January 4, 2005

Ok. The Marlowe case is simple. But the amount of knowledge required to grasp it is vast. Marlovians suppose Marlowe did not die on 30 May 1593, as his inquest claims, but lived on, as the official dispatch delivered to the Queen on the 5^th of June stipulates. One of the two documents has to be wrong. Might they both be? Marlovians say yes. They were both wrong. Marlowe didn’t die on or shortly after the 30^th of May, but simply fabricated his death to avoid what Shakespeare will call, in the Sonnets, the "vulgar scandal stamped upon [his] brow."

Marlovians know Marlowe was supposedly stabbed in his brow by a "wretch’s knife,"

Taken in tandem, these two sonnets alone prove Marlowe’s case. Of the two, only Marlowe had been the victim of a vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow by a coward’s knife and only Marlowe’s body had been dumped into a plague pit or "common grave,"

as "the prey of worms" just as only Marlowe’s name had received a "brand" and had his "nature subdued:"

William Shakespeare never underwent this sort of public scandal. Was never thought stabbed or thought tossed in a common grave to arise from it to warn the world that he had "fled":

This assumption is the only one that explains why this conclusion, i.e., "my name is Will," comes as a surprise to the reader. If the reader knew in advance the Poet’s name was "Will" or "William Shakespeare," there would be no surprise. The surprise arises only in the learning the poet’s name had changed to "Will." We are thus led to know the poet faked his death, after some disgrace, fled and changed his name to "Will."

So the case is simple and straight forward. Marlowe, having sustained his arrest appeared to die, the victim of a "wretch’s knife" via a blow to his "brow." His body was tossed into a "common grave" along with his name. He then became the writer "Will" or "William Shakespeare," who appears in these same sonnets to have been the de facto father of a young noble with the initials of "W. H.", to whom the Poet and his publisher, Thomas Thorpe, "wisheth..eternitie." The only peer with those initials at that moment (1595/6) was William Herbert, later the Third Earl of Pembroke, it being well known that Marlowe and Herbert’s mother knew one another and were in the same small community at the time of Herbert’s conception in 1579. Venus and Adonis, which recalls Herbert’s birth and the quakes of that year, "and like an earthquake shakes thee on my breast," entered history on Herbert’s 13^th birthday in 1593, i.e., April 8/18th. The poem pledges his future patronage:

The pledge was fulfilled in 1623 when Herbert backed the publication of the First Folio, while excluding the autobiographic poems that connected him to the poet and implied him illegitimate. Both Sir E. K. Chambers and Frederic Boas came to the opinion that "W.H." was in fact William Herbert, Chambers caving in reluctantly after evidence of Herbert’s early marriage proposal surfaced. The poet comes as close to making this relationship clear as possible and even hints of some family blackmail if his demands are not met,

No estranged father could put it any better. Such fathers are made "lame by Fortune’s dearest spite." They are cut off from their sons, not only by name, but by lineage as well. Thus they are truly lamed, for their name dies. And the "hidden shame" is all theirs. Stratfordians would rather Shakespeare to have been a homosexual pedophile, but the record is clear he wasn’t, as proven by the 26 sonnets to the so called "dark lady," who the boy shared affections with, as sons do, with their father’s former lovers. Lovers who become their sons’ mothers. What sort of homosexual would fondly recall the boy’s mother, let alone urge him to marry so he might have a lineage:

Of the two, only the Kentish Marlowe could have known William Herbert’s Kentish mother in the "lovely April of her prime." So the case is closed. Marlowe did it. If additional proof be needed consider just sonnet 76, which contains an acrostic to Marlowe’s teacher and friend Dr. Thomas Watson who saved Marlowe’s life in the now famous fray in Hogs Lane and slew William Bradley in the process:

Can the reader spot it? Stratfordians claim they can’t. Since acrostics and anagrams can and should be deciphered "forward and backwards," as Marlowe reminds us in Faustus, notice lines three and four can read "To W" or, read twice, as "To T W". Then come the six lines in a row that read, indisputably, "TWATSO". They are followed by a line that opens with "And" which has the sound value of "N" so the actual acrostic was devised to read TWATSON. Or T. Watson. The sonnet credits him as the Poet’s mentor and inspiration, a well established fact regarding Marlowe and an impossibility regarding the actor.

Hero and Leander had entered on the 28^th of September 1593, or five years after Watson had saved Marlowe’s life on that day in 1589, i.e., 18/28 September. This date trail in the works, links both canons to events in Marlowe’s life or to events in the works. The Sonnets, for example, entered on the 20th  of May 1609 or 16 years after Marlowe’s unexpected release on the 20th May 1593. Two other works said Shakespeare’s entered on that same day in consecutive years, Anthony and Cleopatra and Pericles, an unlikely coincidence, particularly since different publishers and printers were involved. Edward II entered history on the day its historic events begin on, as does 1 Henry VI.   1 Henry VI entered history 201 years to the day from the date of its opening action, it being a well established fact the FF was delayed in print for a year, raising the possibility 1 Henry VI had been planned to enter on the 200^th anniversary of its opening action, and suppressed for thirty years to do so. 

The last work said Shakespeare’s, Two Noble Kinsmen, entered in 1634 on the same day the first work said Shakespeare's (V&A) appeared on in 1593 (the 8/18 of April). Twenty years later Marlowe’s last known work, the lost Maiden’s Holiday, entered on that same day in 1654, a registration cycle that spans 60 years and memorializes William Herbert’s birthday. Marlowe, if he was still alive, would have celebrated his 90th birthday that year.  Two of his sisters made it nearly that long.

Midsummer Night’s Dream entered on the 8^th of October 1600 or on the same day North claimed the Athenians celebrated the return of Theseus on and, thus, the birth of their Republic. It proves an imaginary date North made up and mentioned only once in his Life of Theseus, a translation of Pultarch's, relied upon by the author of MND. Hamlet, it’s oblique subject having been James VI, later James I, surfaced on the 26 of July in 1603, James having been crowned on the 25^th of July in 1566 and on the 27^th in 1604, on St James Day. Masters of ceremonies, like Shakespeare’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek, were paid to track these important dates and arrange events to memorialize them properly. Their real life analogs, Sir John Cheek and Sir Lewis Lewis Lewknor were well known Elizabethan and Jacobean figures, universally ignored by Stratfordians. Cheek was Lord Burghley’s brother-in-law and Lewknor claimed to have been Marlowe’s classmate at Cambridge and to have been given the same degrees, a fact not supported by the Cambridge records. As James’ mysterious master of ceremonies he would have frequently interacted with the players and writers. His appointment dates to the 21th of May 1603. 

Henry IV, the most personal of the histories and the one to signal Marlowe’s survival, entered on Marlowe’s birthday, the 26^th of February (1598), a day of no importance to Henry. Henry V entered on the 4^th in 1600, the first Monday. Henry’s death fell on the 3^rd of August in 1422 or the first Monday of the month.  Two other plays by "Shakespeare" entered that same day, Much Ado and As You Like It.  It is the only time three of his plays surfaced at once.  As it turns out Henry VI created a three day festival in Canterbury to celebrate the memory of his father, Henry V.  They were and are the 4th, 5th and 6th of August.  Three plays for three days, with a bit of a private jest tossed in for good measure.

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta entered on the same week day a year to the day from his arrest orders, i.e., the 17^th of May 1594 and 18^th of May 1593 prove the same weekdays. Othello entered on Southampton’s birthday, Marlowe and Southampton having overlapped at Cambridge. Richard II entered history on the 29 August, Richard having been defeated at Flint on the 19/29 August in 1399. The Rape of Lucrece appeared on 9 May 1594, or a year and one day from the date of the London pogrom that tortured Kyd and arrested Marlowe. The Privy Council’s orders, authorizing torture, were dated Friday 11 May 1593. The 9^th of May 1594 proves a Thursday. Perhaps the office was closed on Friday? Henslowe notes in his Diary, on the 8^th of May 1594, that he paid 15 pounds "to lay down for his share to the Queen’s players when the broke and went into the country."  The plague, scholars know, was ravishing London that week.  Someone tracked dates for the entry of these works over a period of 60 years.  If it wasn’t the author who was it? And why connect them to events in Marlowe’s life, if it wasn’t Marlowe? So Marlowe did it. And he had fun doing it, "these blenches gave my heart another youth." The plays, nearly all of which, except for the English histories, follow his adventures in the foreign diplomatic service of England:

He found favor with James VI, just as Kyd said he was planning to do, and he never looked back. The sonnet above, along with the "encryption" of his name in the King James Bible (Psalms 45 and 46) and his verse translation of it, disguised as the marvelously heretical, Slave Deus Rex Judaeorum, which he attributed to the notorious courtesan, Emilia Lanier and timed to appear along with the King James Bible in 1611, suggest he really was ordained and cloistered, at least once.  (Stratfordians like to print "God" in lower case, attempting to imply the author supposed himself a disciple of Pan, but the original is uppercase.) His cloister was, likely, at Valladolid, Spain where he surfaced under his own name on the 20/30 May 1599. He returned to London in 1604 and was pardoned under his own name that year in Canterbury by the new Archbishop, a mentor from his Cambridge days, Richard Bancroft. 

Once believed the Trinity Marlowe, that other Marlowe proves dead in 1596, leaving scholars with the choice of two dead Marlowes, only one of whom had been Kentish. With him at Valladolid was Cervantes, which explains the remarkable English version of Don Quixote published by Marlowe’s publisher, Edward Blount, and attributed to "Thomas Shelton," a nom de plume scholars have never deciphered, but which is comprised of the names of Marlowe’s patrons, Thomas Walsingham and his wife Audrey Shelton, to whom Hero and Leander was dedicated by Blount. Blount, we must remember, also furnished the world with the 20 manuscripts first published in the First Folio as the plays of William Shakespeare. 

Curiously Blount published several anonymous diplomatic translations during the period dedicating them to Southampton, Walsingham and Herbert, linking the four principals of the Shakespeare conspiracy to a high level translator who could not be named, but who Blount says was alive, well and "desirous" of doing them "good service."   Oddly Stratfordians, including the Editors of the prestigious Cambridge Bibliography of the English Language (CBEL) have erroneously attributed these translations to Blount, even though he clearly stipulates he wasn't  in his dedications to these men.  Shakespeare either uses these same translations, including Don Quixote, or the original materials in his works. 

What would appear to be this same hand turns up as the emendator to the unique copy of the Second Folio of 1634 called the "Perkins," now at the Huntington and once thought a Collier forgery.  The hand made over twenty thousand emendations, some of which have been proven authentic, when an original edition of Troilus and Cressida surfaced in the early 20th century.  In order to avoid facing the implications of Shakespeare alive and well c. 1635, the famous or infamous Sir Frederic Madden, then head of the British Library and Museum (c.1860) labeled Collier a forger.  The case against Madden has been proven by Professor Dewey Ganzel in his Oxford University Press biography, Fortune & Men's Eyes The Career of John Payne Collier. (1982) And by forensic analysis of the ink which proved it was period ink and not dies or paints mixed by Collier. Ganzel called the criminal conspiracy against Collier "the most successful...defamation...in literary history."   I'd say it was the second most successful...with the Shakespeare conspiracy taking top honors.  There can be no doubt we are reviewing the most puzzling series of literary events in our history---just as there is no doubt Marlowe's life lies woven into the fabric of the Sonnets and most of the plays.  Just as the author chortled, in Measure for Measure, "death's a great disguiser." 

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