Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 1 The Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe by Robert U. Ayres Preface: How this book came about ........................ 4 Introduction ........................................................13 Part I: Before the “Death” .............................................27 Chapter 1: The authorship question: Who was William Shaksper(e)? ..............................................27 Chapter 2: The birth and early education of Christopher Marlowe ....................................57 Chapter 3: A short but necessary historical background ................................................78 Chapter 4: Canterbury, Cambridge and Reims .........91 Chapter 5: Plots and counter-plots ....................... 108 Chapter 6: Theaters, spies, and the Earl of Oxford ............................................................... 122 Chapter 7: The impersonation of Gilbert Gifford and the Babington plot 1585-88 ........................ 138 Chapter 8: The Grand Armada and prison in Paris ............................................................... 152 Chapter 9: Back home and a bit of fame ............... 164 Chapter 10: The Bloody Question; Archbishop Whitgift and the Star Chamber 1583-90 ................... 171 Chapter 11: Manwood, Martin Marprelate, and the Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 2 marron murders ........................................ 178 Chapter 12: The Stanley plot and the Flushing episode ............................................................... 191 Chapter 13: A gold chain and the death of Manwood 1590-92 ................................................... 204 Chapter 14: Interlude at Scadbury ....................... 231 Chapter 15: The death of Christopher Marlowe ...... 240 Part II: Resurrection ................................................... 278 Chapter 16: From Calais to Venice ....................... 278 Chapter 17: Istanbul, Crete, and a child bride ....... 290 Chapter 18: Re-enter LeDoux .............................. 306 Chapter 19: The Cadiz raid (1596) and Admiral Tom Howard .................................................... 313 Chapter 20: A short English interlude, and more of LeDoux .................................................... 325 Chapter 21: The Fall of Icarus and the Tudor twilight ............................................................... 338 Chapter 22: Valladolid, Ireland and Venice again ............................................................... 353 Chapter 23: Gregorio goes to Venice with Harry Wotton 1604-09 ........................................ 365 Chapter 24: Interlude in Naples and a new love, Micaela Lujan: 1610-13 .............................. 389 Chapter 25: The Bermuda Triangle 1613-14 ......... 404 Chapter 26: The astonishing rise of Francis Bacon 1603-13 ................................................... 417 Chapter 27: The Overbury scandal and trial 1613-16 ............................................................... 433 Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 3 Chapter 28: “You don’t love me” June-October 1616 ............................................................... 441 Chapter 29: Quevedo and the Spanish Conspiracy 1516-18 ................................................... 449 Chapter 30: Bacon’s fall and Bacon’s revenge 1518-21 ............................................................... 482 Epilog............................................................... 517 Afterword ......................................................... 533 Appendices ............................................................... 539 Appendix A: Anagram ciphers (examples) ............. 539 Appendix B: “Shall I die? Shall I fly?” ................... 593 Appendix C: Technical evidence ........................... 602 Forensic and stylometric evidence ............... 602 Crypt-acrostic evidence: The signatures in the sonnets and elsewhere ...................... 611 Appendix D. Anagrammatic evidence ................... 629 References ................................................................ 636 Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 4 Preface: How this book came about My interest in Kit Marlowe really began in 1972 when I was living in Washington DC. My recently retired father, my mother, and my younger brother, Alex, were then living in Annapolis, Maryland, about an hour’s drive away, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. On one of the family gatherings that summer, I told everybody about an interesting book I had just read, Calvin Hoffman’s best- seller The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. It had never occurred to me – or most people – that William Shakespeare of Stratford might not be the author of those great plays, like Hamlet and Othello, we all learned at school. Well, for me Hoffman’s book was an eye-opener, to say the least. It made for interesting conversation for a couple of weekends. Alex was particularly intrigued. He asked to borrow my copy of the book. I didn’t see it again for 35 years. During those years Alex finished at Harvard (where he was one of the editors of the Lampoon). Later, he got interested in films. Thereafter he has worked on and off as a free-lance script-writer for the movie industry, as well as a writer-editor, notably of a series of books published by Penguin, entitled “The Wit and Wisdom of...”. Subjects of that series were various, from Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers to Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but one of them was Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain. Mark Twain, as it happens, also made rather a point of not believing that William Shakespeare wrote the works Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 5 published under his name. In his small book Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909) he wrote “So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life ... He ought to have explained that he was a nom de plume for another man to hide behind” {Twain, 1909 #474}. Alex read that little book in the course of his work on “The Wit and Wisdom” series, and remembered the Hoffman book I had loaned him. He reread it and several other Marlovian books that had appeared since. It rekindled his interest in the subject. Starting sometime in the 1990s Alex wrote a feature film script called Playwright about an episode in Kit Marlowe’s life. I don’t think I should reveal the plot here, except to say it is a love story (heterosexual, in case you care). The history of the script would be an interesting tale in itself, but that, too, belongs in another place. In brief, the script was sold to an independent English movie company, which hired a gay director who hired a gay script-writer who rewrote the script to make Marlowe a gay, even though he wasn’t. Alex was angry, because that changed the whole story. But he could do nothing, until that movie company went bust. After some legal problems he got his script back, and the script is now the property of another legal entity in which Alex is co-producer, along with a more experienced producer, and – in the interests of transparency – my wife and I are investors. Negotiations on financing, directing and casting are continuing and I can say no more about that. However, when Alex re-acquired Playwright and we invested in the company, I also became interested once Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 6 again in the whole issue. My perspective is that of an experienced scientist. I have BS in mathematics and a– PhD in theoretical physics, along with 18 books and a couple of hundred academic publications. I have been a Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, at the European business school INSEAD and a visiting professor or adjunct professor at several other universities. I have a lot of experience reviewing academic publications, and I am now, or have been, on the Board of Editors of a dozen journals. The reason for mentioning this background is simply to make one point:– that I have a pretty good sense of how to evaluate a chain of evidence and how the bits and pieces of complex systems fit together. On the other hand, I have no literary qualifications and no literary preconceptions, except that I was curious – indeed puzzled – why the academic world seems to be so unwilling to accept, or even to take seriously, the arguments put forward by Hoffman and since elaborated by others such as Ule, Wraight, Baker and Farey. More research seemed to be called for. I did what everybody does nowadays, by starting with Google and the Internet. On the Internet I encountered a number of interesting essays by individuals with interests in the authorship question, including several Baconians, several Oxfordians and, of course, some Marlovians (and others). Curiously, the skeptics – I mean those who did not accept the conventional wisdom – were mostly unpublished, albeit well documented and well-argued in some cases. It has become clear over time that trade publishers are not Ayres Death and Posthumous Life of Christopher Marlowe 4 August 2012 Page 7 anxious to publish the work of scholars who don’t fit the mold, even though some recent books written by “Shakespeare” scholars with academic credentials– have received very large advances. Well, the same barriers against heterodox views exist in other fields, from physics to economics. If you think about it, breakthroughs pre-suppose the existence