The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Marlowe survived 1593 and became Shakespeare. (Some people think he also became Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, or at the very least translated that novel into English, and that he also found time to be all 47 translators of the King James Bible.)

Kit Marlowe, even by the louche standards of the Elizabethan theatre, was a rake and a radical. He was homosexual, atheistic and a member of the free-thinking “School of Night”, patronized by Walter Raleigh. At the time of his death he was on bail from the Star Chamber, where a sometime colleague in espionage, Richard Baines, had testified that the playwright had once stated “that all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles”. Marlowe looked set to have his tongue cut out. Or be hanged.

However, he had friends in high places—friends with the influence and the motive to make the playwright disappear before the Star Chamber hearing.

Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, the men who shared Marlowe’s last afternoon, were all linked to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spy chief, for whom Marlowe had also worked in espionage. Walsingham appears to have saved Marlowe’s head once before, when the playwright/spy was caught counterfeiting money in Holland, a capital offence. A charge of atheism and sodomy may have been too big for Walsingham to have removed from the charge sheet at the Star Chamber, but he certainly had the men and the know-how to fake a homicide. And a disappearance. Widow Bull’s house was right on the Thames, ideal for a quick exit to the Continent. The matter of a corpse to substitute for Marlowe’s was easy; there had been several recent executions in the Deptford area that could provide suitable candidates for the coroner’s report. John Penry, a non-conformist Puritan preacher aged 30, one year older than Marlowe, is the favourite. Penry was executed a couple of miles from Deptford on the evening before Marlowe’s death, and there is no known record of what happened to his body.

Arguably, the strongest evidence that Marlowe was “disappeared” rather than dispatched is the lenient treatment accorded the man who stabbed him in the eye, Ingram Frizer. He was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth a month after the allegedly fatal incident.

On the other hand, M. J. Trow in Who Killed Kit Marlow? (1992) suggests that the leniency extended to Frizer is proof that he did murder Marlowe—but on the orders of Lord Burghley, another of Elizabeth’s spymasters, who feared that loose-cannon Marlowe might spill embarrassing beans at his trial. A similarly plausible argument, that the Earl of Essex arranged Marlowe’s murder to clear the way to slandering Walter Raleigh, is deployed in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning. This turned Samuel Tannenbaum’s 1926 classic The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe on its head, for Tannenbaum identified Raleigh as the organizer of the plot to kill Marlowe.

Those who hold that Marlowe survived his many enemies on 30 May 1593 generally propose that he then went into exile, first in France, later in Spain and maybe Italy. Naturally a writer as talented as Marlowe needed to carry on writing but, because of his new circumstances, he was obliged to adopt a nom de plume. It is at this juncture that the Marlowe conspiracy shades over into a Shakespearean one.

To those outside the ivory tower of Eng. Lit. academia, it may seem fantastic that the identity of the Bard, the world’s greatest playwright, is in doubt. There is no question that a theatrical impresario called William Shakespeare lived and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, but a number of scholars find it impossible to believe that he authored the plays attributed to him. How could a man with only a provincial grammar school education have written plays and poems which were rich in Latin and Greek? Many of the Classics that “Shakespeare” referenced and plagiarized were not even translated into English in the early 17th century, and would have been available only from the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge universities or rich collectors. Oddly enough, as “Marlovians” like to point out, Marlowe’s studies at Cambridge, together with the contents of his patrons’ libraries and his trips abroad as a spy, were exactly the training “Shakespeare” needed. Thus, the third Marlowe Conspiracy Theory suggests that Marlowe, living in exile and anonymity, continued to produce plays and poetry—but under the name William Shakespeare.

The strongest evidence that Marlowe was Shakespeare is timing. Shakespeare seems to have written nothing before 1593, the year of Marlowe’s death. The first work attributed to Shakespeare was the epic poem Venus and Adonis, registered in the Stationers Register on 12 June 1593 (two weeks after the incident at Widow Bull’s house). This was published with a dedication to Lord Burghley’s ward, the Earl of Southampton, which included two lines from a verse by Ovid that Marlowe had translated some years earlier.

After the registration of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare does not trouble the records again until he is paid for performances at Court in 1594; not until 1598 is there mention of him as a playwright. In that year he is cited as the author of 12 plays, emerging almost miraculously fully fledged as a great as well as a prolific dramatist. Since Marlowe’s handwriting would have been familiar to London printers, it would have been necessary to have his scripts copied by someone else before sending them off to print; in this context, the unexplained bequest to a copyist from Marlowe’s friend Thomas Walsingham becomes an interesting piece of circumstantial evidence in the “Marlowe is Shakespeare” debate.

There are those who suggest not only that Marlowe survived the Deptford incident to pen the plays of Shakespeare, but that during his European exile he translated the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote into English.

Don Quixote was published in Madrid in 1604. By coincidence there is evidence from diplomatic records that an Englishman by the name of Christopher Marlowe was in Spain between 1599 and 1603. The first—and arguably the finest—English translation of the book was published in 1612, and attributed to one Thomas Shelton, who is reputed to have been the ever-present Thomas Walsingham’s brother-in-law. Marlovians, however, speculate that the spectral Shelton, who seems to have authored nothing else in his life, was the nom de plume of Marlowe and used by him to disguise his brilliant translation of Don Quixote… or even his authorship of that novel!

In July 2002 the memorial plaque to Marlowe in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner was unveiled. Next to Marlowe’s date of death is a question mark, setting in stone the mystery of Christopher Marlowe.

Christopher Marlowe was murdered by Elizabeth I’s government to prevent him talking: ALERT LEVEL 4

Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1593 was faked and he became Shakespeare: ALERT LEVEL 5

Further Reading

M. J. Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe? 1992

Samuel Tannenbaum, The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe, 1926

Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 1992

Robert Maxwell

The corpse of British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell was found floating near his yacht Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands on 5 November 1991. An investigation by Spanish authorities concluded that the overweight Maxwell had died of a heart attack.

His family accepted the findings. Many did not. Maxwell had no history of heart disease. The interest of conspiracists became particularly engaged when a forensic scientist disclosed that a perforation behind Maxwell’s left ear might have been caused by a needle. Speculation that Maxwell was murdered intensified when it became clear he had been evasive about his background: born in Czechoslovakia in 1923, he had escaped from the clutches of the Nazis in circumstances never adequately explained. From this conspiracists hypothesized that Maxwell was smuggled through Nazi-allied Croatia by Communist partisans and in return agreed to serve in the Russian NKVD (later KGB). The NKVD dispatched Maxwell to Britain as a refugee, where he exceeded all their hopes of infiltration by first serving in the Army, then setting up a publishing empire, and then securing election as a Labour MP. To ease Maxwell’s climb up the greasy pole of the printing/publishing industry, the NKVD brokered deals between Maxwell’s Pergamon Press and Eastern Bloc publishers.

Alas, the mighty fall. The Israeli secret service, Mossad, apparently discovered Maxwell’s identity as a Soviet spy while interrogating a KGB archivist. This was a bitter blow to Mossad—they’d thought Maxwell was working for them. In revenge, Mossad dispatched an underwater assassination team to terminally