Most of us believe that the works of Shakespeare were
written by Shakespeare, but a few propound with passion the theory that Bacon was responsible for the whole boiling. It is, I surmise, this minority who will react most violently to the announcement, made this week by Mr. Calvin Hoffman, an American dramatic critic, that their real author was Christopher Marlowe. According to Mr. Hoffman, the tavern brawl in which—in May, 1593—Marlowe was supposedly killed by three servants of Sir Thomas Walsingham was a put-up job, under cover of which, with Walsingham's help, Marlowe fled the country to escape charges of heresy and high treason. Mr. Leslie Hotson discovered some years ago that the three ser- vants received a pardon a month after their alleged crime; and Mr. Hoffman now claims to have found written evidence, at Douai in northern France, that Marlowe was there in August, 1593, in company with one of his three assailants. He was also there, apparently, in 1601. Mr. Hoffman believes that after 1593 (when both Marlowe and Shakespeare were thirty years old, and up till when Shakespeare had published nothing) Mar- lowe lived in concealment under Walsingham's protection at Chislehurst, which this sanguine investigator believes will one day displace Stratford as a national shrine. It must be extremely • distressing to Baconians to find that the struggle to which they are dedicated has been converted, overnight, into a three- cornered contest—the more so since one of the main planks in their platform has always been that, whoever really did Write the plays, it couldn't possibly - have been Shakespeare. All the evidence they have painstakingly amassed to suggest that Shakespeare was a dim, oafish small-part actor, empty of knowledge and devoid of sensibility, now falls like an un- guarded ammunition-dump into the hands of a new enemy; and —unlike most captured ammunition—it fits his guns just as well as it fitted theirs. They must be dreadfully vexed.
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