While Ros Barber and her book The Marlowe Papers have received plenty of coverage over the past year, this blog post caught our eye because it appeared on The Huffington Post last week, where Barber is listed as a member of their “signature lineup of contributors” to the “Arts Books” section. There’s nothing new in what she has to say about Marlowe and his possible faked death, but with the vast readership of The Huffington Post the publicity for the authorship issue is, in a word, significant.
From Barber’s blog:
At the time of his supposed death, Marlowe was out on bail, facing charges that would have almost certainly ended in his execution. Early that month Marlowe’s former roommate, Thomas Kyd, had been arrested and tortured for his connection with Marlowe; within a year, Kyd was dead. Ask yourself this: Faced with the same circumstances, would you consider faking your death to escape?
Faking death is an entirely plausible action for a person in a serious fix. Though we only hear about failed attempts, it is statistically reasonable to assume that some are successful. Even people who are actively being sought have successfully disappeared. How much easier to disappear when, as in Marlowe’s case, no-one comes looking: a substitute body, convincing witnesses, an official inquest. How much easier to vanish four hundred years ago, before the advent of photographs, modern passports, finger-printing, DNA testing and traceable bank account.
In questions of human behavior, one observer is quoted above all others. So for the final word on the plausibility or otherwise of faked deaths, let us turn to Shakespeare himself. The author was obsessed with characters being wrongly thought dead. 33 of Shakespeare’s characters — in eighteen plays — are mistakenly believed to be dead for some part of the story. These include no fewer than seven deliberately staged deaths, three of which are faked to avoid a fatality. Taking into account Marlowe’s parlous position in 1593, the ingenuity of human beings faced with their own destruction, and Shakespeare’s obsession with false death, Christopher Marlowe’s apparent demise is not the bar to authorship that many assume.
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