Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
A new documentary revives an old controversy: Was actor and landowner William Shakespeare merely a front man for Christopher Marlowe, the flamboyant gay genius and shadowy Elizabethan spy?
Mar 2, 2002 | If you look hard enough, it's possible to find a group of ardent souls, somewhere, who still believe almost any weird idea that might ever have held currency. The Flat Earth Society, for instance, is still very much in business, with headquarters both in America and what they'd hesitate to call the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia. There are groups of people, after all this time, who still think Japanese anime is edgy and avant-garde, and others still devoted to proving that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. Perhaps you know some of these people, or are one of them. For my part, I believe the Shakespeare-authorship thing. I think Christopher Marlowe might've written all the Bard's works instead, and it was Michael Rubbo's new video documentary, "Much Ado About Something," which just completed a two-week run at Film Forum in New York and should appear somewhere near you soon, that smashed my paradigm.
The film is about the so-called Marlovians, the folks who say that Marlowe was the guy, as opposed to Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, et al. Or, for that matter, the rustic actor named William Shakespeare who commonly holds the laurels. Rubbo is an Australian filmmaker best known for the 1974 Castro documentary "Waiting for Fidel." He started out wanting to document the Marlovian apostasy because of all the interesting characters involved (they might as well have been flat-earthers instead). He entered intrigued, but as a skeptic -- and was swayed.
Indeed, something odd seems to be ado, Shakespeare-wise: Mark Rylance, the somewhat dashing, hat-affecting artistic director of the Globe Theatre, speaks lavishly on-camera on how he thinks it was really Marlowe. Jonathan Bate, probably Britain's leading orthodox Shakespeare scholar, appears all postmodern-unflappable in the film but helped award it a major prize and blurbs it in the press.
But back to my paradigm. Pre-Rubbo, I used to think the same as most semi-educated people about the Shakespeare-authorship controversy: that everyone knows the guy wrote his own stuff and we can totally prove it and it isn't really a controversy at all but part of a common urge to find conspiracies all over the place. There are lots of people out there, for instance, who believe in a secret government conspiracy to create hypnotically programmed killers, like in "The Manchurian Candidate." Of course, that actually happened -- it was called MK Ultra and was, fortunately, unsuccessful, otherwise there might've been a rash of assassinations by lone, deranged gunmen beginning in the early '60s -- and there's the rub: "Conspiracy theory" is a scare term, but real conspiracies happen all the time, especially wherever you find spies and government dirty-tricks bureaus. If they're doing their jobs right, it's sometimes very hard to tell where facts leave off and the conspiracy-nut surmise begins.
Rubbo's film shows that Her Majesty's Secret Service (the original, Elizabeth I version) might have been involved in the Shakespeare thing up to their Elizabethan ruffs. While "Much Ado About Something" begins by showing the Marlovians as harmless eccentrics, mostly of the English Miss Marple and Colonel Mustard variety, it also shows them as holding that rarest of patents in the conspiracy-buff field -- an idea that keeps looking more compelling the further you get into it.
So, Marlowe. The film shows us a man who was the most eminent playwright and the finest writer in English of his day. A young guy, handsome; we have his portrait. He's the guy, as even the orthodox scholars say, who would have been Shakespeare, if not for having been killed, in May 1593, at age 29, in a sudden brawl at a rooming house. Marlowe was an authentic genius, a polymath, and it turns out, an apostate freethinker with a warrant on his head from the church, and an upcoming date with the torture chamber. And according to the evidence the film shows, he was a highly ranked secret agent for the queen, sent on missions overseas to stir up trouble and dig up information.
His patron, Francis Walsingham, was certainly one of Elizabeth's spooks, and Cambridge, Marlowe's university, was a recruiting ground for young agents. A letter to the regents at his college shows that the queen had taken a keen interest in keeping Marlowe out of trouble. The college thought he'd gone to France to cavort with Catholics, a bad thing indeed in those days. The palace demurred on France, but vouched for Marlowe's valuable service there to the crown.
But trouble struck. Church authorities got a line on Marlowe through an informer, and accused him of atheism, homosexuality and a number of other problematic things (mostly true, it seems). Marlowe scholar Charles Nicholl tells the camera that he believes the brawl, which happened a week after the warrant was served, was actually an assassination meant to keep Marlowe from spilling crown secrets. He was in the rooming house for eight hours, alone with three other men. One was a spy for the queen en route to deliver a diplomatic packet to London; another, Ingram Frizer, was employed by Marlowe's own patron, Walsingham; and the third was a sort of Elizabethan Ratso Rizzo type. The official story, reenacted in the film, is that they argued about the "ley" (the bill for the food and booze), whereupon Marlowe grabbed Frizer's dagger and struck him on the head with it from behind. Frizer turned, disarmed Marlowe and backhanded him with the same dagger, whose blade caught him in the right eye. And exeunt. But more on that anon.
