History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe

by Rodney Bolt

Book Overview

What if Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to the Continent and went on to write the works we now attribute to Shakespeare? 'About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1596910208
• ISBN13: 9781596910201
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very clever

The footnotes alone are worth the price of the book - very, very funny! Really gets you thinking about how scholars write Shakespeare biographies from very skimpy evidence. Marlowe's genius and absolutely fascinating life wonderfully captured by Bolt. Fun, educational, irreverent.

fiction, but what fun

Farfetched, but lots of fun to read. Very imaginative and I, for one, would be happy if it were true that poor Kit was not murdered, but lived on to create. I enjoyed the descriptions of the politics and personalities of the time, especially my favorite villain, Sir Robert Cecil.

Clever, witty, ENTERTAINING!

If you're a fan of Shakespeare, and want a way to experience the flavor of life in his times (Elizabethan England), there is no better book from the standpoint of entertainment and thought-provoking suppositions. Fiction? OF COURSE! And the author admits it. But what FUN! (This book has for me a lot of the exciting "you are there" of the film Shakespeare In Love: wildly informative and entertaining quasi-fantasy.)

A well-imagined alternative history

If you've ever been bemused by the fuss about who wrote the Shakespeare plays, this book will set you straight. The foreword reprints Sam Clemens' (aka Mark Twain's) inventory of all the positively known facts about Shakespeare, and it's a scanty list. Most striking is the fact that Will's children were illiterate, that he left no literary bequest but carefully distributed physical goods down to old furniture in his will, and that we know more about his life as a trader and bean counter than we do about his acting. Bolt takes as his premise that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him, and that he acted as a front for Christopher Marlowe who was writing from exile after narrowly escaping assassination; a stand-in died in his place in the infamous "tavern brawl". Bolt readily admits that this is a fiction, but argues that even supposedly reputable Shakespearean history is mostly invention, too. As he says in his Afterword: "Other writers have looked at the evidence and deduced a story; I have imagined a story, then supported it with the same sparse evidence." The book weaves a persuasive and instructive tapestry of Elizabethan life. (Bolt does a good job of signaling what's his invention, and what's based on accepted sources.) It gave me with a good sense of the intrigue and insecurity at the heart of the regime, of the making and staging of plays in that time and of the constant flux as people and ideas flowed freely across war-torn Europe. There are frequent references to, and reinterpretations of, Shakespearian poetry and plays, and many witty asides. I sense that I missed many of the puns, anagrams, and in-jokes, but they were done with such a light touch that this didn't bother me. My only quibble with the book is that Marlowe is a cardboard figure around whom the history turns. The peripheral characters are better drawn, from Shakespeare as a ambitious and venal minor talent, to Marlowe's friends and mentors in the spy world, to the puppetmasters like Sir Francis Walsingham and the slimy Sir Robert Cecil. This book is a history, as the title promises; it's not really a biography, even an imagined one.