Books: Whodunit?

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Fake Murder? Shakespeare is first listed as an author in 1593, when the poem Venus and Adonis ("The first heir of my invention,") was registered at the Stationers Company. Plays bearing his name began to appear some years later. In 1598, a Rutlandshire clergyman-schoolteacher, Francis Meres, "specifically names twelve of his plays," compares them to the works of Horace, Homer, Sophocles.

Teacher Meres, says Teacher Hoffman, was fooled. Shakespeare's name was merely "tagged'' to these poems and plays in order to hide the identity of the "real" author, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare (1564). He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but records show that he was a brilliant student. He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Young Marlowe, as everyone agrees, translated Ovid, wrote poems and plays (Hero and Leander, Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, Edward II, The Jew of Malta). Records indicate that he was a homosexual and an outspoken atheist, also suggest that he was a secret agent of Queen Elizabeth's government. In 1593, a long charge of atheistic crimes was drawn up against Marlowe, but before he could be brought to trial (if such was intended) he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl. He was buried on June 1, 1593, in Deptford churchyard.

Or was he? Sleuth Hoffman says no. He believes that Marlowe was the "secret lover" of Courtier Sir Thomas Walsingham (WalsingHam, suggests Hoffman, is the "Mr. W. H." to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated). Fearing that his boy friend would be burned at the stake for heresy, Walsingham faked up a murder. Only a stooge was buried at Deptford. Marlowe lived on secretly for many years, wrote all the plays of "Shakespeare." In fact, he began to write under Shakespeare's name almost immediately. Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously six weeks before Marlowe's murder, was published four months after his "death." Calling it "the first heir of my invention" was just Marlowe's cute way of saying that V. & A. was his first crack at being W. S.

Just Snobbery? Author Hoffman has spent years compiling a list of Marlowe-Shakespeare "parallelisms," i.e., extracts from Marlowe's acknowledged works which are repeated or rephrased in the works of Shakespeare. He is not the first to find, for instance, that four whole lines from Marlowe's poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love turn up again with hardly a word changed in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, or that after Marlowe wrote of Helen of Troy, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?" Shakespeare echoed him (in Troilus and Cressida) with "She is a pearl,/ Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships." But Hoffman also lays down scores of absurdities which parallel nothing but his own wishful thinking, e.g., "Here is my dagger" (Marlowe); "There is my dagger" (Shakespeare). Nor does it ever occur to him that certain elemental ideas have struck almost every poet who ever lived, e.g., that rain may be described as Heaven's weeping, that fast-beating hearts are like hammer blows, that lovers long before the Elizabethan Age had decided that even the sunniest day was a pain in the neck compared with a long, dark night.