ABSTRACT
The case for Christopher Marlowe’s authorship of the Shakespearean plays differs from all the others in that its supporters have not only to produce proof that he wrote them, but also that he was alive at the time in order to do so. Most of the plays belong to a period subsequent to the year 1593, and in the May of that year, according to the findings of a Coroner’s Court, Marlowe was murdered in Deptford. His body was identified, and was afterwards buried in the churchyard of Deptford Parish Church, where the entry to this effect can still be read in the Parish Register. Marlowe’s claims therefore cannot even merit consideration unless these awkward official records are first proved to be false. This is the task which Calvin Hoffman, the originator of the Marlowe theory, sets himself in the earlier part of his book, The Man Who Was Shakespeare, and it is to his efforts to perform it that we must first turn our attention.
