Many readers and scholars have wondered how Shakespeare got an inside view of court intrigues in Scotland ("Hamlet" and "Macbeth" are based on actual people and events there, including the court of James VI). And how he knew about life and politics in Italy (consider those Italian plays: "Romeo and Juliet," "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "The Merchant of Venice," etc.). There's also a longstanding problem with Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote," and how it was translated into its masterful English edition. The Marlovians see a single hand behind these apparently unrelated literary conundrums, and further suggest that Marlowe was among the 47 translators who rendered the King James Bible into such remarkable English.

Maybe that seems to wrap everything up far too neatly. But hold on: Diplomatic records place a man named Marlowe in Scotland several years before the fatal brawl, engaged as a tutor (and double agent, in the queen's service) in the court of James VI. And what's this? Christopher Marlowe actually reappears in the diplomatic records, postmortem. He was in Valladolid, Spain, in 1599 -- at the same time Cervantes was, and just a few years before the initial publication of "Don Quixote."

The "Quixote" translation -- which, in fairness, did not appear until 1612 -- was long attributed to a Thomas Shelton, brother-in-law of the spymaster Walsingham (hmm). Except there was no such person as Thomas Shelton; it was a nom-de-plume. In 1602, a communiqué from Valladolid says that Christopher Marlowe is planning to return to England the following year, a full decade after the supposed death of the famous writer by the same name. And there we pick him up again, in prison records, with his bills charged to Robert Cecil, another member of that same Cambridge spy ring. That same year, James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England -- and Marlowe's not in jail anymore. Somehow the King James Bible appears, translated by the 47 mystery men. And that's about where the research tapers off.

Well, except for the papers of Washington Irving, he of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," who once served as an American diplomatic attaché to Italy, and who alludes in his papers to a 17th century document about an English poet named Marlowe, exiled and under the patronage of the Gonzaga family. The Marlovians say that there are still unresearched archives in Italy that might hold crucial evidence. In his film, Rubbo interviews the most likely such Italian librarian, who says that in all the decades she's been there, nobody has yet come around asking to look at the Gonzaga family papers.

The weirdest bit, however, is something that the film mentions but doesn't explore fully. Peter Farey, a British Marlovian with a sort of hobbyish civil-servant aspect, gets lots of screen time in the film. Among other things, Farey says he has decoded the famously obtuse inscription on the Shakespeare plaque in the Stratford chapel, placed there to commemorate the First Folio, which was published after Shakepeare's death. It reads:

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

Farey's interpretation is more literal than many. Allowing for the peculiarities of Elizabethan punctuation and diction, he interprets it thus: "Read if you can whom envious death has placed within this monument to Shakespeare: with whom his [the real poet's] quick [living] nature died."

That part seems pretty straightforward. When Shakespeare died, so died the living envoy of the real poet; so died his front man. But why would anyone, or anything, be placed there? It's just a plaque.

"Whose name doth deck this tomb, far more, then cost?"

As for the second part, the only name on Shakespeare's tomb (which is outside, in the yard) is that of Jesus Christ. Christ, far more, then cost -- cost, such as the aforementioned "ley" presented by the innkeeper on that fateful night. Christ-far more-ley. Which is creepily close to the way Christopher Marlowe signed his name Christofer Morley) "Sieh all" is, Farey says, a common Elizabethan cipher: Nobody spelled "seeth" like that, especially on a plaque for a poet. Any literate Elizabethan, Farey claims, could have interpreted this as "he is," in reverse, or, in the parlance of the time, returned. He is, returned, with the word, "all": "He is returned with all that he hath writ."

As for the last line, we scarcely need to ask who Farey thinks is the "page," now gone, who served forth Marlowe's wit. That would be the rustic actor Shakespeare, a mere "Johannes fac totum." There is a bust of Shakespeare above the plaque (famously derided by Mark Twain as looking like a bladder). It shows the man with a quill and a piece of paper, writing on a pillow. It was renovated in the 18th century; early engravings show that the Bard of Avon was once effigied holding a sack of grain, like many another wealthy provincial landowner. Both the bust and the man, Farey would say, are but a figurehead. And what's this about someone, presumably Marlowe, having "returned with all he hath writ"? What might be "placed" in the floor beneath the plaque? Nobody has ever thought to look. Hmm.

There's more to the case as well: Funny references in the plays, Marlowe's own motto woven into texts, a rustic boob named "Falstaff" (as in, Shake-spear) -- stuff like that. But the question remains: Does it matter who wrote Shakespeare? As the scholar Touchstone (get it? It's another, ruder pun) says to a rustic boob in "As You Like It," "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."

A little room, perhaps, by the riverside on May 30, 1593. If you don't "tremble," as Dickens did, at the prospect of finding out some uncomfortable things about the Western canon, you can't help wondering what would happen if scholars ignored the injunction on Shakespeare's gravestone and started digging that dust and moving those bones.

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