History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe

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 can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.' T. S. EliotMark Twain likened writing the biography of Shakespeare to reconstructing the skeleton of a brontosaurus – using 'nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris'. We work with a handful of facts and a pile of conjecture. All biographies of Shakespeare, from the wayward to the academic, use the same few-score hard facts kneaded togethe…