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Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy
By Park Honan
Oxford University Press £25
421 pages
Dateline: 7th November, 2005
Although Park Honan, who is Emeritus Professor at Leeds University's
School of English, has written his own life of Shakespeare, this book
would really make a perfect companion piece to Peter Ackroyd's recent
biography of the Bard.
Where Ackroyd presents a superb history of Shakespeare's time and then
tries to superimpose his impression of the playwright on to it, Professor
Honan is able to work differently.
Unlike Shakespeare, much is known and documented about the short life
of Christopher Marlowe. He was educated at public school, Canterbury,
and graduated from there to Cambridge University on what we would now
describe as a scholarship.
He spent no fewer than seven years at Corpus Christi, arriving there
when he was only sixteen. During that time, he received a proper grounding
in the classics which helped him in his quest to become a writer.
The author can be overly academic in demonstrating his considerable
research into the life of Marlowe and gleefully telling us, sometimes
in the first person, when he has made a new discovery. This is some
achievement when people have been picking over Marlowe's bones for 400
years but doesn't always make that much difference to the overall impression
we get of the man.
One of the pleasures in this work is that when he has arrived at a
subject, the Professor delves deeply into it, leaving his story temporarily
and following odd pathways that tell his readers so much about life
in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, not to mention Europe at the same
time.
He is also good when it comes to analysing the plays and, in particular,
finding all of the possible sources, so many of which were derived from
both school and university education.
Unlike Ackroyd, Professor Honan tends to be cautious when making guesses
about what might have happened to Marlowe and this could be wise since
the writer seems to be a popular subject for biographies at the moment.
In the last few years, Charles Nicoll has written The Reckoning,
a novelised version of the playwright's life; and only last year, David
Riggs published The
World of Christopher Marlowe.
Such popularity for a man who did not live to thirty and died over
four centuries ago would seem remarkable if Marlowe had not written
a series of plays that are still regularly performed today, indeed Tamburlaine
opens at the Barbican this week. As a bonus, he was also a colourful
character who, like Burgess, Philby and Maclean (or, more appropriately,
Graham Greene, who spied for his own country), was recruited as a spy
during his undergraduate days in Cambridge.
In this guise, he was able to travel to Europe and widen his outlook
as well as filling his purse. On the downside, he was close to arrest
and conviction as an accomplice to murder and on a fateful night in
Deptford, lost his life to a couple of men who may well have desired
or been obliged to kill him as a result of his undercover occupation.
This biography can be hard work when the professor gets into full research
mode, delving through the accounts and receipts to learn more about
his subject. However, it can also be a gripping read and deserves to
stretch a good few Christmas stockings.
Philip Fisher
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