ABSTRACT
There was a period in the mid-1590s when William Shakespeare could not get Christopher Marlowe’s voice out of his head. For what spare hours Shakespeare owned he idled at the Rose, gripped by the plays of his matchless peer. One dismal afternoon in the late 1580s Shakespeare gave a coin to stand in the pit and watch a tall actor bellow the words, “From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits. … ” Of all the audacious acts of Shakespeare’s professional career, perhaps the most audacious was that he did not, with the words “Then after all these solemn exequies / We will our rites of marriage solemnize” booming in his ears, shuffle back to Stratford with his tales between his legs.
