Elizabethan Intrigue

The problem of what really is in a name--and particularly in the name of William Shakespeare--has reappeared in the form of a book by Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. This time, though, the contender for honors is not Bacon or the Earl of Oxford--but Christopher Marlowe, the originator of English dramatic blank verse.

Echoing Henry James, who was "haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world," Hoffman presents a new theory: that Marlowe was not murdered on May 30, 1953, but lived on to publish plays under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. To prove his theory--at times, it almost seems as if the idea were more axiom than theory to Mr. Hoffman--he has poked into old tomes and publication entry books, has listed 30 pages of parallel constructions in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and in the end has come up with a story that is intriguing--if not convincing.

The book is intriguing primarily because it is a good mystery story, with the who-done-it given away on the first page. Marlowe's supposed murder in a tavern brawl has troubled historians ever since the record of the inquest was located in 1925. Not until then did scholars learn that Marlowe was stabbed in the presence of three men--all notorious-spies--just before he was to go on trial, and perhaps on the rack, for atheism. Questions immediately arose over the accuracy of the inquest. Could Marlowe have died instantly from the wound described? Why was the confessed murderer pardoned within four weeks by Queen Elizabeth? These questions have led some biographers to conclude that influential men in the government wanted Marlowe, who had also engaged in espionage for the Queen, out of the way before his appearance on the rack.

Unfortunately for the case of Marlowe-as-Shakespeare, Hoffman fails to see that all four men at this strange meeting had been spies at some time. He also omits any mention of one of the keystones of any anti-Shakespeare theory, the unfinished play Henry VIII. For, accepting Hoffman's thesis for a moment, would it not have been impossible for Shakespeare to write anything at all after the "true" author, Marlowe, had really died?

While perhaps not going far enough in some points, Hoffman goes too far in others. First he says that there is no evidence of Shakespeare and Marlowe's knowing each other, and he then concludes that they must never have met. It is this kind of logical leap and the lack of scholarly footnotes that throws doubt on Hoffman's thesis. Despite the inadequacies of the book, however, Hoffman has become the first to put into print a fascinating theory. It is a theory that demands, at least, a scholarly refutation.