Was it Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe?

Boob said:

Don't be ridiculous. Everyone knows it was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Since the early 1800s Christopher Marlowe (b.1564) has been a strong contender for the authorship of "Shakespeare's" works.

Two centuries later, scholars began to suspect something was peculiar when they noticed that Marlowe's works supply the "missing" early works of Shakespeare, so it was suggested, anonymously, that Marlowe might have been William's nom de plume.

Importantly "Shakespeare's" works first began to appear just weeks after Marlowe supposedly died. This remains a primary point. No work said to have been "Shakespeare's" surfaced until after Marlowe was officially buried.

As it now stands most scholars believe Marlowe died on 30 May 1593 and that the literary Shakespeare simply appeared a few weeks later, in full possession of Marlowe's extraordinary powers, opinions, and memories, not to mention papers, manuscripts and other intellectual properties.

Also are the facts that the actor (Shakespeare) had no intellectual properties, no intellectual friendship circle and was the center of an illiterate family, the darkness including his wife and daughters, as well as his parents. That the author of The Tempest, who caused Prospero (O for Sper) to raise his daughter, Miranda, even whilst exiled on an island, as a lettered woman, might allow his own beloved daughters to be reared in the hateful darkness of illiteracy, defies imagination. Its like finding a flashlight or cellular phone in a Pharaoh's tomb, you know its the wrong crypt. This Stratfordian family simply cannot be the family of the writer. Elizabethan wills prove, over and over, that women in families headed by literate men were as like to be literate as were the men. In will after will they were left their share of their father's books.


More proof to come:
http://www2.localaccess.c...m#_ednref2

prince--writing under a psuedonymn?

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as his great rival William Shakespeare. Though his father was only a shoemaker, Marlowe was educated at King's School and awarded a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. While at Corpus Christi he studied philosophy, history, and theology.

At this point Marlowe disappeared from university, and later speculation was that he was recruited by the government for espionage work. When he returned to Cambridge, Marlowe was refused his M.A. degree due to suspected Catholic sympathies, until the Queen's Privy Council intervened on his behalf.

In 1587 Marlowe left Cambridge again, this time for the life of a London playwright

Christopher Marlowe was a quick-tempered man, quick to anger and quick to make enemies. He spent two weeks in Newgate Gaol in 1589, charged with murder, though he was later acquitted. Although suspected of a variety of crimes ranging from heresy to homosexuality, it seems clear that Marlowe's unknown government connections kept him out of serious trouble.

Christopher Marlowe's death in 1593 was as shrouded in mystery as his life was clouded by controversy. The long-accepted version is that he and a close friend, one Ingram Frizer, dined in a tavern in Deptford. The two men quarreled over paying the bill, and in the fight that followed, Marlowe grabbed Frizer's dagger and attacked him from behind. Frizer managed to wrest the dagger from Marlowe and stabbed the author fatally in the eye.

However, the truth may not be so straightforward. One week before his death, Marlowe's roommate Thomas Kyd, was kidnapped and tortured by the Queen's Privy Council into implicating the author as a heretic and an atheist. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but death intervened.

Or did it? Marlowe's companions on his final night had close connections to Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster. Speculation has persisted that Marlowe's death was faked on Walsingham's orders, to put an end to the Privy Council's pursuit of his protégé.


http://www.britainexpress...arlowe.htm
[This message was edited Sun Jan 5 10:38:33 PST 2003 by Boob]

BOOB...brains and beauty. Glad U decided
to resuERECT your stay at the Org.

2the9s said:

Many believe that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was an aristocrat named Edward De Vere. The evidence for this is comprehensive, ranging from Edward de Vere’s aristocratic knowledge of the upper classes through to his education and the structural similarities between his poetry and Shakespeare’s. As regards authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, it has been suggested that Edward wrote these under the pseudonym of Shakespeare, both to avoid breaking a voluntary convention against aristocrats publishing poetry and plays and to escape the consequences of the subject matter he was writing about.



http://absoluteshakespear...e_vere.htm
[This message was edited Sun Jan 5 10:54:34 PST 2003 by Boob]

Boob said:

It wasn't really a tavern, but most likely a lodging house of some sort, run by a woman named Mrs. Eleanor Bull. And there were four men in the room altogether: in addition to Marlowe and Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley.

See Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning: The Murder of Chrostopher Marlowe for the details about Marlowe's death, none of which indicate that he was the author of Shakespeare's plays.

In fact the early History Plays (1 Henry VI etc.) were already written by this point. As were his early narrative poems, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," etc.

I think one of the reasons why modern scholars even make this an issue is that is that the definition of authorship that we are most familiar with (a definition associated with individual genius, intellectual property, copyright etc.) is different than it was for writers during the Renaissance.

Ben Jonson, the slightly younger contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare, was one of the first to actually see his collected works into print, assuring that he was seen as the author. Sure, plays were registered at the Station's Registry (or whatever it was called), but from what I understand that wasn't always to secure a kind of copyright or anything like that. (I could be wrong.) There is some feeling that Shakespeare and Marlowe (and even others) may have collaborated on the early Henry plays, even though the registry doesn't indicate this (I don't think).

But, as fluid as this sense of authorship may seem to us, it is stable in its own way. Just because it doesn't follow procedures mapped out by twentieth century custom and law doesn't mean we have no way of determining these things or that writers like Marlowe and Shakespeare were indifferent to being seen as the authors of their plays. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare gained considerable fame and wealth from their plays.

The mystery for modern scholars seems to be why a writer would not claim authorship the way writers do today.

Besides it was really Francis Bacon.

2the9s said:

The alleged slaying took place in the home of Eleanor Bull, once believed to have been a tavern or a brothel, but now correctly identified as an upper class home of an ancient armorial family, with kinship links to the Queen and Lord Burghley. One of Eleanor's sons, Nathaniel Bull, proves to have been a classmate of young Marlowe's at the King's School. Other authorities are now calling the home a "safe-house" where Burghley kept agents awaiting orders.

There are only four explanations which might explain why the four men were there: one: for a social gathering, which seems, under the circumstances, entirely unlikely; two: to plan Marlowe's escape, equally unlikely since these men were agents, not planners; three: that they were there to kill Marlowe, also unlikely, since the men were closely associated with Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's patron and friend, and have never been suspected of being murderers or assassins; and four: to help carry off the charade, i.e., to lie for Marlowe and Walsingham and thus to save Marlowe. This ability to lie well oath, or "foreswear," is in fact, what these three men are now best known for.

2the9s said:

The fact is only Marlowe had an ironclad reason for not doing so, only Marlowe was a fugitive from justice. Whilst the others would have basked in fame and fortune, Marlowe would have found himself the object of a full scale capital manhunt. This is why the plays couldn't be claimed.

I'm no expert, I'm just finding it fascinating!


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[This message was edited Sun Jan 5 11:44:06 PST 2003 by Boob]

Boob said:

That makes sense, although he wasn't the subject of a manhunt at this or any other point, was he? (I'm no expert either.) He was accused earlier of killing someone in a brawl and released, although he probably was guilty.

But his release was an indication that he was probably in in the service and under the protection of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State. He probably worked for Walsingham as a spy or something.

But why would he go underground if he simply became a playwright? Especially such a famous playwright! Everyone who mattered would know it was him right away!

Besides Shakespeare alludes to Marlowe's death a number of times, all very obscurely. Most notably in As You Like It, where Touchstone says:



(He is talking to a shepherd named Audrey.)

Nicholls takes this both as an allusion to the circumstances of Marlowe's death (the "reckoning" being the bill over which they fought and the "death in the little room" being Mrs. Bull's house) and as a deliberate echo of a line from Marlowe's Jew of Malta about "big riches in a little room."

So the details of Marlowe's death seem to have been well known. Or is this just Shakespeare/Marlowe further tricking us?

rio said:

Rio!!!

Lleena said:

All I know is that Lleena is Prince, right mari?

2the9s said:

(somebody was going to start a poetry thread, but he forgot )

Lleena said:

There once was an Orger named Lleena.
Than whom there was nobody meaner...

2the9s said:

She knew an orger named 9s
whose poems were like crimes.

Lleena said:

But whose teeth were by far cleaner!

Why did I come to this thread?

2the9s said:

bkw said:

lets get out while we can...run!

Lleena said:

You turn out the light and I'll throw a rock to the other side of the room, just to distract 9s, whilst we make a run for it.

bkw said:

Good plan. aim the rock at his "2TheBits"!!!

ruuun!

I wrote SHAKESPEARE once...
the prollum came when i got
the letter back with, " NO LONGER RESIDING HERE RETURN TO SENDER " and i know it was that prick
cos don't NOBODY ELSE write in that OLDE ENGLISH
scrall anymore...