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PE: What about this man, here. If this is indeed Christopher Marlowe.
RB: Well he does at least have the track record of being an excellent writer in the same genre
as William Shakespeare-
SW: Absolutely, yes.
RB: Acknowledged as a very powerful influence on Shakespeare's writing, essentially - he
didn't exactly invent blank verse drama, but he was the first person to make it work, and
the English history play, he wrote long narratives out of Ovid, so he has Hero and Leander, the
first publication with William Shakespeare's name on it is Venus and Adonis, which is almost
a pair of poems, very similar poems.
PE: He's a great writer...
RB: He has the right writing background.
PE: Of course, we would say 'he ain't Shakespeare'.
RB: Well he certainly wasn't Shakespeare at the time he's supposed to have died at the
age of 29, but then nor was Shakespeare. And I think you said in your book, Stanley, Shakespeare
& Co, you said that if Shakespeare had died in the same year that Marlowe's meant to have
died, 1593, we would regard Marlowe as the better writer.
SW: No, what I said was if Shakespeare died in the same year as Marlowe did die.
RB: Ah, yes, okay, yes, I slightly changed the words a bit, but you said Marlowe was
the better writer.
SW: Yes, I believe that. There would have been more great writing from Marlowe than
there had been at that point from William Shakespeare.
RB: Yes.
SW: Though of course at that time, Shakespeare had already written some plays, so if you
think Marlowe wrote them as well, you're in a quandary.
RB: Well, there were plays that were already written which we now attribute to Shakespeare,
but nothing appeared with the name William Shakespeare on it until a couple of weeks
after Marlowe died, or supposedly died.
SW: Ah well there are plays in the First Folio, they're attributed to Shakespeare there.
RB: Yes, but they're not attributed to him until 1623, and in fact, until the 1920s quite
a lot of orthodox scholars, even some very well-respected names, attributed things like
the Henry VI plays to Marlowe. So in fact you know there was a whole school of thought
that some of those early plays were essentially Marlowe plays that Shakespeare had taken on
and rewritten and adapted.
PE: Ros, your novel takes the premise that Marlowe didn't die in 1593.
RB: Yes.
PE: And I'm not sure, I'm not sure whether that's something you, you actually believe
or not. You don't - You question the evidence.
RB: I question the evidence around his death, yes.
PE: But the evidence doesn't have to be true in order for your novel to tell a good story.
RB: No, no, it is a work of fiction, as I keep trying to reassure people, and you can
thoroughly enjoy it no matter who you believe is the author of Shakespeare, especially if
you love Shakespeare, because I've put a lot of Shakespeare references in.
PE: You see, for Stanley and I, it does matter, absolutely, that the evidence that exists
for Marlowe's death, the coroner's report, and the burial record, are good enough pieces
of historical evidence, wherever one's coming from, which make them undeniable.
RB: Well, I mean, this was the interesting point for me when I read Charles Nicholl's
chapter in your book, on Marlowe, is that Charles Nicholl himself has written a very
excellent book, I have to say, The Reckoning, and then another version of it ten years later,
in which he very much disputes that the inquest document is true. Now, he doesn't dispute
the burial record, but he does dispute the inquest document, he raises all kinds of issues
with it, as people have ever since it was first discovered in 1925. And the fact is
there's been no real agreement as to the veracity of the inquest document, you know, scholars
have been very much split, and I would say the majority believe the inquest document
to be false.
SW: Well the important thing is that he's dead, and you're not disputing that evidence,
if he's dead he can't go on to write the works of Shakespeare.
RB: Well-
SW: Of course this is all partly to do with the fictional, you've written this excellent,
fascinating novel in verse, with a number, a great many different poems in, it's not
a single verse narrative, and it's only one of many many novels that have been written,
the most famous one perhaps is the one by Anthony Burgess-
RB: Yep
SW: -Nothing Like the Sun, and we have a chapter in our book by Paul Franssen about fictional
treatments of this topic, there have been many doc - many novels, over a good, as you
said yourself the first suggestion of Marlowe came in a novel about a hundred, a little
less than a hundred years ago...
PE: It's interesting, Paul Franssen in his chapter identifies fictional tropes among
that body of work, that genre, and one of them is that Shakespeare has to be presented,
normally is presented, in that genre, as an uneducated person from, you a know, a town
which is in a sort of backwater, and that constant trope, we had it in the film Anonymous
SW: Very much so, he was a drunken, illiterate buffoon.
PE: And actually one of the things about The Marlowe Papers is Shakespeare hardly appears.
RB: Yes.
PE: I just wondered why that was the case.
RB: Yes, I did completely sideline him, I agree. I have him agreeing to be the front
and sort of represent the plays, but he - well actually, one of the things I based that on
is the fact that there is so little personal testimony around him, that he doesn't seem
to have hung out with other writers, we don't have anything, you know, he doesn't seem to
belong to that circle of writers in London, and, you know, no-one ever reports a conversation
with him in a pub, or you know, there's no obvious communication with him, he doesn't
get involved in that commendatory poems business, and so he seems to me a very taciturn man,
he keeps himself to himself. And also because I know that Diana Price has shown that there
are periods of time when we expect him to be in London, and then it turns out he's in
Stratford, he's doing some business in Stratford, so I imagined him being really quite absent
for the purpose of the book. I thought that would work rather - rather well. And I think,
you know, I agree that there is this trope in fiction of really diminishing, as much
as possible, William Shakespeare of Stratford, and sometimes making him quite an objectionable
character, and I think that is entirely for the purpose, I suppose, of making a good story
or something, making a baddie. I didn't want to make him a baddie, I think if he was in
role, which he is in the novel, where's he protecting this man's life by agreeing to
front his plays, then he's doing him a good service, he's doing a good job, so I didn't
want to take him apart.
PE: My favourite depiction of Shakespeare in any novel is in Virginia Woolf's Orlando,
in which Orlando sees Shakespeare writing, and it's a rare account, in any work, of how
Shakespeare physically sat, or looked, when he was writing. And the whole narrative just
stops. And you know it's supposed to be Shakespeare and he keeps cropping up in Orlando. And Orlando
stares at Shakespeare across a room: 'Is this a writer? Tell me everything that ever happened
in the world', it's a marvellous moment. Let's think about Part Two: Shakespeare as Author.
PE: Theorising Shakespeare's authorship by Andrew Hadfield, the University of Sussex.
That chapter really is incredibly helpful, I think, because it's, its about helping us
all to relax about that fact that we shouldn't be worried about there being gaps in the records
of people's lives, or, that the kinds of records that we would most wish to see in someone's
life don't in fact survive and aren't there.
RB: I did have a problem with that chapter, I mean Andrew is someone I know rather well
as my PhD supervisor, but he'd already been challenged on this point, I believe, when
he put this in Sixty Minutes, and challenged with the data of Diana Price, because it is
actually unusual: the number of gaps, the amount of gap that there is, if you like,
this man-shaped absence of data, is actually extraordinary, and I thought it was problematic
for me in that chapter, that he - I would like to see an answer to Price, I haven't
yet seen an answer to Price's data, showing that Shakespeare's ... the gap in Shakespeare
evidence that actually shows he was a writer - because we have a huge amount of evidence
about him, more than any other writer, but not related to writing, so -
PE: It's how you approach evidence, isn't it -
RB: Yes.
PE: - it's what you decide to do with that evidence, and Diana Price has a different
agenda, I think, there, with her telling history. Andrew Hadfield is right in saying we shouldn't
be worried about -
RB: Well, is he? Is he, is he? Because they are extraordinary gaps, they're not usual
gaps, they are exceptional gaps, and that hasn't yet been answered, and I'd love to
see an answer to that.
PE: In- SW: But-
PE: Sorry, carry on Stanley.
SW: Well, I was going to say in my chapter, the next chapter in the book, I produce a
great many allusions to Shakespeare as a writer -
RB: But they don't link to Shakespeare of Stratford, and there's no link to him until
long after he's dead, but that's 1623 -
SW: That's 1623, but that's only seven years after he's dead, and why not, why -
RB: Well-
SW: Why discount evidence after somebody's dead?
PE: Can I just jump in here and say the first reference to that by corroborative evidence
in the First Folio's 1623, but the funeral bust might have gone up in 1616, we do not
know that it didn't.
RB: No, we don't know when it went up, it's true, we don't know when it went up, but the
point is, I want to know - I don't know if we can ever know - but I do want to know why
there aren't references to him that show that he actually knew other writers and that he
had any kind of writerly life.
PE: Well there are writers who talk about a writer called
RB: William Shakespeare, and that's not disputed, and Stanley very very... I mean I like you
really take us through it, year by year, and I really appreciate that, you know, piece
by piece, through the evidence of writers who know that there is a writer who publishes
under that name, William Shakespeare. But none of them know him personally, there's
no - there's certainly no indication that they know him personally, if they did know
him personally they don't reveal a personal connection -
SW: Oh, that's not quite true, I mean there's the Manningham anecdote about Shakespeare
-
RB: Yes, but that's an anecdote! And he's heard it from Mr Curle. So he clearly doesn't
know Shakespeare personally. And also we don't know, it doesn't say that he's a writer. He's
connected to theatre.
PE: But I see what I'm hearing from you Ros which is an absolutely completely understandable
longing, we sometimes don't have the evidence, the kinds of things we would like to have
evidence for, and the fact that we don't have evidence, isn't evidence of absence.
RB: But if you ask someone who's in evidence science, like Professor David Schum, who is
emeritus professor of Evidence Science at UCL, he says that where there is absence of
evidence where you would expect evidence to be, that in itself is an important piece of
evidence that needs to be accounted for by any explanatory narrative.
PE: Well we can't always account for evidence.