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Making the Flash Album for Curious Brew reminded me that it is my firm belief that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe. I know I know I know that there are several versions of the "Who Was He?" out there. I find the Marlowe version to be the most persuasive by far. I definitely do not think that the actual personage of William Shakespeare wrote the canon of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

It just doesn't line up that he would have. If he had, we ought have rough drafts, we ought have a biography that led him around Europe, we ought have evidence that he went through something of the trials that the characters of the plays went through. Overall, we ought have in Shakespeare, the actual man, the sense of genius that we would see in today's masterworks of art. And we don't. Not even close.

The clearest, most concise case for Marlowe is from a 2002 article in Salon.com, . It is based upon the documentary film, Much Ado About Something. If you are looking for a conclusive case, you won't find it in the article (perhaps in the film). But you will find a plausible reconstruction of Marlowe's supposed 'death', how it was faked, the strong suggestion that he was a secret agent for the Queen, the evidence for Marlowe's erudition, and a couple rather juicy bits of suggestion such as this:

...an epic poem in the Marlovian style, first registered to "anonymous" in the Stationer's Register, was re-registered 13 days after this hypothetical flight [from the scene of the faked murder] would have taken place, in the name of William Shakespeare -- the first time that name had ever appeared there. The title page carried a two-line quotation from Ovid, whom Marlowe himself had translated into English. The verse in question concludes:

The living, not the dead can envy bite,
For after death all men receive their right.
Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire,
I'll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher.

In other words, I'm Marlowe and I'm alive. There is even the suggestion that the epitaph a plaque in Stratford basically is code for the real authorship.

The way I see it is that Marlowe's death was faked to escape charges laid upon him by the Church of England (Marlowe appears to have been an avowed atheist, and possibly a gay man). He already had a significant body of work, but spent the rest of his days in secret travelling, sometimes in fake costumes (hence the constant theme of double identity in the plays, especially since Marlowe was acknowledged to be gay), as a spy for the queen upon various foreign governments (hence the knowledge of sailing and details of foreign courts' intrigues, found in the plays).

Marlowe was at times desolate and impossibly lonely living this life, hence the transcendent passion that bleeds through his plays as well as his sonnets (even moreso with the sonnets, which are truly divine creations). And, as suggested in the article, that W. Shakespeare was the front man was an open secret, which just seems to fit, given the lack of genuine compency for theatrical genius shown in W. Shakespeare's bio.

It is a simple matter of qualification, life experience, and deep pain (at the root of so much great art, and the transcendence of which fuels its divinity). Art that drips humanity is produced by a consciousness overflowing with life's juices. That is the way it is now, and because I view this as a timeless aspect of artmaking, it was true in the 17th century.