Shakespeare's Identity Revealed?

Two Views on King Arthur

King Arthur and Shakespeare - a Third View

The Shakespeare Debate with John Bede and Carl O. Nordling

A Case for Christopher Marlowe

The Sun-Spots of the Poet

The Revelation of the Sonnets

The Controversies of Timon, Pericles and Henry VIII

The Method of Doctor Mendenhall

The Unfathomable Melancholy of Robert Burton

The Contribution of David Rhys Williams

The William Shakeshafte Mystery

A Temporary Summary

Ventilating the Theories, by Laila Roth

Scrutinizing the Sonnets

John Michell's Solution to the Problem

All We Know About William Shakespeare, by Mark Twain

The Secrets of Anthony Bacon

Comments on A.D.Wraight

The Marlowe Case - Another Presentation

The Difficult Case of Sir Francis Bacon

Fact and Speculation in the Case of John Penry

A Shakespeare Apology, by John Bede

Presenting a Baconian Problem

The Perfect Set-Up - a Summary of the (lack of) Evidence

Melancholy

The Mystery, by Laila Roth

More Marlowe Theories

The Gothenburg Shakespeare Symposium, May 2002

Comments to "Arden of Feversham"

Main Traits of the Marlowe Theory

Doubts about Bacon

These have followed the track of professor Abel Lefranc's theories and confirmed them. These theories point to, that the man who wrote under Shakespeare's name was no one less than William Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, a grandchild of Henry VIII:s romantic little sister Mary Tudor and a cousin with both Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth, Mary Stuart and king James I in different lines. He was in other words very closely related with the royal family and could have become king himself after Queen Elizabeth had he wanted to. But instead he wrote "Hamlet" to explain why he declined.

Carl O. Nordling from Borgå (Finland) confirm these theories with an overwhelmingly convincing chain of circumstantial evidence. One of the most pregnant arguments is the idiomatic idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare, which in their dialectical ingredients are dominantly northernish from the parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the homelands of William Stanley, which Shakespeare never came in the vicinity of. Numerous plays betray expertise knowledge abroad, which William Stanley must have acquired on his extensive journeys, while the actor from Stratford never came outside the doorstep of his country. Scenes of "Hamlet" betray intimate knowledge of proceedings at the court of Frederick II of Denmark in the Kronborg Castle of Elsinore (inaugurated 1585) where William Stanley was a guest, since he probably wrote the German first version of "Hamlet" which was given there at the inauguration probably with himself in one of the leading parts, that amateurish play in bad school-German out of which the later English versions were developed. These are only a few examples of argument.

This thesis opens up an entire world of new interesting queries, of which all must turn around the question who this remarkable excentric high nobleman really was, who rather wrote plays than vied for the British crown. The mystery of William Shakespeare thereby becomes greater and more unfathomable than ever.

Our only light along this dark and blind alley are a very few known facts of William Stanley's life and the 37 completed plays under the name of William Shakespeare. Of these two sources of light, the second provides more material.

With relatively reliable certainty you can nowadays establish the chronological order of the Shakespeare plays. Among the first are the impassioned chronicles of English medieval history - the Lancaster tetralogies - which betray an emotionally extreme historical interest and a profound engagement in the very house of Lancaster, to which William Stanley himself belonged. An equally ardent interest in Italian mentality and affairs appear in the early Italian comedies and above all in the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet". The affluent production of dramas until 1600 yells out loud in every play how much the author enjoyed writing them, almost wallowing in constantly surpassing himself in developing higher dramatic standards in every new play. Then suddenly comes the Hamlet crisis as a definite climax. Suddenly politics interfere on stage with devastating realism. "Hamlet" is nothing but a profound expression of a personal political crisis - Hamlet, who might have become the ideal king, is the author himself, whose conscience compels him to refrain from politics with all its power temptations since it is all so rotten. Carl O. Nordling poignantly exposes how the play "Hamlet" was psychologically used by its author against the kings James I (whose mother herself married her husband's murderer) and Frederick II of Denmark, who is king Claudius in the play, who fires cannons to his revelries, which is exactly what the Danish king did. The highest point of the ingenuities of "Hamlet" is when the leading actor uses a play to stir the conscience of the king - which is exactly what William Stanley did.

Gradually the plays then become more solemn and resigned - the great tragedies follow with the letting loose of king Lear's utter despair and terrible bitterness, and the criminal established power position of Macbeth, which forces him to ever more atrocious crimes. Resignation finally culminates in the last melancholy fairy plays, where Prospero in "The Tempest" in the end disrobes himself of his magical mantle and throws his books into the sea.

Here we are faced with the greatest issue - if William Stanley really was the man who wrote all this superb body of work, why then did he stop so suddenly and so early? He was born in January 1561 and only somewhat over 50 when he stopped writing. He lived for another 30 years, and no one knows anything about these 30 years. Did he fall out of favour with his royal cousin? Was he prohibited to write any more controversial and critical plays against the establishment?

The full picture thereby becomes a rather melancholy one. We see a young brilliant talent of royal blood brush society, blood and ancestry aside to instead devote himself passionately to the theatre under a rigorously observed pseudonym - if his real name had come out it would have been a most unacceptable scandal - royal persons were not supposed to write plays like "Titus Andronicus" and "Richard III". As a perfect actor he kept to his silent part - and could thereby continue to write plays. But after "Hamlet" age begins to make itself felt with disastrous consequences. It is too clearly felt that it becomes less and less fun to write plays, and more and more of them are never finished, like "Timon of Athens", "Pericles" and "Henry VIII", which are completed by others.

Finally only one thing remains to the author - to maintain his part by sticking to his anonymity - it is never revealed.

And is it a coincidence that all theatrical scenes in England are closed in September 1642, the same month that William Stanley, the 6th earl of Derby, expires? The British theatre thereby finds its grave to be replaced by the joyless wet blankets of the Puritans and their bloody civil war against monarchy - the staged political reality outmanoeuvres and closes the theatre.

What most of all convinces me that earl William Stanley is the author of Shakespeare's works is the consistent noble quality in all of Shakespeare's works - there has never been a writer more noble. I have often wondered: "If Shakespeare wrote all these works and was so successful - why then was he never knighted?" There is nothing more royalistic than Shakespeare's plays, no matter how bitter they may be about the use of power. Shakespeare's chronicle plays are the very heart of the matter of British monarchy. Therefore it is not more than self-evident that they should have been written by a person inside the royal family. All this is really rather incompatible with an ordinary middle class commoner of Stratford, a small place in the country, which he fled to make his fortune in London mainly by speculating in house-property. It doesn't fit with the internationalistic connoisseur of all Europe with such a heavy partiality for British royalism and every drop of noble blood in England.

The most difficult party to win over to this "Derby theory" will then of course republican nations be with the United States at the front. Real republicans will never be able to tolerate that William Shakespeare was not an ordinary upstart from the country. And the possibility that he instead could have been of the very highest nobility would simply be unthinkable.

It would be very difficult for ordinary people to understand this royal self-negator, who in fact is such an extreme democrat, that he sacrifices his royal and political possibilities just to be able to present the truth about the establishment on stage instead - and to give all the honour and credit for the show to the actors.

However, important pieces in the jig-saw puzzle are missing, and the most important of all is: If William Stanley of Derby really was the writer behind William Shakespeare's name, why then did he stop writing at the same time as the actor William Shakespeare retired?

The most likely answer to that question is that William Stanley and William Shakespeare had some kind of agreement and perhaps even partnership. It was William Stanley who sponsored Shakespeare's theatre company and who practically paid everything for them. In return his terms might have been, that they were allowed to produce his plays on condition that he was allowed to hide himself under Shakespeare's name and thus was ensured of an incognito. When Shakespeare suddenly retired after the Globe having burnt down in 1612, perhaps William Stanley suddenly found himself without a writing partner and found it difficult if not impossible to find a new name to hide behind. Ben Jonson was an entirely different character. Consequently William Stanley might have found it impossible to avoid recognition if he continued to write for the theatre when Shakespeare was gone. This is the most probable explanation. A born aristocrat of the highest order, earl Derby was vain enough not to risk his reputation and good standing as a cousin of the royal house and therefore preferred allowing William Shakespeare to keep the honour of his writings for 300 years - as long as the British Empire lasted.

The next great problem to stumble across in this argument is the Shakespearean Sonnets. This is the most personal and intimate work of the poet and the one which shows some unambiguous self-expression. The only theme of the Sonnets, however, is love, the love for a beautiful young man and a dark lady. The Sonnets were privately circulated during Shakespeare's career and were not published until 1610. They are dedicated, in the style of a most typical Shakespearean mystification, to a certain mr "W.H.", which abstruse dedication has puzzled scholars for 370 years and continues to do so. The most widely embraced theory has been that mr "W.H." was lord Henry Wriothesley of Southampton, one of the younger Shakespeare's foremost patrons, an extravagant young man with extremely long hair, who could be the male main figure of the Sonnets.

The whole Derby theory seems to totter on this precarious ground. However would anyone else than the author himself circulate these extremely intimate poems, which were known only among Shakespeare's closest friends? The language is that of the dramas but even more beautiful, elaborate, sensitive and even more ambitious.

What have the Derby followers to put against this? Simply that mr W.H. was William Shakespeare himself, whom the earl of Derby loved. William Stanley married not until 1595 at the age of 34 when probably most of the Shakespearean separate poems had been written. Further on even the tone of the Sonnets becomes more resigned as if it was slowly tiring, like in the tragedies, and the last two sonnets rather dryly express the death of love in a matter-of-fact sort of utter resignation, as apparently the whole unique Shakespearean inspiration is drying out after a period of 25 years' unequalled fruition.

William Stanley's marriage appears to have been stable and conventional with three sons. Stanley could have written the Sonnets to Shakespeare, as Shakespeare might have written them to Wriothesley. The initials "W.H." fit better with Henry Wriothesley than with William Shakespeare, but here the border lines of probability are extremely vague.

However, there are two poems preserved by William Stanley which no one else could have written. They are two poetical epitaphs from about 1632 on deceased family members, one of them being William Stanley's second son, who died 25 years old. One of the epitaphs has by tradition always been attributed to Shakespeare while the other must be written by the same hand. The churches are the Chelsea Old Church and the church in Tong outside Birmingham. These two epitaphs could be the earl's only lapsus linguae, the one instance when he lost his mask and unconsciously revealed himself as the man behind the art of William Shakespeare, who was himself dead since 16 years when these two epitaphs were engraved, which epitaphs could not have been written earlier, since the buried persons didn't die any earlier, which is why the motive for writing these burial poems neither could have existed any earlier.

Summary. It cannot be proved that Shakespeare was not the person who wrote the works of Shakespeare. Neither can it be proved that it was William Stanley who did it. Neither can it be proved that it was Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd nor any other Elizabethan who did it, although the least probable is that anyone of these could have done it. For arguments we can only use probabilities. It is as improbable that Shakespeare wrote all these works alone as that Stanley did it alone. We can't overlook the most probable possibility that they in a certain sense did it together, like later Alexandre Dumas - Auguste Picqart, the brothers Goncourt, Erckmann-Chatrian, Nordhoff and Hall and other famous co-operating writers. Then it is probable that the language is that of William Stanley while many scenical effects probably could be Shakespeare's own, since Shakespeare as an actor and director had more experience of practical details in stage work than Stanley as only a spectator and dreamer. What makes it very probable that Stanley was the writer and Shakespeare the technician is the fact, that Shakespeare (most probably) had to work all year round on stage while he almost only could have found time to write in summer; while Stanley had all the time in the world as a free independant noble. What makes this partnership most probable is that it broke when Shakespeare left the stage and that neither could continue alone. Another strong argument for Stanley being the poet is his slightly superior age - it is almost impossible to imagine that Shakespeare could have written the Lancaster tetralogies, "Romeo and Juliet" and other early masterpieces in his early twenties, while Stanley, who had already had a high education and travelled a lot, more probably could have done so. Shakespeare's imagination and quick thought could have picked up Stanley's higher international knowledge and experience and used it for his own purposes, for instance to give "Othello" some local colour. But Shakespeare could never have written the first version of "Hamlet" in bad anglicized school German which was staged at the inauguration of the Kronborg Castle at Elsinore in 1585. Instead, this was probably the first in a long line of magnificent dramas without a published name produced by the theatrical maniac the earl of Derby, whose title and position excluded him from this work, which fact served him as a spur to perform it all the more but in secret, which motivation lasted only as long as he could continue to do it in secret.

So we neither exclude the Derby nor the Stratford theory but recommend a compromise that includes both as indispensable for the appearance of the plays, proposing, though, that the dominating hand and quill belonged to the earl of Derby.

This will naturally upset all faithful Shakespeare fans most terribly, who every year go to Stratford in tens of thousands on pilgrimage. But truth must not be moved by that. What we are most interested in here is to help the truth to come forth. William Shakespeare can not be proved to be the author. If William Stanley was the author, then let it be proved.

Abel Lefranc : "Sous le masque de William Shakespeare", Paris 1918.

A.W.Titherley : "Shakespeare's Identity", Winchester 1952.

Carl O. Nordling : "Hamlet's hemlighet", Faktainformation A-Z, Stockholm 1995.

He was born in Bombay in 1906 as much an Anglo-Indian as Rudyard Kipling. His father was a police inspector, and his mother was the daughter of an Indian judge. As that of Kipling, White's childhood was extremely unhappy since his parents did not agree. The thirst for knowledge saved him, he educated himself at Cambridge and published "The Sword in the Stone" in 1938. Twenty years later all the four novels were ready, and he died in 1964 on board a ship outside the port of Piraeus.

No matter how funny and entertaining "The Once and Future King" is, it contains at the same time much of more doubtful worth, above all lots of nonsense. He ridicules the age of chivalry a little too much, and the dialogue is often base. Noble ingredients never appear except to be made fun of. What saves the novels, though, is the unforgettable characteriziation of Sir Lancelot.

The third and greatest of the novels, "The Ill-Made Knight", is all about him. No one ever has dared to picture Sir Lancelot as ugly and awkward, but White manages this with overwhelming consequence. Also Sir Mordred is depicted with greater nuance and understandability than in other Arthurian tales, and White undertakes the effort to rather convincingly explain the strange behaviour of this destructive villain. But Sir Lancelot is the only complete character in the lasting life-work of Terence Hanbury White.

In the same way, we find in Marion Bradley's immensely more weighty cobble-stone of a novel, "The Mists of Avalon", the leading character in Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of king Arthur, the mother of his bastard son Sir Mordred. Marion Bradley is an American born in Albany, New York, in 1930, and her much more impressing and elaborated, psychologically poignant and deeply analyzing Arthurian romance is without equal in its penetration of the old Keltish religious life in prehistoric England. Historically her Arthur appears in the critical days when Christianity replaced the Roman realm in England. Queen Guinevere represents the Christian establishment of the brave new age while Morgan le Fay is the last representative of the old Keltish natural religion which is dying, while Arthur stands between them, is dependant on both and is hopelessly divided and destroyed like the whole kingdom when Christianity can not tolerate "heathendom". The tragedy of king Arthur in Marion Bradley's novel is then that his enlightenment and all his glorious court falls prey to Christian intolerance - a great, ambitious and extremely challenging theme, which gives a very convincing impression that that could really have been how it all happened. What you miss in Bradley's novel, though, is all the greatest advantages of White - the glorious good humour of the court life among the knights and the warmth of it.

We have asked John Bede of Northern Ireland to give his opinion about these two masterly tales of king Arthur with certain misgivings, though, that he might prefer "Prince Valiant". Our Irish colleague is if anything an Arthurian expert, and he has himself written an account of the fall of Camelot. We are happy to be able to include his answer to our queries right away:

by John Bede.

"Derry, July 1996.

My dear friend, without any hope of success I will try to make an effort to answer all your queries in your very own fine Swedish.

Marion Bradley's novel is instead more serious, and of all the efforts that have been made to reach the truth, hers is perhaps the greatest. "Prince Valiant" is the most superficial of all Arthurian tales, but it is also the best drawn of all.

Marion Bradley's historical location of the Arthur saga in the 5th century could be correct. I have myself preferred to locate it outside the dimension of time, since to me the Arthur saga is an ageless manifestation of the eternal political problem of the impossibility to make a perfect ideal come true. Prosaically enough, the probable historical origin of the Arthurian political problem - the tragedy of the ideal regime - is the emperor Frederick II:s court in Palermo. This emperor of the 13th century had that in common with king Arthur that he according to the legend once would rise again from the grave and come back to fulfil his realm.

So much in support of your theory. I think, however, that your theory falls on the very corner-stone which according to you is its decisive support - the two epitaphs by Stanley. Shakespeare could never have written them. It is obvious that they are inspired by the style of Shakespeare, but they are rather imitating than convincing. In my view earl Stanley's poems confirm that earl Stanley is not Shakespeare the poet.

You allege that Shakespeare the man is difficult to combine with the 37 grand dramas. Could he then not have had some imagination? Jules Verne wrote fantastic travel stories and described conditions abroad in far off countries without ever leaving France. I am sorry, but your and mr Nordling's and professor Lefranc's theory does not hold, no matter how much material there is in support for it. As there will always be doubts about Shakespeare's identity, there will always be greater doubts about another's substituting Shakespeare's identity.

But here's another theory for you: have you never wondered why Shakespeare never wrote a play about king Arthur? Of course, the Queen deceiving her sovereign with one of his knights was a delicate theme to represent on stage, but all the same he succeeded in writing about it, and it became his most delicate drama: that's what his Sonnets are all about: king Arthur reflecting on Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The dark lady then is most probably Morgan le Fay.

It's just a theory, but it fits."

---------------------------

Our friend John Bede thus maintains that Shakespeare could not produce a play showing how the King's Queen deceives him with his first knight - it would not have been proper. For the same reason the play "Henry VIII" does not say anything about the king's adultery. That Shakespeare should have found the theme of king Arthur so irresistible that he simply had to treat it in some way and found a method of doing so in the cryptical sonnets is a most enthralling theory.

We have objections, however, against John Bede's view on the epitaphs. They were written 20 years after the last writings of Shakespeare, and nothing implies that earl Stanley wrote anything in between. During 20 years even a poet has time to rust. If the epitaphs are not on level with Shakespeare's finest sonnets, they are all the same sustained by an almost Shakespearean pathos and honesty and depth of feeling. Above all: the nature of these epitaphs bear witness that these were not the first poems that earl Stanley ever wrote.

Here are the epitaphs in modernized spelling:

"To say a Stanley lies here, that alone

were epitaph enough; no brass, no stone,

no glorious tomb, no monumental hearse,

no guilded trophy or lamp-laboured verse

can dignify his grave or set it forth

like the immortal fame of his own worth.

Then, reader, fix not here, but quit this room

and fly to Abraham's bosom - there's his tomb.

There rests his soul, and for his other parts

they are embalmed and lodged in good men's hearts.

A braver monument of stone or lime,

no art can raise, for this shall outlast time."

(Chelsea Old Church, the monument on his son, Sir Robert Stanley,

and his children, 1633. )

"Ask who lies here, but do not weep.

He is not dead; he doth but sleep.

This stony register is for his bones.

His fame is more perpetual than these stones,

and his own goodness, with himself being gone

shall live when earthly monument is none.

Not monumental stone preserves our fame

nor sky-aspiring pyramids our name.

The memory for him for whom this stands

shall outlive marble and defacers' hands.

When all to time's consumption shall be given,

Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven."

(Tong Church, in the outskirts of Birmingham, the monument on his uncle

Sir Thomas Stanley with wife and son, 1632.)

"Thanks for sending me the works of Carl O. Nordling. He has put forth a most admirable and magnificent work of research, and I wonder if he realizes himself the importance of his findings. I am inclined to agree with him and accept his theories on almost every point, but in the end he stumbles on his own wicket and backfires. I must maintain that Shakespeare was not Marlowe nor Thomas Kyd and least of all Robert Burton. This clergyman is the very opposite of Shakespeare: a devout protestant, an unbearably tedious pedant, and a most unspiritual and unsophisticated bore completely lacking the art and vocabulary of Shakespeare. His work has merits but far from the merits of Shakespeare.

On the other hand, this Derby theory remains interesting and not without a certain plausibility. Mr Nordling's case is hopeless, however, without proper evidence. You'll never convince the world that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare without definite material evidence. The Shakespearisms of Marlowe, Burton and others can always be explained in other ways. It is known that Marlowe collaborated with Shakespeare at least in Henry VI Part One. Burton was clearly influenced by Shakespeare, since he has references to him, while there is not one reference to Michel de Montaigne in Burton, which clearly is one of Shakespeare's greatest influences. This is only one point of many indicating a clear incompatibility between Shakespeare and Burton.

The link between many Elizabethans and post-Elizabethans is a certain spirit of mind, which is felt both in Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Bacon, Burton and others, which reaches its highest expression in the personality of Shakespeare. Also William Stanley voices this spirit in his late epitaphs. But although Shakespeare leaves the scene and dies, the spirit prevails and never leaves England. It is also felt in Milton, Dryden, Swift, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the Brontë sisters and even in Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling and Somerset Maugham. But this spirit must never be confused in the days of Shakespeare with other personalities than Shakespeare. William Stanley might well have been under its influence, since he knew Shakespeare personally, but the intimacy with this spirit does not imply that Stanley was Shakespeare.

This is my argument against mr Nordling and Lord Stanley as a Kelt and representative of the English-speaking peoples and, as I claim, myself an intimate of the spirit of Shakespeare.

The issue remains interesting, more material will certainly appear to shed some more light on the mystery, but no scientist will get anywhere in the ways of new theories without proper evidence which dispels every shadow of a doubt."

So much for John Bede. His answer is oracular and ambiguous. He accepts mr Nordling's theories with one hand only to refute them with the other. One could also say, that he neither opens nor closes the door but leaves it slightly ajar. And one can well ask if such an explanation to the mystery as "Shakespeare's spirit making itself felt in others than Shakespeare"

can be regarded as scientifically acceptable.

Mr Nordling's theories are basically these:

1) Shakespeare's dialect is not the language of Shakespeare's home county but belongs rather to the north of England in counties like Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, which Shakespeare never visited, and which dialect is not used outside these counties, while earl William Stanley was from these very parts.

2) The two epitaphs in Tong and Chelsea are easier to identify with Shakespeare than many of his sonnets. These epitaphs were provably written by William Stanley in 1631 and 1632, that is more than fifteen years after Shakespeare's death.

3) "Hamlet" can only have been written by someone intimately familiar with the life of the Danish court at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore in 1585. Shakespeare had no connection with the Danish court while William Stanley most probably did have.

4) The social position of William Stanley as a close relative of both the English and the Scottish royal families and his resignation from the rights of royal succession fits psychologically perfectly with the position and predicament of Hamlet in the play.

5) Many details and geographical descriptions in the plays of Shakespeare show that the author knew the world well outside England, so well that he must have been a traveller himself. Shakespeare was not. Stanley did travel in his youth.

These are the main arguments of Carl O. Nordling, of which the three first are the most important.

In 1589 he was involved in a deadly duel with William Bradley. Marlowe's friend and colleague Thomas Watson interfered, and since this was the man Bradley really had sought quarrel with, Bradley left Marlowe and concentrated on Watson, who killed Bradley. This extremely thrilling triple duel must have made a strong impression on Marlowe - if Watson hadn't interfered, Marlowe would have been dead, being a small person (166 cm) and no fighter. Watson had a short term in prison for the duel, while Marlowe was acquitted.

May 18th 1593 Marlowe was arrested for alleged atheism and suspected coining of money. He had been informed against by his colleague Thomas Kyd, who had been arrested and tortured for political pamphlets. Marlowe was released on bail but forbidden to leave London, where the plague was raving. His life was on a tight-rope, and the odds were against him. Others had been executed for less. At this moment, on May 30th, he is accidentally killed in a fight over a bill in a Deptford inn by three companions who had been his friends. According to the coroner's report, Marlowe died instantly of a wound by a knife above his eye. Because of the plague situation, the body was instantly buried without even having been identified in an anonymous grave no one knows where.

Now, is this a credible story? Marlowe was an expert on intrigue, which he had proved in seven great tragedies, all works of a genius. Is it probable that he allowed himself to be involved in a fight with three common men for some pennies? No, it is much more probable that he arranged this scene without other witnesses in order to escape the difficult situation of his life and officially vanish. Pronounced dead, he would be free. All his three murderers were on the payroll of Sir Thomas Walsingham, cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham and Marlowe's benefactor - some even say lover.

The body that was slipped away could have been someone else's. There has never been evidence of Marlowe's death, the body never had a known grave, the brawl took place when the inn was empty with only its owner, a widow, present; the body was never identified and never had an autopsy, and the death certificate, discovered in 1925, seems fabricated. Experts have stated that no one can die of a wound of that sort which according to the coroner Marlowe died of instantly. Experts have stated, that to die of such a wound would take at least a few days. According to the coroner's report, Marlowe was the attacker whom the defendant killed by accident in self-defence while the other two did nothing. All four had been associating peacefully the whole day, after dinner Marlowe rested on a bench while the other three remained seated, then came the bill, and Marlowe suddenly attacked the middle man from behind, who could not defend himself, and sitting in the middle he couldn't even turn around against Marlowe. All the same, according to the coroner, he managed to give Marlowe a fatal wound above the eye, which no one else could have died of, but Marlowe did.

Also the coroner had been selected by Sir Thomas Walsingham. Every detail in the coroner's report seems premeditated long in advance to create a perfect crime scene in which Marlowe could officially vanish for good. The report seems fabricated to the very purpose of leaving no doubts and nothing to question. The fellow responsible for Marlowe's accidental death was of course prosecuted but soon released since he had acted in self-defence, and he immediately continued in the service of Sir Thomas Walsingham.

According to theories, Marlowe escaped to France and Italy. The scene in "Romeo and Juliet" where Tybalt kills Mercutio seems copied from the very fight between Marlowe, Bradley and Watson - but of course dramatized. Mercutio then could very well be a self-portrait of the young Marlowe.

There was one drawback in Marlowe's staged death - he could not return to life. He could continue to write plays, but not in his own name. The name provided for Marlowe's continued progress as a playwright was found in a decent fellow who willingly let himself be paid by Walsingham to give his name to Marlowe's plays. His name was William Shakespeare, an honest actor from Stratford.

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;" - Sonnet LXXXI.

This is the Marlowe case in brief.

Without doubt, the reports, rumours and backbiting on Marlowe must have been an unbearable burden to him. This remarkable shoemaker's son from Canterbury, an only son with four younger sisters, worked himself up alone to a brilliant degree in Cambridge. Just this career of a student without any family fortunes or titles must have been something unique in England at that time. This brilliant intellectual talent came by his sheer endowment early into contact with such influential gentlemen as Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps the most colourful of all the Elizabethans beside the earl of Essex, and Sir Philip Sidney, another literary genius who died young, but who had time to act as a host to Giordano Bruno when he visited England. It's possible and probable that Christopher Marlowe might have been in some contact with Giordano Bruno, since you can trace some influence from him and from Sidney, which surprisingly is voiced in "Love's Labour's Lost".

But Marlowe was never an atheist. That reputation was false. In almost all of Marlowe's plays there are religious arguments, which show an astounding ability to discern between what is true and false. In "Tamburlaine the Great", the first classical Elizabethan drama, the chief character Timur Lenk rejects Mohammed and denounces him, but he never rejects God. This is a typical Marlowian differentiation. In "The Jew of Malta" the greedy Jew occasionally seems both heroic and sympathetic in his wild intrigues, and his religion is never derided. When he quite surprisingly perishes in the end it almost seems unfair. This Jew Barabbas sustains the whole play by his enormously complex religious character, just like Shylock does the same in "The Merchant of Venice", who could be regarded as a more modulated and developed version of the Barabbas character. Marlowe goes furthest in his interesting religious dealings in "The Massacre at Paris", where the victim to the slaughter is religion itself, which commits suicide by its moral collapse and bankruptcy. A better reason for never more dealing with any kind of religion couldn't be imagined on the part of Marlowe or king Henry IV of France.

Marlowe might very well have known king Henry IV of Navarre personally. "The Massacre at Paris" seems to convey that impression, and even more "Love's Labour's Lost", which leads us to suggest that Marlowe escaped after May 1593 to king Henry in France. He had earlier been on missions to Rheims, he must have known France well with the problems of the Huguenots, and many English Catholics had sought refuge at Rheims, whom he knew, since he had been spying on them for Sir Francis Walsingham.

"Tamburlaine the Great" has another interesting common denominator with the historical Shakespeare plays. In this early drama the poet already demonstrates his total freedom to deal with historical facts exactly as he wishes. Everything is allowed in rewriting history in order to fit it in on the stage. Tamburlaine has exactly as little to do with the real Timur Lenk as Shakespeare's Antony has any resemblance with the historical Antony, the murderer of Cicero. Such perfect parallels in the utterly shameless and disrespectful way of illustrating history are more than just striking.

Neither was Marlowe any proved coiner of money. It is true that he knew the art of coining base money, he probably tested doing it when he was in Holland,

("When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom on the shore,

And the firm soil win on the wat'ry main..." Sonnet LXIV,)

but there is no evidence that he ever practised that craft in England. Thus the Crown had no real charge against him.

Also his reputed homosexuality could be questioned. It is most probable that he with other British poets of the highest rank (like Byron, Shelley and Oscar Wilde, whom we must never forget was married and had two children: his homosexuality was in fact only a left-handed escapade,) quite simply was liberal enough to be bisexual - or asexual, which highly intellectual thinkers often are. This gives the Marlowe theory an advantage to both the candidatures of Shakespeare and Stanley to the authorship of the dramas: without any family ties Marlowe could more easily concentrate on creating the world's greatest dramas than both Shakespeare and Stanley.

When Marlowe vanishes from life, Shakespeare doesn't yet exist as a poet or playwright. Four months after the Deptford 'murder' he turns up as the author of his first publication, the poem "Venus and Adonis" eloquently dedicated to the dashing earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, which dedication makes it impossible for anyone to doubt the author's identity as W. Shakespeare. This dedication eliminates every suspicion of Marlowe's haunting the verses, although the poem fits perfectly as a continuation and development of the theme in the last work in Marlowe's name, the idyllic love poem "Hero and Leander". Perhaps it was necessary to furnish the two Shakespearean poems with dedications to avoid suspicion: The two poems fit as a continuation of Marlowe's poem like hands into their perfect gloves, as if, as one scholar put it, "Marlowe reminds you more of Shakespeare than Shakespeare does himself."

Then follow the Italian comedies, which betray the same thing: plays like "The Taming of the Shrew", "The Two Gentlemen of Verona", "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Merchant of Venice" can only have been written by someone who stayed long enough in these north-eastern parts of Italy to know them more than well. The local knowledge they display, like for instance about the water ways between Venice and Milan, could in those days only be acquired on the spot. To this comes the phenomenon about the sources to some of the Italian plays.

The source of "Romeo and Juliet" was a widely read and extremely popular short story by Luigi da Porto (1485-1529), which the poet simply has dramatized, but with some innovation: the characters of Mercutio, the Nurse, Benvolio and Prince Escalus have been invented, neither Paris nor Juliet's father play any great part in the short story, Tybalt is killed by Romeo without having killed any Mercutio, and Romeo is not dead when Juliet awakes in the tomb. The story of "Othello" is a true one recorded by G.B.Giraldo Cintio (1504-73), who got it live from Emilia, Iago's widow. In "Othello" the dramatist has not invented any extra characters, but he has given Othello a character of his own, the moor is not a nobly tragic figure in the original, but the whole series of events is a most brutal and vulgar story of vile desire. Iago's motivation is, that Desdemona has turned him down, she can't understand that he, who is already married, could try anything with her, who passionately loves only the moor, and so Iago decides to revenge himself on her. The story is very racist: to be turned down for a moor is the supreme insult to Iago, who breeds suspicion in the moor and prompts him to murder, which they however commit together, breaking down a wall on Desdemona, who is crushed. They were both tried for murder, but Othello admitted nothing and was acquitted though dishonoured for life, while Iago was badly tortured and died from it. The only name mentioned in the whole novelette is "Disdemona", the "un-devilish", while all others remain anonymous.

More remarkable is the origin to "The Merchant of Venice". This story is part of a collection like "Decamerone" written by a certain Ser Giovanni, and this short story is called "Il Pecorone". The remarkable thing is that the poet has come across this obscure collection of short stories, found this long one and dramatized it exactly according to the text. There are no extra inventions here. The drama concentrates the action on the middle part of the story, which really is like a short novel with complicated intrigues and long voyages in far off countries; and every detail is copied from the story: the Jew's refusing to compromise, the faked court of justice - only the Shylock character is developed and is like a brother of Barabbas in "The Jew of Malta", only more human.

Published short stories like "Il Pecorone", "The Book of Juliet" and "The Moor of Venice" could hardly have been available in English. A short story like "Il Pecorone" can only have been available in Italy. But W. Shakespeare never left England and did probably not know Italian. One who did know Italian was Thomas Kyd, the author of the most successful "The Spanish Tragedy", the first blood-curdling horror drama, which instantly turned Thomas Kyd into Marlowe's most dangerous competitor. Kyd's dramas are often spiced with Italian. If Kyd knew Italian it is probable that also Marlowe did, or got the ambition to learn it, linguistically talented as he was; and if he went to Italy after some time in France, which seems probable that he did, he must have gloated in thrilling modern Italian short novels and stories in order to gratefully use them for material to practise on as a playwright.

Thomas Kyd is intimately connected with Marlowe's fate. They worked together and vied with each other and were probably both good friends and hearty enemies, as great stage personalities often are. Lying on the rack, Kyd denounced Marlowe. Agents of Her Majesty's government had ransacked Kyd's apartment for pamphlets against Flemish immigrants, found nothing of that kind but found the more other interesting things, like deeply compromising atheistic writings, for which Kyd was arrested. These extremely daring and religiously challenging writings Kyd blamed on Marlowe and made a full statement implicating Marlowe completely, being forced to any unwilling confessions by the most insensitive machinery of the rack. Kyd was released but later on died from the after-effects of his torture. Marlowe might have felt some guilt for Kyd's undeserved fate, since Marlowe really was much guiltier of religious speculations than Kyd, who never had any interest in politics or religion. Like Michelangelo destroyed his own frescoes in the municipality of Florence when his competitor Leonardo's frescoes were ruined from sheer bad luck, so Marlowe might have decided to never again appear under his own name as a playwright after the most brutal rape of Thomas Kyd's muse.

There are more implications. One of the strangest is the secret contents in "As You Like It". Not only do we here find the strange character of Jacques, who many believe to be a self-portrait of the poet, and which is convincing as such. Two other characters reveal even more than Jacques: Touchstone and the preposterous priest Sir Oliver Martext, who really has nothing to do with the play. The knave Touchstone has several interesting quarrels with exciting import if you are familiar with the case of Marlowe. In one place Touchstone scolds the churl William, whom he calls a humbug and falsification while he himself is genuine. This is irrelevant and incomprehensible nonsense to each one who knows nothing of the Marlowe case, since the only possible interpretation is that Marlowe in this disguise unmasks William Shakespeare.

Sir Oliver Martext is as a mere character even more irrelevant. This is the only instance in the whole Shakespeare production where a superfluous character has been introduced to just utter a few insignificant lines and vanish. There is no explanation to his total misplacement. But in the First Folio the name is written Mar-text, and his only line of any meaning is his last: "...ne'er a fantastical knave of them all shall flout me out of my calling." The visiting appearance of Mar-text can only be explained in one way: he is the abbreviation of the clandestine message of Marlowe's text. This of course appears as a somewhat roundabout explanation, but let us remember the great pamphlet war in Canterbury in the 1580's. The author of seven pamphlets causing great religious controversy was a certain pseudonym who has never been found out calling himself Martin Marprelate. Now, Canterbury, from whence the pamphlets proceeded, was the hometown of Christopher Marlowe. This, of course, proves nothing, but might be the only possible explanation to that pamphlet war, which the spurious name of Sir Oliver Martext might be a last distant echo of.

These are but small links in a long chain of Marlowe indications in the play. But just such small hints so well disguised might have proved too much. Just before the play was to be printed in 1600 it was withdrawn from the presses, someone apparently had found it too risky and dangerous, and it was never printed until in The First Folio 23 years later.

These are but small trivialities in the overwhelming concordance between Shakespeare and Marlowe, as if Shakespeare had been Marlowe's double. The great circumstantial evidence is the style of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which is identical like finger-prints of the same person but in different ages. Scholars have always recognized traits of Marlowe's hand in early Shakespeare plays like "Titus Andronicus", "The Taming of the Shrew", "King John" and "Henry VI". Characters like Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens are like aggrandized developments of such early heaven-storming Marlowe characters as Tamburlaine, doctor Faustus and the Jew Barabbas of Malta. The only chronicle play of Marlowe's, "Edward II", is a clear prototype to all the chronicles of Shakespeare. Concerning "Henry VI" there is a fragment by Marlowe called "Richard, Duke of York", which clearly is an earlier version of the third part of "Henry VI". The strange thing about this early version is, that everything is already there: the whole tragedy is developed, the ultimate personality of Richard III is already finished, even the horrible war scenes with the father who has killed his son and the son who has killed his father are complete in Marlowe's version.

We must not forget the Shakespeare apocrypha. There were six additional plays to which this name was attached as the author: "Locrine", "Sir John Oldcastle", "The True Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell", "The London Prodigal", "The Puritan" and "A Yorkshire Tragedy". These six were sorted out as The First Folio was compiled as not on the level with the other 37 plays. But these six were printed in Shakespeare's name while he lived. It's quite possible that they were actually written by him - but not by Marlowe.

The first one is the most famous: Hamlet's folly. Hamlet is on the point of losing his head as he visits Ofelia with torn clothes and later on violates all limits to the correctness of behaviour for an heir to the throne in the violent scene against her. And the height in this disturbing middle part of the play, which always has caused so much concern and difficulties to actors and directors, is of course the suicide monologue.

All this folly, which is not to be found in the original story of Saxo Grammaticus, where Hamlet's folly finds completely different expressions, is singular to the author. Therefore there is only one interpretation: here is a personal self confession. Hamlet is such an extremely idiosyncratic individualist, that it can only be a self-portrait - and as such a unique expression of the poet. The problem is just, that this intricate irrational distracted playacting is completely ununderstandable.

Is it then possible to place such a torn personality in connection with William Stanley, the 6th earl of Derby, the candidate to the throne of the Catholics, a highly educated jurist with responsibility for a county, and with additional responsibility as the governor and owner of the Isle of Man, happily married with three sons and two castles, an established man of the world in the highest possible social position with a wife well seen at court? Lord Stanley, the proposed candidate of many scholars to the authorship of Shakespeare's works, is a far too well-balanced man to have drawn a self-portrait in the madness and tragic nature of Hamlet. There is no evidence that he ever would have written a single play himself, although George Fenner, a Catholic agent, wrote to Catholics abroad, that the earl of Derby "was far to busy writing plays to show any interest in the Catholic party". He would rather have been too busy governing the Isle of Man and Lancashire, bringing up his sons, maintaining his castles and properties, managing the administration of his theatre companies, keeping up his law duties and entertaining his wife to be able to write any of the Shakespeare plays. After all, these are not mere entertainments but rather part of the most advanced and difficult literature in the world. No one surpasses Shakespeare except Dante, and not even Dante surpasses the beauty of the Shakespearean sonnets.

Let's study Kit Marlowe, who at the age of 29 has to break off his career and go underground for the rest of his life to become a ghost writer to others and never again appear in public life, who always has had problems with women, who in "Edward II" describes relationships between men much more convincingly and intimately than between the sexes, and who also previously, like in "As You Like It", has shown an inclination to surreptitiously reveal self-confessions masked in mysteries. The extremely strained relationship between Hamlet and Ofelia fits perfectly to the case of Marlowe. It just couldn't fit more perfectly, because here we have glaringly clear the most characteristic of all symptoms of Marlowe: a bad relationship between man and women (Hamlet-Ofelia) but the best possible relationship between men (Hamlet-Horatio) - but please note: without any sign of homosexuality. That's Marlowe's sexual earmark: all his sexual relationships are bad, whether they are between the sexes or the same sex, while all his asexual relationships or Platonic friendships are perfect. And nothing would suit better into a case like Marlowe's than Hamlet's suicide monologue. Such a case would if anything give frequent occasions to reflections upon suicide, and in a character like Hamlet he would have had the ideal opportunity to give vent to such broodings in artistic expression. It would be nothing less than the perfect self therapy. The distracted Hamlet could very well be regarded as the painful self-portrait of Marlowe - and then suddenly Hamlet starts to make sense.

Even greater expressions the sickly spots of the poet find in "King Lear", where the bitter disillusions of the central figure find cosmic expressions in a tragic madness that goes beyond everything. King Lear is no more than a consequence and development of the first cautious steps into Hamlet's folly. In "Hamlet" the sickly melancholy of bitterness carefully suggests itself in a daring effort to intimate an expression. In "King Lear" the poet goes the whole line and dares to cry out his universal pain much more than just sufficiently - there is no more need for any further madness after that. Lear is the last lunatic in the canon.

Two spots remain - "Coriolanus" and "Timon of Athens". Coriolanus is the total public enemy, who takes the consequences of the injustice he suffers from the state he has served. Also Coriolanus is a complex character, who from sheer nobility of spirit can't apply the populist methods demanded of a civil servant if he is to get any support from the common mob. He just can't lower himself to show the vulgarity needed to become popular. As a consequence he is misunderstood and becomes unpopular and is frozen out by the more popular politicians whose positions depend on the favours of the common mob, whereupon he, being a completely honest man, takes the consequences in full and joins the enemies to the state to take up arms against his own home country: his logic makes him a traitor. This character is also a most personal invention of the author: Plutarch has not the slightest indication of the profound political psychology which is so predominant in the drama. Thus we can guess a self-portrait here as well. Of Lord Stanley? Impossible. He never wavered in his loyalty to the Crown, and king James did himself intervene for Lord Stanley in his great family trial of many years. He was loyalty impersonated.

Finally the total misanthropist Timon of Athens - again a perfectly personal expression of a deep disappointment in humanity and in life itself. The only woman parts in the whole play are two harlots appearing drunk with Alcibiades. Never was woman given a more bitter jibe in any play by this playwright. It's his maximum insult against the weaker sex. Also this would fit perfectly into the case of Christopher Marlowe - and nowhere else.

Finally an authentic document (somewhat shortened), the critical moment in Marlowe's life, which compels him to his most extraordinary fate - to be able to survive only by officially ceasing to exist. It's the royal agent Richard Baines' report on Marlowe to the Privy Council and the Queen:

That the Indians and many Authors of antiquity have assuredly written of above 16 thousand years ago, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years.

That Moses made the Jews travel 11 years in the wilderness, which journey to the promised land might have been done in less than one year, to the intent that those who were privy to most of his subtleties might perish and so an everlasting superstition remain in the hearts of the people.

That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe.

That Christ was the son of a carpenter and that, if the Jews among whom he was born did crucify him, they best knew him and whence he came.

That Christ deserved to die better than Barabbas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabbas was both a thief and a murderer.

That if there be any God or good Religion, then it is the Papists', because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, etc.

That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.

That if he were put to write a new religion, he would undertake a both more excellent and Admirable method.

That all they that love not Tobacco and Boys were fools.

That all the apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth, that Paul only had wit, but he was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience.

That he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England, and that he was acquainted with one Poole, a prisoner in Newgate, who has great skill in mixture of metals, and having learned some things from him, he meant, through help of a cunning stamp-maker, to coin French crowns, pistolets, and English shillings.

That Richard Cholmeley has confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe's reasons to become an Atheist.

That this Marlowe does not only hold these opinions himself, but almost into every company he comes he persuades men to Atheism, utterly scorning both God and His ministers, wherefore I, Richard Baines, think all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped."

So Marlowe's life as a successful dramatist is put at the stake, and he has no alternative to have his career disrupted than to anticipate the authorities and interrupt it himself, which he doesn't hesitate to do the very following day. And instead of the successful playwright and national poet Marlowe we had the most difficult case in theatre history, a much worse and more tragic and complicated case than the naïve simpleton Oscar Wilde, who was not strong enough to cope with his own case. Not until 1895, the very year when Oscar Wilde was put to trial, it started to be observed that Marlowe and Shakespeare could be the same author, the theory was published in California by the lawyer William G. Ziegler, who had found out that Shakespeare's and Marlowe's style were identical. The coroner's report on Marlowe's death was discovered 30 years later in 1925, and 30 years later again Calvin Hoffman published his book "The Man Who Was Shakespeare" where he exposes the sensational results of 19 years of research, an extremely concentrated and substantial book containing enough circumstantial evidence to show that Marlowe himself staged his death to be able to continue developing his art in spite of the "vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow" (Sonnet 112) but under the name of his colleague, the most reliable actor and stage director William Shakespeare.

The problem of the Puritans seems to have been the Nemesis not only of Marlowe but of the entire Elizabethan age. The important key figure to the Shakespeare mystery William Stanley, earl of Derby, died 81 years old in 1642. Around the same time the civil war broke out, and all the theatres closed in all England for 18 years ahead. Later on in the civil war, the Puritans burned the castle and home of Lord Stanley including his invaluable library, where all the original manuscripts of the Shakespeare plays might have been kept.

Many thanks for sending me the Richard Baines report in full. As I had not read it before, it appeared to me as a stunning revelation. I am now prepared to reconsider the Shakespeare problem and to alter my position more in favour of Christopher Marlowe. In fact, this report could both be regarded as an explanation of the case and as close to clear evidence of Marlowe's authorship of the Shakespeare works as you can get.

The stunning thing about this report is the evil of it. Of course it is biassed. Mr Richard Baines must have hated Christopher Marlowe. I see him as a petty official drudging on in obscurity with sordid paper work and with little chance of advancement in life. So he becomes a police spy specializing on informing against people. His motivation can't just have been safe-guarding the security of the state. Something about the successful genius of Christopher Marlowe must have revolted him, maybe Marlowe's audacity combined with some arrogance and insolence, but most probably Marlowe's clearcut and ruthless freedom of conscience. Mr Richard Baines must have been a complete Puritan, a bigot of the very worst kind, reacting against Marlowe's preposterous free-thinking as destructively as he possibly could. Mr Baines must have been fully aware, that his report was the complete devastation of Marlowe's career and life, and he must have written it in the very intention of effectively ruining the playwright's life.

Of course, the Queen, being the highest sponsor and lover of the Theatre in England, must have seen through Mr Baines' bias and vile intentions and been shocked. She could impossibly have sanctioned the arrest of Marlowe and his execution. She could not have taken such a prejudiced Puritan report seriously. At the same time, she could not disregard the fact that Marlowe's knowledge of coining was a latent security risk which had to be dealt with. She probably summoned Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's benefactor, promptly and commanded him to do something about it, to dispose of the problem without disrupting Marlowe's most promising career as a playwright and poet. Walsingham, who was knighted a few years later, must have solved the problem to the Queen's satisfaction. Instead of Marlowe she got Shakespeare, the protégé of Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, and, more important, in the theatre company of Will Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, perhaps the most influential political key person in England beside the Queen, being the leader of the Catholics with diplomatic connections all over Europe, if anything an international figure and the perfect underground diplomat to be able to advocate new plays in the untarnished and completely non-controversial name of William Shakespeare.

I am with you, Christian, in your rehabilitation push for Christopher Marlowe.

Sonnet 16 reveals there is a portrait of the man. This information inspired Oscar Wilde to write his most initiated speculation "The Portrait of Mr W.H." in 1888, a story which shows that Oscar Wilde perhaps deeper than anyone else tried to understand the sonnets but as a result only missed his shot more grossly than anyone else: He wants Mr W.H. to be a fair actor called Will Hughes, who is supposed to have been an expert on playing female parts. The idea is good although it remains 100% speculation.

In sonnet 29 he goes further and confesses to be in disgrace with Fortune and cries in self pity for his outcast state.

In sonnet 50 he is exiled. This theme of exile is remarkable and reoccurs constantly in the Shakespeare canon and is maybe the heaviest of all arguments for Marlowe. The exile theme appears already in the early comedy "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and dominates also the comedies "As You Like It", "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest" and haunts most of the tragedies. The exile is always experienced and expressed as an extremely painful suffering but also with a kind of masochistic lust and pathos, as if the poet wallowed in that kind of suffering. The exile theme is driven to extremes in "King Lear", where the central part is driven to the highest degree of mental disorder by being driven into exile by his own family. Neither Shakespeare nor Stanley ever experienced being driven into exile.

In several sonnets he thinks of himself as a dead man, for example in 71 and 72, but in 73 we have another obvious indication. The only known portrait of Marlowe in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge has a text in the upper left-hand corner which says in Latin: "Quod nutrit me destruit," ("That which nourishes me destroys me,") which the portrayed person himself wanted inscribed on the painting, as some sort of motto. It was painted in 1585 as Marlowe was 21 years old. This very statement and phrase reoccurs constantly throughout the works of Shakespeare in many varied forms, like in sonnet 73:

"In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."

In sonnet 74 he goes even farther in reflections over himself as dead:

"So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch's knife,

Too base of thee to be remembered."

In sonnet 125 he speaks straight out:

"Hence, thou suborn'd informer! A true soul,

When most impeach'd, stands least in thy control."

In sonnet 127 appears the dark lady with devouringly destructive passions for a result (sonnet 129), the most typical of all Marlowe syndromes: Platonic love is perfect, but sexual love is only devastating.

This is merely a sketch of the top of the iceberg. 90% of the real contents of the sonnets will perhaps always remain hopelessly unexplainable even with Marlowe for a guide. The fact remains, however, that with both Shakespeare and Stanley for guides even less of the sonnets can be grasped and explained.

We mentioned the exile theme in so many of the Shakespeare plays. Almost all the greatest writers of Europe have created their masterworks in exile, starting with Dante, who was exiled from Florence and wrote most of his Comedy in exile. Victor Hugo wrote his three unsurpassed novels "Les Miserables", "Workers of the Sea" and "The Laughing Man" in exile from France on the isle of Guernsey in the English Channel. Dostoyevsky was not allowed for many years to live in his city of St. Petersburg and wrote "The Idiot" and "The Possessed" in Germany. Ibsen wrote most of his plays in voluntary exile in Rome. Stefan Zweig wrote all his greatest books after the exile from Austria in 1934. Already Ovid, the Latin poet who is most frequently remembered and quoted in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, (Marlowe actually translated him,) used his art in for instance "Tristia" in his exile from Rome as a kind of therapy to handle his anguished desperation. There is much to indicate that Marlowe in his enforced exile from England the more was motivated to create the more sublime masterpieces to fight and withstand the utter desperation of his loneliness. There are many indications in the sonnets that his love was telepathic.

Echoes of Marlowe occur not only in Oscar Wilde. Keats and Shelley were also exiled from England on different grounds, wrote their masterpieces and found their deaths in exile. Of all poets in England after Shakespeare, these two come the closest to the spirit and poetical ideal of Shakespeare.

By his fate Marlowe would find himself in the company of Beethoven, who by his deafness received the cruellest possible fate for his profession, and Dostoyevsky, who was condemned to death and had his life ruined by his political involvements in the writings of his youth. The last Shakespeare plays have often been compared with the last works of Beethoven. All these three, Marlowe, Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, were forced by their destinies to an extra effort of life and to a deeper not to say maximal concentration on their work, which luckier and happier artists never found.

They have been treated with some doubt as to their genuineness. "Timon of Athens", "Pericles" and "Henry VIII" separate themselves from the usual mannerisms of the poet and almost fall outside the frames of his art: Timon is rather a philosophical drama and unique as such in his production; Pericles is neither a comedy nor a tragedy but rather some kind of an entertainment almost like a vaudeville of rather an equivocal nature; and also Henry VIII is completely detached from all the previous chronicles by its almost documentary realism. Arguments have been raised that these plays might not have been written entirely by our poet.

We dare refute such arguments. There is only one scene in Timon which is doubtful, act III scene 5 in the Senate with Alcibiades and the senators, which honestly speaking seems to be manufactured in subsequence by some clot.

Pericles is a remarkable limbo play which doesn't seem to belong anywhere. It was excluded from The First Folio but was taken in later on, since some scenes unmistakably bear the imprint of our genius, especially the scene with the fishermen. The drama recounts the strange story of how prince Pericles of Tyre proposes to a lovely princess, who has an incestuous relationship with her father. In order to win her, Pericles must explain an impossible enigma, the answer to which is the very matter of incest, which answer Pericles is clever enough to discern, whereupon the father to the princess is taken by such a fear, that he has no option than to dispose of Pericles just because he has solved the riddle, in the same way that he disposed of all the previous suitors for not having solved the riddle. It's the old Turandot story all over again but in a more poignant version. Pericles has to flee to save his life, is wrecked in a storm and encounters lots of adventures, until he finds another princess, woos her and marries her and has a daughter; but in the difficult delivery on board of a ship and in the middle of a new wrecking storm his wife dies, whereupon she is buried at sea in a coffin. This coffin floats ashore and falls into the hands of a king who knows the art of resurrecting the dead: He brings the Queen back to life, who in her sense of being lost in life chooses to serve as a priestess in a temple until time will explain her life to her.

In the meanwhile the small girl, who in the storm is separated from her father, faces many strange adventures. She grows up and is taken care of by a bawdy-woman, who in vain tries to exploit her and offer her to clients: the girl is utterly impossible as a whore, since she only preaches virtue and threatens the whole brothel business with bankruptcy. This is dramatically and psychologically the most interesting part of the play.

Pericles is himself totally inconsolable without his wife and daughter and allows his beard and hair to grow for years, until one day through a miracle he suddenly regains his Queen, daughter and his senses with even the whole of his old kingdom. Thus everything ends very well.

The drama is rather short and something like a parenthesis in the production but a most important missing link: It is obvious that the poet here experiments with new possibilities after having tired of the great tragedies and left them behind. Pericles is in fact the introduction to the last fairy plays, which all have the same form as Pericles but higher developed: the most impossible, difficult and complicated embroilments and disasters are turned by the unfathomable mechanisms of fate into bright redemption and triumphing human happiness.

Henry VIII is almost pedantic in its careful reconstruction of the falls of the Duke of Buckingham, Catherine of Aragon and Cardinal Wolsey. The play is very extensive, and nothing much happens really: people just talk and complain.

The representation of the case of Cardinal Wolsey, however, is of the greatest interest. He is in fact one of the poet's greatest and most impressing characters. It's difficult to imagine that this corrupt and ambitious cardinal might have been so interesting a person in reality.

We bring these plays to light here since they seem to have special bearings on Marlowe. In Pericles we have one of the very obvious: in Act II scene 2 six suitors to the lovely princess Thaïsa parade. The fourth of them carries a torch upside down with the device: Quod me alit, me extinguit", ("What keeps me burning consumes me",) a variation of the motto of Marlowe Quod nutrit me destruit, or, as the Sonnet 73 renders it: Consumed with that which it was nourished by. Also the salacious intrigues of Pericles smell very much of the early Marlowe: such tendencies are evident in for instance "Dido, Queen of Carthage". None of the dramas in the name of Shakespeare reminds you so much of the early sexually liberated Marlowe as Pericles does.

We mentioned somewhere that Marlowe probably was the man behind the great theological war of pamphlets made by the pseudonym Martin Marprelate from Marlowe's hometown Canterbury. In the dramas under the name of Marlowe preceding his fall there is very much theology. In the Shakespeare dramas there is almost none whatsoever until suddenly in Henry VIII in the case of Wolsey. All of a sudden this poet speaks of God, which he has never done before. Robert Greene, one of Marlowe's colleagues, who is charged with having denounced and denigrated Shakespeare, appears to have had some admiration of Marlowe, since Greene publicly expressed that Marlowe had a prophetic spirit. Indeed, such a prophetic spirit permeates the whole of Henry VIII maybe more than any of the plays.

The Shakespeare connoisseur Carl O. Nordling has suggested that the poet of the dramas very well later might have written the great work published in the name of Robert Burton, the very meticulous and learned treatise called "The Anatomy of Melancholy", one of the favourite books of Doctor Johnson's. Our opinion was that neither Shakespeare nor Stanley were probable as authors of this work, while indeed it could fit into the picture of Marlowe. If Marlowe anonymously wrote the pamphlets under the name of Martin Marprelate, he might also very well have written "The Anatomy of Melancholy" and used Robert Burton as he used Shakespeare, being obliged to never again use his own name after the terrible denouncement of Richard Baines.

In view of this possibility you can see the Wolsey character as a missing link - a transition into a new phase of the poet's life: he abandons the theatre to return to where he started: in theology. We have admitted to Carl O. Nordling that "The Anatomy of Melancholy" in language and style perfectly fits as a natural continuation and development of the idea-world of the dramas, especially in view of the last great dramatical character in the poet's output, the unforgettable Cardinal Wolsey in his abysmal fall from wordliness and power to purest spirituality.

In 1901 a strange experiment was conducted in Boston, Massachusetts, by a certain doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. He had in 1887 elaborated a method to analyze the literary "fingerprints" of an author's style by means of a very simple but extremely tedious system of summoning up some hundreds of thousands of words from an author's writings and grouping these in words of one syllable, two syllables, three syllables, four syllables, etc, adding the sums in a diagram. The more words counted, the more precise the literary "fingerprint". The method appeared to work out well, since the stylistic "fingerprint" of the investigated author always was the same, no matter from what works of his you took the vast collections of words.

In 1901 he was engaged by the rich mr Augustus Heminway for his purpose of trying to prove that the works of Shakespeare had been written by Francis Bacon. Doctor Mendenhall meticulously carried out his investigation but came to the decisive result that the literary "fingerprints" of Shakespeare and Bacon did not match. The great Bacon admirer mr Heminway's purpose had failed.

However, doctor Mendenhall had also made his test on other contemporary authors like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Christopher Marlowe and others. It appeared, that the literary "fingerprints" of Christopher Marlowe matched with Shakespeare as perfectly as those of Shakespeare matched with himself.

This could be regarded as an undeniable evidence of that Marlowe is the true author of the works of Shakespeare, since the method in all its simplicity can be carried out by anyone and is 100% objective.

The Shakespeare research has six authentic autographs of Shakespeare to compare, and they are variously spelt Shaksper and Shakspe. Others spell his name Shaxper, Shagsper or Shacksper. It has never been spelt Shakespeare by anyone before The First Folio seven years after the man's death. The different spellings of his name by himself and others might indicate, that he had some difficulty in spelling it himself. That would explain why nobody else could spell it properly. One of his dauthers couldn't spell at all, she was illiterate, and on his departure from life all his property did not include one single book, so maybe also the father was illiterate. His will was obviously dictated. The more you close in on this Stratford man, the more improbable becomes his authorship to the greatest dramatic works of world literature, while as a reliable theatre man of good faith and common sense he could very well have served as the ideal cover-up for one harassed by the authorities with threats to his life like Christopher Marlowe.

There are some striking common denominators with Marlowe-Shakespeare however. He quotes Marlowe twice as often as Shakespeare, (only this is a matter of interest,) and the idea-world is principally the same. In the last play "Henry VIII" there are clear inclinations towards circumstantiality and pedantry, where the leading part is a priest who for the first time in Shakespearean drama pays any attention to the importance of God. And why would a comfortably established country clergyman of Segrave in Leicestershire, who hardly ever travelled outside his own county during his lifetime, commit his soul into lines like these:

"I was once so mad to bustle abroad and seek about for preferment, tire myself and trouble all my friends; but all my labour was unprofitable; for while death took off some of my friends, to others I was unknown; little liked by some, others made large promises; some pleaded strongly on my behalf, others fed me with vain hopes; while paying court to some, getting into favour with others, getting known to others, my best days were going, the years gliding by, my friends tired of my applications to them, and myself the worse for wear; so now, sick of the world and glutted with the falseness of human nature, I resign myself. I have had some bountiful patrons and noble benefactors, and I do thankfully acknowledge it; I have received some kindness, which may God repay, if not according to their wishes, yet according to their deserts, more peradventure than I deserve, though not to my desire, more of them that I did expect, yet not of others to my desert; neither am I ambitious or covetous all this while; what I have said, without prejudice or alteration shall stand. And now as a mired horse, that struggles at first with all his might and main to get out, but when he sees no remedy, that his beating will not serve, lies still, I have laboured in vain, rest now satisfied, and

Mine haven's found, fortune and hope, adieu!

Mock others now, for I have done with you. (Prudentius)"

(part 2, sect.3, mem.6)

The whole work is written to a large extent in Latin, and the text is constantly interrupted by Latin quotations, but also Greek appears occasionally. The author apparently also has a great penchant for Ovid (in remarkable similarity with Marlowe and Shakespeare) who is quoted more frequently than any other Latin writer including Cicero.

Such curious reminiscences of and clues to Marlowe-Shakespeare can't be ignored. The Marlowe chits in Burton are exactly of the same character as in Shakespeare: sudden flashes disappearing at once.

You get the same impression of Burton as of Marlowe-Shakespeare: here is a man who spends his life hard at work with only writing because he can't do anything else. Like Shakespeare ought to have been occupied with the practical work at his theatre for almost the entirety of his life, Burton would have been constantly busy with his pastoral duties; but "The Anatomy of Melancholy" shows an author who has read everything and knows the whole world literature by heart. He could hardly have done anything in his life but reading and writing. At the same time you find in Burton the same vast knowledge of the world and human nature as with Shakespeare, of which none ever placed their foot outside the soil of England. None of them ever "bustled abroad".

We can't decide the matter. We content ourselves with stating that it is possible, that Marlowe as a good and experienced actor on the stage of life, just as he dressed up in all the characters of Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare's own, he also could have entered into the character of the pedantic Oxonian Robert Burton in perhaps a vain effort to hide and forget himself: "Look now! I am neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare but the clergyman Robert Burton, and I prove it by telling you everything about myself, naming my parents and my brother and never mentioning Cambridge with one word!"

It's just a theory. The Marlowe theories are constantly whisked away by the fact that there is no evidence. It's true that we have no evidence, but there is also not a single piece of evidence to prove that Shakespeare or Stanley was the dramatic author, while there is more circumstantial evidence pointing towards Marlowe than to anyone else.

Most of the high quality of nobility, the dramatic tensity and elegance not to speak of all the magnificent sense of humour which characterize the Shakespeare dramas have fallen out with Burton, who instead displays a higher developed universalism and greater concentration on the deepest of all human problems, which also the Shakespeare works indefatigably grapple with: the spiritual abysses of man.

His work "Shakespeare, Thy Name is Marlowe" (1966) doesn't really offer anything new. He sums up and confirms all the research results of Calvin Hoffman's in "The Man Who Was Shakespeare" (1955) and adds a few new ones, above all the method of doctor Mendenhall. Everything seems to lead away from William Shakespeare for an author of the great Elizabethan plays to instead indicate Christopher Marlowe, "who stands alone, gloriously accused" (Calvin Hoffman). The strange thing is that all these remarkable results of research conducted since 1895 have not in any way made the Shakespeare authorities question their constantly less tenable position as maintainers of the Stratford man as author of the dramas. This can only be explained in one way: they don't want to, since they dare not risk the imagined security of their blind faith in authority.

Of course it isn't certain that Marlowe wrote everything in the dramas. We have pointed out a few weaknesses, for instance in "Timon", that could be later additions. But you can't escape the fact that Marlowe was the creator of the Elizabethan blank verse drama and that he already in "Edward II" brought this to perfection. You can't escape the fact that he alone had a motive for his death in Richard Baines' devastating denouncement of him to the Queen's Privy Council. He couldn't have continued to concentrate on dramatic poetry under such a threat. He had all the reasons in the world to free himself from all disturbances by disappearing as Marlowe to be able to concentrate on the main thing without interruptions. And you can't escape the fact that William Shakespeare does not exist as a poet until Marlowe has gone under ground.

But why Shakespeare? Here it is important to remember a few other things. Marlowe was not the only poet. Thomas Kyd was dead, but many others worked with the theatre. We must never forget the splendid and illustrious couple the Earl of Oxford and his son-in-law Lord Stanley, who according to witnesses both wrote dramas which no one knows where they have gone. Beaumont and Fletcher produced dramas unremittingly. Ben Jonson arrived later, but there were others. The Earl of Oxford had a Shake-Speare, a man shaking a spear in his coat-of-arms, and this heraldic symbol seems to have been prevalent here and there. The Time International Magazine points out quite correctly that the life of Edward de Vere was much more Shakespearian than any other contemporary person's: almost all the most dramatic episodes of the Shakespeare dramas occurred in de Vere's life. But such a colourful and self-centred Don Juan character doesn't write the world's most beautiful poetry, and those poems which have come down to us by de Vere's hand fall very far from the beauty of the Shakespearian language. De Vere may stand in the spotlight, but the observer thereof is somebody else. His son-in-law, theatrical collaborator and fellow enthusiast for the stage William Stanley must by this come under grave suspicion. Both the Stanley brothers held theatre companies, and William Shakespeare was on their payroll as an actor.

It is most probable that Shakespeare was selected as a gathering symbol for a comprehensive dramatic activity involving perhaps more people than the already mentioned. It's impossible that one man wrote everything in "The First Folio". There is a poem for example which we know for certain that was partly written by Marlowe and partly by Sir Walter Raleigh, ("The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" in the collection of "The Passionate Pilgrim"). "The First Folio" is a magnificent collection of the finest drama and poetry during the period 1593-1613, and we can't guess what number of poets might be guilty thereof. But Christopher Marlowe had once and for all created the form and was probably the only master thereof. All the others could have provided him with infinite material and ideas, he might have edited any number of works by others, but the stamp of the editor is his own.

The same perfection of form pervades Robert Burton's impressive work of erudition "The Anatomy of Melancholy", his only work, which is constructed with the same clarity of form as any Shakespeare drama. This overwhelming purity of form is impossible not to relate with the architecture of the dramas in The First Folio. Certain covert confessions in Burton's work must also cast a suspicion on the underground Marlowe.

Then we have the poems on the relatives of William Stanley, written 1632-33, which directly remind you of the Sonnets in The First Folio. Here they are:

"Ask who lies here, but do not weep.

He is not dead; he doth but sleep.

This stony register is for his bones,

his fame is more perpetual than these stones;

and his own goodness, with himself being gone,

shall live when earthly monument is none.

Not monumental stone preserves our fame,

nor sky-aspiring pyramids our name.

The memory of him for whom this stands

shall outlive marble and defacers' hands.

When all to times consumption shall be given,

Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven."

- epitaph on the Stanley monument in Tong Church off Birmingham.

"To say a Stanley lies here, that alone

were epitaph enough. No brass, no stone,

no glorious tomb, no monumental hearse,

no gilded trophy or lamp-laboured verse

can dignify his grave or set it forth

like the immortal fame of his own worth.

Then, reader, fix not here, but quit this room

and fly to Abram's bosom: there's his tomb,

there rests his soul, and for his other parts

they are embalmed and lodged in good men's hearts.

A braver monument of stone or lime,

no art can raise, for this shall outlast time."

The son-in-law of the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, William Stanley himself, the sixth Earl of Derby, perhaps the most important key figure in the whole mystery, died in 1642 at the age of 81 years, a very advanced age for those times; and with him died the English theatre, which was banned and closed by the puritans, who had extolled and written outrageous lampoons on the news of Marlowe's death, this Marlowe, whom a bishop of Canterbury gave an education at Cambridge to make him a theologian, who probably was the theological pamphleteer pseudonym Martin Marprelate of Canterbury, Marlowe's home town, who always remained a name of controversy to the pious party, and who after his heydays probably returned to theology under the name of Robert Burton.

(A small parenthesis in connection with Shakespearian mysticism: The Tempest has a clear occult touch with obvious glimpses of the occultism à la mode in the 1610s, but already Pericles contains a ritual which was practised by the first freemasons, still Rosicrucians at that stage: Act III scene 2, when the presumably dead Thaïsa is resurrected from the coffin thrown into the sea. Did the Rosicrucians adopt this mysterious scene from the play, or was it the other way around?)

All circumstantial evidence indicates Marlowe. Shakespeare was the name he chose as a collective pseudonym for all the theatre enthusiasts and their united efforts to turn the English theatre into something as big and marvellous as the Greek theatre of Athens had once been. Marlowe's own sacrifice for this cause was his own good name and reputation. The sacrifice couldn't have been greater, - but he probably felt the cause was worth it: the "Shakespeare" art of the theatre has never been surpassed.

The last word has not been said yet in this Shakespeare debate, which probably never will be concluded.

In this the obscurest topic of all ages you are grateful for the least ray of light enlightening us in the dense darkness surrounding the mystery of the Shakespeare dramas. Such a ray of light is the case of William Shakeshafte.

It appears from several of the plays that their author was initiated in Catholic thought and consequently would have had Catholicism for a base in his education if he wasn't a Catholic himself. In 1757 was found in the Shakespeare family house of Stratford a secret document in which John Shakespeare, father of the actor, committed himself to Catholicism. The man who seems to have won John Shakespeare over for the Catholic cause was a certain Edmund Campion from Lancaster, the Catholic heartland of England, which person appears to have surrounded himself with a circle of Catholics in Stratford. Four of the five tutors that might have educated William Shakespeare were Catholics from Lancaster belonging to this circle.

Towards the end of the 1570's there was a young actor up in Lancaster called William Shakeshafte. In 1937 the theory was presented, that this William Shakeshafte would have been William Shakespeare himself, since the name of William Shakespeare's grandfather was Richard Shakeshafte. According to this theory, John the father would have sent his son up to Lancaster to have him educated in general but also in theatre and Catholic thought, for which purpose he was given an incognito name, that of his own father, for the sake of safety. This very young actor William Shakeshafte must have been a Catholic, since he stayed within the circle of the arch-catholic family Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancaster, which family would have trusted the young actor's solidarity and protected him with anonymity. We mustn't forget, that Queen Elizabeth actually executed 200 Catholics during her reign. Two of these were the brothers John and Thomas Cottom, the former a teacher in Stratford 1579-81. Edmund Campion, John Shakespeare's Catholic friend, brought them both to Lancaster and Hoghton Tower in 1580, and two years later they were decapitated in the London Tower as suspects of high treason in the name of Catholicism.

This theory would explain certain things. Above all it would explain why the Shakespearean language is so full av idioms, words and expressions typical of northern England. It would also make the link between W. Shakespeare and the enigmatical William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby, leader of the Catholics and their candidate for the throne, and also the owner of Shakespeare's theatre companies, clearer.

William Shakespeare would then by his father early have been confirmed as a Catholic, sent up by his father and his teachers to the Catholic centre of intrigue in Lancaster, early have learned to act incognito, entered the theatre world at an early stage and found this disguise a good means to protect himself and survive. He would then early have learned to avoid the mistake of Christopher Marlowe to expose himself in the middle of the stage to the envy and intrigue of the establishment with their jealousy for power sacrificing anyone who challenged their position. Christopher Marlowe exposed himself totally from the beginning hiding nothing of his sympathies and taking clear and dangerous stands, while William Shakespeare never exposed himself but remained carefully hidden all his life - and not only survived but became the wealthiest man of Stratford.

What these theories can't explain are the Shakespearian epitaphs from 1633 belonging to graves of the Stanley family, which couldn't have been written earlier. Neither can these theories explain the fact established by doctor Mendenhall, that the literary styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare are absolutely identical.

The greatest argument against that Marlowe was Shakespeare has been the Preface of The First Folio (of 1623, the year of Anne Hathaway's passing away,) in which a long row of the colleagues of Shakespeare, above all Ben Jonson, testify to Shakespeare's genuineness. Calvin Hoffman, the foremost champion of the Marlowe theory, who recently passed away but to the last claimed he was in possession of evidence that Marlowe was Shakespeare, explains these Shakespeare testimonies, that Ben Jonson wrote anything for money. It might appear more difficult, however, to explain how eventually Christopher Marlowe from Canterbury would have learned the north English dialects.

There is still no binding evidence, and the questions are more troublesome than ever: Are any of the documents in the William Shakeshafte case falsifications? Could the Catholic confession of John Shakespeare, not found until 1757, be a forgery? Could Ben Jonson really have written lies in The First Folio about his deceased colleague in so convincing a complimentary manner? And why does the poet's dark period of despairing tragedies coincide so exactly with the revolting process of William Stanley against his family, so that even the poet's last period of harmonious fairy comedies commences exactly as this process finally is agreeably settled?

A colleague of ours in England wrote, that it would be a relief if William Shakespeare was the only guilty one of Shakespeare's works, because then nothing would have to be changed. We could only assure him, that so far neither Shakespeare, Marlowe nor Stanley could be excluded as suspects in the case.

Finally the question always remains, which all three of them undoubtedly would have posed to a stupid future world of curiosity: What matter is it who wrote the plays? The only important thing is that they are alive!

We have four major candidates: 1)William Shakespeare, actually a historical person, 2)William Stanley, the leader of the Catholics in England, jurist, a cousin of the Queen's, composer, world traveller and a theatre enthusiast and director, 3)Christopher Marlowe, the creator of the Elizabethan drama, the predecessor and greatest competitor of Shakespeare, whose sudden death in a woman's establishment in Deptford, reputedly in a brawl, clearly appears to have been a set-up, and 4)Francis Bacon, politician, jurist and philosopher.

The weakest candidate is Shakespeare himself. He appears to have been no more than an ordinary theatre amateur with a striking talent for business though, who managed to make himself a considerable fortune out of anything except the theatre. He didn't possess a single book when he died and seems to have been almost illiterate.

The strongest candidate is Christopher Marlowe. It is all but proved that he staged his "death" himself to be able to quit the scene of his career, since he by his frankness and challenging way of life with very revolutionary views had made himself increasingly powerful enemies. When he disappeared he was threatened by an indictment for forgery of coins through a false denunciation of a Puritan informer and had possibly nothing better to expect in life than torture with consequent decapitation, which process his colleague Thomas Kyd already had passed and would die of. None of the other candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's works had stronger motives to suppress his own name and person - in order to be able to continue working.

Francis Bacon can't be excluded from the investigation. During the 20th century the amassment of myths around his person has become too conspicuous to be ignored. Among other theories there is the supposition that he would have been a bastard son of Queen Elizabeth. This is proved wrong by the medical fact that the Virgin Queen died a virgin. Certain is, that Francis Bacon was a most talented and ambitious gentleman. It's not impossible that the progress of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons originally was his responsibility. His device was that, he lived well who kept himself secret. He was probably the most manipulative power in British politics, until his ambitions fell short in 1621 when he was completely disgraced and had to resign as Lord Protector, second in power only to the Crown, commanded by his king to plead guilty of having taken bribes. Although he died most naturally (at the age of 65, when he stuffed chickens with snow in the first deep-freeze experiment and caught a deadly cold), his person has assembled more myths than any of his contemporaries for his Masonic and Rosicrucian influence. In one version even he would have survived his own staged death in order to be able to continue to work in peace. The strongest argument against his possible Shakespeare authorship is, that his style is completely alien from Shakespeare's. He is a dry philosopher concentrating on pure science and common sense, while the author of "The First Folio" is anything but dry and scientific. There is nothing less Baconian than the Shakespeare Sonnets.

Finally there is William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby, related with both Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart and as close an heir to the throne as King James. He also would have had perfect motives to bury himself in anonymity to be able to act at all, since he was not only the leader of the Catholics but their candidate for the throne. He owned the theatre company of Shakespeare and was related with Francis Bacon, he composed music himself which was published in his days, as a young man he travelled widely all around Europe and was familiar with parts such as the Hellespont, Constantinople and Cyprus, Denmark and Wittenberg besides Italy, Navarra and practically all Europe. Two epitaphs for members of his family created in 1631-32 are more obviously in the style of Shakespeare than are many of the Sonnets. When he died in 1642 at the age of 81 all the theatres of England were closed and there was civil war. This is a coincidence too curious to exclude any suspicion that the destiny of "Lord Strange" was not intimately connected with that of England. There is nothing to contradict that he could be the secret author of Shakespeare's works.

The problem is complicated further by the method of doctor Mendenhall. This American doctor in the end of the 19th century construed a method to analyse the styles of different authors in order to reveal pseudonyms. The method was 100% objective and showed clearly, that Francis Bacon could not have been the author of Shakespeare's works, while the different styles of Shakespeare and Marlowe were perfectly identical with each other. The probable fact that the same author wrote both Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works does not exclude the possibility that a third person could have written it all.

Thus far we have reached. The research continues.

by Laila Roth.

In your Free Thinker Shakespeare Debate you seem to concentrate on two things: establishing 'waterproof' candidates and disproving all other candidates. I wouldn't occupy myself with either.

Instead I would like to present arguments for all four candidates, since there are arguments for all four, and in the name of justice all arguments should be investigated.

One theory remains for you to approach. It's the theory that the main characters in the Sonnets would have been the Earl of Essex and Mrs William Stanley, whom W. Stanley was jealous of since he suspected her of having an affair with Essex, which she well might have had, he being constantly encircled by beautiful bewitched women, until the equally jealous Queen Elizabeth beheaded him for having called her a living carcass. If the chief characters of the Sonnets are Essex and Lord Burghley's granddaughter, that is Mrs Stanley, the author then would of course have to be Stanley, whose love-hatred of his wife would match perfectly the sharp sonnets against "the Dark Lady", his "mistress", ending with reconciliation and resignation, just as Stanley's own life, just as the Shakespeare dramas end with the melancholy and ambiguous fairy tale comedies.

There are weaknesses in the theory of Essex and Mrs Stanley, I agree, but the theory makes sense in the context, and above all, the rank, age and character of Essex fits perfectly the Loved One in the Sonnets.

Of course, this character fits the Earl of Southampton equally well, Henry Wriothesley, "Mr W.H.", which has been the traditional interpretation of the main character; but in that case, who was 'the Dark Lady'? In my opinion, the Shakespeare theory falls on the terribly manifested jealousy in the Sonnets and certain dramas, a symptom known to have been William Stanley's but lacking in the stable family conditions of William Shakespeare. Thereby I wish in no way to disparage the Shakespeare theory. He is as good a candidate as all the others.

But John is perfectly right in finding the strongest motivation for writing under a pseudonym in Marlowe. That theory holds. As a successful dramatist he had aroused so much controversy and ire in puritan circles, that he was libelled with terrible slander about "homosexuality, blasphemy and atheism" and finally even of coining money, which must have resulted in his execution if he were brought to trial, wherefore he had every reason in the world to go underground and remain there. The gross slander has even survived until our time, so that there are even today Puritans who in the name of the only proper faith, that is loyalty to the Shakespeare orthodoxy, still love to dismiss the Marlowe theory by stating that "he was just a homosexual atheist who died in a drunken brawl". I find that surprisingly prejudicial of serious Shakespeare scholars imagining themselves to defend a proper cause.

On the other hand, I quite agree with John Bede, that the author of the Sonnets actually answers to the name of 'Will'. The last line of Sonnet 136 could hardly be interpreted in any other way.

Concerning Francis Bacon, I would like to present an objection to the reliability in the method of Doctor Mendenhall. Shakespeare and Marlowe only wrote poetry, while Bacon only wrote prose. According to the method of Doctor Mendenhall, Francis Bacon can't have written the works of Shakespeare, since his prose doesn't agree with the poetry of Shakespeare. Don't exclude Francis Bacon from the investigation on such ridiculous grounds, please.

I am looking forward to the continued development of your investigation with great interest.

The sonnets 1-19 express love of a younger man, and their message is a continuous: "Save thy beauty by begetting a son." Four fifths of all the sonnets express the same honest and self-effacing love of the same young man.

I sonnet 20 the young man is rather explicitly characterized: he has the face of a woman and the ability to attract both ladies and gentlemen. So he is rather androgynous and possesses the best traits of both sexes: he lacks female falseness and capriciousness and as a man is like "created for a woman".

In the sonnets 25-26 he humbles himself like to a lord, and these sonnets would indicate that the poet is without rank lacking "honour and proud titles", while the loved one is a lord. This would fit perfectly into Shakespeare and the dashing Earl Henry Wriothesley of Southampton, to whom the poet's two epic poems were dedicated. As is well known, the sonnets are dedicated to "Mr W.H." (Henry Wriothesley?), but a lord could never be called 'Mr'.

Then there is a crisis. In sonnet 29 the poet is hit hard by calamity, in 32 he speculates in his own death, in 34-35 he accuses the loved one for what's happened, in 41-42 there is a triangle drama between the poet, the loved one and a lady (the latter's wife?), and in 44-45 we have evidently a separation between the poet and the loved one with long distance and waters between, in 48 he leaves his most important legacy with his friend, in 50 the separation is definite: "My grief lies onward, and my joy behind", and in 56 there is even an ocean between them. All this seems to indicate a catastrophe of some kind with an exile, which would well fit in the picture of Christopher Marlowe's fate, his relationship with Sir Thomas Walsingham and Mrs Audrey Walsingham.

Sonnet 62 differs from all the others by its sudden self-love. Everywhere else, when the poet is occupied with himself, the theme is death and extinction.

69 is the first sonnet to criticize the loved one. Sonnets 71-74 are perhaps the most interesting ones in relation to Marlowe. He speaks about himself as a dead man, 73 contains the famous Marlowe signature ("consumed with that which it was nourished by"), and 74 seems directly to describe Marlowe's case, ("my body being dead, the coward conquest of a wretch's knife").

In sonnet 80 the poet suddenly has some competition: another worships the loved one, which puts our poet into the shade. Here is another constantly recurring theme in the sonnets: the poet's humility and denigration of himself unto self-effacement. In 81 he speaks again of his own death. In 83 the rival appears again and even more manifestly in 86. This has been interpreted as Shakespeare's attitude towards Marlowe, but the competitor could also be Spenser. And the object might