Was Shakespeare Really Marlowe? Quiz

Answer: Born in the same year

Christopher Marlowe attended Cambridge University, and was awarded the degree of Master of Arts in 1587. William Shakespeare never went to university. Some speculate that he may have attended the grammar school in Stratford, but the records have been lost, and there is no proof he had any formal education at all.

There is no evidence that either man was a southpaw. Shakespeare married at age 18; as far as is known, Marlowe was never married. Births were not recorded in Elizabethan England, but christenings were. Marlowe was christened on February 26, 1564, and Shakespeare on April 26, 1564. Children were usually christened three days after birth, so it's likely, but not certain, that Marlowe was born on February 23, and Shakespeare on April 23.

But both were definitely born in the same year.

Answer: 18

Marlowe's genius was evident at an early age. Both "Pharsalia" and the "Elegies" are believed to have been written around 1582. In contrast, the earliest work bearing the name of Shakespeare was not published until he was nearly 30, and there are no references to him as a writer prior to that date.

Answer: John Marlowe

John Marlowe signed his name with a fine, bold hand, and there are surviving documents proving that he could write. John Shakespeare, on the other hand, signed his name with a mark, as did Shakespeare's mother. The fact that his parents were illiterate is not proof that William Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays bearing his name, of course, but more surprising is the fact that his daughters, Judith and Susanna, were illiterate as well. One might be able to believe that the greatest writer in the English language was born into a family whose members were illiterate.

But the writer of Shakespeare's plays shows great admiration for women with wit and learning. Is it likely that the creator of Portia in "The Merchant of Venice" would allow his own daughters to grow up ignorant and unlettered? For many people, including myself, this is one of the strongest arguments against William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

Answer: Spy

Marlowe was frequently absent from Cambridge, as the university records show. The Dons threatened to withhold his Master of Arts degree because of these absences, and a rumor that he had converted to Catholicism. The Privy Council sent a remarkable letter to the Cambridge authorities that reads as follows:

"Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames, and there to remaine, Their Lordships thought good to certifie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetlie wherebie he had done her Majestie good service & deserved to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge: Their Lordships request . . .he should be furthured in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant of th' affaires we went about."

Reims was the site of a Catholic seminary that trained young Englishmen to be priests, who then returned to England to work for the restoration of Catholicism in that country. Marlowe was pretending to be a Catholic convert, but actually spying for the English government. Cambridge took the hint, and Marlowe got his M.A. in 1587.

It should be noted that "Marlowe" was spelled in a dizzying number of ways. Marlowe himself spelled it "Marley." But it is also spelled Marlowe, Marlow, Morley, Marly, Marlin and even Merlin.

Answer: Tamburlaine, Part I

All of these are plays written by Marlowe, but Tamburlaine, or Tamburlaine the Great, was Marlowe's first commercial success. Based upon the life of Timur, a 14th century Asian conqueror, it laid the foundation for Elizabethan theatre. It was one of the first English plays to employ blank verse, and was a tremendous success. It was first performed in 1587 by the Admiral's Men at the Fortune Theatre, and a sequel was written by Marlowe and performed before the end of the year.

There are many, many similarities between Tamburlaine and the early Shakespeare plays. Stratfordians say that Marlowe "influenced" Shakespeare. Marlovians say that the plays are similar because they were written by the same man.

In 1901, the physicist T.C. Mendenhall was convinced that Sir Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays, and decided to conduct a "stylometric analysis" of the works. He hired two women who counted the word length of every word in Shakespeare's works, Bacon's works, and those of several other writers. What a tedious task that must have been! And the results were disappointing; absolutely no correlation was found between Shakespeare and Bacon. But to Mendenhall's shock and surprise, Marlowe and Shakespeare matched perfectly! This is the same method used to determine the authorship of the various Federalist Papers. A computer cannot tell the difference between Marlowe and Shakespeare. The correlation is a staggering r = .9998!

Answer: Counterfeiting

In 1592, the Netherlands were at war with Spain, and England was allied with the Dutch. The English kept a garrison in the town of Flushing. Marlowe was accused of counterfeiting by a man named Richard Baines. On January 26, 1592 Sir Robert Sidney, the English governor of Flushing, wrote to the Lord High Treasurer, Lord Burghley:

"I have also given in charge to this bearer, my ancient, two prisoners, one named Chistofer Marly, by his profession a scholar, and the other Gifford Gilbert, a goldsmith, taken here for coining, and their money I have sent over to your Lordship . . . a Dutch shilling was uttered . . . part of that which they did counterfeit was Her Majesty's coin . . ."

There is strong evidence that Marlowe was still employed by the English government as a spy on the continent at this time. He may also have been employed in this capacity as tutor to Lady Arabella Stuart, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth and a possible heir to the throne. Counterfeiting was a capital offense, and Marlowe would have faced a severe punishment for this crime. Yet he was released very quickly, for he appears in the records as a free man in May, 1592. Queen Elizabeth's famous spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had died in 1590, and at the time of Marlowe's arrest his duties had been taken over by Lord Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil. Very likely the counterfeiting had been undertaken with the government's approval, and Sir Robert was able to secure his agent's prompt release.

Answer: Thomas Kyd

Marlowe's downfall began with an event called the Dutch Church Libels. Many Dutch and French Protestants had come to England in the latter part of the 16th century, and these immigrants were very unpopular with the native population, who accused them of usuary and monopolizing trade. On May 5, 1593 a 53 line poem was nailed to the wall of the Dutch Churchyard in London. It threatened the immigrants with violence, and was seen by the authorities as an incitement to riot. Unfortunately for Marlowe, the poem made many references to "The Jew of Malta," and was signed "Tamburlaine." The Privy Council was ordered to find the author of the poem. On May 12, 1593, the playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and his rooms searched. Some "heretical tracts" were found among Kyd's papers, and Kyd was put on the rack and tortured. Under torture he claimed that the papers were not his, but belonged to Christopher Marlowe, with whom he had shared lodgings some years earlier. Poor Kyd was released, but died a short time later from the effects of his ordeal.

While all this was going on, Marlowe was staying at the estate of his friend, Thomas Walsingham, near Scadbury in Kent. The authorities had obtained additional reports from paid informers accusing Marlowe of making all sorts of blasphemous statements, and also accusing him of promoting atheism. These were capital crimes, and many people were hanged for merely questioning Church of England doctrine.

Now occurs the first of many curious events surrounding Marlowe's alleged death. He was arrested on May 20, 1593 but was not imprisoned! He was allowed to make bail, and instructed to report daily to the Privy Council. It was very, very unusual for bail to be granted to someone charged with the crimes Marlowe was said to have committed.

Answer: Ingram Frizer

Ten days after the warrant for his arrest was issued, Marlowe met with three men - Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley - at the house of Eleanor Bull, a widow, in the town of Deptford. According to accounts, they arrived there at ten o'clock in the morning. At six o'clock in the evening, an argument arose between Marlowe and Frizer over the bill (or reckoning) for their "feast." Marlowe grabbed Frizer's dagger and wounded him slightly on the scalp; Frizer then grabbed Marlowe's arm and turned the dagger back on him, stabbing him above the right eye, and killing him instantaneously.

This is the official account of Marlowe's death. But it leaves many questions unanswered. First of all, what was the purpose of the meeting, which lasted all day? Frizer and Skeres were well-known confidence men; Poley was a government spy who was carrying dispatches from the continent when the incident took place. Why did he dally at Deptford while on official government business? Some say that Marlowe was murdered, either on the orders of Lord Burghley or some other high official. But if they wanted Marlowe killed, there were easier (and less public) ways of doing it.

Marlovians believe these men were there to assist Marlowe in faking his death, and to help him escape to the continent.

Answer: It was held by the Queen's Coroner

In Elizabethan times, whenever a homicide occured within the "verge" (an imaginary circle with a radius of twelve statute miles from wherever the Queen happened to be staying at the time), the Queen's Coroner conducted the inquest. When Marlowe was killed, the Queen was staying at Nonsuch Palace, so Deptford was just barely within the verge.

The Coroner of the Queen's Household was a man named William Danby. He held an inquest into Marlowe's death on June 1, two days after the alleged murder. He assembled a jury headed by Nicholas Draper and Wolstan Randall, who are refered to as "gentlemen," and fourteen local tradesmen and artisans who concluded that Ingram Frizer had killed Marlowe in self-defense.

The transcript of Marlowe's inquest remained undiscovered until 1925. Everything we know about Marlowe's death is found in that document. But many questions remain unanswered. Why did Danby conduct the inquest? Deptford was at the very fringe of his jurisdiction; local authorities were probably not even aware that they were within the verge. Secondly, how did he arrive so quickly? He would have to have been summoned from Nonsuch Palace, and since Marlowe was killed at six in the evening, this probably would not have been done until the following day. Yet only two days later, the inquest was complete. Furthermore, even though the homicide occured within Danby's jurisdiction, the law dictated that he be assisted by the local coroner, and this did not happen.

Marlovians believe that it is much more likely that Danby was near Deptford when the alleged killing happened, which allowed him to immediately take charge of the proceedings. And to prevent local authorities from asking inconvenient questions.

Answer: John Penry

John Penry (1559 - May 29, 1593) was a Puritan minister who had been sentenced to death for writing pamphlets critical of the Church of England. Penry had been scheduled to be hanged on May 24, but his execution was delayed for five days. Then late in the afternoon of May 29, a scaffold was hastily erected and he was dragged from his cell and hanged.

This was most unusual, since most executions were held at noon. In addition, Penry's wife attempted to secure his body in order to give it a Christian burial, but was denied, another very unusual occurence. Penry's corpse simply disappeared. Penry was hanged in St. Thomas-a-Watering, only a few miles from Deptford.

He was about Marlowe's age. We don't know if he resembled Marlowe, but it is doubtful that any of the coroner's jury knew either man.

It is possible that the reason Marlowe and his co-conspirators lingered so long at Eleanor Bull's house is that they were waiting for Penry's body to arrive. As Coroner of the Queen's Household, William Danby would have had the authority to claim his body, which could then have been transported easily to Deptford.

Answer: Venus and Adonis

"Venus and Adonis" is a poem of 1,194 lines based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Venus falls in love with a mortal youth, Adonis, who initially wants nothing to do with her. She has to work very hard to seduce him. He is later killed while hunting a wild boar, and his body turns into the flower we call the anemone. The poem contains some rather graphic sexual imagery.

The poem was entered into the Stationer's Register on April 18, 1593 - anonymously. But when it was published in June 1593, it contained a dedication to the Earl of Southampton signed by "William Shakespeare," who called the poem "the first heir of my invention."

It is very strange that there is not one single printed word that can be attributed to "William Shakespeare" until after Christopher Marlowe's death! It is even stranger that this work was entered anonymously, but published only a few weeks later under Shakespeare's name. Furthermore, "Venus and Adonis" is a masterful poem, not the work of a beginner. If Shakespeare was the author of the plays attributed to him, many of which were certainly written prior to "Venus and Adonis," why would he refer to the poem as "the first heir of my invention?" On the other hand, the poem bears many resemblences to Marlowe's unfinished poem, "Hero and Leander." And it would have been the first work published under the name of his "invented" persona - William Shakespeare.

Answer: True

It is interesting that many of Shakespeare's plays are set in northern Italy; they contain details of everyday life that would have been difficult or impossible to have been obtained simply by reading about the cities that serve as the scenes for the plays.

For example, in Act 2 Scene 8 of "The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare uses the word "gondola," which had never appeared in print in any English book prior to that time. Many scholars believe that Marlowe spent time in Italy after his supposed death.

There are also hundreds of passages in Shakespeare's plays that are lifted nearly verbatim from Marlowe's works (there are over 600 of them!). The most famous references, however, are Shakespeare's sonnets, which clearly speak of the writer being in "exile," something that never happened to the man from Stratford. And there is the famous passage from "As You Like It," Act 3, Scene 3: "When a man's verses cannot be understood, 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." No one disputes this is a reference to Marlowe, but it makes much more sense if Marlowe is writing these words than if Shakespeare is writing them.

Answer: A. D. Wraight

Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published in 1609. The first hint that they were not written by William Shakespeare of Stratford is in the dedication, which reads as follows: "To the onlie begetter these insuing sonnets, Mr. W.H., All Happinesse and that Eternitie promised by our ever-living Poet, wisheth the well-wishing Adventurer in setting forth." T.T. "T. T." is thought to be Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. The identity of "Mr. W. H." has been the subject of much speculation and controversy; they may even have been the initials of the alias Marlowe was using at the time. But the most important phrase is "our ever-living poet." This was a stock-phrase that always - always - refered to a writer who was deceased. The man from Stratford was very much alive in 1609! But Marlowe was "dead," at least in a figurative sense.

Furthermore, the sonnets themselves bear no relation to the Stratford man's life. They speak of disgrace and exile. As far as we know, the actor, William Shakespeare, never suffered a public disgrace, and he certainly never went into exile. But if Marlowe was forced to live abroad, unable to return to England, they would fit him perfectly. In 1994, A. D. "Dolly" Wraight, published her book, "The Story That the Sonnets Tell," in which she expressed her theory that the sonnets were addressed not to a single individual, but to three. By arranging the sonnets in the correct order, she claimed, they tell a perfectly coherent story, and identify Marlowe as the author.

Answer: The Hoffman Prize

Calvin W. Hoffman was a wealthy Broadway press agent. He became interested in the Shakespeare authorship controvery, and in his 1955 book, "The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare," laid down the basic ideas of Marlovian belief, that Marlowe did not die in 1593, that his murder was staged, and that he lived for many years in France and Italy, continuing to write plays that were produced and published with the man from Stratford acting as a front.

When Hoffman died in 1987, he left a large sum of money to fund an annual prize for the essay that offers evidence "to satisfy the world of Shakesperian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe."

Answer: Shakespeare's memorial plaque

William Shakespeare of Stratford died on April 23, 1616 and was buried in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church. Sometime soon after his burial (before 1623), a memorial plaque and bust were placed over his grave. Exactly who commissioned the plaque is not known. The inscription reads:

STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST?
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HAST PLAST
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKESPEARE: WITH WHOM,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK Ys TOMBE,
FAR MORE, THEN COST, SIEH ALL, Yt HE HATH WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

On Shakespeare's tomb is the more famous inscription:

GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HERE.
BLESE BE Ye MAN Yt SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE Yt MOVES MY BONES.

Now the inscription on the Memorial Plaque makes no sense as it is written. But if one takes "read" in the sense "to understand," you can see that it is a sort of riddle. Look at the third line and the words "with in." Is this a stonecutter's error for "within"? Or was it deliberately written that way? If the latter is true, we get a meaning something like this: "Stay, passenger, understand, if you can, whom envious Death has placed with Shakespeare in this tomb." "Whose name doth deck this tomb." The only name on Shakespeare's tomb is Jesus, or Christ. "Far more, then cost." The now obsolete English word "ley" meant "cost" or "reckoning." So, whose name are we talking about? Christ + Far + More + Ley = Christopher Marley. Then there is the curious word "sieh." This is usually explained as another stonecutter's error for "sith," which meant "since." But read it backwards and it becomes "he is." So "he is back," or, as the Elizabethans would have said, "he is returned." The final lines seem to confirm that Shakespeare was Marlowe's front man, as they can be taken to mean Shakespeare's death "leaves living art without a page to serve his wit." In other words, now that Shakespeare is dead, Marlowe can no longer use him as "a page to serve his wit."

This is a very abbreviated version of Farey's argument. Please visit Peter Farey's Marlowe Page to read the entire article.