Marlovian theory

The Marlovian theory is an idea about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. The Marlovian theory says that Christopher Marlowe wrote most of those poems and plays.^[1] The theory also says Marlowe did not die in Deptford on 30 May 1593. It says his death was faked. Like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was an Elizabethan poet and playwright. They were both born in 1564.^[2]

Marlovian theory began in the 1800s.^[3] The idea is that the Church wanted to punish Marlowe for being an atheist, so Queen Elizabeth's government helped him fake his death, leave the country and continue writing plays by pretending those plays were Shakespeare's.^[2]

One piece of the puzzle is that the play Lust's Dominion was attributed to Marlowe when it was published in 1657. The play borrows from a pamphlet published in 1599, about the death of King Philip II of Spain in 1598. Marlowe died in 1593. The attribution has been recognized as spurious (wrong) by critics and scholars for nearly two centuries.^[4]

Marlovian Theory Media

Putative portrait of Christopher Marlowe (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge).
William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
The body was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford. The plaque shown here is modern.
Two Latin lines (arrow) from Ovid's Amores, which Marlowe had completely translated into English years earlier, on the title page of the first printed work of Shakespeare (1593), here reprinted in 1594
An 1870 oil painting by Ford Madox Brown depicting Romeo and Juliet's balcony scene
Cover of the 1609 quarto edition of the Sonnets.
The inscription on Shakespeare's monument