Christopher Marlowe Conspiracy Research Paper

This conspiracy takes us back to Deptford in 1593. Supposedly Christopher Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl. He was stabbed in the eye, which some people might call a just for reckoning for the crime of being a flagrant atheist. Many scholars believe that Christopher Marlowe faked his death and that William Shakespeare was named as the play’s author to protect the truth of what really happened to Christopher Marlowe. I believe that the conspiracy theories are true. There is a lot of believable evidence supporting the conspiracy, that Christopher Marlowe faked his death, and put his plays in Shakespeare’s name to protect the truth of what really happened to Marlowe on the day of May 30th, 1593.

Wilbur Gleason Zeigler was a lawyer and writer

who is best known for founding the Marlovian Theory. According to Zeigler the theory is “that the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe did not die in Deptford on May 30th, 1593, as historian records state, but rather that his death was faked, and that he was the main author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare” (MetaFilter).
Both Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare lived in the same town of London, and were both born in 1564. They were both playwrights and poets. There knew some of the same people Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and William Stanley. They both worked at the few theaters in London. Also they each occupied the same prestigious position, as most famous poet and playwright in England. They have so much in common, but yet there is no record of these two men ever meeting or speaking with each other: How do the two most famous playwrights of their time not meet?
Let us compare the two men. With so much in common, it is quite brilliant that these two men lived such different lives, and looking at the differences may be a clue. “Their education was totally opposite, for William Shakespeare quit school when he was fifteen years old, but there is not a record stating that he was ever in grammar school. Christopher Marlowe had two degrees including masters from Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. William Shakespeare had no opportunity to learn the military life, legal, or court manners, things in which Christopher Marlowe was proficient. According to records Marlowe traveled to many countries, and yet Shakespeare never left England” (The Shakespeare Conspiracy).
There is so much similarity between these two men in their writings.

There are one hundred duplicated lines in William Shakespeare’s writings taken from previous writing by Christopher Marlowe. There are also many references to Marlowe in Shakespeare’s writings. For example, “Act 2, Scene 8 “The Merchant Venice” Shakespeare used the word “gondola” which had never appeared in print in any English book prior to that time”(fun trivia). Many scholars believe that it was reference to Christopher Marlowe’s travels to Italy after his supposed death.

The most famous references are William Shakespeare’s sonnets, which talk about the writer being “exiled” something that never happened to William Shakespeare. Another famous passage from “As You Like It,” Act 3, Scene 3: “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” (fun trivia).

Both writers used an average of 240 four-letter words per thousand, 130 five-letter words, and 60 six-letter words, with other word-lengths close if not exact. Baconian compared “the distribution curves of Bacon and Shakespeare, he found no match; comparing Shakespeare’s plays with those of his contemporaries he noted a 4-word ‘spike’ that no other playwright replicated except Marlowe” (The Shakespearean Authorship

Trust).
In 1997 author David More wrote an essay Drunken Sailor or Imprisoned writer? It was the first to suggest that John Penry was a viable substitute for the body of Christopher Marlowe. John Penry was imprisoned for his writings and was executed on May 29th 1593, and where is his body? No one knows, it has never been discovered. In 2001, Michael Rubbo, an award winning Australian documentary film maker, made the TV film Much Ado About Something for PBS Frontline, “exploring the Marlovian theory and interviewing prominent Marlovian’s such as A.D. Wraight and Peter Farley, as well as Orthodox academics such as Stanley Wells, Jonathan Bate and Christopher Nicholl. After this had been aired it had been inspired to be made a film” (The Shakespearean Authorship Trust).
Mark Twain said “so far as anybody actually knows and prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life” (Telegraph).
Considering that William Shakespeare had slim to no education, how does one write such brilliant plays and poetry. He had never left England, how can he write about other places and describe detail in which he had no idea about. These mysteries make it easy to believe that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays or poems.
Also it was only two weeks after Marlowe’s “death” that William Shakespeare’s plays became known.