Talk:Christopher Marlowe

Michael Rubbo, the Australian documentarian working for the Canadian National Film Board, has just completed a film called Much Ado About Something, which posits that Marlowe did not die but fled the country to avoid persecution, and in exile wrote the works of Shakespeare. Sounds preposterous, I know, but the film is quite interesting & provoking anyway; it played at the Toronto Film Festival just after the Sept 11th attacks, and I saw a sneak preview of it a few weeks ago. The entry for it is not yet up on IMDb, but the film has been optioned by both PBS and the BBC, though the A(ustralian)BC has yet to decide on a length they want it cut to. Though it was originally 2 hours long, I saw a 93-minute version, and either PBS or the BBC wanted another 6 minutes cut from it; Rubbo was considering releasing the various cut interviews on a DVD. Look for it on PBS in early 2002; I don't know when it's coming out on the BBC. --KQ

Oh, dear. Well,unlike most other "he wrote Shakespeare" entries Marlowe actually wrote plays, which makes him the easiest to dismiss on a personal investigation. (I'm not saying that the movie's not fun, by the way, only that Shakespeare probably wrote most of Shakespeare!):

Read any three Shakespeare history plays

Read Tambulaine, Edward II, and Dido

Then get back to me. They're different authors. You can do the same thing with "Truman Capote really wrote To Kill A Mockingbird for his cousin Harper Lee." Read Other Voices, Other Rooms. Reread To Kill A Mockingbird. Yes, authors develop and change, but there are differences. By the way, this isn't my idea - I had to do it for a course in college! --MichaelTinkler

Yes, the film is quite fun. Your counter-arguments are actually not uncommon, and Rubbo addresses them in his film. People will of course have to decide for themselves whether they're convinced. :-)

I'm not claiming they're uncomonnon - only that Marlow is the easiest-falsified of the 'he wrote S' entries, since he actually *did* write plays that survive (unlike Bacon or Oxford or whoever else people put forward). I hope he convinces no-one, because I don't want to have to write the entry for 'pseudo-literary criticism' to go with pseudoscience ! ; ) --MichaelTinkler.

Well, he does address what you've just said above. Just a disclaimer, I am not convinced--but, as I said, it's an entertaining and provoking film. You should look for it. :-) --KQ

I think it is reasonable to believe that contemporary standards of investigation are easily good enough to show beyond any reasonable doubt that Marlowe did not write Shakespeare's plays. Simple questions of overall style and quality of a work are the easiest for a layperson to see, but patterns of word use (particularly pronoun use) vary widely, and are often characteristic of a particular author. Then there is the question of vocabulary change, there is comparatively little vocabulary change between the plays we attribute to Marlowe, but a move to the Shakespeare plays shows a wide difference in vocabulary. So, on the level of language use alone, it is possible to determine that it is highly unlikely that Marlowe wrote Henry IV, or that Paul of Tarsus wrote the letter to the Hebrews.

And these techniques can be used even when an author is intentionally trying to mimic the work of another author, since such mimicry would require the use of these same tools for linguistic analysis, which is a skill few people have, and which nobody even knew about in Marlowe's day. MRC