MARLOWE: THE REAL STORY PART 4

WAS MARLOWE REALLY MURDERED?

For the past 50 years or so, a theory has been put forth that Christopher Marlowe was not murdered at all. The proposition is that his killing was faked, and that Marlowe escaped from inevitable prosecution as a heretic by fleeing abroad. The main proponent of this theory, Calvin Hoffman, maintained in numerous writings that Christopher Marlowe was the author of the plays of Shakespeare.

The outlines of his theory go something like this:

With the connivance of Thomas Walsingham, and through the services of his men Frizer, Skeres and Poley, a recently executed man was substituted for the body of Marlowe. Marlowe then fled to Italy, where he wrote Shakespeare's greatest plays (many of them set in Italy), sent them back to Walsingham, and Walsingham had William Shakespeare, an actor, serve as a front man for the authorship of the plays. Of course, Walsingham would have had Marlowe's manuscripts recopied.

Hoffman relied heavily on what he termed "parallelisms," phrases and lines from Marlowe's acknowledged works that are very similar to lines from the plays of Shakespeare. Further, he raised the cherished argument that no one of Shakespeare's limited education could have written the erudite and complicated plays attributed to Shakespeare.

If Marlowe had been spirited away into exile, it was cleverly done. There are a number of references to Marlowe's death in various documents of the time, and friends and associates seemed to have no doubts that Marlowe had been killed at Deptford.

The most convincing argument, however, is the difference in quality between Marlowe's plays and those attributed to Shakespeare. If one rereads Marlowe's plays, one is struck by the absence of plot, the two-dimensionality of the characters, and the almost simplistic moral presentation of the plays. With the exception of some moments of soaring poetry, and, in Edward II, a few scenes of dramatic power, Marlowe's plays are not comparable in quality to even the earliest and least popular of Shakespeare's plays.

In brief, if the non-murder of Marlowe is dependent on his assuming the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, the case is indeed weak. In all likelihood, the man murdered in Deptford in 1593 was Christopher Marlowe. The question is "Why?"