An imaginary life

ONE of the pleasures of reading about Christopher Marlowe is that it provides an antidote to the idolatry conferred on Shakespeare. David Riggs manages to write around 400 splendid pages about Elizabethan theatre while only briefly mentioning the favourite literary genius of the western world. The theatre was well established in London by the time that the lad from Stratford-upon-Avon arrived. It was served by numerous writers, some of them providing pot-boilers, some such as Thomas Kyd (“The Spanish Tragedy”) extraordinarily gifted, and all constantly in demand to provide new scripts to fill the city's booming theatres.

Marlowe was king of this company, the greatest playwright that England had yet produced, the author of crowd-pullers such as “Dr Faustus” and “Tamberlaine”, and the composer of “Come live with me and be my love”, the most popular lyric of its time. Marlowe had the knack of combining literary excellence with enough violence to satisfy the crowd. Then he died in 1593, apparently in a pub brawl, aged only 29. Few likenesses of him survive. One possible candidate is in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Had he lived and continued to write his mighty lines, would Marlowe, not Shakespeare, now be remembered as the foremost marvel of the age? It has to be said that this is not a question that bothers Rodney Bolt in his quirky book “History Play”, perhaps best described as a scholarly joke. Mr Bolt is deeply suspicious of biographies of Shakespeare and Marlowe in which the few hard facts about their lives are “kneaded together with legend” and “a large dollop of the author's imagination”.

He has taken the few known hard facts and shown how they can be used to construct a plausible story that is totally different from most biographies. Mr Bolt's Marlowe does not die in 1593. He lives for years on the run from his enemies, writing “Hamlet” and other fancies when he has a moment and getting Shakespeare, an opportunist with little literary talent, to market them for him.

All seemingly preposterous, agrees Mr Bolt: he is anxious not to be lumped in with the loonies who claim that Shakespeare was someone else. What is important to him, he says, is “how we construct truth”, adding that “the book may very well have been called ‘The Impossibility of Biography'.”

Poor Shakespeare. It is not his fault that he is treated as an idol, or that he is mixed up with other celebrities who left their imprint on an extraordinarily showy age. Unlike the usual run of ruthless Elizabethans at every level of society up to the queen, he seems to have been a reasonably decent chap. He was happy to acknowledge that Marlowe showed the way forward in playwriting, pioneering blank verse, which Shakespeare was to use with increasing effect in his long series of history plays that tapped into Elizabethan patriotic fervour.

Mr Riggs says it is unlikely that Shakespeare ever met Marlowe but that he would have seen all his plays. In this sense Marlowe, although only two months older than Shakespeare, was his mentor. Years after Marlowe's death, when Shakespeare was writing “As You Like It”, he had the notion of dropping into the play a well-known Marlowe line: “Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight”, as a memorial to the former master. All fantasy? Some will say so, others will enjoy the tale.