CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Long ago, I read the book by Calvin Hoffman that advanced Marlowe as Shakespeare, The Murder of the Man Who was Shakespeare. I got a kick out of its plot, and strongly identified with the outspokenly non-conformist Marlowe. Certainly, he had the mental equipment to have become a Shakespearean-level playwright (if not necessarily the personality and character to have become Shakespeare.) Moreover, his tendency to say blasphemous and/or unpatriotic things, and to make enemies made it much easier to believe he might have disappeared, but continued to write plays using a front, as Hoffman contended, than it did to believe that some noble used a front merely to escape the derision of other nobles for writing, gasp, for the public stage, which was the main motive given for their man’s use of a fake-name by the Oxfordians and Baconians then.
Alas, the conspiracy required for Marlowe to have lived long enough to have written the plays is preposterous. Here’s what happened, in brief, according to the inquest report: on 30 May 1593, Marlowe spent a day with three other men, all of them in some degree suspicious characters, Robert Poley, a government agent; Nicholas Skeres, who had probably once been a government agent and could still have been involved in some way with government work, and Ingram Frizer, who apparently was not in government service but, like the other two, was a con-man who is on record as having cheated sons of well-to-do families out of money. Finally, Marlowe quarreled with Frizer about the bill (le reckoninge). This led to Marlowe’s trying to stab Frizer, who re-directed Marlowe’s knife into Marlowe, killing him. At the inquest two days later, a coroner with a jury of sixteen local citizens believed the testimony of Poley, Frizer and Skeres on the matter and found that Frizer had killed Marlowe in self-defense. The body of Marlowe was on view at the time, though the conspiracy-buffs are sure it was someone else’s (or maybe his own, rendered inert by some strong drug). There is no direct evidence of any conspiracy to counter the direct evidence of the inquest report, needless to say, and little indirect evidence. Not that there were not anomalies, but an anomaly-hunter can find anomalies in any criminal or like incident.
For instance, many Marlowe-advocates claim that Marlowe could not have “then & there instantly died” from the wound he got, as the coroner’s report stated. But, assuming he actually died instantly (instead of only seeming to have), there would have been nothing anomalous about it. Here’s what Marlowe-authority Charles Nicholl says about it in his book, The Reckoning:
Frizer, still hemmed in by Skeres and Poley, struggled with Marlowe to get the dagger off him. “And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye, of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch.” From this wound, Christopher Marlowe “then & there instantly died.” Judging from this description, the point of the dagger went in just above the right eye-ball, penetrated the superior orbital fissure at the back of the eye socket, and entered Marlowe’s brain. On its way the blade would have sliced through major blood-vessels: the cavernous sinus, the internal carotid artery. The actual cause of death was probably a massive haemorrhage into the brain, or possibly an embolism from the inrush of air along the track of the wound.
Most of the other “anomalies” can be explained as readily.
Worse for the Deptford Hoax than the absence of direct concrete evidence for Marlowe’s faked death coupled with the direct evidence of his unfaked death is the extreme unlikelihood that any sensible conspirators would have worked up so wacked-out a scheme. We are to take them to not have considered unworkable an undertaking that could only succeed if: (1) a jury (16 men!) would not know either Marlowe or the man whose body was switched for his; (2) all the connivers would be willing to risk fairly serious punishment if they were found out, and Frizer a murder rap if not; (3) a loose cannon like Marlowe could keep himself concealed indefinitely; (4) the powerful enemies Marlowe was being protected from (according to most Marlspiracy theorists) would not send at least one representative to observe the public inquest and make sure privately of what had happened, even to the extent of digging up the supposed Marlowe; (5) no one would observe or hear what really went on at Mrs. Bull’s house during the many hours Marlowe and the other three were together there, which would include, presumably, the delivery of a corpse; (6) the corpse used in the proceedings could be gotten without any problems; (7) no one involved in the many subplots, such as the stealing of the corpse, would talk.
Instead of this, why not just have Marlowe leave the country? Or disappear, maybe at sea? Or have a doctor (one person) sign a death certificate stating that Marlowe had died of the plague. If a body needed to be buried, and there’s little reason one would have, another body could be buried quickly (because the custom was to bury plague victims quickly) in place of Marlowe’s (as in the Deptford Hoax except that few or none need have seen the burial, and if the body were examined, it could more easily pass as Marlowe’s because of the disfigurement the plague would cause, which could easily be enhanced, I would think—as a knife wound could not).
One counter argument to the above is that an official writ of someone high up in the government stating that Marlowe had died would be more credible than, say, some friend of Marlowe’s saying Marlowe had fallen off a boat and drowned. There are two problems with that: (1) an official writ could still come out of a simple back-alley death, or death by the plague, or several other possible scenarios, with many fewer people involved; and (2) if Marlowe were so important to the government that a hoax like the one proposed by the Marlowe-advocates could be carried out, the pro-Marlowe forces in the government would have been powerful enough to get him off the hook much more simply: by telling his enemies that he was guilty of none of the evil they suspected him of, but had only posed as a villain for reasons of state.
Peter Farey, the most gallant defender of the faked-death scenario, remains adamantly convinced of its plausibility. I’m afraid I can’t cover his arguments in full, but I hope in the following few paragraphs to give a fair sense of them, and why I reject them. His central argument is that from what we know about the men who met in Deptford and the circumstances, the most likely explanation by far for their meeting there was specifically to fake Marlowe’s death. The jurors didn’t know enough about these men and the circumstances to even consider that possibility. Here are Farey’s points, with my counter-comments interspersed:
(a) “Marlowe was in deep trouble, required to report daily to the Privy Council while further evidence was collected concerning suspected heresy. Comment: but what we also now know is that he was almost certainly in imminent danger of arrest, trial and execution for writing seditious literature. Three people had already been hanged for this within the past couple of months, despite Lord Burghley’s attempts to save at least two of them. That Marlowe would at such a time have chosen to spend a relaxing day in Deptford Strand ‘for no particular reason’ (as I at one stage argued–BG) is unthinkable.”
Response: even if Marlowe thought he’d be executed the next day, he may have decided to enjoy a social function. Human beings are not predictable. This is not likely, I agree, but what is likely, it seems to me, is that either he didn’t know how strong the case against him was, so was sure he’d not be punished, or he was aware of how strong the case against him was, but was still sure he’d not be punished (for any of a number of reasons including his knowledge that he was an Important Spy, or had friends in high places—or even that he was not rational). I might add that we do not know that “he was almost certainly in imminent danger of arrest, trial and execution for writing seditious literature,” although Farey presents some evidence (none of it direct) for supposing he may have been.
(b) “Marlowe’s friends and/or acquaintances were people like the ‘most ingenious’ Earl of Derby, and the ‘deep-searching’ Earl of Northumberland, together with his three ‘magi’, the mathematician Thomas Hariot, scientist Walter Warner, and geographer Robert Hues. There were his friends among the ‘university wits’, Thomas Nashe, Robert Peele, and George Chapman, and there was his patron, Thomas Walsingham. Instead of people like this, would he really choose to spend what were likely to be the last few hours of freedom he would ever experience with two confidence tricksters and a former agent provocateur with whom there is no evidence whatsoever of previous friendship? I think not.”
Response: this is excessive certainty (and snobbishness) as to how Marlowe, a variable human being whose circles of friendships are incompletely known, would have acted.
(c) “For the whole of the time he was in Deptford, Poley (one of the three at Deptford with Marlowe) was on duty—’in her majesty’s service’ the record says. He had left the country on 8th May, and – despite having with him ‘letters in post (ie in a hurry) for her Majesty’s special and secret affairs of great importance,’ had gone from the Hague to Deptford before delivering them. When exactly was this relaxing day with a few ‘friends and/or acquaintances’ (as one Stratfordian scenario hypothesizes) organized? The whole idea is absurd. And (other than attending the inquest on 1st June) what on earth was he doing in her majesty’s service between 30th May, when the event happened, and 8th June when he at last got round to delivering those letters?
Response: First of all, outings do not need to be organized. Secondly, that Poley did not deliver the post till six days after the inquest pretty strongly demonstrates he was in no hurry to deliver it. What was he doing instead? Goofing off, probably. Why the lack of hurry to deliver the important message? Who knows, but some possible reasons include his knowlege that the message wasn’t really important, and/or that his boss always wanted things “in post,” which meant for him, “in a week or two,” and/or that Poley was insolent and didn’t bother with orders. We must also be aware that the record of Poley’s having had “letters in post” has to do with his pay, where the importance of the letters may well have been exaggerated to justify his being paid as much and/or for as many days’ duty as he was.
(d) “At the time of this happening, Frizer and Skeres were right in the middle of some rather shady financial chicanery together. To make a healthy profit (about a hundred thousand pounds at today’s rates), all they needed was to get things settled with a young man called Drew Woodleff. That they would at this very moment ‘decide for no particular reason to get together’ with a couple of other people in no way involved with this (and, as we have seen, with far more pressing concerns of their own) is just out of the question.”
Response: “Just out of the question?” Poppycock. We weren’t there, so we can’t know that they didn’t know that they didn’t have to wait a few days before proceeding with Woodleff. But the Woodleff business does suggest that perhaps Frizer and Skeres got together with Poley and Marlowe because they needed their help with Woodleff for some reason we can never know, as we can never know such a great deal about this incident.
(e) “Even if we were able to ignore all of the above, however, (which of course we can’t) why on earth would they choose Deptford as a place to meet? The obvious answer is to meet Poley off the ship, but this would be ridiculous. Arrivals by sea were never as predictable as that, and an adverse wind could have had them spending days waiting for him to turn up. Marlowe was reporting to the Privy Council at Nonsuch every day, and Poley had urgent and important letters to take there, so somewhere in that vicinity around the time of his return would have been far more sensible. Or why not at or near Scadbury, where Marlowe was apparently living, and Frizer was Walsingham’s ‘servant’? Deptford, in this context, makes no sense at all.”
Response: They had to pick someplace. But who says they met there rather than on the way there? One possible scenario is that Mr. A was going to Deptford for one of any number of reasons, met Mr. B and Mr. C along the way and invited them along—and Mr. D., by coincidence, turned up there, too, and joined them. Or maybe they did all decide to go to Deptford because they had heard Mrs. Bull served terrific mutton, or ran a terrific whorehouse, or because none of them had ever been there and wanted to see what it was like, or because they were trying to go to Paris but got lost.
Farey sums up as follows: “All of the above is based upon written records. We can, of course, invent various imaginative reasons why such things might not matter, but that’s only if we are determined to deny the possibility of some other purpose being the real reason for these people being there. And that would be cheating!” With that, Farey goes on to say that his scenario explains some fifteen things that he feels need explaining, and which no other scenario explains. For example, it “fully explains why Marlowe would choose to spend the day with these people rather than with his known friends and acquaintances.”
My response: No matter whom you put with Marlowe, Farey’d find a way to say why they, and only they, could have been there. I would add that I certainly do not “deny the possibility of some other purpose being the real reason for these people being there.” What I deny (what I, in fact, consider unthinkable) is that the “other purpose” Farey believe brought them together is not the only possible one, nor the most plausible one.
Farey also claims that his scenario “fully explains why the three ‘witnesses’ needed to be accomplished liars.” I would see no need to–and suggested to Farey that if the three “witnesses” were an army officer, a bishop and a judge, all of the highest moral repute, he would argue that only such unimpeachable witnesses could have been there. It seems to me that all he is doing with his fifteen items in need of explanation is demonstrating that he can make any datum fit his predetermined conclusion.
Here’s Farey’s worst argument for his scenario: “With (it), a dead body said to be Marlowe lying there at the end of the day is exactly what would be expected. With (a scenario that assumes the four persons involved came together for who knows what reason but not to pull off a faked death hoax), it is last thing you would expect.” From this it follows that had Farey been in England at this time and known all the facts he lists—e.g., who was involved, where they went, what we know about them, etc.—he would have been able to predict what actually happened. Of course, I would have been able to predict Marlowe might have been killed in a tavern brawl or the like since I would have known that Marlowe had gotten into two or three recorded potentially lethal fights before. He was known to be bad-tempered. It is most certainly not the last thing I would have expected. But, then, I would not have expected anything. What happens, happens, for people like me; what happens is the result of a conspiracy for anti-Stratfordians (if it has anything conceivable to do with the Bard). Clickety-click.
Farey simply assumes that every known detail concerning the Deptford event and its participants is relevant, and that no unknown details concerning it are. He’s like someone asked to identify the contents of a pitch-black cage who touchs a hoof and something pointed, hears a moo, and smells something that reminds him of the way his pet cat smells. He then says the cage contains a small hoofed cat with antlers who moos. He refuses to accept that there may have been more than one animal in the cage, so that some or all of the “facts” he discovered may not apply, nor that there are the many facts that he has missed that very likely would apply. However unlikely his identified animal is, it best fits the few known facts (if only in his view), so that’s it for him.
Farey, I suppose I ought to report, pooh poohs those of us who find the faked death scenario implausible. We have no way of knowing that many faked deaths have not occurred successfully since we’d never find out about them if they had succeeded. The same is true, naturally, of successful authorship hoaxes: if they were successful, it follows that we could not know that they were successful.
The problem with this reasoning is that we still should have heard about at least one faked death that succeeded for a long time—until, say, the person involved no longer had to pretend to be dead, because he was. We haven’t. On the other hand, we have heard of much simpler faked deaths that did not succeed, some of them involving just a single person who disappeared. That such faked deaths failed suggests, I should think, the difficulty of pulling off a very complicated one that went without being so much as suspected for centuries (in spite of its being widely known that the person whose death was faked had extremely good reasons to fake it). The same reasoning holds for being skeptical that many authorship hoaxes as complicated as any of the alleged Shakespearean ones could have been carried out too successfully even to have been suspected.
Aside from the implausibility of the conspiracy needed for it, the Marlowe candidacy is unsupported by any kind of substantial evidence. Hoffman produced little more for his man than parallels between his written works and Shakespeare’s. The feebleness of those parallels was what first turned me against his theory. Moreover, if one writer used phrasing like the other, so what? There seems little reason not to expect Marlowe and Shakespeare to know and be influenced by each other’s work. Shakespeare, the actor, may even have acted in one or more plays by Marlowe. No doubt, if I were fair, I’d list all the parallels Hoffman, and others after him, found. I’ll just list two examples: “Ah, cruel brat, sprung from a tyrant’s loins” which is supposed to parallel “O, tiger’s heart, wrapped in a woman’s hide”; and “Love is too full of faith, too credulous” which does parallel “O hard-believing love, how strange it seems/ Not to believe, and yet too credulous”—as do probably five zillion similar lines by other writers. Amazingly enough, the supporters of all the other candidates for the role of The True Author have found equally inexplicable parallels between what their man wrote and what Shakespeare wrote, which should give all parallel-hunters pause for thought, but never does, the parallels they find being the only really good ones.
The best support for the Marlowe hypothesis is his having been a poet and playwright of genius and of the proper age to have written Shakespeare’s works. And, of course, although Marlowe was a commoner, he was not only college-educated, but came to know many of the more important cultural figures of his time such as Thomas Hariot, Thomas Watson and Sir Walter Ralegh. He was almost certainly part of the English equivalent of the CIA, too, which makes it easier to believe there may have been more strange, secretive goings-on in his life than in the lives of others of the candidates.
Stylometrics (the statistical analysis of such things as sentence-length, ratio of adjectives to nouns, number of unusual locutions, etc.) has also been used in Marlowe’s favor, particularly Thomas Mendenhall’s finding early in the twentieth-century that Shakespeare’s pattern of relative word-lengths—percentage of three-letter words, four-letter words, etc. is almost exactly the same as Marlowe’s but significantly different from other writers whose writings Mendenhall analysed. Modern stylometricists rarely claim their results to be conclusive indications of anything (nor, in fact, did Mendenhall, although Hoffman reported his findings as though he did). And more than one have carried out other studies that have found great differences between Marlowe and Shakespeare. Not that Marlowe advocates don’t believe themselves able to explain away those differences. Farey, for instance, attributes them primarily to the effect of passage of time on Marlowe-as-Shakespeare’s style, arguing that it is unfair to compare young Marlowe’s style with that of Shakespeare ten or twenty years later; it should only be compared to the young Shakespeare’s (which, Farey believes, it fairly closely matches). He is probably right, but I think few objective persons, knowledgeable of the state of stylometrics at this time, would deem it mature enough to be more than mildly suggestive; Farey himself does not put a great deal of stock in it.
The final kind of evidence that has been adduced for the Marlowe theory consists of secret messages. For instance, the prologue to Marlowe’s play, The Jew of Malta, is spoken in the name of Macheval, which—for Marlowe-advocates—must almost certainly be the author himself, for Marlowe was often referred to as Machiavellian, and the first four letters of the name, MACH, produce Ch. Ma. So what, someone might ask? Well, it so happens that “Ch. Marl.” is the name under which Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was published in 1604!
The passage begins: “Albeit the world thinks Machevil is dead,/ Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps,/ And now the Guise is dead, is come from France/ To view this land and frolic with his friends.” For the Marlowe-advocates this can not be an entertainingly fanciful playwright’s explanation for the presence of Machiavelli onstage after his death, but has to be a proclamation of Marlowe’s not having died as supposed. Later parts of the passage, about Macheval’s deeming religion a childish toy, could apply to Marlowe as well, but “Though some speak openly against my books/ Yet will they read me, and thereby attain/ to Peter’s Chair: and when they cast me off,/ Are poisoned by my climbing followers” can only apply to Machiavelli, since Marlowe had no followers, nor could his books reasonably be said to help anyone gain “Peter’s Chair,” or the papacy.
Equally or more silly is the interpretation by some Marlowe-advocates of a sentence spoken by Touchstone during his conversation with Audrey (iii. 3): “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” Supposedly, this could not have been written by the man from Stratford, because he could not have known that the inquest on Marlowe’s death spoke of “le reckoninge” (the bill) as the cause of the knife fight that did Marlowe in. But Shakespeare could, of course, have heard about “le reckoninge,” and heard that phrase itself, which could easily have gotten into circulation even before the inquest and reached him in the gossip he would surely have heard about Marlowe’s end. Or it could have been a coincidence that he used that particular word.
Much more elaborate than the preceding is Farey’s interpretation of the Shakespeare Monument. This is the instance of secret-message-finding that I have previously said I would spend some time on because I find it representative of all the Shakespeare-rejectors’ word-work—at its best. Here, again, is the text of the English part of that monument’s inscription. which is all we will be concerned with here:
STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST, READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE, FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATH WRITT, LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.
To most scholars, this means something like:
(l.1) Wait, fellow traveler through mortality—why rush by so quickly?
(l.2) Read, if you are able to, who it is that death, envious of his high value, has caused
(l.3) to be put into this monument: Shakespeare, with whom
(l.4) the vital portion of the natural world went, as well; whose name on this tomb,
(l.5) is of far greater value than the tomb’s material cost since all that its bearer wrote
(l.6) leaves living art, (though) only paper (and also as a page/servant), to assist his wisdom (in making itself known).
Anti-Stratfordians are loud about how few scholars would agree on every detail of my interpretation above, or on any other interpretation; this makes the inscription, for them, ambiguous. But, of course, scholars disagree on the exact interpretation of just about all poems, particularly those from centuries ago; and they certainly agree on all that is important in this one: the fact that the passer-by is asked to take note of the name of the man, Shakespeare, who is buried here, and that this man was an uncommonly fine writer as the accompanying text in Latin verifies. Peter Farey would agree that the text’s surface message approximates my interpretation of it, but that the text is ever so slightly warped here and there so as simultaneously to contain the more important message he finds hidden in it. For starters, he—pursuing the time-honored anti-Stratfordian tactic of seeking anomalies—zeroes in on the inscription’s peculiar request that a passer-by read its message if he can (as if he could do that if he couldn’t read). Farey theorizes that a passer-by will look twice at this, and—on reflection be led to the “alternative meaning” that is inviting him to “solve if thou canst.” An unprecedented instruction for such an inscription to make, Farey agrees, but what of it? There has to be a first time for anything.
Nor does it bother Farey that such a text’s asking a person to read it if he could was not unusual (something he himself points out). For instance, Ben Jonson’s “An Epitaph, on Henry L. La-ware,” which was probably written in 1628, the year of La Ware’s death, begins, “If, Passenger, thou canst but reade/ Stay, drop a teare for him that’s dead…” My main guess as to why that such seeming absurdities existed is that literacy was still new–too new for many to recognize the circular thinking involved in “read if thou canst” in asking a person to read something if he was able to read. Some kinds of obviousnesses have to be pointed out by the very clever before the rest of us notice them. Then, of course, followeth our amazement at not having seen them before. An example few have remarked on is Shakespeare’s “remembrance of things past.” How can one remember anything that is not in the past, or has not passed?
Farey’s interpretation of the text as a whole is as follows:
(l.1) Stay, traveller, why go by so fast?
(l.2) Work out, if you can, whom envious Death has placed
(l.3) with, in this monument, Shakespeare – with whom
(1.4) his living function died. ‘Christ-
(l.5) ofer Marley’. He is returned, nevertheless. That he did the writing
(1.6) leaves Art alive, without a ‘page’ to dish up his wit
It seems to me that Farey’s translation makes reasonable sense up to “He is returned, nevertheless.” It strikes me odd that someone would be placed in the monument with Shakespeare but possible. The phrase, “living function,” seems a null phrase, but too short to count for much. “He is returned, nevertheless” loses me entirely, for I don’t understand why Marley, who is in the monument with Shakespeare, has returned. Farey says in his Internet essay on the subject that the sentence “implies that, despite what we thought, he has nevertheless . . . in some way returned from the dead.” But Farey’s translation gives us too few details to let us know in what way or from where Marley has returned.
Then comes “That he did the writing” . . . What writing? For Farey, it is the writing that we traditionalists think Shakespeare did, but there is nothing in Farey’s translation of the inscription that tells us this. Whatever it is, it assures the continued existence of Art that lacks a page to dish up Marley’s wit. It is here that we have to go outside the covert text for clues. According to Farey, we have to guess that Marley’s art will no longer have Shake-speare as a page to serve up his wit, Shakespeare having in his lifetime acted as a front for Marley. We are to further assume that because Marley is still alive, and has written Shakespeare’s previous works we will get more such works from him (although Marley neglected to follow through on this, so far as the historical record indicates).
It is at this point that one wonders what the point of the secret message is, from its schizpirational author’s point of view. It is absurd to believe that anyone who did not already believe Marlowe was Shakespeare would bother to look for a secret message in the inscription, much less such a secret message. It is near-infinitely absurd to believe that anyone not believing this would find Farey’s message (as we shall see when we examine how Farey found it). So: what is the point of a message that secretly tells a few people something secret they already know? Farey’s guess: “This is simply a way of providing Marlowe with his share of (appreciation), whilst (for reasons I do not pretend to know) preserving the secret of his survival.”
If, on the other hand, the message is intended (more in keeping with the way human minds work) to tell posterity The Truth, why the vagueness? Why would a clearly ingenious puzzle-maker not secrete a knock-out message into the inscription like, “Bless the Man buried here for pretending to have written the works of Christopher Marlowe of Canterbury to preserve that man’s Life?” Or, sticking closely to the text as given, why not (after line one), “Read, if you can, who is in this monument with Shakespeare: Christ-ofer Marley, since it was he that writt/ Our England’s most majestic works of witt?” This would also make the overt message a clearer one: “Read, if you can, whom death put in this monument; whose name decks this tomb far more than cost—since it was he that writt our England’s most majestic works of wit.” Why so tangled a secret message when much better ones were available? Why, in fact, is it a given that any message dug up by a Baconian or Neo-Baconian Word-Sleuth will invariably be clumsy if not stupid, and equivocal at best? Anti-Stratfordian answer: to allow the secret-message writer, if caught, to be able to deny the message was intentional! The idea is to make the secret message so ridiculous that any sane person would take it as an accident, and not ferret out its author and punish him for revealing . . . the Truth.
I trust the reader will agree with me that Farey’s uncovered secret message would not be worth leaving for posterity—or, really, anyone else—as Farey has it. Aside from that, is it really there? Its first two lines are reasonable enough, however unlikely. Farey’s reading of “with in” as two separate words in its third line to get “with, in this monument, Shakespeare” is horrendously awkward but can be excused as poetic license, I suppose–although “within” was often spelled as two separate words in Shakespeare’s time, and seems rarely if ever used to mean anything but “within” whether spelled as one or two words.
Not so easy to excuse is Farey’s unwarranted conversion of “nature” to “function.” The problem with “nature” as function” is not that “nature” can’t, with straining, mean “function,” but that in this context, nature can only (untortuously) mean “the physical universe”—because it lacks “the” or “an” or some other such modifier. Unless the secret message is intended to tell us that “functionality” or some such thing had died, which wouldn’t make much sense, but I suppose would be permissible.
Then we come to Farey’s “decoding,” or whatever he chooses to call it, of “WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE, FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL,” to “Christ-ofer Marley. He is returned, nevertheless.” He begins, having determined that there is a puzzle to be solved, by considering, “whose name doth deck this tombe (question-mark understood)” to be a clue in a riddle. He elects to disregard the monument as a tomb since it doesn’t act as a tomb, in his considered opinion. Since the monument is said to hold Shakespeare (at the behest of Death, I might add), it would seem (and has seemed to nearly everyone who has given the matter thought) that “this tombe” refers to, and further specifies the exact nature of, “this monument,” and that the name that decks it is Shakespeare’s. For Farey, though, “this tombe” most logically must refer to Shakespeare’s actual tomb, which is the tomb nearest the monument. This leads him to conclude that the only name that can satisfy the clue he has found is “Jesus.” That’s because the only name (as a name) on the gravestone over Shakespeare’s tomb, is Jesus (in the phrase, “for Jesus Sake forbeare”). “Jesus,” of course, is the name of Christ. Christ, then, is the person whose name is on “this tomb.”
I have all kinds of what I can only term grammatical problems with this. If we are asked to find out whose name is on “this tomb,” and decide—arbitrarily, it seems to me—that Shakespeare’s grave is meant, then the proper answer would be, “Christ’s”—possessive—if not “Our Saviour’s” or “the Messiah’s,” etc. Even if we ignore that, how do we know to go on? As Terry Ross shows in an analysis of all this he did at HLAS, “Jesus” is a more than sufficient answer to the riddle. Death has placed Shakespeare, a good Christian, with his God. Then, using Farey’s translation of “sieh” as “he is returned,” and assuming “he” to refer to “Shakespeare,” we can take the words directly after our solution, “Jesus,” to say that “he (Shakespeare) is returned far more than cost” (by which is meant, the cost of dying). All else reverts to its surface meaning.
Against this, Farey has, he believes, revealing punctuation marks: the commas before and after “far more.” The second of these isn’t certain—and the placement of commas throughout the inscription seems random, but for Farey they indicate that we must take “far more” and “then cost” as two separate semantic units that go with “whose name doth deck this tomb,” or “Christ.”
Doing this, we soon discover–that is, Farey first among mortals has discovered–that “far more” is an anagram for “ofer mar.” He has no explanation as to why, having found an answer to a riddle to get “Christ,” we are now to play anagrams to get, “ofer mar,” but it is breath-taking to find that we now have, “Christ-ofer Mar!”
Then what? Here the inscription tells us: “then cost.” “Than” in that era was often spelled, “then,” as the inscription has it, but could, of course, mean, “then,” too—and does here, for Farey. Once we play our third game—this time the simple crossword game of finding a synonym—and convert “cost” to “ley,” we have “Christofer Mar,” then “ley,” or “Christofer Marley,” which is the way Christopher Marlowe spelled his name in the one signature we have from him! One has to admit that it’s ingenious. But it’s hard not to consider it nutty, as well.
Oh, “cost” becomes “ley” because the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for “lay,” which can also be spelled, “ley,” that gives one meaning of it as “impost, assessment, rate, tax”—and each of those is a kind of cost. This use of “lay” is so obscure that the OED’s editors have found only one recorded instance of it. Amusingly, it was in a manuscript from the 1300s that was not printed until centuries after Shakespeare’s monument was erected, and it was not then spelled “ley.” Nor was it used as a synonym of “cost”: “He . . . bad his hostes feede hem that day And sette heore costes in his lay.” The “lay” was not the costs but was a bill for the costs. No matter: Farey is convinced that he has found his name.
His adventure is not over, though. Faced with “sieh,” he must continue, because “Christopher Marley since all he has writt/ leaves living art but page to serve his witt” would not make sense, even to him. This text results from a fourth game Farey decides to play for no reason except that he likes the result. (In defending his playing games to find his solution, Farey offers the example of a funerary inscription that contains an acrostic—a quite obvious one (one using the first letter of each of its lines) that spells “Francis Walsingham”; he presents no precedent of an epitaph’s requiring one to play two games, much less four, instead relying again on the certainty that there has to be a first time for everything.
“Sieh,” to get back to Farey’s “solution,” is “He is” backwards, or “returned,” as one definition of “back” in the OED has it, and it—”sieh”—is with “all,” or “withal,” which Farey takes to be a possible synonym for “nevertheless.” Farey deems it important because of another set of clues: that in certain words in the inscription (all of whose letters are upper-case) “a larger capital is unexpectedly present or missing.” There are six such: “read,” “with,” “tombe,” “quick,” “sieh” and “he.” It’s clear why “read” would be important since without it no one would examine the inscription cryptographically—or however it is that Farey can be said to have examined it. “With” needs to be emphasized to make sure the word-sleuth doesn’t read it as merely the first syllable of “within.” The “tombe” is where we find Christ’s name. As for “quick,” well, I can’t see why it should be considered important, myself. It is actually superfluous, since “nature,” whatever it is, is said to have died, so must previously have been alive, or “quick.” I think only Farey could consider it more worthy of emphasis than “nature”—or, especially, “far” and “more,” which are absolutely vital since they help spell The True Author’s Name; or “cost,” the Final Clue to the Name; or “page,” the brilliantly clever pun without which there’d be nothing in the secret message to tell us that Shakespeare acted as Marley’s front. That “he” should be emphasized makes little sense, either (unless, as Terry Ross suggests, it refers to Jesus). It is thus close to unarguable that the extra-large capital letters are there at the whim of the engraver, just as the extra, and missing, punctuation marks are (where they aren’t the result of wear on the metal bearing the inscription).
Of course, in Farey’s favor, “sieh” is misspelled. But Terry Ross has found other examples of worse misspellings of funerary inscriptions of the time: in one, for instance, “Christ” lacks a proper “s”—one has clearly been later squeezed into it as a sort of super-script. They weren’t world-class at the art of punctuation back then. Even today gravestones—expensive ones—get things wrong. On his, Isaac Bashevis Singer was described as a “Noble” (rather than “Nobel”) laureate. Elvis Presley’s middle name was misspelled on his stone, and an Edgar Allan Poe monument in Baltimore included both a misspelling of his name and a double “the” in a quotation, that took two goes to correct.
Of the remaining liberties Farey takes with the inscription, little can be said in defense of his switch of “that he hath writt” to “that he did the writing”; paraphrasing the former as “that he did writing” would be quite proper, but sticking in “the” is cheating, pure and simple. His reading “but” as “without” seems quite strained; the OED, however, does give “without” and “unprovided with” for “but” . . . in Scottish use at the time of Shakespeare, and for all we know the author of the secret message may well have been Scottish, so I’ll let that go. Nonetheless, the verdict seem undeniable: the message Farey finds is no more on the monument than similar messages found by Baconians, Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians are where they turn them up right and left.
In defending the word-games he plays to find his solution, by the way, Farey offers the example of a funerary inscription that contains an acrostic—a quite obvious one (one using the first letter of each of its lines) that spells “Francis Walsingham”; he presents no precedent of an epitaph’s requiring one to play two games, much less four, instead relying again on the certainty that there has to be a first time for everything.
Whatever one thinks of Farey’s uncovered secret message, one thing has to be admitted about it: it is superior to the one found by a certain Hugh Black using Lord Bacon’s cipher on the poem on Shakespeare’s gravestone. By fooling a bit with the text’s captializations, then arbitrarily using combinations of upper- and lower-case letters to stand for various letters in the alphabet, he got, “Shaxpeare. Fra Ba wrt ear ay,” which believers understood to say, “Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”
To conclude on the Marlowe theory, it has twice the conspiracy requirements of the other theories and as little evidence as they to support it. Worse, Francis Meres, Ben Jonson, John Howes, Robert Greene (if he wrote The Groatsworth of Wit), Henry Chettle (probably) and others of Shakespeare’s time mentioned him and Shakespeare as two different men. We are left with no reason to seriously consider Marlowe to have been The True Author.
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Next Chapter here.
This is great, Bob. Your comments on individual poems are some of what you do best – thanks for publishing these. It would have been great if they were in the book!
sarcophagus lid
sinks low above the treetops
wash it down with beer
returns the moonlight
half lion and half pharaoh
mingles with the guests
the dandelion
all my scientific friends
are classifying
i take a bite
how sour are the pickles
that dwell in the worlds
fallen from the trees
and into her red mittens
the visiting moon