Customer Reviews

The World of Christopher Marlowe

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This is a very absorbing, sometimes astonishing, short bio of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, with a lot of detail of the time and place. The harshness of the times, the austere educational system that Marlowe survived all the way to an MA, his mysterious activities as a spy, all make for an exotic picture of a world that seems, for all its lingering barbarism, more attuned to poetry that our own. This has to be one of the most seminal eras of history, soon to produce the rarest of the rare periods of tragic drama. In that emerging sequence, Marlowe stands out for his bold embrace of the iambic pentameter, the at first poor cousin of the Latin hexameter, yet soon to shine in Shakesperean glory. Marlowe's short but brilliant career ends ambiguously, his murder more than what appears on the surface, perhaps a government assassination. The image of Faust.

Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan poet and playwright, was one of the most talented members of his generation. He helped pioneer the use of blank verse in dramatic poetry and used it to produce five masterpieces while William Shakespeare--who was only two months younger than Marlowe--was still finding his dramatic footing. Who can say how great he might have become if he were not cut down (possibly on orders of the Queen, herself) at the age of 29.

As a man, Marlowe was the "unShakespeare". Where Shakespeare was a prudent man who invested his money wisely and was careful not to offend authority, Marlowe was a risk-taker both in his personal life and in his plays. In an age where not toeing the official ine was punishable by death, Marlowe never met a line he was not tempted to cross. If this is what got him killed, it also makes him a fascinating person to read about.

David Riggs weaves Marlowe's personal tragedy into an exciting volume that I found as hard to put down as any thriller. It is a book I can heartily recomend.

I agree with the reader who says the book is often abstruse. The chapter on double-agenting had my eyes rolling and I was constantly looking back pages to see who's who. Add to this the fact that these Brits (or their elite) can be referred to by a seemingly endless list of tiles each (and, then, their names, as well) and that the minor functionaries and offices of government aren't on everyone's tongue and one often feels mired in the mud. I think this could have been alleviated with chapter introductions or summaries or just a more prudent handling of the proper nouns. Anyway, when I get to that point in any book, I just try to make sure I'm getting the main point and head thru at a trot.... Life is short, and there's so much to read!

What I got that was positive from this book, and it was very positive indeed, was a sense of M's contribution to blank verse and the development of Elizabethan drama. I went to my shelves to look at some earlier stuff, and yeppir, there's Marlowe at the dividing line. This certainly gave me a whole new appreciation of him as a figure in English literature and has got me back to sampling some other Elizabethan writing, including his ,comparing and contrasting, which is a nice trip. Very interesting to see how these boy's classical education trained them to snap off large amounts of magnificent English poetry. (The last British governor of Chad remarked in the NYRB that he had zero training when assigned, but the underlying assumption of his superiors was that if you translate Latin poetry to Greek poetry ad lib you could surely run a country! I suppose history has dimmed that conceit, but as a liberal artser, I liked it anyway.)

The historical/political background was already well known to me and as far as who might have or could have done this or that, I like my speculation with the facts.

(The book is unfortunatly cheaply produced, though not more so than many, and and the illustrations are really muddy. A book can be handsomely done for $30. Check out, for instance, Who Murdered Chaucer - St. Martin's Press - for a sad contrast in book production, also a $30 dollar item.)

I'm not an Elizabethan scholar, I knew next to nothing about Marlowe or the times, and this isn't an area of particular interest to me. Nonetheless, I found this to be an incredible read. It's an absolutely fascinating sketch of an age. The first part of the book includes a rivting examination of Marlowe's education, complete with an in-depth analysis of current intellectual trends and their effects on English cultural and political life.

But this book is well titled: its chief object is the world around Marlowe, not Marlowe himself. As noted in another review, we are given very little information about Marlowe the man. While the thorough detail surrounding his life at each step is fascinating, I came away feeling like I knew next to nothing about the man. Perhaps this is simply honest, as we may not know much about him. But it was an odd feeling.

I also disagree with the reviewer who feels that this book seeks repeatedly to defame Marlowe. I found the book even-handed and uncritical of Marlowe. Perhaps that's because I don't know the "other" stories that were not included, but I don't feel that this is a brief for the prosecution.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's intellectually curious.

I enjoyed the history in this book, and not just about Marlowe's own past. Unlike other biographies I have read, this one sometimes gets off of Marlowe and looks at other factors which influence him, either directly or indirectly, and how they might have had an effect on his work as well as his life, right up to the end!

Inarguably, one of the most famous playwrights in the Elizabethan world after Shakespeare is his rival, Christopher Marlowe, who within a brief meteoric career wrote some of the most remarkable dramas for the English stage such as "Tamburlaine the Great", "Doctor Faustus", "The Jew of Malta", "Edward II and the "Massacre of Paris".

David Riggs declares in the prologue "This is a book about Marlowe's life, his works, and his world", however, the one element that strikes the reader is Riggs' graphic accounts of Marlowe's world, and therefore this book certainly lives up to its title in that respect. The information concerning his education, the influences of his childhood, the blood-curdling world of Elizabethan politics and religious tensions definitely keeps the reader turning the pages. For the record, Riggs supports the theory Marlowe's untimely end was part of an assassination plot hatched by the Elizabethan secret service: his argument is convincing. While Riggs does explore Marlowe's life, works and horrific death in depth, it is obvious the reader is expected to be familiar with the playwright's biography and works to a point already before certain sections can be understood in this book. Also, there are areas where the text tends to prove cumbersome and difficult to keep track of, such as Riggs' account of the cloak-and-dagger world of the Elizabethan secret service and those who became entangled within this sphere; however, I would not let this be a deterrent, if anything, this displays how tangled the webs of deception had become in that era. While it cannot be proven how far Marlowe had sunk in that quagmire in the domestic scene, we can fully appreciate the dangers he was courting if he was employed as one of their agents in the field, especially his escape from his counterfeiting escapade in the Dutch town of Flushing.

The book contains an extensive bibliography, index and references. The various woodcut illustrations and portraits are a nice touch. A great book for Marlowe devotees.

E.A. Bucchianeri, author of "Faust: My Soul be Damned for the World"

Riggs' The World of Christopher Marlowe offers a less than candid view of a mysterious man-a not quite straightforward attempt to shape a difficult biography. Its considerations of some of the environmental factors known to have surrounded Marlowe are all colored dark, adroitly slanted toward negative conclusions. We aren't shown any person he loved who influenced his 29 years. This is shaky stuff, shot through with misunderstanding, and in some places it approaches diatribe. The author hews to a line, though; in each chapter he attempts to dismember Marlowe, pointing the reader towards the man's final destruction. The strongest tool Dr. Riggs uses is smooth-flowing character defamation, achieved though innuendo and dialectic argument, exhibiting Marlowe in different situations as an unregenerate criminal opportunist. Since Dr. Riggs, prosecutor, gives slight attention to any reflective, humanistic defense of Marlowe and also omits a good deal of known biographic material, a reader may be moved to rebuttal:
Reading assertions of Marlowe's "immorality" steady-on is like watching a beating; the process becomes offensive. Again and again, Riggs labels Marlowe a double agent: "By commissioning Marlowe as a double agent..." "Both options remained available to a skilled double agent." There seems to be some serious confusion in this author's mind about the meaning of the term. Henry S.A. Becket, in his Dictionary of Espionage, Spookspeak into English, tells us: a double agent was someone who worked for one secret service and then changed his allegiance to a rival, purporting to serve both his conflicting masters. Marlowe was never a double agent. (He seems to have worked on several dangerous counter-espionage missions-not the same thing at all.)
Riggs' treatment of Marlowe's "long criminal record" is close to amusing. (Close, but no cigar; there's no humor in this book.) Riggs' offering of Marlowe's criminal career can be summarized in three court documents plus a letter from the governor of Flushing. Although part of each document is shown or described, sometimes surrounded with Riggs' interpretation, no in-depth or alternative scenario is suggested. In each of these troublesome situations there was no conviction-not even a trial for Marlowe in three of them-and Riggs admits this.
In the first case, a serious sword fight in Norton Folgate with no known motive, Marlowe was jailed on suspicion of murder, but the court decided it wasn't his fault; he was exonerated. In the midst of the fight, the aggressor had turned to Marlowe's friend, and according to the record, said, "Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee!" (Riggs' text omits the last sentence of this speech.) Marlowe's friend took on the aggressor, killing him in self-defense, and was acquitted.
The second trouble, in January 1591/2, was probably about a secret service investigation by Marlowe into a counterfeiting operation at Flushing. During the job, he was betrayed by a man named Baines whom Marlowe had trusted as a co-worker. There was no court case.
Next came a case, in May, 1592, about a disturbance of the peace on the street near the Theatre. Marlowe and friends might have been weaving home late at night from a nearby tavern, singing or shouting, and when the constables came up his friends could have run away, leaving him because his club foot (he was born with it) made it hard for him to run. He was not tried but released on promise to pay a £20 fine if he failed to keep the peace towards the constables, whom he'd threatened, or if he didn't appear at the next General Sessions of the Peace for Middlesex County in October. Riggs leans on the fact that no record of Marlowe's appearance exists, but Marlowe was delayed in Canterbury at least until Monday, 9 October, because of the next case.
The last proceeding on Riggs' docket is a civil suit at Canterbury in September, 1592: £5 to pay for a jacket damaged in a knife fight between Marlowe and an old friend, William Corkine. This case is surrounded by so much biographic material reported by other reputable authors that it's odd Riggs restricted his own report to the court details, ending with, "settled out of court during the first week of October." The suit was amicably settled, on Monday the ninth. Today, a rose Corkine put in the plea book over the place where the case was re-recorded (soon after Marlowe's death in 1593), is kept there in a container. Years later, Corkine or his son published in his Second Book of Ayres an instrumental arrangement of Marlowe's poem, Come Live with Me ("a sweet new tune"). Perhaps by omitting these known facts, Riggs is better able to make an indictment. Biography suffers.
There are other oddly constructed places in the work. When Marlowe was interrogated by several members of the council late in May 1593, as evidence of his heresy or atheism two papers were brought forth. One was a long sheet filled with jottings-16 flippant opinions on a variety of subjects, all said to have been expressed by Marlowe, and a concluding 17th item: an accusation by a third man who claimed Marlowe persuaded him to become an atheist. This paper is known as the Baines' Note, signed by the very man who'd betrayed Marlowe at Flushing in January 1591/22. The second paper in evidence was a three-page MS copy of an excerpt from a book published years before and given to Queen Mary Tudor: a work by John Proctor entitled The Fal of the Late Arrian, refuting the heretical beliefs of an earlier writer. The three pages, "found" among the papers of Kit's friend Tom Kyd, are thought to provide the basis for a talk Marlowe gave to a group of Northumberland's scholarly friends, a talk later labeled the Atheist Lecture.
But-this is curious-Dr. Riggs tries to make the reader believe that the scurrilous Baines Note is in fact the outline of the Atheist Lecture. The Note is fed to us with its items prefixed by Riggs' own comments, such as, "the atheist lecturer knows..." "the lecturer says..." "the lecturer contended that..." "the lecturer mocks...." And then, "In the last part of the lecture..." These pages of Dr. Riggs' text are truly astonishing. Surely he sees that the bits of banter in The Baines' Note, Baines-embroidered-black, and signed by Baines, bear no relation at all to a coherent lecture.
Through hundreds of pages, Riggs tirelessly tries to make his readers feel his distaste for the protagonist, but by the time he makes his peroration, which includes a re-assertion that the queen decided to condemn Marlowe to death, sub rosa, at least one reader is ready to rebel. Think it over: would Elizabeth-ever-bother to arrange a secret death for Marlowe? Archbishop Whitgift legally controlled all cases ecclesiastical. Whitgift headed the council interrogating Marlowe, and he hated Marlowe. Simply to let him have his way would have been easy.
Contrariwise, looking at Marlowe's world in Riggs' text, we can see between the lines that the queen would have been more likely to save her-poet-agent than to condemn him. She needed his ingenious undercover service abroad. Clever woman that she was, aided by her State Secret Service and several devices of her own, she got what she wanted, in spite of the intransigent archbishop. She managed.
(Roberta Ballantine. bertaba@comcast.net)

This is a scholarly book about the life and times of playwright Christopher Marlowe. It is not an entertaining easy read. I read about 20% of the book before giving up. It's erudite, but still comprehensible. It just wasn't that interesting to me.

In the first 82 pages, I found maybe two pages worth of information about Marlowe as a person. In contrast, there are maybe 10 pages about the town he was born in and at least 40 pages about the educational system he grew up with.

I would not recommend this book for those who read biographies for just for fun. Nor would I recommend it for someone who wants to read about famous gay people. The author concludes that he probably had little contact with women, so he was either celibate or had homosexual sex.

I've read and enjoyed detailed biographies like this, when I have had a greater interest in the culture and times. For those readers, this is probably a great book.

Apart from some very interesting and thoughtfull exegesis of Marlowe's works, it's no surprise that readers find David Riggs's account of the poet's life "abstruse" and confusing. This is unfortunate, because of all the poets of the English Literary Renaissance, we have more real information about Marlowe than any other. Yet, sadly, a story which should be as clear as glass in its implications for all the writers of the time has been so successfully muddled, first, purposely, by the government that brought him down and then by later biographers who, for some unknown reason, have consistently chosen to believe the government's disinformation campaign rather than their own common sense. Most at fault in this is Charles Nicholl, who, while providing the most important information on Marlowe's life and death in his book The Reckoning (1992), also ensured its misinterpretation due to his refusal to see (or at least to convey) the truth of what his own research so clearly revealed.

Despite Nicholl's maunderings on how easily poets can become spies--a piece of nonsense that Riggs, who should know better, cheerfully supports--the fact is that there isn't a scintilla of evidence that Christopher Marlowe (or any great poet then or later) was ever a government spy. Was spying the only possible "service to her Majesty" that a budding poet might perform? Is there any objective evidence that Marlowe was in Flushing for purposes of spying? And why, when it comes down to a "he said--she said" on the subject of Marlowe's allegience, do the biographers choose to believe, not the great freethinking poet whose words have lived for centuries, but the reprehensible turncoat who was fingering him? Riggs may choose to throw in a question mark here and there, but the result is a colossal crazy quilt made up of scraps of truth, old lies, and centuries of misinterpretation, such that no ordinary reader could possibly sort out without help.

Despite the obfuscation, the fact remains: Marlowe's only proven relationship with the three government agents who saw to his removal was as the victim of an elaborate sting, one conjured up by Robert Cecil as his entry into his father's world of Machiavellian politics . To see this, all that's needed is to know a little about history (both the history of the period and History in general), read the four plays that we can be certain were actually written by Marlowe, and consider what governments have always done to writers who were driven to tell it like it is, writers like Ovid, Cicero, Voltaire, Solzinitzen, Vaclav Hamel. The fundamental truth about Marlowe was expressed shortly after his death by his fellow writer, Tom Nashe: "His life he contemned in comparison of the liberty of free speech"--a simple truth simply told by someone who did know what he was talking about.