Not in the Picture
In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography. By A. D. Wraight and Virginia F. Stern. Foreword by Dr. William Urry. (Macdonald, 84s.)
IN the past forty years a great deal has been discovered about Christopher Marlowe—more than could ever have been hoped for. Yet ignorance about him still persists: in a current unscholarly but avowedly literary compilation he is referred to as an 'atheist and a homo- sexual,' who died 'in a tavern brawl.' Here we have all the usual misleading platitudes, based on the pious slanders of those who lived just after him. Such summaries are hardly more valuable than Aubrey's comic mis-statement that Ben Jonson 'killed Mr. Marlow, the poet, on Bunhill, comeing from the Green Curtain play- house.'
This sumptuous book, written by Mr. Wraight and lavishly illustrated with photographs by Miss Stern, does not embody any new research (with the exception of one or two new facts discovered by Dr. William Urry, soon to be published), but purposes to collect together and summarise all that is known about Marlowe. It is beautifully produced, and its best feature is its photographs: there are evocative pictures of Canterbury, of the King's School there, of Corpus Christi (both of which Marlowe attended), London and Scad- bury—the Kentish home of the patron who perhaps had the poet murdered, Sir Thomas Walsingham. There are also countless repro- ductions of important documents: the college register at Corpus Christi, the title-pages of all the plays, almost all the extant documents relat- ing to Marlowe himself, and many others of more general interest. These alone, with their informative captions, make up a valuable pic- ture-book.
Mr. Wraight's text is at its best when he is summarising accounts of general aspects of Elizabethan England: Canterbury and the life of scholars at the King's School, the conditions likely to have been encountered by Marlowe at Cambridge, and so on. He provides, too, a full and accurate record of all that is known about Marlowe—or perhaps it is more true to say that this can be extracted from his text. Unfortu- nately, however, he does not justify his pub- lisher's claim that 'for the scholar this book will be of inestimable service'—which it might well have been had it stuck to facts, or were its incidental scholarship up-to-date and less erratic. It is hardly encouraging, in a purportedly serious book, to find Mr. Calvin Hoffman's The Murder' of the Man Who Was Shakespeare quoted as an authority, and mentioned with respect. This lurid volume, whose manifold fac- tual errors did not escape detection when it appeared in this country, asserts that Marlowe did not really die at Deptford in 1593, but went on to write Shakespeare's works. Mr. Wraight even concludes with a cautious hint that he believes that this absurd idea, hitherto the play- thing of idiots and exhibitionists, has some merit. Despite his commendably wide reading, in fact, he has spoiled the objectivity of his account of Marlowe by making it too clear that he is infected with this kind of crankiness: fully in the spirit of Mr. Hoffman, the Marlowe Society, the Bacon Society, and all the rest, he attacks 'the united front' of Shakespeare scholars for their hindrance of the true recognition of Mar- lowe's genius, and so on.
All this is, of course, quite without founda- tion. But it leads Mr. Wraight to further irrele- vant excesses. He attempts, for example, to prove that Greene's famous reference to 'the onely Shake-scene in a countrey' is not to Shakespeare but to, of all people, Edward Alleyn, the cele- brated actor who appeared in so many of Mar- lowe's plays; from this basis he amateurishly tries to revive Malone's now discredited theory that Shakespeare's Henry 'VI 2 and 3 is a revision of a work by Marlowe and others. In all his discussion of this very complicated problem, he does not once allude to the com- paratively recent writings of Professors Alexan- der and Dover Wilson on the subject, let alone Dr. Andrew Cairncross, but relies on a now superseded study, published in 1926—and once quotes W. W. Greg as holding a view he aban- doned long before he died. All this is hardly an inestimable boon to the scholar. It is simply a waste of time.
In a long section called 'The School of Night,' Mr. Wraight confidently assumes the existence of such a group, consisting of Ralegh, Marlowe, Chapman (for whose works he lists an edition nearly one hundred years old, as if more modern editions did not exist), Roydon, Harriot and others; he neither mentions that there are any doubts about the matter nor quotes in his bibliography any of the reputable books that have cast such doubts. Many would be in- clined to agree with Mr. 'Wraight that such a group did exist, though not in so organised a form; but simply to inform the uninitiated reader that it did so is frankly mischievous and misleading, and could do serious harm.
This expensive book has useful features; it is a pity that it cannot be recommended without reservation.
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
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