Customer Reviews

History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe

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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.)

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.

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.

The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book - very, very funny!

Really gets you thinking about how scholars write Shakespeare biographies from very skimpy evidence.

Marlowe's genius and absolutely fascinating life wonderfully captured by Bolt. Fun, educational, irreverent.

Farfetched, but lots of fun to read. Very imaginative and I, for one, would be happy if it were true that poor Kit was not murdered, but lived on to create.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the politics and personalities of the time, especially my favorite villain, Sir Robert Cecil.

I was taken in, not by the book, but by the library that shelved this book in the biography section instead of in fiction. The library was probably taken in by the end-of-book notes, although a cursory glance at said notes gives away the fictional character of the work. In the endnotes, there's a lot of "I embellished the facts here to improve the story" and "I invented this character." Every single footnote is made up. The index, on the other hand, is real, as is the bibliography.

I'm one of those who believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays, but in this book, Shakespeare hardly gets credit for living. I'm not sure I can finish this book. I was looking for a life of Marlowe, and this ain't it.

Well, I did finish the book, but I was frustrated throughout. One of the totally made-up characters is named Oliver Laurens. Don't I remember a fellow named Laurence Olivier, who had some little influence on the drama a few centuries after Marlowe lived? Then there's a reference to a made-up writer named Bernard Rosine. Odd that Rosine Bernard was the real name of Sarah Bernhardt. And here's another pseudo-writer, Julius Marx. Shades of Julius "Groucho" Marx. It was all too confusing for me.

The very title of the book, HISTORY PLAY, is two-edged. Half history and half play (as in games and puzzles, not drama).

This disturbing 'biography' is pure fiction and shows that anyone can write a book and get it published if you have connections. This is the silliest thing I have ever heard. The writer spent a lot of time making comparisons when there are none to be made.

Marlowe wrote only seven plays in his young life, 'Dr. Faustus' the best known, and his poem "Hero and Leander" the only poem to outlive him. Perhaps with his interest in the occult and Satanism, a rumor has run amok that he returned in the adult human form of a famous playwright and literary figure, the prolific William Shakespeare. It's the darnest thing I ever saw. The majority of the fiction is about Shakespeare and very little about the man himself.

Having been murdered at such a young age, there will always be speculation as to the cause. "Afterlife" -- I don't think so! It is all foolish hypothesis, and to dignify it at all in print is preposterous.