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Marlowe Up Close: An Unconventional Biography
With A Scrapbook Of His Ciphers

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I must confess that I waited for this book to arrive with great anticipation. As an keen follower of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, I was eager to see what this book had to say that was new, particularly with regard to the theory that Marlowe was the author of the the Shakespeare canon. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. This sort of book is precisely the reason why anti-Stratfordians (those who argue that Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him) are mocked by most scholars.

Let me make my position in this debate perfectly clear. I believe that there are serious problems with the idea that Shakespeare is the author of the plays and poems attributed to him. I am not alone in this view, as thousands of people have signed the Shakespeare Authorhip Coalition's Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. The argument against William Shakespeare of Stratford is not based upon the evidence that someone else wrote the plays, but rather on the lack of autobiographical evidence that he did. Some (a small fraction) of these arguments can be summarised as follows: 1. Although Shakespeare's name appears on many of the plays and poems attributed to him, his name also appears on plays and poems that conventional scholarship has demonstrated cannot have been written by him. 2. If we accept (as most Shakespeare scholars do) that Robert Greene was referring to Shake-speare as Shake-scene in his Groatsworth of Wit, then it is clear that he is accused of buying up plays from impoverished playwrights of the time, namely Peele, Nashe and Marlowe. 3. Shakespeare seems to have been far more wealthy than would be expected from someone who mainly wrote plays for a living. Procurement of plays from playwrights such as the University Wits (Marlowe and others) would have been lucrative. While convential scholarship argues that Shakespeare made his money from his business dealings (part ownership of the theatre) and from usury (lending money), it is hard to see how he could have had the prodigious output that he had, given that he was also an actor and needed to travel backwards and forwards between London and Stratford. 4. The two major links to Shakespeare as author seem very strange indeed. In the First Folio of his plays, Ben Jonson wrote a famous preface. Most convential scholars take this dedication as a simple tribute to Shakespeare. But the form of the preface is very odd. Jonson was a master of his craft and yet he seems to have allowed two different interpretations of his words. If he wanted to praise Shakespeare in a simple manner, why would he use words (for example "While I confesse thy writings to be such,/ As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.", "though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke", "if I thought my judgement were of yeeres,/I should commit thee surely with thy peeres,/And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine, /Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line [note the use of the conditional in this last example])- which can be interpreted in two ways - one of which seems to suggest that Shakespeare is not in the same class as other writers of the time? The Shakespeare memorial in Stratford is also very odd in its writing. Peter Farey has written an interesting article on this that deserves to be better known. I find it to be a very neat, convincing interpretation that is unlikely to have been produced by chance alone. 5. There seems to be nothing in Shakespeare's biography that relates to the poems or plays. In particular the Sonnets seem to match poorly. Most conventional scholars have given up trying to match the Sonnets with the Shakespeare biography. The Sonnets speak of exile, disgrace, loss, a dark lady and the author seems to be openly gay. The plays seem to condemn usury, for example, and to scoff at natural wit as a source of inspiration, and yet Shakespeare was a usurer who sued people for money and he was known in his time as a natural wit because he had little formal education beyond Stratford Grammar School (which he is presumed to have gone to).

In reading the literature against the anti-Stratfordian case, the main argument that is most commonly used is that there are flaws in the conspiracy theories. Marlowe died in 1593 and therefore couldn't have written the works. Bacon wrote with a very different style to Shakespeare. The truth is that there are flaws in most of these theories. For this reason, it is very important for anti-Stratfordians to develop their cases carefully and to avoid weak arguments, particularly circular arguments. In the book by Roberta Ballantine, it is argued that Marlowe left clues in his writings. By re-arranging the letters of these writings, it is possible to read out a new biography of Marlowe which traces his life after his faked death in 1593. Unfortunately, Ballantine does not adequately explain her methods. Nor does she apply any statistical analysis to determine the probably that any particular transcription of the text could not have been produced by chance alone. Frankly, I find some of the transcriptions difficult to understand and some of them downright silly.

The anti-Stratfordian arguments need to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, this requires excellent scholarship from those who advance the case that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him. This book "Marlowe Up Close: does not contribute to the debate. However, I look forward to the day when an Elizabethan historian can take up the case against William Shakespeare and develop the arguments in a substantive and logical fashion.

This book is a FIND! For those who ever considered the Shakespeare authorship question, MARLOWE UP CLOSE offers a remarkable amount of well-documented information, suddenly between two covers. Even as a child an autograph collector will realize that the five extant signatures of Shakespeare and the one simple sentence added to his will are not the practiced hand of a constant writer and rewriter. Encountering Mark Twain's scalding and insightful opinions on the subject alerts one to the history of reasonable doubters.

Given the history of the authorship question with the various camps and its champions, it is not a great stretch to sift through and find the Elizabethan literary darling, "poet/spy" Christopher Marlowe, the most likely suspect as the ghostwriter of the great plays and sonnets. And while the Stratfordians, Oxfordians, Baconians et al make emotional arguments for their candidates, Roberta Ballantine, in this new book, carefully reconstructs Marlowe's life before and after his suspicious "death" and subsequent exile to Italy where he continues to work as a spy for his Queen as he ships home plays filled with Verona gentlemen and Venetian merchants. In fact, as we follow Marlowe's adventures in Ballantine's rich but brief summary, we find situations and characters that people the famous plays. One need only peruse the carefully researched and collected portraits she presents to realize that the iconic image of Shakespeare in our culture actually derives from the painted likenesses of Marlowe. For contrast, Ballantine includes the one portrait known to be Shakespeare and we encounter a stranger.

The well-annotated biographical sketch, the meticulous timeline and notes of Marlowe's life and the portraits are compelling, but it is the collection of the poet/spy's voluminous ciphers - stunning examples of steganography at its peak (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) - that astonish us with new insights. Cleverly highlighted sections of the First Folio edition rearrange anagrammatically to form inner messages in a method of communication used in spycraft since the ancient Greeks. That the story develops in a series of linked couplets makes the decipherment hard to argue. In fact, the entire book is so well presented, annotated and cross-checked that it seems stunning in its obvious reasoning and good sense.

It is such great fun to feel that one is in on a secret that finally makes sense of events long puzzling. And in the era of DaVinci codes and spy stories, this work of non-fiction is truly satisfying. Ballantine is apparently a scholar and not an academician as her prose is clear, concise and to the point. She would certainly fall under the category of "literary sleuth" rather than "investigative reporter" for her detective work, 400 years after the last witness has died, is brilliant indeed, but as a journalist she would be guilty of "burying the lead." So, even as she solves the biggest mystery in English Literature and reveals the heart and soul as well as the person of the Immortal Bard, she has chosen a lead that may not reach out to the intensely curious Shakespeare enthusiast. The cover should say in big red letters "THIS IS THE BOOK THAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO FIND ABOUT THE TRUE AUTHOR OF THE "SHAKESPEARE" WORKS.