Christopher Marlowe led perhaps the most widely unconfirmed life of any major writer. The numerous ascriptions that have met him over time – petty thief, secret agent, homosexual, general sybarite – are the cream of the crop among the tame many...
[more]Christopher Marlowe led perhaps the most widely unconfirmed life of any major writer. The numerous ascriptions that have met him over time – petty thief, secret agent, homosexual, general sybarite – are the cream of the crop among the tame many that are given to practically all the major writers about whom little is known. One that few others have the privilege of being given is "Shakespeare" – on that dubious hierarchy of ostensible "true" Shakespeares, Marlowe is at the uncrowded top, alongside Francis Bacon and William Stanley. The most often repeated theory supporting this claim argues that Marlowe faked his death in 1593 to put at long last a great many outstanding debts – monetary and otherwise – and prejudices to bed and, with all those cumbersome things behind him, he then sat down to finally write some of the greatest works of English literature under the name of an admirer.
This is fun, but it also obscures much of Marlowe's actual work: many are more attracted to Marlowe as Shakespeare than Marlowe as Marlowe. But it was Marlowe who, with Tamburlaine, gave rise to many of the poetic and theatrical conventions of late Elizabethan theater, his unique and influential usage of blank verse perhaps foremost among them. By the time of his death – having composed such other cornerstones of English literature as The Massacre at Paris and, particularly, Doctor Faustus – he was writing work that was far better than was Shakespeare's at the same period. Surely, had Marlowe been the true Shakespeare, Macbeth would have been written about ten years earlier.
This fact also distracts from much of the most public Marlowe scholarship: few accessible works on the writer do not leave this prurient possibility far from their ostensible subject, and a fantasied life of Marlowe bandying about London post-death and churning out Shakespeare's greatest works tugs mercilessly at the attentions of the scholar and the reader alike. And for good reason: despite the occasionally convincing case that could be made for Marlowe's authorship of Shakespeare, it is the sexiness of such a conspiracy that outweighs the dearth of reason. It is this mere sexiness that doesn't allow the theory to be more properly put in place; it is simple and thoughtless sexiness that obscures let Marlowe's true work – or, to appease the Marlovian theorists out there, his early work – and lets salacity crowd in.
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