History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe [Hardcover]

Rodney Bolt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2005

Rodney Bolt’s delightful life of Marlowe plays out a surprising solution to an enduring literary mystery, bringing the spirit of Shakespeare alive as we’ve never seen it before.

Rodney Bolt’s book is not an attempt to prove that, rather than dying at 29 in a tavern brawl, Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to Europe, and went on to write the work attributed to Shakespeare. Instead, it takes that as the starting point for a playful and brilliantly written “fake biography” of Marlowe, which turns out to be a life of the Bard as well. Using real historical sources (as well as the occasional red herring) plus a generous dose of speculation, Bolt paints a rich and rollicking picture of Elizabethan life. As we accompany Marlowe into the halls of academia, the society of the popular English players traveling Europe, and the dangerous underworld of Elizabethan espionage, a fascinating and almost plausible life story emerges, along with a startlingly fresh look at the plays and poetry we know as Shakespeare’s. Tapping into centuries of speculation about the man behind the work, about whom so few facts are known for sure, Rodney Bolt slyly winds the lives of two beloved playwrights into one.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With gobsmacking audacity, Bolt recreates an alternative life of Marlowe that compellingly views the known facts from a different angle." (Independent (UK) )

"A triumph...It has both a serious remit and enough puns and anagrams to make Shakespeare (or possibly Marlowe) blush. It made me laugh out loud. And, most of all, it made me want to go back to the plays. This was a book that needed to be done perfectly or not at all. It is perfect." (Spectator (UK) )

"History Play's rich and meticulously researched portrait of the 16th and 17th centuries is written with a keen sense of Elizabethan metaphor and contemporary analogy.I was happy to go along for the ride." (Times Literary Supplement (UK) ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Rodney Bolt was born in South Africa and read English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—Marlowe’s alma mater. After working in the 1980s as a writer and director in theater in London, he moved to Amsterdam, where he now lives. He is also a travel writer, and has won national travel-writing prizes from Germany and the United States.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1st US Edition edition (August 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596910208
• ISBN-13: 978-1596910201
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,625,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clever, witty, ENTERTAINING!, August 28, 2006

By 

Movie Fan "Uncle Kirk" (Surf City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe (Hardcover)

If you're a fan of Shakespeare, and want a way to experience the flavor of life in his times (Elizabethan England), there is no better book from the standpoint of entertainment and thought-provoking suppositions. Fiction? OF COURSE! And the author admits it. But what FUN! (This book has for me a lot of the exciting "you are there" of the film Shakespeare In Love: wildly informative and entertaining quasi-fantasy.)

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A well-imagined alternative history, October 25, 2005

By 

Pierre de Vries (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe (Hardcover)

If you've ever been bemused by the fuss about who wrote the Shakespeare plays, this book will set you straight. The foreword reprints Sam Clemens' (aka Mark Twain's) inventory of all the positively known facts about Shakespeare, and it's a scanty list. Most striking is the fact that Will's children were illiterate, that he left no literary bequest but carefully distributed physical goods down to old furniture in his will, and that we know more about his life as a trader and bean counter than we do about his acting.

Bolt takes as his premise that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him, and that he acted as a front for Christopher Marlowe who was writing from exile after narrowly escaping assassination; a stand-in died in his place in the infamous "tavern brawl". Bolt readily admits that this is a fiction, but argues that even supposedly reputable Shakespearean history is mostly invention, too. As he says in his Afterword: "Other writers have looked at the evidence and deduced a story; I have imagined a story, then supported it with the same sparse evidence."

The book weaves a persuasive and instructive tapestry of Elizabethan life. (Bolt does a good job of signaling what's his invention, and what's based on accepted sources.) It gave me with a good sense of the intrigue and insecurity at the heart of the regime, of the making and staging of plays in that time and of the constant flux as people and ideas flowed freely across war-torn Europe. There are frequent references to, and reinterpretations of, Shakespearian poetry and plays, and many witty asides. I sense that I missed many of the puns, anagrams, and in-jokes, but they were done with such a light touch that this didn't bother me.

My only quibble with the book is that Marlowe is a cardboard figure around whom the history turns. The peripheral characters are better drawn, from Shakespeare as a ambitious and venal minor talent, to Marlowe's friends and mentors in the spy world, to the puppetmasters like Sir Francis Walsingham and the slimy Sir Robert Cecil. This book is a history, as the title promises; it's not really a biography, even an imagined one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Depends on what you're looking for, February 6, 2010

By 

Alan Venable "Author/creator of 'Dr. Peanut'... (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe (Hardcover)

If you think there's any value in the authorship question, this book isn't likely to help you. Apparently, not only characters but the sources of the most interesting information are transparently fabricated, as I learned when I tried to track down the Zelle source and learned it was only Mata Hari's real surname. So I suppose the book amounts to a parody of other authorship writing. Post-modern cool? So that's why the Brooklyn Public Library (from which or from one of whose borrowers the copy I bought online from Better Book Worlds was apparently stolen--no "DISCARD" stamp) had indeed shelved it under FICT.