1620s." His piece was also published in the Marlowe Society's Newsletter 22, of Spring 2004.

Izabel Gortázar mentioned the result of her research on this in an essay for the Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection blog on 20 September 2010² when she said that she "found no Basconi or Bosconi families in the Padua records." Amplifying this for some of us she said "A few years ago I went to Padua in search of Marlowe. Luckily I had friends who ensured that I had entry to the old Municipal, Church and University records and that I could talk to Librarians and Professors. Although I only spent a few days there I could not find any records of a Basconi/Bosconi family, and indeed was dissuaded by the Librarians to continue looking for such name, assuring me that there had never been a Bosconi or Basconi family in Padua."

Some Marlovians, amongst whom I count myself, nevertheless thought that there might even yet be something in it. At least we did until Edward Clybourn told us about a newspaper article he had found, dated 23 April 1916, which he correctly thought must cast doubt upon the truth of the whole thing. It was from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and was by Henry Watterson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal for more than 50 years (1868-1919).³

The first half of it consists mainly of a summary of, and apparent agreement with, his friend Mark Twain's argument against Shakespeare's authorship of the works attributed to him. "Thus Mark Twain briefs the case. Not a single statement can be gainsaid. The conclusion is dead against Shakespeare." Next he considers the Baconian case, finding some merit in it, but also disliking some aspects. He mentions how in a discussion with Whitelaw Reid, American Ambassador to the UK, Reid wouldn't check whether one Baconian argument was true or not, saying that he would not even if he could, "meaning of course that as American Ambassador he could not afford to meddle in such a controversy." Before and after the Bacon bit, however, are anecdotes apparently about how people feel free to make anything up in support of a story if they have enough belief in their version of it. Whereupon he illustrates this with his own story, written of course before Leslie Hotson's discovery of the inquest, and containing a whole lot of information which we now know to be completely wrong.

"TO COME directly to the point, there is a simple but perfect thesis in explanation of the Shakespearean mystery," he said. "This relates that the plays were written by Christopher Marlowe. They were revised by Francis Bacon. Thus prepared for the stage, they were produced by William Shakespeare." Then comes the "story". Marlowe and Shakespeare were celebrating in a tavern when he got into row with an actor called Herrick, who was accidentally killed in a scuffle. Marlowe's friend and "former classmate" Francis Bacon happened to be passing and helped to sort it out. Marlowe and the dead Herrick would swap clothes and the former "fly for his life". "Next day it was given out that Marlowe had been killed, and, the penalty death for him in case he came to life again, it was ever after thus proclaimed." He travelled to Paris and Spain, and "Finally, all individual traces lost, he repaired to Italy and settled down in Padua." There he wrote the plays which he sent back home to Bacon.

So far, so good, but now Watterson gives full rein to his imagination:

"Bacon left no cryptogram. No more did Marlowe. But, in an early edition of the Lemounier (sic) Vasari, the Comte de la Borde (sic), correcting one of the many errors in the Guida de Bassano,⁴ refers to a recluse of Padua, Pietro Basconi by name, who claimed to have nursed Marlowe in his last illness (Marlowe died in 1627, just a year after Bacon's death), and to have had from him the story and reduced it to writing. This strange composition came into the possession of Andreas Basconi, a descendant of Pietro, and was read, we are told, as late as 1843 by no less a person than Washington Irving, who, thinking it a doubtful yarn, and with Whitelaw Reid, knowing it dangerous for a man of importance (he was the American minster (sic) to Spain) to tamper with a subject so sacred to the British heart, wrote nothing about it, nor, indeed, spoke of it except to one or two intimate friends."

So could it have happened like that? "Why Not? Why Not?" Watterson asks. Couldn't a friend of his, long resident of Florence, have heard the story and told him about it? Or why, when in London, couldn't he have "fallen in with a ragged Italian in Leicester Square who, born and reared in Padua, had an inkling of the truth and who tried to sell me a plaster cast of Christopher Marlowe, declaring that, if I would go with him on a dark night into a wood by the river Wye, he would produce from the hollow of an old oak the identical Basconi manuscript."

Now comes the important bit. "Go to! Go to!" he says. "I am not on the witness stand making oath to anything—only pursuing the usual Bacon-Shakespeare method" ... "Why may I not call from the shadows and the stars the strange story of Christopher Marlowe ... at the moment of his supposed death the greatest of English poets and dramatists...many of whose early conceits, and some of his actual phrasing, to be found in the plays later ascribed to William Shakespeare?"⁵ In other words, whilst agreeing with the Marlovian theory, the story he told about it was "from the shadows and the stars"—all made up. In fact it is easy to see that the bit about the River Wye must have been inspired by the actions in 1907 of a Baconian, Dr. Orville Ward Owen, who claimed he had decoded instructions revealing that a box containing proof of Bacon's authorship had been buried in the River Wye near Chepstow, but whose dredging machinery failed to retrieve any concealed manuscripts.

Henry Watterson did clearly favour the Marlovian theory over any other. The Wikipedia article⁶ on the Louisville Courier-Journal says that "He attracted controversy for attempting to prove that Christopher Marlowe had actually written the works of Shakespeare" and the New York Times carried his reaction to the Oxfordian book of J. Thomas Looney, saying that "My own guess—we can only guess—has always been that Marlowe wrote the plays."⁷ His correspondence with Wilbur G. Zeigler—the first known Marlovian—is also held in the Library of Congress, and should be well worth reading.⁸

The date when his article appeared is an interesting one, though. Not only was it the exact tercentenary of Shakespeare's death,⁹ but it followed hard upon a quite extraordinary court case, which ran from 3 to 21 April, in which a Colonel Selig—who had produced several films about Shakespeare (presumably ready for the tercentenary)—sued a Baconian, Colonel Fabyan, because the recent publishing of his anti-Stratfordian theory would lose Selig money. The judge actually came down on Fabyan's side because he found that Bacon must indeed have written the works of Shakespeare! The plaintiff and defendant were apparently good friends, however, and cynics suggested that the publicity given to Selig's films would have been well worth the cost to him of those proceedings. Watterson's article appeared on 23 April as a signed front-page feature article in his own Courier-Journal, which apparently realized over a thousand dollars for its syndication of the story to other newspapers.¹⁰

So how is it that Calvin Hoffman got hold of this, and thought it worth following up? We know that the notes about it had been left to him in 1983 by a friend of his. Any of Henry Watterson's five children would have been well over 100 years old by then, so we are probably looking at one of his grand—or great-grand—children. It is in fact interesting that the Watterson Papers as held at the University of Louisville carry on until 1983, despite his having died in 1921. Perhaps this descendant lived until 1983, having carried on collecting related documents, and then left them all to the University of Louisville and the Library of Congress, except for one item. They left the "notes" about the Basconi/Padua story to Calvin Hoffman, because they not only knew of Henry's beliefs but also that Hoffman's 1955 book had argued much the same theory. It is just a pity that they seem to have missed their ancestor's point—that that bit was just a story.

©Peter Farey, 2012

¹ I am grateful to Gene Ayres for sharing with me this information which he obtained from the then archivist at King's College Canterbury, Paul Pollak.
² http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-doubts-about-will-4-real-death-of.html (accessed 13 February 2012).
³ The article is quite long, but it can be found online at http://tinyurl.com/watterson-item  (accessed 13 February 2012).
⁴ The earliest edition of Vasari’s writings published by Lemonnier appeared in 1846. As Ellen Wilson pointed out to me, this must therefore refer to Léon-Emmanuel-Simon-Joseph, Comte de Laborde (1807-69). He wasn't one of Lemonnier’s editors, however, so this would appear to have been in the form of handwritten marginalia.
⁵ I have corrected part of this, where the lines were set in the wrong order.
⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Courier-Journal (accessed 13 February 2012).
⁷ Thanks to Ellen Wilson for finding this at http://tinyurl.com/watterson-NYT (accessed 13 February 2012).
⁸http://memory.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2009/ms009072.pdf (accessed 13 February 2012).
⁹ Thanks to Anthony Kellett for pointing this out.
¹⁰ Wall, Joseph Frazier. Henry Watterson, Reconstructed Rebel (1956). Oxford University Press, New York. pp.293-4.

Crossing the Channel by Isabel Gortázar

To the best of my knowledge, pending further research, the first documented appearance of someone whom I personally believe might have been Christopher Marlowe after 1593 occurs in 1595.

Going through the Anthony Bacon Papers¹ in 1995, A.D. Wraight² and Peter Farey³ found several documents relative to a Frenchman, possibly passing for a Huguenot⁴, named Mr. Le Doux (no Christian name mentioned), staying in the house of Sir John Harington, at Burley-on-the Hill near Exton in Rutland, as tutor to Sir John’s son.

The information is contained in a series of letters from various persons, including: Mr. Le Doux; a de-frocked possibly Huguenot nun called Ide du Wault; Anthony Bacon; and a French servant of the latter called Jacques Petit. Le Doux, Petit and Ide du Wault are all at the house of Sir John Harington during the Christmas Festivities of 1595/6.

Jacques Petit’s letters to Anthony Bacon, together with other documents found in the Lambeth Palace Archives, led A.D. Wraight and Peter Farey to surmise that Le Doux could have been Christopher Marlowe, acting as a secret agent to the Earl of Essex.

(For those who wish to know more about Mr. Le Doux, Anthony Bacon and Jacques Petit as they appear in the Bacon Papers [Lambert Palace Library], and their possible relation with Christopher Marlowe, I suggest they visit The Marlowe Studies, where they will find most of the information published so far on the subject.)

This document below has been included and published as part of a longer essay: "About Mr. Le Doux and Some Related Matters," at The Marlowe Studies website.

However, I thought to post it here separately as well, for what I believe to be interesting information for Marlowe researchers in general, even if probably not particularly relevant to the theories about Mr. Le Doux.

As I say, I find this letter from Jacques Petit to Anthony Bacon interesting in itself, for two reasons. In the first place, it confirms the problem of dates, as it gives us good proof of the unreliability of apparent dates in some of the documents contained in the Bacon papers. The dates can be unreliable on two accounts: The fact that not all the correspondents seem to be using the same calendar, which affects primarily all documents dated January, February and March, of any particular year, but also the day. A second misleader is that we sometimes find the date of reception of one document, but not the date when it was written or even sent.

In the letter we have here, we find, written sideways on the margin the following note: “De Jacques Petit, le 4eme Feburier 159?” The last digit is unclear, but it seemed to me to say 1596. We know from other documents in this correspondence that this letter could not have been written in January 1595/6, when Petit was at Burley writing frantic letters to Bacon about Le Doux and du Wault (see the complete essay). The printed Index in the LPL indicates the year 1597, which would be consistent with the apparent 1596 (OS) in the MS itself. For the record, however, the day that Petit starts this Diary, the 6th of January 1596 was a Tuesday in the Julian, Old Style calendar, and a Saturday in the Gregorian calendar. In 1597, January 6th was a Thursday (Julian) or Monday (Gregorian). In fact we only find January 6th to be a Friday in 1595 (Gregorian), and in 1598 (Julian).

This discovery not only gives us new food for thought as to Petit’s movements, but, as I said above, may also require that we revise several year-dates in the Bacon Papers in order to establish which calendar is being used in each case, and this can only be done by double-checking against week-days whenever possible, and/or following up on events and/or information dated beyond the tricky months of January, February and March. Once we know which calendar is being used in each document, we must remember to add or detract the ten days’ difference that existed between the two.

In this respect, for example, we will find that the letter written from Middleburg by Le Doux to Anthony Bacon, dated 22nd June 1596, would have meant 12th June in England, because the Baron Zeroitin in his letter to the Earl of Essex, also from Middleburg, also dated 22nd June, explicitly says he is using the Gregorian calendar. Even if we cannot be certain that Le Doux had crossed the Channel with Zeroitin, both men seem to have entrusted their letters to the same courier.

The second reason why I think this letter from Petit is interesting to Marlovian researchers has to do with the information it gives us about Channel crossing conditions in the Sixteenth Century - a matter of extraordinary importance when it comes to speculating as to who might have been where, when.

As we will see, Petit’s Diary (Journal) sheds abundant light on the matter, and goes a long way to prove that making exact plans about arrival, or even departure, dates across the Channel may have been futile.

Reading this document we realize that it took Petit nearly a week to go from the Thames Estuary to The Hague. We also realize that the precise dates of departure and arrival were a matter of chance. The crossing could have been done in two or three days, it also might have been delayed even longer. Contrary winds, bad weather, a greedy captain, pirates, enemy ships… There are other documents telling a similar story that I will endeavour to publish in the near future. So here is the letter:

Jacques Petit: Journal de passage from Gravesend to The Hague.

Recorded by Anthony Bacon as follows: “De Jacques Petit, le 4eme Feburier 159?”

Below is the transcription (in italics) and English translation, of a two-page document preserved among the Bacon Papers in the Lambeth Palace Archives (MS65, f34 r/v.). It is a letter from Jacques Petit to Anthony Bacon. For easier reading, I have placed each translated paragraph just under its French transcription.

Memoire de nôtre passage depuis Gravesend jusques a La Haye en Hollande:

Diary of our Crossing from Gravesend to The Hague in Holland.

Vendredi, le six de Janvier sommes parties de Gravesend & avec la Maree sommes descendus jusques a Lee por le minuit. Le vent et la maree estant contraires, le maitre du navire est retourné a Gravesend pour avoir davantage de passagers et faire mieux son profit.

Friday, January sixth we have set off from Gravesend and sailed down with the tide, reaching Lee at midnight. As we had the wind and the tide against us, the captain of the vessel took us back to Gravesend to find more passengers so he could make more money

Sammedi nous n’avons point bougé de la a cause que le vent estoit toujours mauvais.

Saturday we have not moved because the wind was still bad.

Dimanche de grand matín, avec bon vent et la maree, sommes descendus jusque a Lee, puis a la seconde maree sommes arrives a Lands End. La nuit avec peu de vent avons passé Dunkirk et jetté l’ancre entre Ostend et Newport.

Sunday, early in the morning, with good wind and the tide, we sailed to Lee, then with the second tide we arrived at Lands End. At night with little wind, we passed Dunkirk and anchored between Ostend and Newport.

Lundi il a eté calme tellment que n’avons peu bouge de tout ce jour jousques avec la maree.

Monday it was so calm that we have moved very little all day, until the tide.

Mardi sommes arrives a Fleshingue ou nos passagers (qui n’avaint ni vivres ni argent) on mis pied a terre. et de 20 ou 25 qu’ils estoint il ny a a pas 20 qui ayent paye pour leur passage. Cestoit telle racailleque c’est merveille que n’ayons ete submerges. Et que l’enemy ne nous aye pris veu les blasphemes et les vilanies quon y profiroit et endurcit tant des homes et des femmes & le mauvais gouvernement plein de nonchalance de nos mariniers.

Tuesday, we arrived at Flushing, where our passengers (who had neither food nor money) disembarked, and out of the 20 or 25 there were, not 20 had paid for their trip. They were such riff-raff that it’s a miracle we didn’t drown. And that the enemy did not take us despite the blasphemies and villainies they proffered, both the men and the women, and the bad managing of the indifferent sailors.

Ceux de Flesingue qui vinrent regarder nôtre Flibot chargé de chaux (a la valeur seulement de 30p sterling)⁵ et de ces passagers nous demandant si l’enemy nous avoit rencontres s’estonoit d’entendre que non, disant qu’il y avait et navires et scouters de Dunkirk que auront rode les alentours tout hier et la nuit passé.

Those of Flushing who came to inspect our Flyboat loaded with lime (at the value of only 30d sterling) and of those passengers were asking us if we had met the enemy and they were surprised when we said we hadn’t, saying that there were vessels and scouters⁶ from Dunkirk that would have been roaming around all of yesterday and last night.

Mercredi: Nous sommes arrives a Dort,⁷ et de la a Rotterdam, puis de Rotterdam jusques a Delft ou nous avons couche.

Wednesday: We arrived to Dort , and, from there (continued) to Rotterdam, then to Delft, where we have stayed the night.

Jeudi: Au matin nous sommes arrives a La Haye ou nous nous sommes retires chex un Mr Daniel Anglois (name unclear), ou Sir Francies Ver a aussi son logis. La nous avons mis les hardes de Sr William Woodhouse, et faissons nôtre ordinaire ailleurs lequel revient pour nous 5, a un angelot par jour, ce qui est le moins que l’on puisse payer car tout est extremement cher.

Thursday: In the morning we arrived at The Hague where we rested in the house of one Mr. Daniel Anglois (name unclear), where Sir Francis Ver also lives. There, we changed into some rags (provided by) Sir William Woodehouse, and we are staying in an inn which costs us 5 one angelot⁸ each day, which is the least one can pay, because everything is extremely expensive.

Si nous n’entendons point bientôt des nouvelles de Mr W. Wodehouse, il nous faudra vivre a credit car son despensier dit qu’íl n’a plus d’argent de son maistre et commence déjà a nous laisser faire comme nous pourrons.

If we don’t hear soon from Mr. William Woodehouse we will need to live on credit, because his agent says he has no more money from his master and is already leaving us to fend for ourselves.

**********

©Isabel Gortázar, February 2012

My sincerest thanks to LCR Seeley and Anthony Kellett for their invaluable help in translating and making sense of this document. Thanks also to S. Foster for sharing his Channel navigation experience with me. I wish to thank Cynthia Morgan as well, for her help and suggestions.

¹Bacon Papers. Lambeth Palace Library.
²Wright, A.D. Shakespeare, New Evidence. (Adam Hart Publishers Ltd. 1996.) Also online at
http://www.themarlowestudies.org
³See Farey’s extensive research at: http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/title.htm; Also at http://www.themarlowestudies.org
⁴Huguenots and Walloons were French and French-speaking Flemish Calvinists respectively.
⁵ The denomination of sterling is difficult to make out, as the letter after 30 is not clear. However, having consulted my colleague Anthony Kellett about the possible relative prices of lime at the time, and discarding absolutely the it may refer to pounds sterling, the probable meaning seems to be 30d, rather than 30s, particularly in view of Petit qualifying the sum with the word “only." Here follows Kellett’s information:
“One cubic metre of lime would cost around four shillings (48d) in Holland, in 1596; and weigh roughly one tonne (though both price and weight would vary, based on the actual material described as 'lime'). Therefore, as an approximation, Petit’s transport either carried around 7 cubic metres (7 tonnes), and was worth 30 shillings; or less than one tonne (one cubic metre) and was worth 30d."
⁶ "scouters" may mean “privateers." If they were “from Dunkirk," as the letter says, they would have been under Spanish orders. Dunkirk was taken in 1583 by Spanish forces led by the Duke of Parma. It became a base for the Dunkirkers, a series of ships that acted both as pirates, and as part of the Spanish “Armada de Flandes” (Flemish Armada).
⁷ Dort, or Dordrecht, in Dutch.
⁸ This would be the second time we find, in the Bacon Papers, Jacques Petit referring to “an angelôt” as 10 shillings. It would also seem that Petit’s travelling party could have consisted of five people, but that is not clear.

Dr. Rosalind Barber Wins 2011 Hoffman Prize

Dr. Rosalind Barber has been announced as joint winner of the 2011 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe for her verse novel, The Marlowe Papers. Ros spoke to The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection about winning the prize, and about the book, which will be published by Sceptre in the UK (24th May) and St. Martin’s Press in the US (winter 2012).

“Obviously, I’m thrilled to be a winner of the Hoffman this year. I’m very glad, also, that the adjudicators were happy to consider a novel in verse, but then it's slightly unusual as works of fiction go, in that it is based on four years of full-time academic research and has twenty-five pages of notes! Not that it's a 'dry' read at all; everyone who has read it has found it a real page-turner; because as many people have acknowledged, the Marlowe-Shakespeare theory is simply a great story. And those who have read The Marlowe Papers say you absolutely forget it’s in verse, because the story just rips along. No one has to read the notes in order to understand or enjoy the book, but they do add another layer of enjoyment for anyone who likes a little history with their historical fiction, as they show the skeleton of historical evidence on which the flesh of the novel is constructed.

"I was inspired to write The Marlowe Papers after watching Mike Rubbo’s Much Ado About Something, where Jonathan Bate, despite finding the idea that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare ludicrous, admitted it would make a great novel. I suspect there were quite a few people that leapt to their keyboards or notebooks after watching that documentary, but I had the advantage of having written three previous novels (all unpublished, but great practice) and three published books of poetry. The idea of being the author of the acknowledged greatest works of literature of all time but not getting credit for them set me alight: how excruciating to be in that position! And Marlowe is such an interesting character to explore, not only a committed writer with a passion for language (something I can relate to), but also tied up in some way with the Elizabethan spy networks. It felt like here, finally, was the idea that had the potential to be a breakthrough book for me, and I seized it gratefully.

"I wrote The Marlowe Papers as part of a PhD in English literature – not the only part, as I wrote a 50,000 word 'critical introduction' on the Shakespeare authorship question and the research behind the book, and published three academic papers on Marlowe. But I knew that to do the idea real justice I'd need to research it properly, and that this would take both time and university-based resources. I am very grateful for the funding I received from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, which made the project possible. The book took four years (full-time) to write: a year of pure research, then three years of daily writing (with more research along the way).

"The hardest thing about the book, the aspect that made it most difficult to get started, was that I wanted to write it as a fictional autobiography; I had to 'be' Christopher Marlowe. And if that wasn’t challenging enough, the 'Marlowe-wrote-Shakespeare' storyline meant I was attempting to write as - oh dear! – the acknowledged greatest writer of all time! This struck me initially as the most terrifying act of hubris, and I wondered how I could possibly pull it off. But I had been funded to do so and couldn't back out. It helped that I was writing in contemporary English rather than mock-Elizabethan; the conceit being that The Marlowe Papers is Marlowe’s poetic journal, written in cipher and translated into modern verse. And modern verse – iambic pentameter in particular – is something that feels very natural and comfortable to me. So I simply started and – despite a false start, a couple of wrong turns and a couple of 'hit the wall' months – kept going.

"The results have just landed on my desk in the form of a bound proof, which is a thing of loveliness. Unfortunately, unless you’re a UK bookseller or journalist, you won’t be able to get your mitts on your own copy for five months, but I hope when you do you'll agree it was worth the wait. In the meantime you can sign up for news of the book and events around its launch at themarlowepapers.com, which will soon be revamped (when my publisher takes it over) to include short films of me talking about the book and reading extracts. The plans for the UK hardback (I don’t know so much about the US edition yet) are really exciting. The official launch date is 30th May: the anniversary of that fateful day in Deptford when Marlowe died and a new writer - Shakespeare – suddenly came into being.”

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, January 2012

Christopher Marlowe's Early Life: What If? by Samuel Blumenfeld

In writing The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, I faced all of the same problems that other biographers of Marlowe have faced. Constance Brown Kuriyama summed up the problem very nicely in the Introduction to her biography, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, published in 2002: “Although biography is technically nonfiction, all life-writing is an amalgam of fact and interpretation, logical inference and speculation, truth and myth.”

And this is certainly true when it comes to Marlowe. For example, we all know of Shakespeare’s supposed “lost years,” which biographers have tried to fill with as much fictional nonsense as possible. Apparently there seems to be a similar blank period in Marlowe’s early life – the period from 1572, when Marlowe was 8, and 1578, when at age of 14 he entered the King’s School. What was he doing during those six years? And why didn’t he enter the King’s School at the age of 9, when that was possible? What was he doing for those five years that made him wait until the final deadline for entering the King’s School at age 14?

The standard biographies of Marlowe start with his birth in Canterbury in 1564 and some known facts about his family that William Urry was able to gather through his intensive research in Canterbury’s archives. But little is known about Marlowe’s childhood until he enters the King’s School at age 14, for which there is adequate documentary evidence.

So we have no choice but to engage in a bit of speculation. I believe that young Christopher, who would become the greatest dramatist in all of human history, was a child prodigy and exhibited his high intelligence and linguistic genius at an early age. We all know of child prodigies. Today you can see such musical prodigies performing on YouTube. But we don‘t know how child geniuses were treated back in 16th-century England, particularly if the little genius came from a common family. It is also likely that Christopher's father, John Marlowe, a cobbler, recognized his son’s precocity and did not expect him to follow in his footsteps. His son was meant for better things.

Where did Christopher get his primary education? In 1569, when the future poet was five years old, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, founded a new school at Eastridge Hospital for the education of poor children at no charge. Kuriyama writes: “The school opened its doors to twenty poor children at about the time Christopher was ready to begin his education, offering instruction in reading, writing, and singing.”

If young Christopher Marlowe was indeed a child prodigy, we can assume that the Archbishop would have readily recognized the precocious talents of young Christopher and been amazed at how quickly he learned the fundamentals of English literacy. Also, in 1572, the Archbishop may have been asked by his good friend Lord Burghley if he knew of a youngster who might make a good page to a young nobleman about to embark on a two-year tour of the Continent, and the Archbishop may immediately have thought of young Marlowe who had just turned 8, the appropriate age when boys became pages.

I have found no factual evidence that such an exchange took place. This is mere speculation on my part, and I made that clear in my biography. But it is speculation based more on possibility than probability. Young Marlowe had to be doing something between 1572 and 1578. He wasn’t at home playing video games, and he could have entered the King’s School in 1573. Why didn’t he?

Who was the young nobleman who needed a page? I believe it was Philip Sidney, who had gotten Queen Elizabeth’s permission to embark on a learning tour of the Continent where he would also make important political and literary contacts. And because John Marlowe was always having financial problems, the payment he might have received for the engagement of his son as a page, may have been welcome.

It was in 1572 that 18-year-old Philip Sidney was about to embark on his tour of the Continent. As a young member of the noble Sidney family of Penshurst Place in Kent, Sidney’s entourage consisted of three servants and four horses. Did Sidney’s chief servant need a page to do all of the mundane things that pages did: tend to the luggage, water the the horses, and go on errands of one sort or another? When a child reached the age of 8, he was qualified to be a page. And when he was as intelligent and gifted as young Christopher, he would have been chosen by an aristocrat for the job.

I have been told that a page from a common family would not have been hired by a nobleman. But could an exception have been made when a boy from a common family had uncommon gifts of intelligence and verbal skills? And so, I have speculated that the boy Christopher was engaged by Philip Sidney to be his chief servant’s helper.

And how would have Christopher come to the attention of Sidney? It is possible that Lord Burghley asked his friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury, if he knew of a boy at his school who could be a good page for Sidney. And is it not conceivable that he could have recommended Christopher?

This makes a very plausible story for which, as of yet, I have found no documentary proof. But in this biographical business, you never know what some literary researcher will discover in the future. For example, nothing was known of Marlowe’s involvement in a supposed counterfeiting scheme in Holland until a letter written by Robert Sidney to Lord Burghley in 1592 was discovered in 1976 by Professor Richard B. Wernham.

While an army of scholars has spent decades and tons of money scouring every archive in England to find evidence of Shakespeare’s life as a dramatist, very little has been spent by scholars digging up information about Marlowe. But so much that has been discovered so far has tended to corroborate the theory that Marlowe wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare (or, better stated, has not disqualified Marlowe's authorship), as this blog has demonstrated since 2008.

In any case, there are several reasons why I believe my speculation makes sense. Becoming part of the Sidney entourage would have made young Marlowe acquainted with how the aristocracy lived and what their values were. Second, a tour of Europe with the Sidney entourage would have introduced Christopher to foreign lands and languages. They spent enough time in Italy so that the young page would have been able to quickly learn Italian.

Also, the Sidney party arrived in Paris just a few days before the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots on August 24, 1572. The Huguenot leadership had gathered in Paris to attend the marriage of Huguenot King Henry of Navarre and the Catholic Princess Marguerite de Valois. The marriage was supposed to bring the Protestants and Catholics together. However, Catherine de Medici, the Queen mother, saw this special occasion as a golden opportunity to destroy the Huguenot leadership in one fell swoop, and therefore she planned and ordered the massacre with help of the famous Duc de Guise.

Sir Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris, and Sidney and his entourage took refuge in the English embassy. The massacre would haunt Sidney and Walsingham for the rest of their lives – as well as (as I have speculated) the young page Christopher Marlowe, who in later years would write a play on the subject, Massacre at Paris.

From Paris, the Sidney party traveled to Germany, Austria, and Italy. On February 26, 1574 Sidney sat for his portrait by Paolo Veronese in Venice. In Padua, Philip took a house where he could study at the university. If young Christopher was among them, he had ample opportunity to learn Italian.

In March, 1575, Philip began his journey back to England. By then young Christopher, future literary genius, was eleven years old, and virtually everything he would have learned as a page would find itself in his future plays.

Back in England, young Marlowe may have remained in service to Sidney and lived with the family in London or at Penshurst. And it was there that he would have become acquainted with Philip’s sister, Mary Sidney. As Philip Sidney’s page, Christopher may have attended the great party that Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, threw for Queen Elizabeth at his famous estate at Kenilworth in July 1575 during the Queen’s summer progress. The romantic gaieties, the ambrosial feasts, the ceremonious devotion to the Queen, the sparkling entertainments, the merrymaking, the idyllic twilight interludes with exquisite music and dance will all be found years later in a play called A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In February 1577, Sidney once more had the occasion to travel to the Continent. Elizabeth had ordered him to offer her condolences to the Empress Maria upon the death of her husband Maximilian II in Vienna. Among his suite were two of his closest friends, Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville. As ambassador of the Queen, his train was richly appointed.

After stops in Brussels and Heidelberg, the party reached Vienna in April 1577. Sidney paid his respects to Maximilian’s widow, the Empress Maria. He then proceeded to see if the projected league among the Protestant princes was possible. Part of his mission had been to study the new incumbents of thrones, to observe conditions in Germany and the Empire, and to report on the prospects of a league of the Protestant princes of Europe. But he found that disunity among the princes made such a league unlikely.

By June 10, 1577, Sidney and his entourage were back in England. Young Marlowe was 13 years old, and if he was to enter the King’s School at the deadline age of 14, he would have to leave Sidney's service (hypothetically) in less than a year. Marlowe obtained his scholarship on January 14, 1578/9 and began his studies in the Michaelmas term of 1578/9.

But if he had indeed spent the years 1572 to 1578 as Sidney’s page, he would have been able to bring to the King’s School an incredible experience and knowledge of foreign language and Continental geography and history. The young poet would have gotten to know some of the most important people in the aristocracy: Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester, Greville, Dyer, and Sidney’s sister Mary who had married Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke in 1577.

Of course, this entire story is pure conjecture. However, I have found nothing in the biographies of all of the individuals involved that would have made this story impossible. While nowhere is the name Christopher Marlowe mentioned in the many letters Sidney wrote during his travels, it may be that a page was simply too unimportant to mention. Perhaps someday we may find among papers at Penshurst proof that John Marlowe was paid for the services of his son.

But if we cannot find proof that young Christopher was Sidney’s page, we shall still have to find out what he was doing from age 8 to 14 and why he didn’t enter the King’s School at age 9.

© Samuel Blumenfeld, 2011

Samuel Blumenfeld, a regular contibutor to MSC, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others.

A Case for Marlowe - Made Simple by Anthony Kellett

Editor's Note: Anthony Kellett recently explained the case, regarding Marlowe’s disappearance, for those relatively new to the subject. From a transcription of that brief talk, I have produced this guide, both for those to whom it was originally aimed or for more experienced readers wishing to undertake a similar task.

Have you ever heard of a principle called Occam’s razor? Put simply, it says that the solution requiring the least number of assumptions or leaps-of-faith is probably the closest to the truth. Not “certainly,” by any means, but “probably.”

First, it’s fair to say that the “Shakespeare-style” of plays, in blank verse, was popularised by a man called Christopher Marlowe, who commenced his playwriting probably seven or eight years before anyone uttered the name “Shakespeare,” in this context. Bearing in mind that both men were born in 1564, whilst Marlowe was starting his writing career, roughly when he’s taking his master’s degree at Cambridge University, Shakespeare was in Stratford, his twins were being born and he was probably working in his father’s glove shop. I have to say “probably” because we simply don’t know.

One of the world’s leading Shakespearian scholars, Professor Stanley Wells (who believes the Stratford man wrote the works), said of Marlowe that if he and Shakespeare had stopped writing in 1593, and I quote: “We would now regard Marlowe as the greater dramatist. The achievement of Marlowe was greater than that of Shakespeare, by that age. Marlowe has a string of great plays: Faustus, Edward II, two parts of Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta; marvellous poem the ‘Hero and Leander,’ a lot of good translations as well.” Wells added the bit about translations because Marlowe made some of the first translations of Lucan and Ovid (supposedly Shakespeare’s favourite Latin poet) into English. Wells categorised Marlowe as “a very rapid developer” and Shakespeare as “a late developer.”

Now, there are a couple of things which are interesting about that summation of Marlowe. First, is that by 1593, the Shakespeare plays, which Wells believes existed, are Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, the three parts of Henry VI, Titus Andronicus and possibly Richard III. And yet, Wells still considers Marlowe’s the greater output, which gives you an idea of these plays’ quality. The second interesting thing is that even though many believe these few plays were all written and performed by 1593, no one (as far as we know) had ever mentioned a man called Shakespeare. If this is true, that Shakespeare was unknown, then any reasonable person in the audience would probably have believed them to be by the same author or authors (since they often collaborated on plays) as, say, Edward II or Doctor Faustus. I am simply going back to Occam’s razor here, as to what is most likely and requires least assumptions. It may not be true, but it is most likely.

Before I go any further, what you should also know about Marlowe is that he seems to have been a government agent, starting during his time at Cambridge. Apparently, he was involved in undercover work for Francis Walsingham. When Walsingham dies, Lord Burghley appears to have taken over “employment” of Marlowe. It is also worth you knowing that Marlowe’s patron and, it appears, good friend, was Thomas Walsingham, a young relative of Sir Francis.

Now, in April 1593, an entry appears in the Stationers register, a kind of copyright register, if you like, for a new poem called “Venus and Adonis.” There was no author mentioned, but it was a companion piece to Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander.” The problem is, Marlowe’s “Hero” was not published and wouldn’t be for another five years, and, at best, was only known to a few close friends. Most reputable scholars believe the author of “Venus and Adonis” must have been familiar with “Hero and Leander,” because of its style and a number of allusions it makes. In view of this, by Occam’s razor, again, and in the absence of further information, anyone would assume this was Marlowe’s work – unless one believes it was just a coincidence that someone else wrote a companion piece to “Hero and Leander,” without knowing it existed or what it contained? This is simply not probable.

Then, on May 20, 1593, Marlowe, staying with his friend Thomas Walsingham, has an arrest warrant served against him. It was probably the result of him being suspected of heresy, a capital offense. Strangely, Marlowe was not kept in prison, but was instructed to report, each day, until the Privy Council could see him. About three days later was possibly his first appearance before them, but he was still not imprisoned.

By the 28th of May, a report is completed into Marlowe’s heresy and was delivered to the Privy Council. Marlowe, it seemed, was in deep trouble. But, before he could be brought before the council again, Marlowe went to a meeting. He met with three men – two of whom worked as confidence tricksters for his friend and patron, Walsingham; the third, like Marlowe, was an intelligence agent. Without knowing anything more, it is difficult to imagine this was a chance encounter, but when you add the fact that they met, for eight hours, at a private house, owned by Eleanor Bull (a relative of the Queen’s closest attendant, Blanche Parry, a relative of Lord Burghley), situated near the docks at Deptford, it becomes extremely suspicious.

Burghley was one of the most powerful men in England. He would have known Marlowe was in deep trouble because he was a member of the Privy Council. So, with Marlowe probably facing an imminent death penalty, why would he meet three professional confidence tricksters and fraudsters, employed by Marlowe’s employer, and by his friend, in a Burghley-linked house near Deptford docks?

Yes, it could be to enable him to escape, or it could be to have Marlowe murdered. But really, if he wanted to murder Marlowe, why would Burghley arrange that in a house so connected to him; hire three tricksters, not murderers; and then why would they take eight hours to do it when a lone assassin could have done the deed in any dark alley in London or on a quiet lane near Walsingham’s country house, with little fuss? And why would Marlowe’s friend Walsingham get involved in that? Walsingham was still being lauded as Marlowe’s friend and patron, some five years later, by Marlowe’s literary friends. So, whilst the possibility still remains, it does not seem the logical conclusion and is almost completely nonsensical.

No, by Occam’s razor, again, if we have three professional deceivers, whom we must assume are friendly to Marlowe, his employer and his patron (unless we make unfounded assumptions that they weren’t), arranging to meet him for what might be the last time, before his arrest and subsequent execution; and they meet at a “safe-house” next to the sewer-infested Deptford docks (rather than Walsingham’s country estate, where three of the four, one assumes, would have regularly gathered anyway), the only sensible conclusion is that it was to arrange Marlowe’s escape – conveniently near the Thames and numerous ships.

The trouble is, if you just let Marlowe escape, then he will be known to be at large, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could be his downfall. Even worse, Marlowe’s capture could lead to problems for everyone else involved, which is just not feasible. So, the only viable solution was not merely an escape, but a faked death and new identity so that Marlowe would not be hunted.

This is Elizabethan England, not the dark ages. If you fake a death, first you need a body. There are several theories about this, not least is the disappearance of the body of a man executed nearby the previous day. His family was not told that his already delayed execution was to go ahead; it happened, strangely, late in the day, around 6pm, and without any notice. The family could never discover what happened to his body. Either way, whether you believe this version or another, it is not beyond the wit of man to assume that these powerful, connected people could provide a body.

Unfortunately, there is a bigger hurdle: the problem of the coroner. When someone was killed, the local coroner would be called to hold an inquest. This would be fatal to this plan. He would almost certainly spot any inconsistencies between the body’s physical appearance and the story explaining his death. The only solution would be to have control of the coroner, and the only coroner likely to be a candidate would be the Queen’s coroner, William Danby. He had jurisdiction over all deaths occurring within a 12-mile radius of the Queen’s court (wherever that was at the time). We know the Queen was at Nonesuch Palace on this day.

Now, which was the dock, as far as possible down the River Thames, but still within 12 miles of the Queen? It was Deptford. This solution may also answer another question requiring explanation. The question is, “Why did this deception (if that’s what it was) take place anywhere near London?” If the plan was to spirit Marlowe away, as quickly as possible, then why not go to Tilbury, or somewhere already well on the way to safety. One possible reason is the need to use the house of a trusted owner, but the fact that Danby would preside is far more essential. It also happens that Danby would have been responsible for the “missing body” of the prisoner, executed the previous evening. Is that not convenient?

So, what other problems remain? We supposedly have the body of England’s leading poet in our possession; so what happens if he, like Chaucer, gets paraded up to Westminster Abbey for burial in front of all his friends and relatives? Well, we just bury the body immediately, before they have a chance. What if they decide to dig him up? Well, we bury it in an unmarked grave. In fact, we throw him in a common grave (maybe the plague pit) and see if they want to go digging in there.

So that’s what happens; they take the body, purported to be “Marlowe,” and just dump England’s greatest playwright in a Deptford Churchyard pit, before anyone that might know him gets the chance to view the body. The only people that identified the body as Marlowe were the three men he met at Deptford. Doesn’t that sound a little strange to you? What would Thomas Walsingham, his friend and patron, think of that? More than that, what would he do when he discovers that his servant, Frizer, was the man who supposedly killed Marlowe? The answer? He did nothing. Frizer was pardoned and went back to working for Walsingham. Does this sound like the behaviour of a friend and patron? I can only understand that response if either, Walsingham wanted Marlowe dead (already acknowledged as highly unlikely), or he knew he was still alive. Which do you think is most likely, by Occam’s razor?

There are many questions that surround this, obviously, and it is very far from proved. Even amongst those that believe Marlowe survived, there are disagreements about who would or could have organised it – but that gets far more involved.

Now, if we leave that there, for the time being, and just put it down as “a bit fishy,” we then come back to this chap Shakespeare, of whom no one has ever heard, at this point.

Remember I mentioned that anonymously registered companion piece to Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” called “Venus and Adonis,” that would sensibly be thought to be by Marlowe? Well, less than two weeks after Marlowe’s disappearance, that piece gets published. Except that it appears as written by some chap called William Shakespeare, and he calls it “The first heir of my invention.” That is the first time Shakespeare’s name ever appears, anywhere, in connection with any writing, of any sort – at the ripe old age of 29, no less.

If this is written by the guy from Stratford, we have absolutely no idea how he got from that glover’s shop in Stratford, 7 or 8 years earlier, to being able to produce poetry of the highest degree of complexity; not only matching the quality and knowledge of perhaps the greatest poet in England, but also writing in Marlowe’s style and a companion piece to Marlowe’s great, but unpublished, poem. Now, by our old friend Occam’s razor, what do you think is the most probable explanation of that, by introducing the least amount of speculation and leaps of faith?

At the end of the day, amongst those who doubt Shakespeare’s authorship, there are very few claiming to have all the answers, or that believe the case is resolved in favour of some other candidate. In fact, the only people, who seem to believe that, are those believing it was the Stratford man; they seem to think they have “won” something, so have no reason to enter the debate. But this is not about winning or losing; it is about establishing the truth.

I’ll tell you the bizarre thing:  anti-Stratfordians, as we are called, are likened to supporters of “intelligent-design” rather than “evolution,” cranks and conspiracy theorists. Well, we have one group, which wishes to examine and debate real observations and real evidence in the real world, whilst another group wishes to take its beliefs on faith and has an attitude that says, “We don’t know how he did, but he just did.” You tell me, which group are the Darwinians, and which are the religious zealots?

© Anthony Kellett, 2011  was Marlowe shakespeare?

Doubters Rebut Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Attack

On the first of September there appeared in The Stage magazine an announcement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust that it was launching a campaign "to debunk the conspiracy theories surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare's works." It was of course timed to be up and running before the release of Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous on 28 October.

The campaign began that day with a new website, 60 Minutes with Shakespeare, featuring an impressive collection of actors, writers and scholars, whose photographs and credentials are laid out before us on the home page. "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?" it asks, "Sixty questions, sixty scholars, sixty seconds each." To find out just what question each of them was asked and to hear an audio recording of their answer you must "sign up" with your name and email address. It is then also possible to obtain a transcript of the response in each case.

This hurdle makes it fairly clear that the main intent is for the majority of people not to bother with the actual details on offer, but to be so impressed with the array of "experts" - all (except Roland Emmerich) apparently on the side of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in this matter - that they will simply assume not only that these people must be right, but that those who suggest that Shakespeare was a "fraud" must be wrong.

That the Birthplace Trust has gone so public in this way, however, gives those who doubt the Shakespeare authorship an unprecedented opportunity to respond. Within a week, therefore, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition began in relative secrecy to coordinate a response by representatives of most of the main authorship organizations, including the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, giving a definitive rebuttal for each of the "60 Minutes." We have provided responses for the items (by Antony Sher and Charles Nicholl) specifically attacking the Marlovian theory, and have had the opportunity to make comments on everything else that's been submitted, most of which have been acted upon.

The result of this collaboration is a report entitled Exposing an Industry in Denial, the purpose of which is to present those rebuttals, and to challenge the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to write a single definitive declaration of the reasons why they claim that there is no room for doubt about the identity of the author of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare.

Given the differences between the beliefs of the various organizations taking part, it was inevitable that not all members of the group would be able to go along with everything written by the others, but in the event such differences are really quite surprisingly few. There is indeed far more in it to be praised than to be pardoned, and we heartily commend it to everyone's attention. It can be found here.

© The International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, 2011

Marlovians Bite Back by Peter Farey

A free e-book has just been made available by the Stratford-upon-Avon based Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, apparently prompted by the recent release of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous. Written by Rev. Dr. Paul Edmondson and Prof. Stanley Wells, CBE, it is called Shakespeare Bites Back and consists of most of the same old arguments for the Stratfordian authorship we have become so familiar with over the years, together with the habitual contempt for anyone presuming to question that belief.

Pages 21 and 22 apparently concern the Marlovian hypothesis. Let's look at what they say.

The chapter heading is "Duping the Dean" and goes as follows:

"The anti-Shakespearians..."

Ah yes, I should mention that we are all lumped together in this fashion throughout the document, as a grossly inaccurate and intentionally insulting policy proclaimed in their so-called manifesto: "We should use the term ‘anti-Shakespearian’ to describe those who propagate this particular conspiracy theory."

And there we have the second rhetorical trick which is also so obvious as to be pathetic. The whole issue is constantly referred to as (note the initial caps) the "Shakespeare Authorship Conspiracy Theory." Do they think their readers are so dim as to be unable to distinguish between those who find it necessary to descend to such semantic trickery, and those who don't?

Back to the Marlowe bit.

"...even succeeded in duping the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey..."

Who may not take kindly to being described as dupes?

"...who, in 2002, misguidedly allowed themselves..."

No, they can't get out of it with weasel words. Duped is duped, one born every minute.

"...to be advised by people who want to believe that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare. "

Want to believe? This is what Freud called projection. If any side in this controversy "wants" to believe anything it is the writers of this e-book. As they know full well, but refuse to acknowledge, all we want is to discover the truth about Marlowe.

"In properly honouring Marlowe by installing a commemorative window in Poets’ Corner, the Dean and Chapter authorized the presence of a question-mark to precede the year of Marlowe’s death."

This is true.

"In doing so they flew in the face of a mass of unimpugnable evidence."

This isn't. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the relevant definition of "impugn" would be "To assail (an opinion, statement, document, action, etc.) by word or argument; to call in question; to dispute the truth, validity, or correctness of; to oppose as false or erroneous." Now, just as one example, this is exactly what I was doing when I wrote "Marlowe's Sudden and Fearful End" which had nothing whatever to do with the authorship question, and which was cited by Park Honan in his Marlowe biography; also my "Hoffman and the Authorship," for which I was the lucky co-winner of a prize for which Stanley Wells himself was once the adjudicator. More to the point, of course, is that nearly every scholar who has examined the documents related to Marlowe's death has "impugned" them in exactly the way the OED says. The evidence seems very impugnable to me.

"Marlowe died on 30 May 1593 as a result of being stabbed in the eye by an identified criminal, Ingram Frizer."

Oh dear, oh dear. It was above the eye, of course, and can anybody tell me for which crime Ingram Frizer had ever been found guilty?

"The coroner’s report survives. It was witnessed by a jury of sixteen men who inspected the corpse."

And took the word of three known liars as to just whose corpse it was, right? Using several sources concerning the law governing the practice of coroners in those days, and the extent to which it was followed to the letter, we have been able to argue quite confidently that the jury would not necessarily have inspected the whole corpse anyway, just the wound which, whilst very dramatic to see (someone sent me the photo of a man with a bread-knife through his eye socket, so believe me!), need not have been what really killed him.

At this time, Marlowe was facing trial and probable execution for proselytizing atheism. That the only three witnesses of what really happened were, as I said, professional liars and all connected with Marlowe's dear friend Thomas Walsingham; that the coroner was the one most likely to be in on any deception and (apparently illegally) working alone; and that the foreman of the jury just happened to be Thomas Walsingham's neighbour, should surely be grounds for some suspicion?

"It is recorded that Marlowe was buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas at Deptford on the same day as the inquest (1 June 1593)."

Well it would be, wouldn't it? Although the record actually says "Christopher Marlow slaine by ffrancis ffrezer; the -1- of June." Francis Frezer? Are we to assume that this evidence is equally unimpugnable? But remember what Edmondson and Wells say (above) about "properly honouring Marlowe by installing a commemorative window in Poets’ Corner"? Don't these people find it just the teeniest bit strange that the greatest poet/dramatist of the day was dropped into an unmarked grave or pit and simply left there to rot? No known grave, no memorial, no follow-up whatsoever? Why on earth not, especially if, as seems likely, both Thomas Walsingham and another dear friend Edward Blount were there to witness the burial?

"Moreover there are numerous references to Marlowe’s death and tributes to his genius in the years immediately following it."

Yes indeed. People were told he was dead and, believing what they were told, expressed their grief and admiration. "Shakspeare" of Stratford should have been so lucky.

"Most significantly Shakespeare himself alludes to Marlowe in As You Like It when Phoebe is swept off her feet on first seeing Rosalind disguised as Ganymede:
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:
“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight.” (3.5.)
The quotation is from Marlowe’s famous erotic poem, Hero and Leander (published posthumously in 1598). In As You Like It (almost certainly written in 1599) Shakespeare paid a fine and public tribute to his dead colleague. If Marlowe wrote Shakespeare this means that he is writing about himself as dead, and from beyond the grave."

Is this really the best evidence that Edmondson and Wells can muster? Were anyone to have been in the position which Marlovians claim that Marlowe was at that time, wouldn't they too have been eager to make sure that they were not entirely forgotten without actually giving the game away?

One is tempted to ask the authors just what they think Shakespeare had in mind when, in the same play, he gave Touchstone the words "When a man's verses cannot be read, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room," accepted by all as referring to Marlowe's death. Couldn't it quite reasonably be taken to mean that if being misunderstood strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room, then the said reckoning may not have left him dead at all?

Furthermore, perhaps they have a better explanation than we do as to why Evans (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) would confuse Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" with a song based upon Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon," perhaps the greatest song of exile ever written?

"How good does the surviving evidence have to be before it can be refuted? The evidence of the coroner’s report is unimpeachable."

No it isn't! Back to the OED, for the relevant definition of "impeach": "To challenge, call in question, cast an imputation upon, attack; to discredit, disparage." The evidence of the coroner's court has been already been impeached by the majority of orthodox scholars to have studied it. Do they not know this?

"The questionmark in Marlowe’s memorial window should be removed."

Not on the basis of this argument it shouldn't. It was the Marlowe Society, of course, who raised the several thousand pounds that the memorial window cost. What the then President of the Society, who to my knowledge has no anti-Stratfordian leanings, actually said at the unveiling was that the Marlowe Society was agnostic on the subject of authorship of any other works, and did not proselytize. By the question mark against "1593" on the memorial the Society merely queried, not denied, the date of Marlowe's death.

And that's the authors' whole rebuttal of the Marlovian hypothesis! Not a single mention of the mass of reasons we give for believing it highly probable, had he lived, for Marlowe to have been the ghost writer for Shakespeare. No need for all that. The report said that Marlowe was dead and people at the time seemed to believe that someone called Shakespeare wrote the works. Period.

"How good does the surviving evidence have to be before it can be refuted?"

It has to be good enough to withstand detailed examination, as it has been subjected to (and repeatedly failed to withstand) in this case.

There is one quotation the authors use which I particularly liked. "The great scholar F. P. Wilson, author of a book on Marlowe and Shakespeare, once said that the most important thing a scholar has to learn to say is ‘I don’t know.' "

Oh, the irony of it!

© Peter Farey, 2011 stratfordians bite back

Peter Farey is the author of "Marlowe's Sudden and Fearful End" and discoverer of as many new facts related to Marlowe's supposed death in Deptford Strand as anyone since Leslie Hotson.

Emmerich's Anonymous? We have a movie, too.

Click here (or above) for Mike Rubbo's 8-minute YouTube clip on the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory.

The clip consists of excerpts from Rubbo's 2002 PBS/Frontline documentary, Much Ado About Something, as well as some recent commentary by the filmmaker. Some great snippets with Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate, Stanley Wells (chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust), actor Mark Rylance (former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe and now appearing in Anonymous), and Marlovians Peter Farey and the late Dolly Wraight.

"Much Ado About Something is a film of ideas - well, notions, anyway - that are bound to stimulate discussion, an aspect long missing from documentary [. . .] Mr. Rubbo is an old-fashioned rabble-rouser, and he knows a good story when he finds it. And he's got one in this case, with its adherents to a cause and their whipsaw articulation of thoughts." Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

" . . . has enough wit, energy and geniality to please not only the fanatical adherents on either side, but also people who know nothing about the subject and think they're not interested." Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Emmerich Orloff Anonymous whowroteshakespeare.com

Emmerich and the Case Against Oxford as Shakespeare

In light of Emmerich's Anonymous film, which promotes the theory that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the seventeenth earl of Oxford, wrote the Shakespeare works, here is a compilation of some of our posts which rebut the Oxford theory.

Peter Farey's "The Wrong Candidate," "Oxfordians and the 1604 Question," and "Questions All Oxfordians Must Answer"; Daryl Pinksen on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as straw man and the weak case of de Vere as Shakespeare; Donna Murphy on the many problems with the Oxford theory; Isabel Gortázar's "Nor Oxford Either!"; and Sam Blumenfeld's disqualification of de Vere as Shakespeare.Emmerich shakespeare frontman

Louis le Doux = Lodovico Dolce by Edward G. Clybourn

Peter Farey and A.D. (Dolly) Wraight made the case for the agent "Le Doux" mentioned in the papers of Anthony Bacon in 1595-1596 being Christopher Marlowe. See chapters 2 and 3 of Farey's A Deception at Deptford for a summary of the evidence for this argument as it has stood until now. Farey argues that Le Doux's first name may have been Louis (also spelled Lois or Loys or Louys) based on a 16th-century wax seal in the British Library of a man in Elizabethan clothing with a baboon's face, with the name "LOIS LE DOULX".

Farey put forward some ideas about where the name Louis le Doux came from. Recently I discovered another very likely source of the name: It is the French rendition of the name of the mid-16th century Italian author Lodovico Dolce.

The key find is the book Anciens Inventaires et Catalogues de la Bibliotheque Nationale, Volume 1. On pp. 404-408 of this book is the "Catalogue de Poetes Italiens," which includes both Latin and Italian poets. On p. 406 are two items under the heading "Loys Le Doux": Le sacripant de Loys le Doux, en rithme and Les transformations de Loys le Doux. The appearance of the name in a list of Italian poets pointed me toward Lodovico Dolce: "Louis le Doux" is precisely how his name would be translated into French. Farey clinched the case by pointing out to me that both Sacripante (a "chivalric romance") and Le Transformationi (a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses) were indeed works by Lodovico Dolce.

The next question is, naturally, are there any connections to link Lodovico Dolce to Christopher Marlowe? Indeed there are. Dolce wrote a tragedy Didone in 1547, four decades before Marlowe wrote his play on the same topic. The book Christopher Marlowe: the Plays and Their Sources by Vivien Thomas and William Tydemam gives Dolce's play as the 5th of five sources for Dido, Queen of Carthage. (As an aside, Dolce's Didone itself was influenced by the work of Giovanni Giraldi Cinthio on the same topic. That is of interest to Shakespeareans because Cinthio's Hecatommithi contains tales that anticipate the plots of Measure for Measure and Othello. They were translated from Italian into French and Spanish by Shakespeare's time, but not into English. That raises the question of how William Shakespeare of Stratford could have accessed them, but there is no question about Marlowe's access to them if he was Le Doux: Hecatommithi was one of the books listed in the Bacon papers as belonging to Le Doux.)

There is another connection between Dolce and Marlowe that is particularly relevant because it relates directly to another nickname for Marlowe that is already well known. Dolce's most famous work was L'Aretino or Dialogo della Pittura. "L'Aretino" refers to his close colleague Pietro Aretino. This name will be familiar to scholars of Marlowe: On pp. 54-55 of Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, there is a long passage about Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (completed 27 June 1593) explaining how "Nashe's tribute to the great Italian dramatist, Pietro Aretino, proves to be a sidelong epitaph for Christopher Marlowe." Nicholl cites the same comparison already made by Gabriel Harvey in Four Letters in 1592, an attack on both Nashe and Marlowe: Harvey refers to Nashe by the nickname "the Devil's Orator" and to Marlowe by the nickname "Aretine." Harvey continued this tirade against Marlowe as "Aretine" in another work dated April 1593 but not published until after Marlowe's reported death. Nicholl concludes Nashe's references to "Aretine" in The Unfortunate Traveller would have been clearly understood by his audience as a tribute to Marlowe.

Thus we have a connection between an already well-known nickname for Marlowe and the name "Louis le Doux," via Dolce's famous work L'Aretino. Since Marlowe had already been given as a nickname an English version of the name of an Italian author who inspired him, it would have been entirely in his witty character to adopt as a pseudonym a French version of the name of another Italian author who inspired him and who had a connection to Aretino. Marlowe's friends in his literary circles would get the reference, but other people would not — an excellent choice for a pseudonym!

The Italian origin of the name Louis le Doux fits well with the existing evidence for the Marlovian theory. Marlovians believe it is likely Marlowe went to Italy in the years immediately after his faked death, since Shakespeare's Italian-themed plays begin appearing around that time. Marlowe's adoption of an Italian poet's name, in the guise of a French translation, when he returns to England two years later, fits this theory well.Emmerich  Shakespeare kill Marlowe?

© Edward G. Clybourn, September 2011