On Mendenhall and compelling evidence of Marlowe authorship by Daryl Pinsken

In 1887, physicist T.C. Mendenhall decided to study the word-length frequencies of writers − the frequency at which writers tended to use words of varying lengths − in a quest to find a mathematical way of proving or disproving authorship. To accomplish this he counted the numbers of one-letter, two-letter, three-letter words, etc., in a text, calculated the percentages of each word length used (the frequency), and displayed the results on a graph. He discovered that writers’ word-length frequency curves remained consistent, and more important, that each writer’s characteristic word-length frequency curve differed from those of other writers.¹

In 1901, a wealthy Bostonian named Augustus Hemingway, having heard of Mendenhall’s work, commissioned him to carry out a comparative study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe. Hemingway believed Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, and he was convinced that Mendenhall had found a way to prove it.

Using Hemingway’s money, Mendenhall hired two women to count the words of various lengths in each of the works. They had to manually count millions of words. Unfortunately for Hemingway, the overall word-length frequencies of Bacon and Shakespeare were very different (although, to be fair, Mendenhall compared Bacon’s prose with Shakespeare’s blank verse, two genres since shown to differ markedly in word-length frequency).

Mendenhall discovered that Shakespeare used significantly more four-letter words than three-letter words. Every other English writer Mendenhall studied, including Shakespeare’s playwright contemporaries, used more three-letter words than any other length. After a while, Mendenhall and his assistants could recognize unidentified blocks of Shakespeare from the four-letter-word spike alone. But when his assistants began to count the words in the Marlowe plays, Mendenhall realized that the Shakespeare curve was not unique after all. To his surprise, the Marlowe and Shakespeare curves were nearly identical. Here is Mendenhall’s reaction to the discovery:

“It was in the counting and plotting of the plays of Christopher Marlowe, however, that something akin to a sensation was produced among those actually engaged in the work. Here was a man to whom it has always been acknowledged, Shakespeare was deeply indebted; one of whom able critics have declared that he ‘might have written the plays of Shakespeare.’ … Even this did not lessen the interest with which it was discovered that in the characteristic curve of his plays Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself, as is shown in Fig.9” ²


(In Fig. 9, word length is shown on the horizontal axis, and frequency, in number of words out of a thousand, on the vertical axis. For example, Mendenhall found that Marlowe and Shakespeare both used 2-letter words about 175 times out of a 1000, or 17.5% of the time).

Mendenhall’s study made no impact on Shakespearean scholarship, but it did energize a small number of proponents of the Marlowe theory and persuaded others that perhaps the Marlowe theory was worth further investigation.

The study sat idle for decades until Peter Farey decided to extend Mendenhall’s work.³ Farey chose a group of authors and, using electronic texts and word-counting software, performed a comparison of two large chunks of text by each writer, calculating how closely each writer agreed with him or herself. All of the writers agreed with themselves quite closely.⁴

Next, Farey moved on to a comparison of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Mendenhall had not noticed that authors' word-length frequency usage could change over time and genre, but Farey had discovered that the word-length frequency curves for Marlowe's earlier works differed from his later ones, and that Shakespeare's comedies differed from his non-comedies. The differences were subtle but significant. Accordingly, Farey chose to compare Marlowe's later plays with Shakespeare's histories and tragedies (since none of the Marlowe works are comedies) to eliminate the effects of time and genre. In his Marlowe-Shakespeare comparison, Farey found the agreement was statistically closer than any other writer had been with himself.⁵


The match between the two curves is astonishing. Farey’s method is easily reproducible, and it is accompanied by rigourous statistical analysis. As such it merits serious attention from mainstream scholarship. Like Mendenhall before him, Farey’s work has not penetrated the mainstream to any large extent. The standard scholarly explanation of the origins of Shakespeare’s style, that he began his career by imitating Marlowe, is invoked to explain why the word counts of the two respective writers are so similar. But even allowing for this, it would still require a strong coincidence for Shakespeare to obtain this degree of match with Marlowe, especially since it would have to have happened unconsciously.

My contribution to the debate was to look at the word counts of individual Shakespeare plays. Did they all look more or less alike? Using a counting method shared with me by Peter Farey, I counted the words of twenty-one Shakespeare plays, randomly chosen across the whole canon. I plotted all twenty-one curves, along with the overall average, on a single graph.


What is immediately striking is the amount of variation between individual plays. What this variation tells us is that the average curve for Shakespeare could have assumed many different shapes. There was no underlying principle forcing it to average out in this manner.⁶

The graph emphasizes how remarkable Mendenhall's and Farey’s results actually are. The possibility that two writers, both showing variability in individual plays, could arrive at the same average curve by chance, is exceedingly small. Mendenhall's and Farey’s studies provide compelling evidence for a Marlowe authorship of the Shakespeare plays.

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, February 2009

Daryl Pinksen, a regular contributor to MSC and author of Marlowe's Ghost, is a Fellow of the School of Graduate Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Click here to reach Daryl Pinksen's website.

Click here for another piece by Daryl Pinksen on style similarities.

Click here to see what the scholars say about the similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare (courtesy of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society).

¹Mendenhall, T. C. 1887. The Characteristic Curves of Composition. Science Vol 9: 237–49.
²Mendenhall, T. C. 1901. A Mechanical Solution of a Literary Problem. The Popular Science Monthly Vol LX: 97–105.
³Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/chap8.htm#note1
⁴Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx3a.htm
⁵Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx4a.htm
⁶Pinksen, Daryl. 2008. Marlowe’s Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse. (p. 55)

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Debunking Shakespeare & his "lost years": Mike Rubbo's John Baker interviews, circa 2000

The many strikes against the Shakespeare-as-author theory. Marlovian scholar John Baker on Shakespeare’s “lost years,” lack of education, time-management problem, daughters’ illiteracy, etc. A great clip to show to people still on the fence regarding the authorship issue. Click here for video.

Video outtake from Mike Rubbo's film Much Ado About Something. Courtesy of Mike Rubbo.

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Mike Rubbo explores Shakespeare authorship in Tampa

Click here to read Tampa Tribune's piece about Mike Rubbo's visit to Berkeley Prep in Tampa, Florida. Be sure to check out the online photo gallery and online video, as well.

(photo credit: Scott Iskowitz/ The Tampa Tribune)

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MSC Exclusive Video: Mike Rubbo on Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory's "smoking gun"

We recently caught up with Emmy-winning filmmaker Mike Rubbo in Sarasota, Florida. Click here to watch our interview.

Click here to purchase Mike's critically acclaimed PBS/Frontline documentary Much Ado About Something, which explores the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory. Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times praises: " . . . an inviting piece of film . . . Much Ado About Something is a film of ideas - well, notions, anyway - that are bound to stimulate discussion, an aspect long missing from documentary."

Click here also for Mike Rubbo: Portrait of a Filmmaker by Violeta Braña-Lafourcade, on YouTube.

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© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, February 2009

Not Bacon! by Isabel Gortázar

There are so many reasons why I am sure Francis Bacon did NOT write Shakespeare, that to explain them all would exceed the limits of this article.

I shall leave aside, for the moment, the various clues in the texts of the First Folio, showing the undying resentment that Marlowe nursed against Bacon for his betrayal of the Earl of Essex - a betrayal that resulted in Essex’s death and, indirectly, in Marlowe’s dying in exile. Instead, I will focus on the strictly objective reasons provided by Bacon’s own work, and I shall attempt to prove that nothing in his highly talented, persnickety, sour, misogynist mind could be mistaken for the depth of understanding and compassion that is the essence of the Great Bard.

In the following poem, Bacon displays his un-Shakespearean banality, both in content and style.

Yet since with sorrow here we live oppressed,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools,
To dandle fools.
The rural parts are turned into a den,
Of savage men.
And where's a city from all vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,
Or pains his head.
Those that live single take it for a curse,
Or do things worse.
Some would have children; those that have them none,
Or wish them gone.
What is it then to have or have no wife,
But single thraldom or a double strife.

Our own affections still at home to please,
Is a disease.
To cross the sea to any foreign soil,
Perils and toil.
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease,
Wars worse in peace.
What then remains, but that we still should cry:
Not to be born, or being born to die?.¹

Does this sound like Shakespeare? I don’t think so. The sour misogyny and querulous tone of the poem would have given Shakespeare the creeps. And what does he mean by: Those that live single take it for a curse, / Or do things worse?

Bacon’s homosexuality would be nobody’s business but his own, except for the misery that he seems to have felt on its account. Unlike other notorious homosexuals of his time, such as his brother Anthony and King James, whose licentiousness permeated the entire fabric of the Court, Francis Bacon’s writings distill barrels of bitterness against women for being women, and against himself for loathing them.

But before I move on, I would like to know in what way could the poem above quoted, published under Bacon’s own name, be less indiscreet, or dangerous in any way, than the various Shakespeare poems. What fearful secrets, not yet revealed after 500 years, are encoded in the 154 Shakespeare Sonnets, that made it necessary for Bacon to use an alias and to waive forever all the glory and profit that he might have derived from them? For a man that was endemically short of cash, this is difficult to understand. Nor could social status be the reason; the Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse contains poems from two monarchs and a number of aristocrats, including the Earls of Essex and Oxford, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, to name only a few.

Now let’s look at Bacon’s Essays.² They are not as interesting as Montaigne’s, but they are curious and well written. One cannot fail to admire the precise mind that produced them, even though most of what they say is by now irrelevant. And this is another major difference with the Shakespearean output, all of which is as relevant today as it was 500 years ago.

Bacon writes about down-to-earth reality such as he sees it, with a sententious, precise language worthy of better causes. He discourses on nearly all matters, divine and human, without room for a single smile, or a single flight of fancy. Here and there, we get a glimpse of the author’s bitterness, trying to explain himself to himself. As in, for example: Ambition is like Choler, Which is an Humour, that maketh Men Active, Earnest, Full of Alacritie, and Stirring, if it be not stopped. But if it be stopped, and cannot haue his Way, it becommeth Adust, and thereby Maligne and Venomous.³

And the Essays provide much information about his view of women. In his Essay: On Beauty, Bacon starts by stating that Vertue is like a rich stone, best set plaine; And surely Vertue is best in a body that is comely, though not of Delicate Features. (…) Neither it is almost seene, that very Beautifull Persons, are otherwise of great Vertue. Having established this general rule, he admits that there may be exceptions, and he then mentions six men in history, who were all High and Great Sprits; And yet the most Beautifull Men of their Times. Needless to say, women are not mentioned at all; not even Helen of Troy gets a line of commendation.

In Of Marriage and Single Life, we read that wives and children are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men. And later: wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

His marriage must have been a lark. At the age of forty-five, Francis Bacon had married the fourteen-year-old Alice Barnham. The couple had no children; Bacon disinherited his wife for some unknown reason the year before he died. Alice Bacon married someone else two weeks after Sir Francis’s death.

A profound respect for, and understanding of, women is perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic in the Shakespearean Canon, which fact helps us to dismiss both Shakespeare and Bacon as possible authors, on the grounds of their well-documented family life. (Marlowe’s alleged homosexuality, based exclusively on the charges presented by his enemy,Richard Baines, cannot be taken seriously; and his early heroes, such as Tamburlaine and Faustus, are both heterosexual.)

It is important to realize how the capacity for rebellion and independence in women is important to Shakespeare, and how insistently he explores (both as Marlowe and later), the myriad nuances of the use that women make of whatever power they have, from the murderous power of Catherine of Medicis and Lady Macbeth, to the self-liberating power of Rosalind, Beatrice and Viola, or the self-serving power of Dido, Volumnia and Cleopatra. Even the angelic Cordelia and Desdemona show a considerable measure of self-respect and the capacity to make dangerous choices.

And there is no denying that the author loves and admires these women he has invented (or perhaps known): their panache, their wit. He loves those thoroughly modern Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, the Merry but ruthlessly independent Wives of Windsor; he loves Rosalind and Beatrice. How could Francis Bacon, the woman-hater, have written those comedies?

In his Masonic Utopia, New Atlantis, ⁴ Bacon describes The Feast of the Family (my italics): “It is granted to any man that shall live to see thirty persons descended of his body, alive together and all above three years old, to make this feast. The Father of the Family, whom they call the Tirsan, (a possible anagram for artisan, with its connotations of the Masonic Craft)…taketh to him three of such friends as he liketh to choose…The Tirsan cometh forth with all his generation or lineage, the males before him,and the females following him; and if there be a mother from whose body the whole lineage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above, on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window, leaded with gold and blue, where she sitteth but is not seen. …” etc.

Freud would have had a field day exploring the mind of a man who disliked and, possibly, feared women as much as that. Renaissance Freemasons were explicitly sexist, but this Tirsan seems to consider the exercise of procreation so distasteful to a man that he deserves a national feast to glorify his public- spirited effort for, he says, the King is debtor to no man but for the propagation of his subjects. The mother of those children, the woman he had to take to his bed out of duty to his King, will be allowed to attend the ceremony, as long as she remains out of sight!

Now, this was not the situation of women in Jacobean England, bad as it was. It is no good trying to explain this mise-en-scene in terms of the period’s social mores. This is a ceremony that Bacon is inventing for his Utopian New Atlantis, a ritual that he describes with obvious approval. The narcissistic treatment he lavishes on the Father and the subordinate role he gives to the Mother, is not just early Masonic, it is thoroughly Baconian. When Shakespeare creates his plucky heroines he does so in the very same period (actually some twenty-five years earlier), within the same social rules for women. But while Shakespeare obviously wishes his heroines more liberated than women actually were at the time, Bacon, in his ideal City of Bensalem,wishes them totally subordinate to the male, and invisible!

Here is Emilia’s rebellious speech (Othello FF- Act IV, 3):

But I do think it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge.

Bravo, Emilia! Was Alice Barnham at all like her and is that the reason why she was disinherited? We can see that Shakespeare is openly on Emilia’s side, but such a wife would have been a nightmare for Francis Bacon.

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, February 2009

Isabel Gortázar can be reached at igortazar@violaservices.com

¹The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse: Farnaby, Florilegium Epigrammatum Graecorum, 1629.
² The Essayes or Counsels Civill and Morall of Francis Lo.Verulam Viscount St Alban, London. Printed by John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625.
³The Essays. Op cit; On Ambition.
⁴Francis Bacon: New Atlantis (Three Early Modern Utopias), Oxford World’s Classics, Ed. Susan Bruce, Oxford University Press, 1999.

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The Allure of Marlowe by D.K. Marley

Imagine this: meandering down a corridor in the great Globe Theatre full of relics of the past, all speaking William Shakespeare's name. But, of course, before that day you had no reason to consider any other name nor had any such thought been presented to you. And then, it happens. You round the corner and before you is a wall that displays the names and faces of five men that could have been the writer of the plays.

This is what happened to me. I perused the names with interest and amazement. Like finding a rare antique at a yard sale that someone missed, Christopher Marlowe's face stared back at me and my heart skipped a beat. How could the world have missed the obvious; how could I? The sparkling little trinket of truth that spoke to me as if his ghost whispered in my ear, "Tell my story. Foul deeds will rise though all the world o'erwhelm them to men's eyes."

I suppose I could have chosen any of the men, but something moved me. From the very moment, Marlowe's allure buried in his mysterious eyes made me know a story lay there hidden, waiting to burst forth. Within a week and endless hours on the internet and at the library, the clues he left behind, the secret little smile in his Cambridge portrait and the knowing glint in his eyes lay before me. The pieces of the puzzle fit together like never before: the treasured words of Christopher Marlowe, the Muse's Darling, and not the man from Stratford, linked into a beautiful and tragic telling of a man who knew the world. Here was the man who travelled the continent, who knew court life and country travails, politics and provocateurs, religion, science, languages, intrigue, love, betrayal, and exile. All the meaty experience to fill the pages of mighty plays and sonnets.

One of the first things that we are told as writers is, "Write what you know." The adage cannot have changed since the 16th century. Marlowe wrote what he knew, leaving behind the clues, which were a common and clever tool used by writers of the day. So I ask, why buy a reproduction when you can have the real thing? It's a lot more fun to dig for authentic Marlovian gold than float along with the crowd picking up synthetic Shakespearean souvenirs.

And if you listen closely, you may hear his voice, as well. "I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name."

D.K. Marley

© D.K. Marley, February 2009

D.K. Marley is a historical fiction writer specializing in Shakespearean topics. She is the author of A Reckoning for the Sparrow, which imagines Christopher Marlowe as the true author of the Shakespeare works. The novel awaits publication. She is also the editor of Soliloquy Literary Magazine. D.K. resides in Georgia and is presently working on a novel about the life of the real Lady Macbeth. She can be reached at dkmarley@gmail.com.

The Clue in The Taming of the Shrew: a question for Isabel Gortázar

We caught up with veteran Marlovian researcher Isabel Gortázar, whose exceptional work has appeared in the Marlowe Society Newsletter and Marlowe Society Research Journal. After a lifetime in publishing, Isabel is now attempting to retire from business in order to spend more time researching the Marlowe-Shakespeare connection. Isabel shares her time between Spain and England.

Q: Isabel, your 2004 article, "The Clue in The Shrew" (Research Journal, Dec. 04), which you have recently revised and is now available in the Marlowe Society Research Journal (Vol. 6, 2009), presents a fascinating examination of The Taming of the Shrew's rather unusual Induction scene. Your brilliant exegesis makes a most compelling case that the Deptford incident, or "farce" as you call it, is strongly alluded to in the prelude, which you see as a kind of riddle containing clues about Marlowe's staged death on May 30, 1593. What triggered this reading of The Shrew for you, Isabel?

Isabel: I have great difficulty in accepting that any work of art by a major artist may be seriously flawed. In my experience, every time you come across a work of art that seems to be illogical or unfinished, all you need to do is to allow yourself an exercise in lateral thinking. This has never failed me so far. For example, Mozart has one allegedly “flawed” major opera, The Magic Flute, but there is nothing flawed about The Flute; all you need is to ask yourself the right questions. This is just one example of many.

When I re-read The Shrew by chance, previous to attending a performance in Stratford, I realized I was up against one of these “flawed” masterpieces; clearly the Induction made no sense, so lateral thinking was required. I knew there was an answer somewhere waiting to be found and, frankly, I was shocked by the absurdities that the critics of all times have offered as explanations for the “unfinished” Induction and the “disappearance” of Christopher Sly.

In these cases, my habit is to strip the – apparently - nonsensical part to its bare essentials. In this case: A man called Christopher Sly, after a quarrel with a Hostess in a Tavern over a bill is left in a ditch appearing to be dead. But Christopher is not dead at all; he is rescued by a Lord and his Servants, and invited to dine and watch a “comedy”. While this comedy is being performed and our attention distracted, Christopher Sly disappears and is never heard of again.

Once you focus on this abridged and simplified reading of the Induction, provided of course you are prepared both to question the authorship of William Shakespeare and the possibility that Marlowe did not die in Deptford, the so-called flaw disappears and the message of the farcical Induction becomes crystal clear.

After hitting on the basic message, it has taken me years to get to the bottom of the clues, and I am sure I am still missing something. In that respect, the recently revised version (2008) includes a few fascinating clues that I had not found four years ago.

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, February 2009

Isabel Gortázar can be reached at igortazar@violaservices.com

Editor's note: Click here for an excellent article by Isabel on the authorship issue, originally printed in the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia de Barcelona and now available online at the Spanish website radical.es.

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Marlowe’s escape, Deptford to Dover; Nicholas Faunt, Marlowe in Italy: Mike Rubbo's John Baker interviews, circa 2000

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John Baker on Marlowe’s escape after his alleged death on May 30, 1593; Marlowe sails out of Deptford and arrives in Dover, where he probably meets intelligence operative Nicholas Faunt, who helps Marlowe escape to mainland Europe. Baker speculates that Marlowe eventually ends up in Italy.

Regarding Baker’s reference to Anthony Bacon: Anthony, erstwhile intelligence operative of Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham and elder brother of Francis Bacon, was, by 1593, chief agent for the Earl of Essex.

Video outtake from Mike Rubbo's film Much Ado About Something. Courtesy of Mike Rubbo.

Click here for Peter Farey's response to Baker.

On Calvin Hoffman: a question for Samuel Blumenfeld, author of The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection

Q: Sam, you knew Calvin Hoffman (image at left), the legendary Marlovian who pioneered the "Marlowe as hidden hand behind Shakespeare" theory in the mid 1950s. How and when did you first come to meet him? Also, I know you believe some of his claims in The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare" do have shortcomings. Please elaborate.

Sam: As you know, Carlo, it was Hoffman’s book that turned me into a Marlovian. Before reading that book I believed, like so many college graduates, that Shakespeare’s authorship had been firmly established by indisputable documentary evidence. But Hoffman’s book showed that this was not the case.

At that time, in the late 1950s, I was editor of Grosset & Dunlap’s quality paperback line, and Calvin had come to my office to persuade me that we ought to publish a paperback edition of his book. So I had to read it, and reading it changed my life. It not only opened my eyes about Shakespeare, but it introduced me to the magnificent genius Christopher Marlowe, whom Calvin believed was the true author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Hoffman had spent years reading both Marlowe and Shakespeare and was convinced that the two canons were written by one man - Christopher Marlowe. The convincing point for me was the uncanny fact that Marlowe’s career supposedly ended with his murder in a barroom brawl at age 29 and that Shakespeare’s writing career suddenly began shortly after that event also at the age of 29. As coincidence would have it, both men were born in 1564.

Hoffman does a great job demolishing the Shakespeare myth, referring to the many works written on this subject by those who preceded him. But the real heart of the book is his assertion that Marlowe had not been killed as reported but had been the subject of a faked death in order to save him from Archbishop Whitgift’s prosecution of him on charges of atheism, punishable by execution.

In 1955 when Hoffman wrote his book, not much was known about the events at Deptford in 1593. But in 1925, Harvard Professor Leslie Hotson discovered the Coroner’s Inquest which described in great detail what was supposed to have taken place at the Deptford tavern or guesthouse. The Coroner’s report, written in Latin, had been buried away in Queen Elizabeth’s government archives and had not seen the light of day for over 300 years until the good professor dug it out.

Anyone who reads that document today in its English translation will see that it poses more questions than it answers. Marlowe was a member of the Secret Service and he was saved because he was too valuable an asset to Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s right-hand man, and his son Robert Cecil.

In the research I did for The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, written fifty years after Hoffman’s book was published, I realized that some of the conclusions Hoffman had come to about Marlowe’s life were questionable.

Most of the biographers of Marlowe believe he was a homosexual. But if you also believe that he is the author of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, it is hard to believe that they could have been written by someone who had not loved women. So where did this assertion about Marlowe have its origin? We find it in the accusations of his arch enemy, Richard Baines, whose damning letter to the inquisition accused Marlowe of not only being a blaspheming atheist but also a homosexual. But Baines’s credibility has been challenged by none other than Charles Nichol, author of The Reckoning.

Of course Marlowe was well aware of homosexuality. He had read the ancient classics and he wrote about such male affections in Dido and Edward II. But because he could write about male homosexuality does not mean that he himself was homosexual.

There is no question in my mind that Marlowe, at age 15, had an affair with the Countess of Pembroke, Philip Sidney’s sister, and fell in love with her. And I believe that Venus and Adonis is the story of the countess’s attempted aggressive seduction of young handsome Christopher, who finally became aroused when she became passive, letting him make love to her in his own way.

In other words, Marlowe was repelled by sexually aggressive women, but enjoyed them when they passively invited his love making. You can see that in Hero and Leander, where Leander is the aggressor.

As for his friendship with Thomas Walsingham, also a member of the Secret Service and a year older than Marlowe, it was no doubt a strong, affectionate friendship, but not a sexual one. In those days, the word love was used among men to denote friendship, loyalty, devotion, and affection. It was not used to denote sexual desire or attachment.

There are other points I can quibble with in Hoffman’s book. Suffice it to say that the power of Hoffman’s book is in its strong assertion that Marlowe lived beyond his purported death in 1593 and went on to write the most magnificent dramas in literary history.

Editor's Note:   Sam edited the 1960 paperback edition of Calvin Hoffman's The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare."  Sam and Calvin Hoffman co-founded the Marlowe-Shakespeare Society of America in 1960.  Although the Society is extinct, the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, of which Sam is a founding member, is alive and well.

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, January 2009


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Marlowe's arrest and escape: Mike Rubbo's John Baker interviews, circa 2000

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John Baker on Marlowe’s arrest, the horrific torture that likely awaited him, and the choice the playwright ultimately made. For further details on Baker's reference to Thomas Walsingham, see our 6/19/08 post on the Walsinghams.

Video outtake from Mike Rubbo's film Much Ado About Something. Courtesy of Mike Rubbo.

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Marlowe and the Whitgift inquisition: Mike Rubbo's John Baker interviews, circa 2000

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John Baker on how a valuable intelligence “property” such as Christopher Marlowe was not immune from the inquisition of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. For further details on Baker's reference to Marlowe’s influential handler, Lord Burghley, see our 6/23/08 post on the Cecils.

Video outtake from Mike Rubbo's film Much Ado About Something. Courtesy of Mike Rubbo.

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Tamburlaine and Marlowe

Let us praise the lucid, well-organized scholarly articles of many years past, pre the deconstructive nihilism that has plagued so much literary criticism since the 1970s. Leslie Spence's "Tamburlaine and Marlowe" (PMLA, Vol. 42, No. 3; Sept. 1927) is a great one. Spence methodically challenges the assumption that the Tamburlaine figure is "a faithful expression of Marlowe's own personality." Spence maintains that the Tartar conqueror depicted by Marlowe is too historically accurate for one to make the assumption that he's somehow a reflection of Marlowe's own views: "Infinite ambition, inordinate lust of dominion, and unbounded belief in his own victorious destiny are [. . .] outstanding qualities in the sixteenth century conception of Tamburlaine, not products of Marlowe's invention." Where Marlowe does primarily offer a personal preference, however, is in adding "emotional complexity" to the character for dramatic purposes and in making Tamburlaine more admirable by omitting his cruelty and framing his harsh punishments as just. The overwhelming rest of it (ambition, lust of dominion, etc.) are culled from the histories of Tamburlaine, thus rendering the Tamburlaine/Marlowe oneness "purely fanciful."

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, January 2009

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History Play: a question for author Rodney Bolt

We caught up with writer Rodney Bolt, whose immensely enjoyable 2004 speculative biography, History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, imagines Christopher Marlowe faking his own death, escaping England, and going on to write the works we attribute to Shakespeare. Of the novel, Judith Flanders of The Spectator (UK) praises: "A triumph . . . It has both a serious remit and enough puns and anagrams to make Shakespeare (or possibly Marlowe) blush. It made me laugh out loud. And, most of all, it made me want to go back to the plays. This was a book that needed to be done perfectly or not at all. It is perfect."

Rodney’s latest biography, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte – Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario (2006), has been lauded as “irresistible reading” by Megan Marshall in The New York Times.

Rodney was born in South Africa and was educated at Rhodes University in South Africa and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is an award-winning travel writer and has also written and directed for the theatre. He presently resides in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Q: Rodney, thanks for taking time to chat with us. I’m curious. Did Marlowe channel you while you were at Cambridge, or is the explanation for your writing History Play a bit more conventional and rooted in perhaps your skepticism with Shakespeare biographies? And certainly you had to know you were delving into the kind of territory that unsettles a lot of Shakespeare lovers and that you were perhaps placing yourself in the middle of some academic crossfire.

Rodney: At Cambridge, I studied English at Marlowe’s old college – so I guess he was always a presence looking over my shoulder. Perhaps, unconsciously, that was where it all began. Certainly, while I was writing History Play I was aware of wanting his ghost’s approval. More than that of living academics. I realized that what I was doing was going to create quite some huffing and puffing – though in the end, I was surprised at how few howls of anger there were. But this awareness did mean that History Play had to be absolutely watertight in its play with historical fact – if Marlowe and Montaigne have a conversation, it has to be completely possible that they were both in that place at the time; the plot that Marlowe becomes embroiled in (which leads to his staged death) is a real one, and his involvement perfectly feasible: that sort of thing. (For that reason, The Spectator review you quote is quite my favourite.)

But as you suggest, the main impetus for writing the book was indeed a scepticism about Shakespearean biography as a whole. We have just so many facts about Shakespeare. Those and no more. Every single Shakespearean biography there is has only this handful of hard fact to work with – the rest is speculation and (though authors generally deny they are doing it) extrapolation from the works themselves. One of my favourite quotes unearthed during research was Mark Twain’s, likening writing a biography of Shakespeare to reconstructing the skeleton of a brontosaurus, using "nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris." I wanted to throw those old bones in the air, and let them land in a different pattern. To show that, using the same method, you could create an entirely different story. So I am not a true Marlovian, in the sense that History Play is a work of fiction (although it looks and reads like a straight biography). I’m probably closer to the people who in the UK recently signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about William Shakespeare. The deeper I got into the research, the more sceptical I became – and certainly, for me, Marlowe is the most feasible candidate for an alternative authorship.

Q: Of all the things you uncovered in your impressively detailed research (many of the characters and events mentioned in History Play, by the way, have been discussed here at our blog), is there any one thing that really floored you about Marlowe, Shakespeare, a shadowy figure, or perhaps some historical incident? Any eureka moments, perhaps?

Rodney: The discovery that absolutely fascinated me was that there were troupes of English players travelling through continental Europe, hugely popular for performing in English. This struck me as an ideal cover for a spy, given the mobility of players. A poet-player (especially a university man like Marlowe) would have access both to servant’s gossip, and to the lords themselves (more often as not when they were drunk and relaxed after a meal), as well as a jester’s immunity in crossing borders (both social and political). And indeed, the same troupes performed for both sides in the war between the Spanish and the Dutch (a war in which England had a crucial role, and from which Queen Elizabeth’s court would be most desirous of inside information). This discovery was made even more exciting by my realization that Marlowe’s mysterious absences from Cambridge, doing "her majesty good service" in "matters touching the benefit of his Country" coincided with the players’ prime touring season. It also makes sense that high-action dramas such as Tamburlaine were written with one eye on a non-English-speaking audience . . . and there was a troupe present at the festivities surrounding the inauguration of Kronborg Castle at Elsinore (Kronborg’s topography bears a startling resemblance to that of the castle in Hamlet), a troupe that included the Shakespearean clown Will Kempe.

Q: I need to ask you about Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” argument. Should an author’s identity matter when we’re interpreting a text?

Rodney: For me, the plays written by (or attributed to) Shakespeare are unassailable. Having worked with them practically (as a theatre director) as well as academically, I stand in awe . . . and it does not matter one jot who wrote them. So, in that sense perhaps, I’m with Barthes. But with works so great, one cannot help but be intrigued to find out more about the hand behind them. I can be very cynical about academics who claim that you cannot move from the works to information about the author – and then go right ahead and do so, to fill out the pages of a biography that would be naked without such speculation. And I find the whole industry that surrounds the man Shakespeare – up there with Queen Victoria and Churchill as great national symbols, an icon subject to extraordinarily lucrative commercial, tourist and academic exploitation – most offensive.

Q: Care to clue us in on what you’re working on now?

Rodney: I’ve moved to the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian period for a (true) book about the Benson family – the spouse and offspring of an Archbishop of Canterbury. When the domineering, stuffy archbishop died, his wife changed her name from Mary to Ben, and took one Lucy Tait into her bed. Her brood were all famous in their own right (E.F. Benson for his Mapp and Lucia books, Arthur as the author of England’s unofficial national anthem "Land of Hope and Glory," Maggie for her archaeological excavations in Egypt, and more). They knew everyone, from Queen Victoria to Oscar Wilde, and not one of them (to use the idiom of the time) was "the marrying sort."


Q: Rodney, many thanks for sharing some thoughts with our audience. Please join us again, we hope? We’ll do lunch in downtown Sarasota when you’re on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Rodney: Great!

(Bolt photo by Armando Guerra)



© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, January 2009

Click here to visit Rodney Bolt's website.

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