A short life and a shady one

Scholars face a formidable task when they set out to write the lives of the playwrights and poets of the Elizabethan age. They do not possess the personal revelations, say, of Byron’s letters. They must piece together scraps of information contained in the lawsuits of an astonishingly litigious population; the comments of friends and enemies in the literary world. They must then fit all this together with the supposed personal references in their subject’s works. Park Honan does this admirably in his life of Marlowe from his birth in Canterbury in 1564 to his death aged 29 in widow Bull’s house in Deptford. It is an ingenious piece of informed speculation.

Marlowe emerges as a driven man. Like A. L. Rowse he was determined to escape from humble origins into a wider world by virtue of his literary gifts. Marlowe’s father was a cobbler and Honan detects in his son’s works a pronounced distaste for leather and boots.