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Daryl Pinksen, author of Marlowe's Ghost
On the morning of May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe met with three associates in the English intelligence network. Days earlier, a list of charges against him that included heresy, blasphemy and treason had been delivered to the Privy Council. Later that evening, the Queen's Coroner was summoned to their meeting place. A body lay on the floor. After an inquest, the dead man was taken to a nearby churchyard busy at the time receiving victims of the plague. According to the official report, England's foremost playwright was interred without fanfare or marker. Soon, plays attributed to William Shakespeare began to appear on the London stage, plays so undeniably similar to Marlowe's that noted scholars have since declared that Shakespeare wrote as if he had been Marlowe's apprentice. Marlowe's Ghost explores the possibility that persecution of a writer who dared to question authority may have led to the greatest literary cover-up of all time.
Marlowe's Ghost
Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards - Grand Prize Winner . . . . . . . .Independent Publisher Book Awards - Bronze Medallist, Best Regional Non-fiction, Canada (East) . . . . . . . . . . . "A worthy take on the fascinating debate over Shakespeare’s true identity." Kirkus Discoveries Review. . . . . . . . . . "Marlowe’s Ghost . . . makes a strong case." Foreword, Clarion Review
Hi Mr. Pinksen,
ReplyDeleteI was one of your students at PWC... graduated in 98...
I just finished an MA in English, and we did a grad course on Marlowe... it was lots of fun... he's a brilliant writer...
I got my hands on your book and enjoyed reading it... it was Tolson Barrington who put me on to it...
I'm not convinced, myself, that they are one and the same -- Marlowe and Shakespeare...
not impossible... just improbable, to me...
the one thing that tips the scales for me is the huge difference between their writing styles and their working within the craft... Marlowe is so much more seditious and cutting...
but again... just an opinion...
cool blog here... i'll check back again another day...
Jon,
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for taking the time to read the book, and to comment on it.
I am at a loss as to how, in light of the abundant scholarship showing a remarkable affinity between the Marlowe and Shakespeare styles, you would assert a "huge difference between their writing styles." Here is an example from Robert Logan, in his 2007 book Shakespeare's Marlowe,
"Of greater significance than the point at which the sense of emulation [Shakespeare of Marlowe] emerges as documentable evidence is the firmness with which Marlowe’s influence rooted itself in Shakespeare and developed, for it continued to thrive for 18 years after Marlowe’s death, roughly from 1593-1611, the remainder of Shakespeare’s career." Logan, Robert. 2007. Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry. Hampshire England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.p.8
Comparing King Lear to Doctor Faustus is as pointless as comparing The Tempest to Titus Andronicus. The only relevant comparison here - the only fair comparison - is between late Marlowe plays and early Shakespeare plays.
Imagine, for example, if Edward II and Titus Andronicus had come down to us without authorial attribution. Scholars would have to rely on internal evidence alone, and compare these two plays to the work of Elizabethan authors. I highly doubt that Titus Andronicus would have been attributed to Shakespeare, and in fact, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority view was that the inclusion of Titus in the 1623 First Folio was an error, and many of the doubters chose Marlowe as the most probable author. They believed that internal evidence was more reliable than the name on the cover, and that internal evidence pointed to Marlowe.
As for Edward II, a few might disagree, but Edward II is indistinguishable from a Shakespeare play, and if that play had come down to us without authorial attribution, it would have most likely have been assigned to Shakespeare, not Marlowe. Recent opinion (Jonathan Bate) says that Marlowe studied and copied Shakespeare's history plays when writing Edward II.
It is this blurring of the lines between the two bodies of work in the years 1591-1594 that allows the argument that all of these plays may have been written by the same person, using reasoning based on the transitive property of equality.
It's a choice: the two bodies of work can be viewed as the gradual evolution of a single writer's style, or, as I would imagine occurred in your graduate class, as two monolithic styles in sharp contrast. Although there may be some utility in viewing the two bodies of work using the latter approach, it is a misleading simplification of a fascinating question worthy of a closer look.
I am very curious about the syllabus and structure of the graduate course you did on Marlowe, if you have the time.
Daryl Pinksen
dpinksen@gmail.com