Mark Twain likened writing the biography of Shakespeare to reconstructing the skeleton of a brontosaurus - using 'nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris'. We work with a handful of facts and a pile of conjecture. Very soon the 'might have beens' and 'we have reason to believes' build up into 'as tradition instructs us' and harden into 'unquestionablys'. All biographies of Shakespeare, from the wayward to the academic, use the same few-score hard facts kneaded together with legend, then leavened by a dash of Zeitgeist and a large dollop of author's imagination. Poems and plays are plundered for biographical booty, even by those who profess scepticism as to the inferences that can be drawn about the life from the work. A river current in The Rape of Lucrece is likened to one in the Avon; all references in the plays to dolphins are lined up to suggest that, maybe, as a boy Shakespeare travelled twelve miles to see a water pageant staged by the Earl of Leicester in his castle grounds at Kenilworth. And so a story is stitched together. But like statistics, quotations in isolation can be turned to very different ends.
This book has not been an attempt to prove that Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to the Continent, and went on to write the works attributed to Shakespeare. It assumes that as its starting point. It swings the old bones around, viewing them from another angle to build a different brontosaurus. By assuming the seemingly preposterous I have hoped to shake up our notions of the possible, or at the very least to look a little more sharply at how we construct truth. I have done this in a spirit of fun, and with the intention of a little saucy iconoclasm. Shakespeare's works are unassailable, and will survive any amount of subversion, but the quasi-religious idol that the man has become is perhaps in need of the efforts of a wicked woodworm. Purists who do not relish the breezes of disruption blowing around sensible ideas will perhaps be displeased, but those who are willing to keep a literary tongue firmly in an historical cheek might enjoy seeing all the familiar bones thrown in the air, and watching them land in a different pattern. It is useful, as T. S. Eliot put it, from time to time to change our way of being wrong. Taking a fresh look at something we have grown used to - be it an historical fact or a Shakespearean sonnet can sometimes yield unexpected rewards.
This book is, of course, an exercise of purest (or most impure) conjecture. But then so is the work of countless other writers of lives of Shakespeare and Marlowe. This story differs only in the degree to which invention has played a role in the outcome, and in the method by which it was told. Other writers have looked at the evidence and deduced a story; I have imagined a story, then supported it with the same sparse evidence. At this distance, the difference between deduction and speculation is paper thin. The book may very well have been called The Impossibility of Biography. It might be placed at a point of convergence of several different strands: of the historical novel that blurs fact with fantasy and doesn't admit the difference; of autobiographies that are so imaginatively written that some readers think they are novels; of novels that are so autobiographical that they approach the same point from the opposite direction; and of Shakespearean biography that carries an unsloughable burden of rumour and tradition.
Admittedly, in building this different brontosaurus, I have fashioned a few bones of my own. The book is grounded in fact, but has the courage of its own (con-) fictions. In the tradition of Shakespearean biography, made-up bits and might-have-beens gradually meld with what we know, to make a story of their own. In doing this I have played with Marlowe's history, but not with real history - though sometimes in the spirit of the fiction I have accepted one person's interpretation of history as fact.
Truth is never easily come by. Like Don Quixote, we can be perplexed by the intertwining of the credible and the fantastic. So for those who enjoy unravelling, I have followed a general rule. The footnotes at the bottoms of pages signal my broader inventions. For many this may be enough - but for those who like to delve, I have combed out the fiction from facts, as other writers have presented them, in the source notes that follow.
Part of the point of the tale has been to observe how people travelled, how cultures crossed, and how theatre got made. As he ruffled the ruffs of a post-Calvinist society, Kit Marlowe travelled through an extraordinarily cosmopolitan Europe, curling his tongue around different languages, accustoming his palate to new cuisines, quickly taking on new customs. He travels in a world tinged with panic, beset with secrets, yet delighting in erudition, catching the Continent at a fascinating moment in its history, one in which our contemporary culture is clearly being forged.
Rodney Bolt
Amsterdam 2004