Marlowe vs. Shakespeare

So this isn't a thread about That Girl's drinking problems?



VS.

 

I really really wanted to see that Frontline, and thought about posting hear to see if I could bum a tape from someone who had it. A friend of mine told me the story years and years ago. At the time I looked for anything about it in my college library, and failed. Then I ran across the book in the local public library. I can't remember the title, but its by a guy named Hoffman (Phillip Hoffman, maybe.) I believe the book is almost completely discredited, but it still makes for fascinating reading. I always thought it would make a good subject for a movie, and sure enough, I'd heard there's a movie about Marlowe coming out in the not-too-distant future. Marlowe was a fascinating character, and his (hypothetical) relations with Shakespeare could make for a trilogy. Shakespeare's As You Like It contains several references to Marlowe, soon after his death.

If anyone has a tape of the frontline episode, please post here.

 

Also, there's a biography about Marlowe by a guy named Nicholas (I believe), and Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange and a novel about Shakespeare) wrote a novel about Marlowe, entitled (again, if I remember correctly) Dead Man in Deptford.

 

The problem with the "Marlowe = Shakespeare" theory is that Marlowe died too soon to have written some of Shakespeare's plays.

The trouble with "proving" anything about almost anyone who wasn't a member of the high aristocracy or royalty in pre-modern times is the usual and maddening gaps in official records. The Elizabethans kept excellent recods about the things that mattered to them - property ownership and aristocratic family connections, for example - but were also extremely casual about other matters such as the order in which a playwright wrote his plays, his general biography or what he was like in private. What is unusual about Shakespeare is that for someone of his social class he in fact is fairly well documented. There are birth records, legal records, property records, even the records granting him his coat of arms. We also have some miscellaneous financial records from the theater companies he was associated with and examples of his own signature.

It doesn't help the we're also dealing with the nomadic, freewheeling world of the Elizabethan theater as well. The Elizabethans' relationship with theater was like our relationship with porn - it was wildly popular but also considered extremely low class and not something most people would want to admit to being heavily involved in. So one would not expect the queen to put forth public praise for someone so base as a playwright. The amazing thing is that his plays survived at all, especially considering the low status of theater and the fact that theaters were often shut down and criminalized in times of social stress and also during Cromwell's puritanism.

So far, nobody has been able to come up with a well-documented person who could've been The Bard in a manner that answers more questions than it asks. Until this happens, therefore, an intelligent use of Ockham's Razor leaves us with the overwhelming probablity that William Shakespeare was a real person who was a major figure in Elizabethan drama and we just don't know as much about him as we'd have liked.

 

Interesting, but it brings up a whole host of other questions that likely can't or won't be answered by any probable documentation, such as "If Marlowe really did have his death faked and was sent by Elizabeth to Italy as spy, why would he jeopardize - or be allowed to jeopardize - his presumably super-secret mission by writing wildly popular plays for so many years?", for starters.

Not surprising, since, like 99.9% of his contemporaries, he did not go to university. In fact, Shakespeare was smack in the middle of a rather catty and well-documented feud between the university-educated playwrights like Marlowe and those who weren't. The university boys mocked Wilie as an "upstart crow" and he returned fire.

His father was a town official and later mayor in Stratford and therefore, young William presumably was raised by a literate father. Also, there is evidence that William might have begun to follow in his father's footsteps and studied at least some law so he'd have to have been very literate to do that. Then his father temporarily fell out of political favor, probably due to suspicions of crypto-Catholicism (there is also strong evidence that The Bard was also secretly Catholic). Finally, theater people would of necessity have to have been intensely language-oriented, especially playwrights who were, after all writing for the ultra-literate aristocracy who delighted in word play and high-falutin' speech. Remember, an Elizabethan audience did not go to "see" a play as much as to "hear" the play. So we should not be surprised to find playwrights having a much larger than normal vocabulary, even for literate people.

And those who think Shakespeare could not have written his plays due to lack of education will want to remember that just because one does not have a university diploma does not automatically mean one is stupid or unlettered. There are plenty of examples of "uneducated" yet intelligent and articulate men from early American history, let alone European history. And there were other elizabethan playwrights who did not have university educations as the above-mention feud proves.

You answered your own objection. So Shakespeare wasn't a professional calligrapher. Que sera. Happily, there's plenty of other evidence that he existed and wrote plays and was recognized by his contemporaries as having done so.

Yeah, I guess mundane reality is just too boring for some people.

 

But a 17,000 word vocabulary?

I don't know about the whole Marlowe conspiracy theory, but I do think the "works of Shakespeare" were written by more than one man.

 

Depends on how you define "written." The Elizabethan theater was highly collaborative, and the plays were the product not of an individual genius isolated in his dingy hovel (a conception of authorship fostered by the Romantics some 200 years later, but heavily saturating our conception), but of a playwright and the players of the company. The manner that plays were created and produced is pretty well documented, and it's what kills the "Marlowe" argument: it would've been pretty hard for a playwright of that era to imagine writing plays without access to the theater and it's environment.

Especially if said playwright is dead and buried.

 

Cool - I think you just rendered this whole debate irrelevant.

 

So he was a language savant, read his contemporaries' plays and poems or had a dictionary. Not outside the realm of possibility, especially given the above. I mean, come on, there's no reason an intelligent guy living in London among the aristocracy and reading and attending the plays and other works of his contemporaries couldn't have used several words once and then dropped them. And he was possibly made self-conscious about his lack of education and therefore at greater pains to "wordier than thou". We can all recognize the phenomenon of overcompensation.

It would be interesting to make a real comparison between Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights and poets. The problem is that we have probably Shakespeare's entire output thanks to the accident of the preserved Folios while we have lost most of the plays of his contemporaries. So we don't have a similar number of works from a test sample of other playwrights to judge. My guess, and it can only be a guess until we find a previously hidden cache of more Elizabethan plays, is that Shakespeare would still be slightly "wordier" than his fellow playwrights but not outside the realm of reasonability.

Oh, and in a sense his plays were written by more than one person as "borrowing" phrases and whole stories was common in Elizabethan times. No copywright laws there! Marlowe himself "borrowed" and reworked the old Faust tale, for example.

And most Elizabethans, not just Shakespeare, looked to Italy for inspiration for a few reasons. First, it was too politically dangerous to put political ideas into an English setting. The House of Tudor was still sensitive about its legitimacy AND you had a childless queen on the throne, making any reference to things political a minefield. Which is why Shakespeare's "English history" plays are little more than Tudor propaganda spinning history along pro-Tudor lines.

Also, remember that Italy had a 100 year head start on the cultural explosion that was the Renaissance. Any English writer looking for the new and novel with which to delight his audience would have been well advised to look there for cultural goodies, as many did.

Finally, the Italians were seen as hotheads and impulsive Mediterranean types, great fodder for operatic melodrama in a way that supposedly stolid Englishmen were not. Macbeth and Hamlet may have killed for coldly political or existential reasons but for tales of insane passion and wildeyed vengeance, Italians or Spaniards were more believable than Yorkshiremen, Scots or Danes.

 

Plays were also constantly developed overtime as the playwright found out what got a reaction from the audience and what was derisively hooted off the stage.

For a modern example of this, look at the way the Marx Brothers approached their early movies. Generally, they toured with the script as a play first to test things out on audiences on the vaudeville circuit, made changes almost every night and then only later made the "definitive" version in a movie.

Elibethan theater companies doubtlessly worked in a similar fashion.

 

I figured, being a cinema guy, you wouldn't be freaked out about the idea of collaboration.

Here's a link to an interview with one of the featured talking heads of the documentary, Jonathon Bate of the University of Liverpool:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muchado/forum/bate.html

He goes into more detail on the objections. Pretty good interview. If you do a search of the site with the terms "Shakespeare Marlowe" you'll get everyone else's take, too.

But Joe already laid out the key objection: every time someone proposes an alternative to Shakespeare (the Earl of Oxford, Marlowe, etc.), there's always something wrong with the theory (like, Oxford didn't seem to have much to to with the theater, so he's as likely to have written plays as I am to design a jet engine). But there's a unifying theme: they alternatives are always from a higher social class than the "commoner" from Stratford.

But my favorite desparate idea of the "anti-Stratfordians" right now: Shakespeare couldn't have written all those plays because he would've been too busy. Well, as Joe pointed out, he looks more productive than average because his players (The Kings Company, IIRC) preserved his works in reasonably good form, and also... well, if these folks would look at the canon of Beaumont and Fletcher, they'd see a fairly prodigious number of plays that, while numerous, aren't produced all that often for a variety of reasons.

 

I think this is basically the thing that sticks in the craw of most anti-Stratfordians: How can a non-university-educated, crypto-Catholic commoner have done anything worthwhile, even in the lowly capacity of playwright? The thought that such an undesirable person towered over his respectable elite contemporaries in the now-prized field of "literature" seems to be too much for them to bear.

 

Could a "commoner" have had such a large vocabulary? it's possible, but how could he have been so knowledgeable about a whole range of topics; diplomacy, court intrigue, falconry etc. that would only have been know to the elites of the day?

 

Could a complete bumpkin like Abraham Lincoln really have written so many cool speeches and guided our nation through one of its darkest hours? So which rich, educated person was pretending to be this so-called supposed "Lincoln" person really?

Who did his father the mayor of Stratford deal with many times in his offical capacity? Who was he writing his plays for? In whose company did he spend his time while at court? Yep, aristocrats. Anyone with two eyes, two ears and half a brain could have written knowledgably about such thing if they had ready access to an aristocrat's court. I mean, come on, yeah, the guy was a commoner but he wasn't retarded!