“Alternate history” is always about battles and assassinations and similar things; nobody ever writes about how the world would be different if Mozart had lived to 50 or if Christopher Marlowe had survived past 29. Shakespeare, of course, is the apogee of English-language drama, but for shear horsepower the climax of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is hard to beat:




"Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,And then thou must be damned perpetually.Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,That time may cease, and midnight never come. Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again and make Perpetual day. Or let this hour be but a year,A month, a week, a natural day,That Faustus may repent, and save his soul. O lente lente currite noctis equi. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.O, I'll leap up to heaven; who pulls me down?One drop of blood will save me.Rend not my heart, for naming of my Christ.Yet will I call on him. O spare me, Lucifer.Where is it now? 'Tis gone.And see a threatening arm, an angry brow.Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven.No? Then will I headlong run into the earth.Gape, earth! O no, it will not harbour me.You stars that reigned at my nativity,Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist,Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud,That when you vomit forth into the air,My limbs may issue from your smokey mouths,But let my soul mount, and ascend to heaven.O, half the hour is past! 'Twill all be past anon.O, if my soul must suffer for my sin,Impose some end to my incessant pain.Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,A hundred thousand, and at last be saved.No end is limited to damned souls.Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?Or why is this immortal that thou hast?Oh Pythagoras metempsychosis' were that true,This soul should fly from me, and I be changed Into some brutish beast.All beasts are happy, for when they die,Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.Cursed be the parents that engendered me;No, Faustus, curse thyself. Curse Lucifer That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.It strikes, it strikes! Now body turn to air,Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.O soul be changed into small water drops,And fall into the ocean ne'er be found.O mercy, heaven! Look not so fierce on me;Adders and serpents let me breathe awhile.Ugly hell, gape not; come not Lucifer!I'll burn my books! Oh, Mephistophilis!"


Marlowe was 26 when he wrote that.


Park Honan, author of this biography, has a classic historian’s difficulty: there just isn’t that much documentation about Marlowe other than the plays and poems themselves. We’ve got a christening record from Canterbury, some receipts from his college years at Cambridge, exactly one signature (witness to a will), an interesting paragraph from the Privy Council exonerating Marlowe from charges of Papism, maybe a portrait (it’s of a young man the same age as Marlowe and was found propping up a gas heater in his old college at Cambridge), and a record of Marlowe being picked up and temporarily imprisoned after a rapier duel where his opponent was killed (Marlowe didn’t kill him; instead one of Marlowe’s friends (Thomas Watson, a poet himself) tried to intervene and separate the duelists. Marlowe’s antagonist then turned on Watson, who fought back and killed him more or less by accident. (Did Shakespeare borrow this event for the duel between Romeo, Tybalt, and Mercutio? Honan doesn’t speculate).


Perhaps the crowning irony of Marlowe’s life is that the single longest official document pertaining to it is the coroner’s inquest report after his death. Honan does a pretty good job with the paucity of material at his disposal (it doesn’t help that “Marlowe” was spelled “Marley”, “Marlin”, “Marlow”, and various other permutations), but or course he has to speculate a lot. Unfortunately, there are some cases where even more speculation would be interesting:


*What, exactly, was Marlowe doing as an intelligence agent? It’s now pretty firmly established that he was, but there’s no real clue on what his duties were.

*Was Marlowe a homosexual? There’s a famous quote attributed to him to the effect that “all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools”; however, the source for this was a man trying to implicate Marlowe as a heretic. Edward II is the first English play with a gay protagonist, but considering what happens to Edward it can’t really be taken as a glorification of the lifestyle.


*Was Marlowe murdered? Honan is more willing to take a position here: Yes. The coroner’s report does describe a pretty strange scene. Marlowe and three acquaintances spend a day at a house in Deptford. The other three men are all dubious: another intelligence agent and two petty con artists. After dinner, Marlowe lies down on a bed and the other three sit facing away from him playing backgammon. A discussion about the bill becomes heated and Marlowe rises from the bed, grabs Ingram Frizer’s dagger, and begins beating him with the hilt. Frizer takes the dagger away from Marlowe and stabs him in the eye. There’s been almost 500 years of conspiracy theory about this: an unfortunate accident, a deliberate murder, Marlowe faking his death (so he could go on to write plays attributed to Shakespeare) and endless variations. Honan likes murder to prevent Marlowe’s reputation as an atheist from affecting his patron, Thomas Walsingham. Given the evidence, that’s as good an explanation as any.


This would make a good movie; sort of a noir version of Shakespeare in Love. Lots of complicated Elizabethan plots and counterplots, gorgeous costumes, magnificent poetry; it’s a natural. Apparently there was a film in production with Johnny Depp as Marlowe and Jude Law as Shakespeare, but it seems to have been dropped.


There are lots of biographies of Marlowe out there; this is the only one I’ve read, so far. It seems like a good start. ( )