It has been argued that the collapse of the Age of Faith began with Aquinas, who made the mistake of attempting an elaborate reasoned argument to defend a position that neither arose from reason nor could be successfully defended by reason. Will Shapiro's book (similarly (& Oxfordianly) confusing prolixity with rational impact) end up signalling the Aquinas-Moment in the history of the Shakespeare Controversy?
[Or are we looking for the Bishop-Temple Moment? It was Temple who headed off the danger of the Church of England's over-committing itself against Darwin. As Andrew D. White's classic 1896 History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom put it (pp.77-78&82): “While everything was done [by religious forces] to discredit Darwin, to pour contempt upon him … while his followers were represented … as charlatans and dupes, there began to be in the most influential quarters careful avoidance of the [original 1859 reactive] argument that evolution — even by natural selection — contradicts Scripture. The defection of Lyell had … started the question among theologians who had preserved some equanimity, ‘What if, after all, the Darwinian theory should prove to be true?’ Recollections of the position in which the Roman Church had found itself [for centuries, up to the 1830s!] after the establishment of the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo naturally came into the minds of the more thoughtful…. [Ultimately], Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker then in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation” as more progressive than the biblical idea of instant creation by god.]

As a successful veteran of numerous oldboyperson-upsetting controversies, DIO (like many before us) is familiar with standard evolution in such decades-long face-investment bubbles: deny as long as possible. (Which invests ever-more faces. Ever-deeper. Like the US' ever-postponed debt-reckoning.)
And then — when it's realized that the Big Guys are gonna lose the debate in the long run (given the laughable-transparency of the Marlowe→WS segue), just act like it never really mattered in the first place.

So: is the dawn of the endgame presaged (not only by Shapiro's Aquinian book and Westminster Abbey's integrity, but) by New York Times critic Ben Brantley's frontpage International Herald Tribune (global New York Times) 2011/10/29-30 article which yawn-claims that he doesn't care who wrote the plays? (Question-in-passing: If it doesn't matter, why shun anybody?)
Marlovian hypothetical aside: think Brantley'd yawn if Shakespeare mss surfaced? Until then Brantley has concocted a curiously original defense: ain't it GREAT that we know so little about Shakespeare! Lucky us…. (Think this is a joke? Well, if it is, I'm not the joker.) Look it up.
This FRONT-PAGE article follows ALL (but Time's) FreesnickerPress reaction to Anonymous: it informs the public of no facts of dissenters' cases. Instead, the article wastes column after column on BB's personal feelings about the plays. (Another profitless lost-opportunity to provide the public the few simple lines of fascinating Marlowe-suggestive facts we started with.) This is NEWS-fit-to-print?
Brantley's is just the most extreme example of the blatant shyness Stratfordians have of debating Marlovians. Recall West Side Story's ever-nervous Baby-John. When his street-gang, the Jets, is working up enough outrage for a rumble with their turf-rivals, the Sharks, he offers: “I say let's just forget the whole thing.”
[As longtime orthodoxy (among a came&went cult of math-challenged historians), that Ptolemy first-hand outdoor-observed (not stole) the Ancient Star Catalog, was in its last stages of collapse, cult-guru N.Swerdlow prominently urged that the point no longer be debated, since the controversy was now “almost entirely historical”. This, in a history journal…. (How do you spoof what already reads like spoof-positive?) Full delicious story elsewhere on this site.]

New York Times chief theatre critic Benjamin Brantley's 1st sentence concludes: “I don't care who wrote Shakespeare's plays.”
[He suggests this may be bold “heresy”. No: it's just an unimaginatively-all-too-typical last-ditch burp of an orthodoxy gradually fading under siege.]
BB-unanticipated Problem: Brantley's very next (2nd) sentence mentions Christopher Marlowe as among the three top serious longterm contenders for authorship. Hmmm. Does BB's claimed narrowness extend to ignoring logic, too? Because — unlike any other Shakespeare-authorship contender — Marlowe left a corpus of mostly topline dramas, still read at universities today. So: Does Brantley seriously mean to claim that no one should care whether or not the Marlowe and “Shakespeare” plays were written by the same man?! (Doubtful. It's more likely that BB just didn't think out the hidden consequence of his dreamy tack.) If so, what grade would Columbia University's Comparative Literaure Dep't give the New York Times's chief theatre critic?

On the plus side: Brantley is wise to the phoniness of alleged Shakespeare bios, evidently aware that citing pieces of the plays as WS-biography is aping the Oxfordians' fallacious game. But to say who-cares to one of the grand mysteries in the history of civilization simply makes the commentator look like he's either posing (for career-convenience) or shamefully narrow. (Of course, specialists in the arts actually are often afflicted with cultural narrowness, a limitation which mirrorless literati too readily and falsely impute to scientists.) This is especially unconvincing given that Brantley says he “can't get enough of figuring out and arguing about” Shakespeare's words. I.e., he is fascinated by some mysteries but finds it prudent to scoff at one that could genuinely bring upon him a serious and ultimately expensive charge of heresy. (Rising to the grand journalistic heights Brantley has achieved requires an unerring instinct for such judicious caution — plus an ever-ready talent for justifying it. See DIO 1.2 [1991] n.66.) Again, double-standards are the single standard.
[It is only right to note admiringly that BB does not repeat the now-canonical anti-Stratfordian snob smear, which virtually all other commentators copy from each other. (See P251f's exposure of this line of irrelevancy.) This is consistent with his claim that his views are his own, thus hopefully countering some speculations on him hereabouts.]

As elsewhere here, we spy symptoms of the unself-conscious nuttiness of a cult that has made it a tactic to projectively regard all outside their cult as nuts.

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurther is said to have observed that: to some lawyers, all evidence is equal. But a balanced and non-bound mind will distinguish between evidences' differing weights. E.g., the lack of surviving WS play-mss is suggestive but not absolute negative proof, as few mss of plays of that era have survived. Shakespeare's title-pages are positive evidence for his authorship but (as we will see below), they are very far from firm proof of it. Returning to the skeptics' evidence: WS' few extant signatures' uneven scrawl [photos at P126] hardly suggests an experienced writer but some can be alibied as perhaps from illness.
[A particularly ignorant, abusive, and suspiciously unoriginal 2011/10/24 Newsweek film-review (following T2:212) conjures-up pre-1593 WS plays (“Marlowe … [was] killed before the greatest of Shakespeare's plays appeared”) thereby rejecting (without telling the reader) WS' own testimony, continuing an apparently uniform policy of preventing the public from learning of the startling 13-day segue that is one of the most powerful jumpstart-alerts to the strength of the Marlowe case. (But, of course, that is exactly why orthodoxologists don't wish the wider public to be Confused by facts of such plain implications as those at the head of this page.)
As any student of propaganda knows: this is how it's done.]
The non-survival of any letter from a celebrity of Shakespeare's alleged magnitude and royal acceptance is even fishier (since no one person could be responsible for suppressing all of WS' hypothetical letters) — but still short of rigorous proof. (Although all the preceding items in-combine come pretty close.) But, as Mark Twain realized long ago: by far the weighiest and patently unalibiable piece of evidence (on either side) in the Shakespeare debate is Shakespeare's will. The fact that this highly detailed document never mentions his books or disposition of mss (several of the plays weren't yet published: P173) — or anything at all related to scholarship — is alone enough to prove that Shakespeare did not write the plays.

When faced with the above unambiguous contradiction of their position (a point gainfully exploited by Blumenfeld: B230), Stratfordian heads dive for ostrichian sand.
Putting them in no position to scoff at equally sand-headed Oxfordians for their own impenetrabilities: [a] to the obvious impediment that their candidate, the Earl of Oxford, died in 1604, and [b] to the fact that their various increasingly wild explanations for his anonymity can never be accepted (see, e.g., even Shakespeare-skeptic Justice Stevens: S206) outside a cult where rigid articles of faith only survive through (Stratfordian-level) inertia, repetition, & cultist insulation.
[With some justice, Stratfordian James Boyle describes (S207) the Oxfordians in a fashion that puts one in mind of the Velikovskian cult: “The Oxfordians have constructed an interpretive [DIO: one might say psychological] framework that has an infinite capacity to explain away information …. all the evidence that fits the theory is accepted, and the rest rejected.” (E.g., suppose an Oxfordian reads [T2:208&213] that Marlowe's “relation to Shakespeare is clearer than any other …. The abundance of Shakespeare's quotations, echoes, and allusions [to Marlowe] is especially important because he lets his other literary contemporaries severely alone.” (See similarly at N72-73.) Instead of seeing this as supportive of Marlovianism, Oxfordians will of course conclude that both men were secretly Oxford. See S196f.) The most central Oxfordian rejection is the failure to face the impossibility of finding Marlovian-strength evidence — not ad-hoc-made-up-scenarios (such as Anonymous) — to credibly explain the hero's anonymity. Is there such a psycho state as “Impedimentalism”? If so, Oxfordianism exemplifies it. The out-of-control fantastic flowering of the theory arises directly from cultists' eternally wheel-spinning, pathetically Sisyphan passion to get past the ever-towering-before-them impediment of explaining&explaining Oxford's anonymity. All the cult's dementia flows from this one awful and ineradicable bar.
Shapiro understandably delights in detailing what happened when the Oxfordians couldn't convince anyone much, by the stylistic and bio-parallels arguments that had launched it. (Namely: cranks' classic never-say-die attitude towards evidence that would convince non-cranks to desist and do something else with their lives. See comments at DIO 10 [2000] end-note 2 [p.83].) The result was fugue-state evolution into schizo-schismatic fantasy-competition:
S196: “The argument that Oxford sought anonymity because of the usual aristocratic misgivings about print only went so far. There had to be a better explanation for why the greatest of poets suppressed his identity. The answer was soon found: Oxford was Queen Elizabeth's secret lover and their union produced an illegitimate son, the Earl of Southampton. The argument, first advanced by Percy Allen in 1933, came to be known in Oxfordian circles as the Prince Tudor theory and proved deeply appealing to skeptics already convinced that conspiracy and concealment had defined Oxford's literary life. Looney [the virtual founder and St.Paul of Oxfordianism], while valuing Percy Allen's loyalty, loathed his Prince Tudor theory and feared that it would ‘bring the whole cause into ridicule.’ Freud [a fervent Oxfordian] hated it too, and even sent a chastising letter to Allen. To this day it has deeply divided Oxfordians.” The Prince Tudor theory is now enshrined in the film Anonymous, the very (impedimental) title of which clued us to its slant the moment we 1st heard of it (2011/6).
(Comparing their shaky presumption-alibis to the Marlovians' lethal explanation for anonymity is no-contest.)
The initially-exploratory and partly-useful Oxford cause has by now become a sad impediment to resolution, having drained-away skeptical idealism and energy into a patently incredible cul-de-sacrosanct of rigidly held but logically-weak alibis for anonymity, which can only assist orthodoxologists' diversion-tactics.
Thus, Shapiro delightedly cites Oxfordian (and Baconian) arguments in extenso. But not those of the Marlovians. [This, even WHILE predicting (S207) that presently ascendant Oxfordianism may ultimately give way to Marlovianism.
Stratfordians have big-event debates with Oxfordians (S205) Not with Marlovians. The situation reminds one of US elections: the pseudo-two well-established parties aren't getting us anywhere. So we can hope for resolution via 3rd party.]

Unconsciously following the Napoleonic dictum that sheer numbers win wars (but forgetting that no matter how many zero-evidences one brings to bear on a case, they still add up to zero), Shapiro's divert-and-conquer response is: massively distract attention, by (page-after-page-after-page) piling onto the reader a string of lightweight pro-WS arguments (parallel to also massively refuting just-as-lightweight anti-WS arguments) — arguments none of which would even begin to cut the mustard with Frankfurter or any other balance-conscious judge.
[Shapiro devotes long chapters (67 pages each) to the irrational excesses of Baconians & Oxfordians, successively. By contrast, his occasional scattered remarklets (S7, 201, 212, 217, 230, 316, etc) on the rational Marlovians add up to maybe a page or two — and transmit not one word from the convincing documentary basis of their case. (Though, he does creditably cite Marlovian websites in an appendix: S316.) I.e., he knows (S217) where the weightiest threat to orthodoxy actually lies.
Shapiro says (S9) his main aim is to show why doubters doubt, so his failure to supply dozens of pages of Marlovian wackiness (parallel to his hefty doses of Baconians' & Oxfordians') betrays the awful unspoken truth: the Marlovian case alone is conspicuous for not breeding nutty theories or advocates.]

Yes, contemporary references to Shakespeare (S223f) as a playwright survive (Shapiro's & Terry Teachout's idea of skeptic-snuffer data); but, given that his name was on the title-pages of popular published plays from 1598 on, this is hardly remarkable. (Alfred Hitchcock's name is commonly spoken of regarding numerous films. None of which he wrote. Procurement of plays seems parallel: P298.)
[Ben Jonson's 1623 preface to the First Folio, lauding playwright-Shakespeare (as well as praising Marlowe's gift for the “mighty line” [T2:173f]), appears to have been mere hype to sell a book (P170, 184). Again, Jonson&co were totally silent (P148, 154) at Shakespeare's death. On Jonson vis-à-vis WS, see P140, 195f, Q417.]

The title-page issue is parallel to the Wizard-of-Oz' pretense: what was BEHIND the title-page curtain? What evidence exists that the title-pages were not adorned with the name of a front-man? The question's burden-of-proof inversion is justified by a hitherto-unemphasized consideration: we have not one but two quite independent evidences of WS' level of literacy:
[A] WS' totally blank record of education, especially university.
[B] His detailed will's failure to hint in any way at literary inclination.
[Likewise, two completely independent evidences are consistent with the theory of a body-switch: [1] The sudden execution of John Penry near Deptford only hours before Marlowe's “death”. [2] The placement of the stab-wound on the body being such as to maximize the area of blood-flow over the face.]

This is a classic instance of Occam's Razor, which asks: what is the simplest single theory that simultaneously explains the available multiple evidences?
Answer: WS' literacy was inadequate to the creation of the plays.
By contrast, Stratfordians require two elaborate separate explanations for [A] the will and [B] the education-blank — and must contend in effect that the obviously consistent implication of evidences [A]&[B] is just a coincidence.
[As with the recent simple revelation (below) of the single common source for both of two ancient Greek Earth-measures — one simple theory that neatly explained both.]

More than any other piece of evidence, the will gives us a firm answer: Shakespeare was not the literary scholar the plays reveal their author to have been, but acted as a mask for someone else of that description. Calvin Hoffman took the trouble to compare Shakespeare's will to that of wealthy contemporaries, finding (H26) that WS' is more detailed than any Hoffman saw. Diana Price's discussion of the full revelations of the will is must reading (P19, 146f).
[Standard Stratfordian retorts (S50):
[1] The existence of a (now-lost) inventory of WS' possessions, which is (on no evidence) presumed
[a] to be a supplementary document. (Though uncited in the will: perhaps just someone's later summary of its items — or even just a copy of it. See like conjuring-up — by the waning defenders of R.Byrd's fake 1926 North Pole flight — of a supposed supplementary document containing his Real Data from 1926, to alibi the fact that the handwritten sextant data in his diary put him over 100 mi south of where the missing data is supposed to put him: DIO 10 [2000] §L7 & n.108 [p.52].)
[b] Thus the (lost) Shakespeare inventory coulda-woulda contained a list of WS' (also now-lost) putative books&mss. (A classic apology-minuet: drool over the dream of finding the Lost-List, — even while claiming that the lack of Shakespeare mss means nothing.) Schoenbaum inventively tries (C305) to confuse WS' unmentioned alleged books with his son-in-law's library of medical books.
[2] Master Stratfordian-defense strategist Jonathan Bate arouses his talking-largely-to-each-other cult's self-gratifying passion to be vindicated, by citing two literate (less wealthy) WS-contemporaries whose (smaller) wills listed no books — poet S.Daniel & divine R.Hooker, a diversion which Twain gutted over a century ago with a just guffaw at the implicit relative value to WS of his will-cited 2nd-best-bed versus the will-uncited mss of the 1st-best plays in the history of English drama — not to mention non-mention of the library used by their creator.
And see Price's broad analysis, summarized below, adducing (P147) facts omitted from Master B's will-argument, thereby quite demolishing it (which may explain why Shapiro [S50] doesn't cite her response to Bate) namely that Daniel specified his publisher as his executor (leaving us in no doubt that he was a writer), and Hooker's will attached an inventory referring to his books.
Such Stratfordian argument from others' bookless last testaments might have some slight force if the party had the same will-detail as wealthy WS; and the same need, as the author of the plays (as against poems), for access to plenty of books [S224; P242f].
But the easily-missed, typically (Stratfordianly) unnoted sub-problem here is the same as throughout the rest of the Stratfordian case's coulda-woulda alibi-fest (in which the inherently improbable is preferred to the probable, in order to alibi one odd bio-blank after another — books, play-mss, education-vita, letters, eulogies at death, even court-reference [P148-149], etc): it must speculate-invent the key evidence its theory requires but massively doesn't have — especially as regards Shakespeare's bio [P14-19] and education.
For similar cult-think (likewise inventing non-existent documents to fend off skeptics), see DIO 10 [2000] §L7 [p.52]]. Shapiro's frustration is palpable (S50): if ooonly we had Shakespeare's supposed list of books, we'd win! But: it's just as gone-missing as his educational record, letters, etc. Hey, doesn't this serial-letdown remind one of the flying-saucer freaks, who keep explaining&explaining why no advanced-civilization artifacts are ever left by aliens at the sites of supposed sightings, encounters, and-or kidnappings?
Stratfordians are immune to noticing the simple consistency (of the obvious conclusion from the will's non-literary cast) — the mutually-confirmatory consistency with WS' entire lack of educational record.]
Price notes (P146) that even actors left books in their wills; that Shakespeare remembered with sundry gifts several among his actor friends, yet not a single writer; that nothing in the will relates to scholarship, but rather to colleagues (and their relatives) in his actual professions: acting, business, & usury.
[WS evidently had no sense of the immortality of the plays his company had bought from Marlowe. He appears to have primarily treated them with the same awe a farmer shows to his grain: just a product of commerce.]
The will is so detailed that it even includes (S9) Twain's favorite bit: WS specified that his 2nd-best bed went to his wife.
[Shapiro deserves a radical-cheek medal for photographically reproducing — as his (delightfully-titled) book's page-one frontispiece — the line of WS' will that contains the disposition of his 2nd-best bed, the line Twain made famous as reflecting the root problem in accepting WS as an author. Schoenbaum also is not reluctant to draw attention to it: C303.]

The will's evidential weight is textbook Frankfurter: it overwhelms all other evidence (on both sides). It leaves zero wiggle-room in proving that Shakespeare could not have written the plays. This is a certainty (OK, perhaps a scientist should formally call it just a near-certainty) which we of course cannot expect to quite achieve in identifying the true author; yet, by elementary induction, we may arrive at an answer with surprisingly high surety.
[It takes but a few minutes to read and ponder Price's summation. What does it say of the English-teaching profession that it has taken it over a century to not understand the logic? The same pattern of defending-to-the-last-ditch a shaky grant-cow icon went on for a few decades among historians of astronomy regarding plagiarist and data-faker astrologer-geocentrist Claudius Ptolemy. But even Ptolemy's least-numerate defenders eventually caught on, and it's now a dead controversy.]

Indeed, once we consider eliminating Shakespeare as author, the central question that requires confrontation is: who would want to hide behind a front and why? Clearing away extraneous matters to get to the probabilistic nub here: this controversy hinges on the following fulcrum-question.
Which is more improbable: [a] that the will of the genuine author of the plays would at great length show no literary or scholarly interests, or [b] that the real playwright would wish to be anonymous. Since we have yet to consider the gov't's persecution of Marlowe, each option initially seems inherently improbable. Yet one must be true. And the probability of option [a] is flat zero, leaving option [b] as valid. (A.Doyle Sign of Four Chap.6 [emph in original]: “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Similarly in Hound of the Baskervilles Chap.3.) Aside from the suppressive influence (S5) of academe's cultist sniggers, the failure of option [b] to catch on is due to popular failure to [i] explicitly ponder the comparative likelihoods of [a]&[b] (as we've just done), and [ii] explain the true author's excellent reason for anonymity — a failure which has led to what Shapiro understandably calls (S7) “endless trench warfare.”

What is particularly odd is that there is one famous figure who had the only powerful anonymity-motive among the top candidates — an undeniably valid reason for staying out of sight. (The same reason that was featured in The Front.) Yet most of those interested in the Controversy are (on both sides) unaware of this. (Shapiro just skips it. And not a single one of the dozens of enraged 2011 reviews of Anonymous mentioned it.) We will shortly provide the evidence establishing the writer's cause for disappearance; but we pause first for some sociology & background.

A comment in passing, regarding academic-establishment-think. If for decades an entire academic field (English & CompLit) is unable to follow Price's simple, irrefutable reasoning from Shakespeare's will, then one is inspired to ask: what about CompLit&co's complex and-or speculative reading of influences and symbolism into the works which lit-Experts claim to interpret for us? Would you seek solution of a calculus problem from a student who can't add two-plus-two? Should one expect a hole-in-the-wall Tijuana clinic to cure cancer, if it can't do the simplest surgery?
[CompLit's problem in this controversy is similar to the gov't's Beltway mentality: insularity and BS' normalcy, which doesn't work its magic so reliably outside its own clan; thus the necessary resort to non-rational means (mainly censorship, shunning & snobbish insult) for fighting enemy ideas.
Note that when the shockingly new ideas of Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Rutherford were announced, they were adopted by most scientists within a decade, often much quicker. The contrast to the present case ought to embarrass the stubborn upholders of English-Dep't orthodoxy, given that the case for Shakespeare's non-authorship has been obvious for well over a century and Hoffman's thorough Marlovian evidence has been published for over half a century. Irony: when the Hoffman theory is finally accepted, it will be a belatedly-much-cited comfort to the CompLit community that he was one of their own: a poet, not a historian or scientist.]

DIO 10 [2000] n.172 [p.77]: The universe's richest mud-mine is a controversy's last ditch.
Part of the reason DIO has no misgivings about issuing the preceding paragraph's unkind — but generally accurate — note (on English Dep'ts' common sense) is
[a] it is a matter of international academic import; and
[b] the targets have themselves long since settled into an un-reexamined pattern of using inaccurately-broad-brush smears to repel doubt of Stratfordian orthodoxology by stigmatizing it as kook, an approach which is not only revealingly overdone-nasty but turns out to be ironically — even amusingly — inverted.
[Typical Stratfordian and Folger Shakespeare Library comments on skeptics (S202): “the sheer volume of heretical publication appalls …. voluminousness … matched only by its intrinsic worthlessness …. lunatic rubbish” and requiring “the capacity to climb into a soap-bubble and soar away into Cuckoo-land”.]
The Stratfordian cult's latest anticrimethought-broadside volume, the (already-cited) new James Shapiro book, Contested Will (2010), is refreshingly more temperate, and produces a detailed survey of dissent's excesses which is of considerable historical value — a credit to Shapiro's dedicated & meticulous scholarship. But, as an argument for Stratfordianism, it is a logically failed mega-diversion, an orthorgy of too-broad portrayal of skepticism as kook, accomplished by the ploy of leaving out explication of reasonable skeptical arguments, while super-detailing a succession of over-speculative searches in defense of hopeless candidates. (The hitherto-unrealized natural origin of these unfortunate forays will be revealed below.) On 2010 April 17, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout raviewed the book, titularly implying (following Shapiro's halting hint: S8) that doubters are not only kooks but are akin to Nazi-apologists: “DENYING Shakespeare” (emph added). (We will examine below who's really crackpot and who's a nut-denier in the Shakespeare controversy.) Just as censorially, Teachout deems Shapiro's book to be all-you-need-ever-read on the matter. But the unambiguous pro-Shakespeare data Shapiro provides are merely (S235f) contemporaries' acceptances of his claim that the plays were his (a ploy long drearily familiar to skeptics: P112), circularly assuming the very claim at issue: that Shakespeare was not conning these witnesses.

During the 19th century, the persistent peculiar and unique (P301) lack of direct evidence of Shakespeare's literacy drove major writers such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James (P9) to doubt that Shakespeare ever composed anything of literary note. So far, so sane. And (except to The Industry) so clear and simple. But nothing else about the general public debate since has ever been that simple.

Once Shakespeare was debunked, the natural next question was: then who did write the plays? Skeptics looked about for highly literate contemporaries (other than the presumably-dead Marlowe) and settled on a few favorites primarily because (S6, 142) they were highly educated, then (in the absence of extant plays by them — a weakness in anti-Stratfordianism that applies to all candidates but Marlowe) tried correlations (and clue-hunting of all sorts) with the event-packed texts of the dozens of plays in the WS-corpus: travel, style, education, even (Mxxvii, 190f) specific events and Oxford's Bible (M381f vs S214-215) — arguments often adorned with supposed veiled allusions (R152) and cryptograms allegedly embedded (even for years after Oxford's death) in various publications (e.g., M365-367; R passim) — though with little evident awareness of the statistical insignificance that is typical of these sorts of sweeps across vast reservoirs of potential coincidences (see DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §G [pp.49-50]). And permutations.
[For the reverse situation (correlations aflow from tiny data pool), see DIO 11.1 [2002] ‡1 §C [p.9].]
This sort of reasoning appeals to the public. And has even fooled actors Derek Jacobi & Orson Welles (Mxxiv&xxvii). But it didn't fare well in a mock trial before a few Supreme Court justices (S205f).
Professional statisticians regard such long-familiar stuff rather as entertainment than serious research. [DIO Editor Dennis Duke looks into the future (better than Nostradamus) with his 2011/2/7 vision: imagine what's going to happen when the crypto-obsessives start putting hundreds of Elizabethan texts' words into computers, checking out the inevitable zillions of permutations….]
Practitioners of this brand of research discern detailed predictions of the entire history of the world in, e.g., the Bible or Nostradamus. (Indeed, one prominent Oxfordian author, D.Roper, is also author of Nostradamus: The Truth, advertised at his website thusly: “All His Prophecies Between 1555 and 2009 Have Come True, Despite Claims to the Contrary. FACT!”.)
[Leading Oxfordian journalist M.Alexander had (M411) 7 years university education in physics & astrophysics. But (as DIO readers know all too well) such a background carries no guarantee of statistical expertise or instinct.
Oxfordians who have cultishly-isolated themselves from non-Oxfordian sources may be surprised to learn that the Marlovian movement has produced its own biographical-correleations (B passim) & cryptography (B261 & 337) Some of these seem (to us) less unconvincing than the Oxfordian parallels. Indeed, the biographical hints in the Sonnets (esp. #74) are shown by Webster to fit Marlowe's fate and exile far better than anyone else's. But the basis for firmly identifying the plays' author obviously lies in the direction of less alibiable sorts of evidence.
A measure of the utter unreliability of stylistic analysis for firm induction is provided by the case of Marlowe's Hero & Leander, placed (T2:99) by some scholars at the start of his career; by others, at the end.]

Chaos was thus assured. And imaginative alibis for key non-fitting evidence abounded, such as (M360; R196) for the inconvenience of Oxford's 1604 death, long before the Shakespeare plays (in which some even discern post-1604 references: S179) stopped appearing. Also, how credible is it that Oxford (b.1550) would start publishing “Shakespeare” plays only in his mid-forties?

Yet a few factors do beckon as potential bases for solid induction. The author had to be someone extremely well versed in the classics (P243), presumably university-trained, and a brilliant writer. As already discussed: obviously, a candidate would be much more plausible if there were evidence that he
[1] was a consummate playwright (M236; S177) and
[2] had a demonstrably ironclad motive for remaining forever creditlessly anonymous, even while he poured his life into creating the pinnacle of poetic theatrical literature.

Concentrating initially upon requirement [1], let us now ask a hypothetical question which, incredibly, seems never to have been previously posed by anyone. Over a century ago, when the search for the true author started, what would have happened had Christopher Marlowe been on-the-ballot? I.e., if at the outset of the serious controversy, it had been believed that Christopher Marlowe (then thought to have been killed in 1593, before Shakespeare's name had been attached to any published literature) were actually alive during the time-range of all the plays and thus in the running for a vote among Shakespeare-skeptics: is there any doubt that he would have been experts' near-unanimous 1st selection? (See below for academe's awareness of Marlowe's unique stylistic connexion to Shakespeare.) His vote would likely have exceeded 90%.
[The many similarities of WS' style and (esp. Edward II→Richard II [e.g., T2:4]) plots to Marlowe's are not argued, but it is alibied that WS is just stealing from his predecessor. Yet we know that Marlowe was a regular stealer from himself even before (T2:70) his disappearance. Afterwards was of course easier and slyer: see what Blumenfeld rightly spots as a self-plug (B36) in Marlowe's Hamlet, the brass of which has since been exceeded only by Peary-biographer Fitzhugh Green: see DIO 10 [2000] n.18 (also n.20!) [p.16].]

Today, with Marlowe generally overlooked, the two most popular candidates are Shakespeare himself and the Earl of Oxford. But Shakespeare was inadequately educated and not provably more than ordinarily literate. There survive a few comments of praise for Oxford's writing, and from these little seeds the Oxford movement (believing these to be just a few glimmers of much else) was probably born, though the praise may be little more than a few kissings-up to a rich noble. He unquestionably died in 1604 (well before the “Shakespeare” plays ceased coming out). Of the putative plays his fans think the praises were admiring (the very existence [M236, S177] of such praise suggesting that Oxford's hype-othesized secrecy was either very slipshod or a fantasy), none has been thought worthy of preservation (unless one circularly attributes the “Shakespeare” corpus to him: R87), and the long-frustrating lack of direct evidence that Oxford could write great plays is similar to the Strafordians' situation. Yet Marlowe — born 1564, same year as Wm.Shakespeare — wrote several excellent surviving plays (and these very much in the style of “Shakespeare”). E.g., Doctor Faustus (played by Richard Burton in the 1967 film), Edward II, The Massacre at Paris. Both's plays are in the blank verse style of which Marlowe was the acknowledged establisher in English drama. See, e.g., the judgement of no less than Swinburne, who viewed WS as virtually plagiarizing Marlowe (Zix), and who writes of the former (Encycl.Brit.): “the first English master of word-music in its grander forms…. The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible … to overestimate…. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; [in] his music … there is no echo of any man's before him…. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. [T2:176n7.] After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare.” (See also the Encycl.Brit. on Marlowe suffusing Henry VI; even Stratfordian A.Rowse agrees. See also T1:98, 2:211, 217f — and 222, where Bakeless reflects how speculation of the purest baselessness becomes Tradition [emph added]: “It is usually agreed that the admission of the three Henry VI plays to the Shakespeare canon has at least something to justify it, if nothing more than a final revision by Shakespeare's pen.” And see Blumenfeld's amused comments on the matter: B158.)
[C.Wilson (W147) on the earliest of the First Folio plays: “Henry VI, Richard III and Titus Andronicus are so like Marlowe that it is generally assumed that he had a hand in the writing of them”. See Hoffman's extensive quotes (H133-136) from Stratfordians (and see Stratfordian Bakeless' lists & rejoinders [T2:224-226, 246-247, 254-255, 261-263]) who detect Marlowe in numerous early “Shakespeare” plays. See also the Editor of the Yale Shakespeare on the authorship of Titus Andronicus: B247.
These expert stylistic detections — and the fact that every single one of the pioneers of Marlovianism were literati — will happily serve as shame-ameliorators in case the ultimate victory of Marlovianism triggers overdone post-game shaming of the whole CompLit field.]
The similarity of style is so great that 2 centuries ago, it was even proposed (S195, 312) that Marlowe's works must have been written by Shakespeare.

The Marlowe and “Shakespeare” plays show a love of Ovid, of whom Marlowe was actually a translator (T2:166f; B31) during his years at Cambridge University. By contrast to such evidence of Marlowe's education and rare intelligence (not everyone went to Cambridge): beyond circular arguments from the plays themselves, there's no evidence that Shakespeare was educated at all.
Teachout & Columbia University's Shapiro scoff at the idea that this is relevant, since it is claimed (S239, 276) that a high-school education then was adequate for the plays' author (as good as a university education today). Price demonstrates otherwise (P236-237, 242f) in convincing detail (adding that Shakespeare's children Susanna & Judith were [like his own childhood family situation: P234] far from fully literate: P237-238), though Susanna could at least write her name.
[C71 claims that university was primarily for professions, not literature, while admitting that some of the best writers did indeed go to Cambridge or Oxford. (E.g. Greene, Marlowe, Marston.)]

Price (P211, 240) and Shapiro (S239) discuss evidence that WS struck some acquaintances as not particularly well-educated, evidence upon which each has a different take. (At Q102-103, Barber skillfully develops this into a delicious comic scene, reminiscent of films such as 1979's Being There. Only funnier. Without a Clue [1988] is better competition) WS had the same problem as Woody Allen in The Front), when fielding Andrea Marcovicci's innocent questions about “his” writings, except that — despite the above-cited glimmers of the truth — WS hid it well. (Barber suggests that WS stayed out-of-sight & out-of-town so much because it allowed him to avoid questions about his writing and-or requests for re-writes.) Marlowe was wiser than The Front's black-listed writers in that he chose a front who was an able actor AND (presuming he knew for-whom he was fronting) was a hero not a villain of this history, in that he was risking his own life to save that of one of the most able artistic creators of all time.
In any case, Shapiro's high-school-is-enough-education dodge evades the question of whether the obvious extra-ordinary intelligence of the plays' author — not just his degree of exposure to classics — might perchance be (probabilistically) correlated with the odds that he'd go to university. So, again, we find that orthodoxy-cling requires opting for a barely-possible but a-priori improbable notion. How could academic cultism get any funnier than the nonpareil self-cornering delight that universities around the world boast English Dep'ts who must defend their religious attachment to Shakespeare's authorship by arguing against the import of a university education.

As already noted above, WS' otherwise detailed will notoriously left no books and no mss (S9, P146, Mxxix), a POWERFUL, SOLID rock of evidence for which Shapiro can only offer insult and (S50, 224, 275-277) alibi-fluff speculations, at least as “far-fetched” (S212) as any he attacks in his heretical targets. Some (S275f) of these alibis (e.g., WS must've just thumbed through books at bookstores!) are so feeble and ad-hoc that — presumably to avoid triggering astonished snickers — they are not even identified as answers (to the will's shocker on books), and are presented hundreds of pages distant from his early-on passing acknowledgement (S9) of the will's booklessness.
[The huge separation in Shapiro's book between Problem-of-Booklessness (idem) and its biographical Solution-Alibi (S224) is particularly funny because WS' will is central enough that it's in the (wonderfully clever) title of his book! — Contested Will.
Note that at one place Shapiro argues (S50) that Shakespeare did own books (and falsely claims that skeptics contend [contra P234-235] WS was illiterate), while elsewhere arguing (S224, 275-277) that he didn't need to. Where there's no evidence, a theologian will cover all bases.)
Price notes (P129, 302) that Ben Jonson's personal library ran to hundreds of books. As his excuse for why WS (richer than Jonson) had to browse bookstalls to read his sources, Shapiro claims (S224): “Shakespeare must have been a familiar sight [there], browsing through titles — for he could not possibly have owned all the books [see P242f] that echo through his plays.” (See also S275.) Again, dream-up-evidence-as-needed Shapiro's main (amusingly ironic) put-down of alternate theories is that they are too speculative. (And don't miss the speculation's sleight: WS couldn't have owned all-the-books-used? No, the issue is whether he owned any books.)]

Shapiro's Teachout-touted chapter using Shakespeare's fame as an argument for his authorship only raises (S2, P114 & 301) the question of why no one would have preserved a single letter by the most prominent man of English drama. But, then: did any ever exist?

There is an addendum to this issue. Shapiro adduces (S224) George Buc's written note that Shakepeare attested to his inquiry that a minor 3rd party play was by an obscure minister: Buc “knew Shakespeare well enough to stop and ask him” about the matter (emph added). But why does Shapiro (like his source) assume the exchange was verbal and not written? Is even Shapiro aware of the obvious answer to the question concluding our previous paragraph? (Note: This is Shakespeare's only surviving comment on authorship. Why is it about someone ELSE's plays? A glaring measure of Stratfordian evidence's thinness.)

Of course, most of the skimpy surviving substantial documentary information about WS has to do with money-lending. Even there: no WS letters. This is obviously peculiar. Even more so in the case of his debtor Richard Quiney, who wrote a 1598/10/25 letter TO the loan shark but retained it instead of sending it, so that it survives today in the Quiney papers. (Photo at C239.) But the same archive contains no letter FROM his famous lender in this connexion — nor any other.

Diana Price highlights the unevadable point and places it in lethal context (P149; her emph):

All of [WS'] undisputed personal records are non-literary, and that is not only unusual — statistically, it is also a virtual impossibility [on the hypothesis that he was a writer].
Over seventy personal records survive for [WS] but not one reveals his supposed primary professional occupation of writing. Indeed, the only evidence that proves [WS] wrote anything is six shaky signatures. [His] documentary evidence further suggests that he was ill-suited to a literary career. He is a man of no recorded education. He appears to have been uncomfortable using a pen. His documentary trail is bookless, and his will has not a trace of literary sensibilities in composition or content.

Now to requirement [2]: motive for anonymity. Oxfordians and others have devoted much advocatory creativity to justifying and getting the popular debate ever-deeper into their shared&now-canonical hopotheses that (Mxxxiii) fear of retribution for veiled critical portrayals of lords or (P133, 218, 222; S196) shyness of mundane publicity, or association with the plebian theatre world explains author-anonymity.
[History knows of numerous cases of persecuted authors hiding behind pseudonyms or fronts, but how many did so because they'd poked fun at a fictional character designed to resemble a real potentate? Even mass-murderous Czar Nicky2 didn't have Rimsky executed for his Golden Cockerel's King Dodo: he simply impeded the opera's production. (Note S177 on Tudor-era censorship.) The whole point of criticizing in fiction (or via jesters) is to evade a persecution which Oxfordians must ahistorically assume Oxford feared, for serious plays they assume he wrote, while Marlovians have thoroughly proven their man's persecution on charges that are documented, not assumed.
Shapiro makes (S226) a trenchant point against the Oxfordians' central fear-of-persecution-for-dramatic-insult argument for their candidate's supposedly needing a front. Shapiro asks: why bother? — why not just publish anonymously, as most plays of the era were?
Note that, if aimed at Marlovians, the same argument is much weakened by the context of Marlowe's 1593 arrest: recognition of highly refined writing style in heretical public material had led to his May 18 arrest, an experience that could have suggested post-“death” use of a flesh&blood theatre-world frontman, serving as a lightning rod to focus attention away from himself and help squash any suspicion that he was still alive — a requirement peculiar to his situation. (Obviously, such a concern applied neither to Oxford nor to any other candidate for authorship of WS' corpus.)

The 1594-1598 gap, during which we have no record of Shakepeare's name attached to any publication, is a minor mystery for all sides. Regarding plays, Marlowe followed Shapiro's simple plan for 5y following his exit: Shakespeare's name did not appear on any play until 1598, when (S227) Love's Labour's Lost, Richard III, & Richard II were published as his.
However: why would pushy actor and money-lender Shakespeare for years forgo the sensational double-talent publicity and extra gate he could have gained by announcing his authorship of the very plays he was performing in?
Shakespeare's 1593&1594 dedications of poetry (Venus & Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, resp), to the wealthy young Earl of Southampton, may have been a reflection of intent to develop a front-in-case-ever-needed.
(Webster hypothesizes that the young earl's friendship was a comfort to Marlowe in exile. The 1594-1598 silence may simply reflect belated hermetic adoption of the plan Shapiro has suggested, after realization that the 13 day gap was a dangerously glaring giveaway, which hopefully wouldn't be noticed until after Marlowe's death — when it would eventually help make the truth obvious.)
The 1598 re-appearance of WS' name may (B237f) relate to the same year's “posthumous” publication of Marlowe's “incomplete” (of course: he's dead, get it?) Hero & Leander? (The soon-after [N69] “posthumous” completion of it by poet G.Chapman is suspected by some to evidence the hand of Marlowe. See T2:112 & H159. Majority scholarly rejection of this judgement typifies the import of arriving at a valid resolution of the WS-authorship controversy, because it is not unreasonable to suspect that the Marlowe-Chapman question is another case of textual analysis being powerfully influenced by Stratfordian insistence that Marlowe was dead in 1598. Bakeless is concerned (T1:185) by the issue: “A final puzzle is when and why Marlowe asked George Chapman to complete his poem, Hero and Leander. Chapman can hardly have talked to Marlowe after the stabbing” — so Bakeless speculates pre-death request. The more obvious explanation is of course off-limits.)
Also 1598: a book by fellow F.Meres (Univ Cambridge-educated: S235) slandered Marlowe (T1:148) while suddenly & simultaneously (S235-236, B234) launching the then-novel myth of Shakespeare having authored numerous plays: a dozen — none attached to his name before 1598.
So WS' play-authorship totals: zero-to-12 overnight.

It is a provocative coincidence that [a] Hero&Leander's publication, [b] Meres' first public recognition (of WS as not just playwright but prolific playwright of a sudden), and [c] WS' curiously belated (allegedly delayed 10y!) public debut as a title-page playwright, all occurred during the very same year, 1598.
Did a passing rumor-suspicion (that Marlowe had survived) during that year require triple-allaying? (Or did these alleviations just trigger each other, to some degree?)
H&L reminded the public of Marlowe and his superlative style, right as plays in that very style were appearing anonymously in London — so a long-prepared lightning rod may have seemed more necessary than previously. Or did the hypothesized rumor suggest the need for an “incomplete” poem's publication to emphasize the perception that Marlowe was gone, thus he & WS were two separate writers? (This was also the time when the Earl of Essex' rise against England's ruling powers [the Cecils & Walsinghams] was unstably cresting, accompanied by a spat with Marlowe's mentor Raleigh: N295, 323.) A possible factor independent of the foregoing speculation: an inferior completion [by H.Petowe] of H&L had appeared in 1598 (T2:109-111); perhaps Marlowe was so offended by this unexpected result of his fake death, that he (or intermediary) then asked Chapman to publish the real completion.)]

In a particularly dumb example of imperial arrogance, a Stratfordian gooroo (whose comments are taken as if they constituted evidence, by the cultists devotedly dominating Wikipedia's WS&Marlowe articles) claims — contra the successful 3-century secreting (1593-1925) of the arrest warrant & coroner's report — that there is no way that the secret (of a front) could succeed in “gossipy” London. (I.e., a plot's existence can only be accepted if it leaks & fails!)
[By-the-way regarding gossip's alleged inevitability (in a time when unapproved speech could be fatal): the connexion of Poley&Skeres to Marlowe's “death” remained secret for over 300 years — until the 1925 finding of the coroner's report.]
This, even as he&his currently manage (despite the existence of a gossip or two in the modern western world) to keep a tight secrecy-lid on the publicly-unknown actual evidence for the Marlovian case. (The very passion Stratfordians exhibit in censoring and slanting coverage [reviews, encyclopedias, etc] betrays their private awareness of how dangerous Marlovianism is when openly compared to Stratfordianism.) With equally sharp logic, the same Expert scoffs at the idea that anyone would give up credit for the plays — evidently expecting a man wanted-for-torture would crave glory more than his life. And his fingernails.

Those who profess to (unreasonably) rank gossip-leakage (which they counted on not to have occurred) higher than Occamite logic, for evaluation of mysteries, may be startled at the implications (however uncertain) of the following:

1. An item cited in no other current analysis:
   Given that Deptford is a port well on the Continental side of London and that Marlowe had already done Continental intelligence work, Marlovians reasonably conclude (e.g., Q4&218) that on 1593/5/30 he embarked on a ship for the Continent. Which renders of possible relevance a now-forgotten item: on that day, according to local Deptford legend, Marlowe accompanied some companions on a visit to a ship. (Nathan Dews History of Deptford … Deptford 1883 p.124.) Now, the legend does not recall it as an escape ship, but rather the famous Golden Hind (which he evidently had occasionally visited earlier as well, for banqueting) — Drake's Earth-circumnavigator-vessel, by then retired (as a memorial & tourist-magnet) in dry-dock at Deptford.
   But one must factor-in aural traditions' notorious capacity for distortion.
   [E.g., such transformations as [a] rhino into unicorn; [b] an occultist legend perhaps evolving into the XmasStar tale (DR “Astronomy vs Astrology” Queen's Quarterly 91.4:969-989 [1984] pp.976-977); [c] Jesus nailed to a ‘T’ which later becomes a cross.]
   I.e., the mere fact that Marlowe&co are gossip-recalled as having been seen going onto a ship on the very day of his “death” is strikingly accordant with Marlovian theory.

2. Another bit of gossip dates from c.1681. It is relayed with proper caution in Price's undeservedly obscure book, which fairly notes Stratfordians' understandable case for mis-punctuation (reading the recollection as a written plea of illness whenever WS was invited to debauch, though no letter of his is extant) — but adding that the punctuation as it stands is consistent with WS' crude extant signatures. The account can be read as describing WS' virtue & shy modesty, including our Brit-playwright-champ's cramps of agony — which came on whenever he was asked to wield a pen (P127): he was “the more to be admired [because] he was not a company keeper lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, & if invited to writ; he was in pain.”

3. Finally: There survives a 2nd-hand recollection of an apparent leak of the secret of Shakespeare's appropriation of Marlowe's 1st post-Deptford play, Titus Andronicus, in 1594. (This early in Marlowe's anonymity, perhaps the eventual routine [see reconstruction-speculation at Q430] of Marlowe's transmission of his plays had yet to be smoothened.) Edw.Ravenscroft, who'd in 1678 staged the play as WS', recanted in 1687, saying (T2:259, emph added): “I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage that it was not originally his [WS'], but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he [WS] only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the Principal Parts or Characters.”
   [This item naturally got Ravenscroft smeared as a liar (idem). yet it is consistent with a formerly common but lately less fashionable supposition (C153) that Robert Greene's 1592 Groatsworth rage was at actor WS for tampering with his & others' plays. (Q377 portrays Marlowe complaining of the same interference at other hands.) This interpretation might accord with Greene's sneer at “Shake-scene” and perhaps at occasional ad-lib (or pseudo-ad-lib) “bombast” by a playwright-wannabee (Q422) actor (whether Ned Alleyn or WS) whose bombastic voice could Shake the scenery and-or who slightly rewrote scripts by giving scenes a Shakeup. (Greene's upper-case for “Shake” does not have to refer to a proper name, since he nearby capitalizes “Crow” & “Tyger” & “Player”.) Such interpretations are anyway less incredible than the now-orthodox Stratfordian position that Greene was upset at hypothetical 1592 entirely-WS-composed plays' competition (idem).]
   Incredibly, Bakeless (idem) claims Ravenscroft's reference to privacy eliminates Marlowe & others since they were well-known not private — forgetting that in 1594 Marlowe if alive was as private as he could be.]

Understandably (S196), few scholars have been or ever will be convinced that anyone (who was not under the torture-threat that kept Marlowe hidden) would — on such bases as Oxfordians propose — spurn credit for decades of dedicated artistic achievement, obviously the center of his life's enduring work. If a hypothetical noble hypothetically eschewed the plebian theatre, he could have his plays performed at the several private patrician theatres (M255, 275, 317; B86; R90) of that day. (Some were performed at court: Q294.) Question: do Marlowe's plays sound plebian?! Yes, they contained mayhem for the pits (and nobles likely enjoyed same, too). But the language, grace, and beauty contained in the plays are more consistent with a world far above the street. And who was backing Marlowe? — the Walsinghams, one of the richest and (T1:91) most cultured families in Europe. The common alibi that the author of the plays would have been ashamed of their creation is one of the most ludicrous of the many alibi-myths that have been generated out of the several non-Marlovian cults' fantasy-cornucopic need to defend their candidates' shyness. (It has also been asked why a noble author would choose the name of an actor-broker-moneylender as his cover: S208.) And, if retribution-fear was a factor, why would the non-peerage actor Shakespeare be more immune from such?) However, before unalloyedly condemning these arguments' promoters, empathize with and be grateful for those valuable pioneer revisionists (e.g., Twain), who had creditably perceived Shakespeare's fraudulence, and — given the mistakenly-restricted spectrum of likely suspects (fatefully but at-the-time-understandably skipping Marlowe) — were simply going with what seemed the best explanations possible at that time for the true writer's mysterious shyness. (See below analogies in the sciences.)

In 1955, US poet Calvin Hoffman dropped a slow-acting bomb onto the debate by proposing that Christopher Marlowe's death was just as illusory as those in several of the very plays we are discussing (e.g., Romeo & Juliet). Hoffman's was the 1st Marlovian publication to appear following the discoveries of the prime documents supporting Marlowe's survival: the arrest warrant and the coroner's report, thus it was the 1st Marlovian case to be so strong as to be irrefutable. But both sides were by then far too locked into their long-established theories to listen.
[An astronomical analogy: Wm.Herschel on 1801/4/17 discovered the major Uranus satellite Umbriel, but after his huge telescopes' retirement, no one else saw Umbriel until Wm.Lassell a 1/2 century later. But, following the rediscovery, it took so long to establish Umbriel's orbit well enough to back-compute its 1801/4/17 position accurately (to verify Herschel's priority), that by then Lassell's name had been attached for decades to the discovery. Such cement having long since solidly set, Lassell's mis-priority is still occasionally listed in publications, even 40y after DR's orbit math had precisely established
The political center scoffs that Marlovians' faked-death idea is “far-fetched” (S212), personally denigrates Hoffman (S201), and won't tell its readers what his evidence is (S212) even while being aware of it (S227). And, perhaps sensing sudden danger from an unexpected quarter, the competitive Oxfordians generally won't (even when mentioning the theory of fake-death: M274) mention Hoffman at all!

Question: Why must Oxfordians be so CERTAIN that Marlowe's admittedly fishy disappearance was a murder not an escape? There's no evidence that justifies such adamancy. And there are a flock of obvious objections to it. But: Oxfordians' blindness must be TOTAL to the Marlovian evidence — to the (admitted: M274) oddities of Marlowe's “death”, to the checkable similarity of his style to WS' (against which the Oxfordians have nothing at all to put in competition), to the provocative neatness of the 1593 Marlowe→Shakespeare segue. The rejection must be 100.00%, leaving no room whatever for doubt of Marlowe's elimination.
Why? Because if Marlowe wasn't dead, Oxfordianism is. (And so is Stratfordianism.)

After all, the Oxford case has always been at bottom an obsolete-since-Hoffmann well-who-else-coulda process-of-elimination, claiming Oxford (S6) had, more than other candidates: “perfect background, really. He was clever, well educated, well traveled”. This and Looney's ever-more-fantastically imperialistic (S194f) stylistic arguments for Oxford constitute the actual longago origin of the Oxfordian movement, arguments so feeble and uncontagious that they necessarily in time became (due to this very feebleness) massively, cultishly encrusted with fanatically-compiled pseudo-evidences, ever more tenuous and statistically-naïve supposed stylistic & biographical WS-Oxford parallels.
[From the beginning, it became increasingly obvious that the raw Oxford case was making few converts. Since as early as 1921 arch-Oxfordian J.Looney had in frustration issued an expectation that was unrealistic for any of the vying parties (which is why the controversy's solution must arise from Occam's Razor), complaining (S194): “circumstantial evidence cannot accumulate for ever without at some point issuing in proof.” (Similarly, more recent Oxfordian despair hopes for [S201-202] “a miracle” or “some dramatic ‘breakthrough’ ”.) For a cause whose evidence had always been near-vanishingly thin, said call-for-proof set soldiers-for-Oxford upon their still-vibrant mission of searching for ever more parallels, even cryptograms, parapsychology (S197f), etc — all of it inadvertently testifying primarily to the weakness, over-complexity (S194f), and a priori implausibilty of Oxfordianism's essential case.]

When the theory of fake-death is pseudo-met by today's top Oxfordian, Hoffman is not cited (M274-275, emph added). Instead, we are told (with utter Oxfordian certainty) that Marlowe was killed not saved — this in a murky evidential context that plainly allows no such certitude. Note in the following Oxfordian quote how close the writer comes to the obvious actual solution but out of preconception refuses to see it.
[Hardly unique. Some examples DIO has encountered over the years in other controversies: DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡6 §§H4-H5 [pp.63-64] and self-critical n.34; DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡4 §H7 [p.47]; DIO 16 [2009] ‡1 n.7 [p.4].]

The murder was a hit job. None of the [three Walsingham] agents was ever punished because they were only carrying out the orders of powerful forces who could have been brought low, had Marlowe lived long enough to complete his testimony for the Star Chamber.
In addition to being a secret agent, Marlowe was also the only serious literary competition Elizabethan England could offer Shake-speare…. Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II reigned above all other works yet produced for the London stage in popularity and acclaim…. (See also T1:190.)
On February 6, 1594, the London printer John Danter registered [anonymously Titus Andronicus,] the first published Shake-speare playscript, a blood-and-gore fest worthy of Marlowe's nightmarish vision…. Unknown forces, perhaps [Oxford]'s new and settled married life [DIO: the wedding was 1591, not 1593], perhaps the impetus of Marlowe's death, had stoked [Oxford]'s creative fires. (NB: While attention is diverted to 1594's Titus Andronicus, No mention of Venus & Adonis following Marlowe's exit by only 2 weeks. Insta-Stoke!)

(This, only a few paragraphs after citing [M274] Occam's Razor! — presumably the last principle which chronology-juggling Oxfordians would want anywhere in the vicinity when going up against Marlovianism's simplicity, unfudged chronology, and devastatingly solid documents.)

The open-minded scholar lets the evidence teach him. The foregoing quote is thus a textbook example of the very reverse.
[Again: Had Marlowe actually been hit-killed, wouldn't the killers have learned on-site that a stab in the forehead doesn't kill instantly?]

Is Marlowe's post-1593 survival unmentionably far-fetched? Well, let us see — by examining the evidence which the most prominent orthodox (& unorthodox) cultists refuse to tell anyone about.

Our next thought-experiment can be an eye&mind-opener for those too-long insularly steeped in any of several cults (P10) built upon inconclusive reasoning on the authorship question.
Start by forgetting all about the Shakespeare Controversy. Forget about the fact that Marlowe's survival has the attraction that it would at a stroke solve the greatest literary mystery ever. Set that entirely aside. And instead just try independently gauging the odds on Marlowe's survival strictly in isolation, just on the biographical and documentary evidence which Hoffman and more recently (B211) David A. More and Samuel L. Blumenfeld have revealed. We are about to see that the likelihood of his survival is far from zero, a probability which we initially, temporarily set (for purposes of argument) at minimally 50%.

The key events all occur in 1593 May, in the context of the growth of the ill-fated (M334) Essex challenge (M273; B202, 216) to the power of the Walsingham-Cecil circle around Queen Liz 1. On 1593/5/18 a warrant was issued (B216) for Marlowe's arrest for atheism, A CAPITAL OFFENSE. (In the wake of the Catholic powers' near-miss 1588 Armada, England was paranoically sniffing out & snuffing out all religious dissenters. After Marlowe's “death”, pastors issued vindictive, even gruesome sermons [T1:143f] on atheist Marlowe's much-deserved fate.) When seditious pamphlets circulated around London in 1593, written in an extraordinarily literate style, Marlowe's once-intimate friend, fellow writer Thomas Kyd, was suspected of authorship and so was arrested and tortured (fatally: H61), ultimately spilling Marlowe-did-it testimony (B216) that was certain to destroy his former friend.
[Bakeless (T1:114) believes that Kyd only fingered Marlowe after his death, a sequence rendered unlikely by the latter's very arrest.]
Marlowe appeared before the Privy Council (often called the Star Chamber) on May 20 (H64). Damning testimony against Marlowe continued to come in, so he was now faced with certain torture himself — or execution or both. The most detailed indictment (quoted in full at H66-67) was by an implacable enemy (B200, 225-226), Richard Baines, accusing (N46, 57, & passim) Marlowe of promoting homosexuality and teaching that religion, Moses, & Jesus were frauds, etc. (Background [B200]: Baines & Marlowe had been co-investigating or co-committing [T1:101] or dabbling in [Q90-164] counterfeiting in Holland in 1592. When caught, each had fingered the other.) This fatal document reached the Privy Council at the end of May — perhaps 5/27 (N47, 391), though Hoffmann (H66) says 1593/5/29. Immediately after receipt (5/30), Marlowe was “killed” in Deptford, at the house of Eleanor Bull.
[Shapiro (S7, 212, 230) scoffs at the theory that Marlowe fled to the Continent (at least temporarily). But Blumenfeld rightly asks (B219 emph aded): What were Marlowe “and two of Walsingham's servants doing in Deptford, spending a full day in idleness and hours walking in a garden … at a seaport [on the Thames, near Greenwich] where [Cecil]'s spies conveniently went abroad and returned and could freshen up at Eleanor Bull's safe house before making their way to London? … Shouldn't Marlowe have been at [T.Walsingham's estate], available for appearance at the Star Chamber in London at a moment's notice?” His constant availability to same was explicitly ordered in his presence and appears in the May 20 arraignment document (H64): he was “commanded to give his daily attendance on their lordships.”]

Marlowe was a longtime operative (T1:159, 177-185; M274; B200, 202, 218) for the Walsingham family's spy ring. (Geoffrey Rush played all-powerful, resourceful Protestantism-guardian Francis Walsingham in the 1998 film Elizabeth.) Marlowe thus had friends (B200) who were wealthy & potent.
[Late spymaster F.Walsingham had been on the Privy Council: H65. His cousin, Marlowe-patron Thomas Walsingham, was often at the court of Queen Liz1, who [T1:91] even visited him in 1597.]
These friends were also routinely superdevious (T1:91). Probably all three. So: did they arrange a fake death, to protect Marlowe from torture that might reveal secrets that would endanger his associates, as Kyd's testimony had already undone Marlowe?
[Thus, his hypothetical rescue might have had little relation to preserving Marlowe's creativity. (Though Hoffman argues that T.Walsingham was determined to save his lover.) Today, we see prosecutors “indicting up” a chain of offenders. The Walsingham power-clique may have feared that its enemies were torturing-up: torture A to get testimony on B, then torture B to get something on C, and so on to the top. Marlowe's “death” severed the prospective chain.]
There is no question of Marlowe's relation to the Walsinghams: the May 18 arrest document specifies (H64, B216) that Marlowe be 1st searched for at Thomas Walsingham's estate. The temporal coincidence of his “death”, so soon after his arrest, is at least provocative. (Though, to Shapiro, not enough to cause even a mention of any of this evidence.)

Once we realize (from the will alone) that Shakespeare is out of the running, then: if Marlowe is assumed alive, an expert vote would be virtually unanimous for Marlowe, so the modest 90% value we floated earlier (Thought-Experiment [1]) was set too far from 100%.
I.e., the probability that he is the best candidate as WS-author is effectively equal to the probability that he lived past 1593.
[We later show more directly that it is not even necessary to adduce the WS will (or compare Marlowe to other candidates) to show that, if Marlowe survived, he wrote the plays.]
We next turn to evidence that will probably convince many that our preliminary rough 50% estimate of said Marlowe-survival-odds (during above Thought-Experiment [2]) was also considerably too low.

Suppose you were arranging a fake stab-death of Marlowe. All three of the slippery men in the room when the “killing” occurred were of the Walsingham circle (B218-219): Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley, & Nicholas Skeres. Poley & Skeres had been key (W146, N150f, M273, B42&70) in undoing the 1586 Babington plot by Catholics trying to overthrow Queen Elizabeth in favor of Mary Queen of Scots (whom Liz1 in 1587 ordered beheaded for said plotting), triggering the 1588 Armada. As a reality-check here, it's worth asking: for schemer-spies of such awesome, delicate, and historic international ability and courageous daring, is it really “far-fetched” to believe that they could pull off a standard cloak&dagger body-switch to protect their spy-ring?
Interlude:
Even the relative amateurs of the 1949 film The Third Man almost succeeded with a similar fellow-spies-witnessed fake-death-&-body-substitution ploy, pulled off by a spy (Orson Welles in the film) desperate to dodge elimination. (The author of The Third Man, Graham Greene, was — like Marlowe — a combination of writer and spy.)
[Readers are encouraged when in Vienna to visit the Third Man Museum (open only on Saturday afternoons), an entertaining & enlightening labor-of-love collection of memorabilia, including: the original zither that played the film's haunting hit song, weekly live demonstration of a projector of the period, 1950 movie-posters and record-sleeves from dozens of nations (reflecting the surprise 1950 international success of film&song), as well as photos, letters, & maps of mid-1940s Vienna including a 1944 map displaying Adolf Hitler Platz & Hermann Göring Platz.]
A prior and more famous (though differently motivated) case of fake death is that of Lazarus — which also involved witnesses who were colleagues of the “corpse”.
And pseudo-deaths continue in more recent fiction. The 1967 Columbo pilot “Prescription Murder” employs a substitute bod (which isn't even dead) for a fake suicide. In the 1973 flim The Sting, Rob't Redford will never know peace from the cops or the robbers; so: he fakes his death. Paul Newman does likewise, leaving us with two simultaneous fake deaths. The 1986 cine-comedy Ruthless People also ends with a neat version of a substitute-body fake death. Looking back to the pre-Third Man era: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) exceeds all those other tales in that, while a fake death is key to the plot, the story culminates in yet an additional fake death. (Non-simultaneous, unlike The Sting.)
[The last survivor among the victims is urged to commit suicide, since anyone found with 9 corpses will hang anyway. Hitherto-unnoted Slight-Problem with the plot: when our hero returns from the “dead”, how does this solve the difficulty? — since any couple found with 8 corpses might stimulate a mite of police curiosity, too.]
And faked deaths occur frequently in real life. E.g., when about to be arrested for various crimes, militarily-stellar Marine SSgt Arthur C. Bennett faked his death near Las Vegas on 1994/2/3 by subbing a body in his camper-vehicle and then burning it up. As credulous (or lazy) as the Elizabethan police (who evidently thought that Marlowe had suddenly transformed from a violence-shy [N86-87] writer into a vicious aggressor, or possibly was seeking an inevitably-painful but unsure-suicide-by-brawl), the modern Nevada cops for years deemed it credible that a man would prefer committing suicide by roasting himself!
[Marlowe was alleged by tailor Wm.Corkine to have attacked him with stick&dagger on 1592/9/15 in Canterbury. The incident was settled, so even Stratfordian Nicholl doesn't think it shows Marlowe was violent (N87). This incident can be interpreted at least 3 ways, e.g.,
[a] the violence is consistent with orthodoxy;
[b] mutual dropping of the case (Q423) suggests its insignificance;
[c] Marlowe already knew (earlier than previously thought) that he'd soon need an escape-ploy, so he was setting up the credibility of himself as a brawler.]

Returning to 1593:
Which is more of a challenge? Saving-hiding a single private individual? Or saving an entire nation?
[Note that this situation provides an inverse version of the disproportionality encountered when comparing the difficulties of CompLit's challenges on WS' unsubtle will vs the subtle symbolisms, etc, which the field's profs profess to discern in the world's literature.]
(Francis Walsingham's dedication to keeping the Catholic empire at bay was inspired by his 1st-hand witnessing the 1572 massacre of Huguenots in Paris, where he was stationed as England's Ambassador to France.)

Required ingredients for scheme to (1) rescue Marlowe & (2) convince his enemies that he was dead so they'd stop even looking for him:
[a] Witnesses.
[b] Marlowe cannot be passively attacked but instead must attack the killer, Walsingham-employee Ingram Frizer (B218). (This permits Frizer to get off on self-defense, which he did with remarkable swiftness — going right back to his employment by Walsingham. See T1:157f, Encycl.Brit., B240.)
[Note one seemingly minor detail of the coroner's report (N17): Poley & Skeres were seated on either side of Frizer. (Why the bunching? Didn't the table have two sides?!) Thus, “in no wise could he take flight” (N84). This, along with Frizer's back being turned to Marlowe, has the look of pre-planning — towards a (successful) plea of self-defense.]
[c] The weapon must belong to Frizer (contra Q353).
[Marlowe either carried no dagger or carried nothing sufficient to explain and-or match the terrible Deptford blood-flow wound, 2 inches into the skull — presumably effected by Frizer's weapon, perhaps by Frizer himself.]
Yet requirements [b]&[c] together force a two-stage (thus doubly improbable) scenario, namely, that Marlowe grabs Frizer's weapon and attacks Frizer (from behind), but Frizer grabs it back and kills Marlowe! A-priori-farfetched? Obviously. Yet all these elements of our required-scenario are found in the official coroner's report (T1:156, H77-78, B219-220), which was recovered in 1925 (T1:151) by Hotson. (Perhaps hoping thereby to squelch Webster's then-fresh 1923 public heresy? As Stratfordians [e.g., T2:216] inversely like to pretend it did.)
[Likewise, when it in 1996 finally de-classified Byrd's 1926 “North Pole” diary, the Byrd Polar Research Center (Ohio State University) believed it would clear him of lingering suspicion. (See DIO 10 [2000] end-note 1 [p.81].) But, instead, it blew up in orthodoxy's face. Hotson's find of the coroner's report (originally trumpetted as proof that — Hosannah! — Marlowe had indeed died at Deptford) simply fanned the flames of skepticism due to its many anomalies (e.g., the obvious falsehood that the Deptford wound would instantly kill), plus growing awareness of the devious rep of the “witnesses”. All sides now distrust the report to some extent (see, e.g., even the most anomaly-immune Stratfordian), so it is a triumph of invincible innocence that any side thinks that the report proves Marlowe died at Deptford.]

An alternate and perhaps the most likely explanation of the involvement of a dagger belonging to Frizer, not Marlowe: if this was the blade that was used to stab or hammer-stab John Penry's freshly hanged corpse on the evening of 1593/5/29, then it had best be blamed for Marlowe's death so that (for coroner Wm Danby's benefit) the blade would exactly match the wound in the corpse's skull.

About the beginning of 1593, Marlowe was first reported (H58) to the gov't as a seditious (and all-too-convincing!) proponent of atheism. (Rob't Greene had 1st made this accusation cryptically in a 1588 work: B83.)
Given his high political connexions (including perhaps having being tutor to a claimant to the throne: N340-342), Marlowe would immediately have learned of this and recognized the attendant danger to his very life. Hero & Leander anticipates (T1:185 & T2:114) his imminent death. (On pre-May awareness of looming danger, see also Barber's learned if inevitably delicate speculations at D100f.)

Marlovians (myself included) have hitherto at least implicitly assumed that sneaky Poley&co (or Walsingham: Q198 [like Q258]) concocted the fictional scheme that saved Marlowe. But, wait a minute! Of the Walsingham spies involved here, which one was a professional concocter of fiction? Who else but the seasoned playwright of the lot: Christopher Marlowe himself! He could think up without help the illusion that made his escape possible. (Though carrying it out required resources made possible by his connexion to the Walsinghams.) After all, his plays are dense with schemes, switches, deceits, plots, poisonings (B153, 275), fakes, betrayals.
Is it just speculation that Marlowe, on learning of his mortal danger, instantly began dreaming-up the details of his eventual fake-death's “brawl”? No, it's not. The conclusion of the hastily (T2:70) completed final play Marlowe produced under his own name, The Massacre at Paris, concludes with a device startlingly redolent of Deptford.
[Massacre brings to life the 1572 Catholic slaughter (by relatives of Mary Queen of Scots) of Protestant Huguenots, a horror which F.Walsingham had witnessed up-close, as British then-Ambassador to France. The massacre goes a long way towards explaining why Walsingham would later go to extremes to keep England permanently Protestant.]
In the play's final scene, vengeance-bent Catholic friar J.Clément in 1589 stabs France's King Henry III (who had recently [1588] eliminated the chief 1572 mass-murderer, the Duke of Guise, and whose army was on the verge of attacking Paris) — but Henry grabs the dagger from Clément and stabs him to death with it.
[Entirely Marlowe's invention. In actuality, of course, Henry's bodyguard cut down Clément instantly. (Note that the assassination occurred only 4y before Marlowe's play.)]
Sound familiar? Of course! — it's the Paris edition of the fantastic blade-switch ploy of the Deptford “brawl” — finally perfected&effected on 1593/5/30 to save Marlowe's life.
But Marlowe isn't done with the blade-switch device, and all of us who have seen his Hamlet (c.1601) have watched it play out before us — without realizing that we are seeing a resuscitation of the grand moment when Marlowe's skill at fiction saved his life by seeming to write its last act.
[Did Ziegler sense (Z293) the Hamlet switch's Deptford echo?]
In Hamlet's final scene (Act 5 Scene 2), Laertes plans to murder Hamlet by perverting what was supposed to be a mere game of fencing: he uses a rapier that is secretly unblunted and doused with poison. (Slow-acting poison, just like that which actually killed Henry III.) But, after he stabs Hamlet with it, Hamlet grabs it during a scuffle and fatally wounds Laertes with the same fatal blade. I.e., Marlowe's 3rd use of his blade-switch device! — Massacre at Paris, Deptford, Hamlet. (The same device is also used in the film Shakespeare in Love.)
[Both Henry III & Hamlet died from slow poison on the blade used.
(In Tamburlaine [c.1589] Act 5 Scene 1, degraded Turkish ruler Bajazeth iamb-pentametrically ill-wishes Tamburlaine luck in upcoming-battle: “And every bullet dipt in poison'd drugs.”)
We note in passing that many Marlowe plays involve regicide (presumably reflecting England's awareness of the shakiness of Elizabeth's position), e.g, Edward II, Henry VI, Massacre, Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth.]

Massacre at Paris was staged on 1594/1/30 (evidently for the 1st time), 8 months after Marlowe vanished. See T2:71, where biographer Bakeless shows better familiarity with calendar-convention than B131 but worse arithmetic.

The play was left unpolished by a suddenly-scramming Marlowe. Instead of the usual 5 acts, the play is in 20-some scenes. And this carries a valuable but hitherto-unperceived insight into his play-construction process. The strict rule for Elizabethan playwrights that all plays be in 5 acts was artificial! — at least it was for the top playwright of them all. The fact that act-bounds were not set as he wrote shows that he was adding said bounds after not before the planning and even (at least in the case of Massacre) virtual completion of his plays.]

At N41, 170, 225, & 286, the leading scoffer at Marlovianism, Charles Nicholl, mis-dates (to 1593 January) the 1594 Jan premiere of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, failing to understand that Henslowe's reference to “January 30, 1593/4” (T2:71) means our 1594 Jan. (The unstructured state of the play as Marlowe left it is proof enough in itself that the 1st performance did not occur under Marlowe's supervision but after his disappearance.) This leads Nicholl (at N41&286) to propose that the (1593 Spring) Dutch Church Libels (ultimately leading to Marlowe's arrest) which cite the massacre were partly inspired by a theatrical performance of Massacre at Paris which hadn't yet occurred.
[If Nicholl is right in believing that the play helped inspire the Libels' threat to treat Dutch immigrants as Paris treated the Huguenots, then their author had private access to the play. This would restrict the likely suspects to Kyd or Marlowe himself, promoting a popular cause: anti-immigration — of which Marlowe's mentor W.Raleigh was the sole prominent promoter in the gov't: N37\&290-293.]

Given the pat story of Marlowe's alleged Deptford demise, one can understand why Marlovians disbelieve the 1593 Deptford “witnesses” — and suggest that the body seen by the coroner was someone else's.
[Remarkable Marlovian speculative research (by D.More) has found (B211, 240) that a prominent Puritan (see his Encycl.Brit bio), John Penry, was (as already noted) hanged late on 1593/5/29 — on shockingly short notice, the evening before Marlowe's “death”. Penry was pretty near Marlowe's age, and his hanging was only 2-3 miles (B218) from the place of the latter's 1593/5/30 “brawl”. If it was desired to avoid wrenching Penry's neck, his death could have been a strangulation-hanging. (Such as was used by Czarist Russia to execute Lenin's brother.)]
Oxfordians agree that the Walsingham spy-clique was indeed plotting, but propose that murder was a surer way to silence Marlowe. (This approach's logic must naturally dance carefully to explain-away the coincidence of Shakespeare's immediately-after appearance!) But how effective would a spy ring be if its members were killing each other whenever danger arose?!
And why the big show, with witnesses, elaborate alibi-for-kill, coroner, etc? — when murderers could just disappear Marlowe (à la Argentina), or (even simpler) have an anonymous goon mug&kill him in the street and leave him there.
(As N328 realizes, forcing him to a highly speculative hit-conspiracy. mixing enemies Essex & Cecil, etc. Note: Nicholl is strictly Stratfordian party whom the New York Times picked to review [2013/1/27] Barber's Marlowe Papers — an author whose balance and integrity may be gauged from the fact that he cites [N6,396] Hoffman's 1955 book only regarding a painting of Marlowe, while nowhere mentioning either Hoffman's or others' theories that Marlowe did not die and was Shakespeare.)
The simplicity of an anonymous murder is parallel to one of Shapiro's best points.
The obvious implication of the very fanciness of his “death” is that the disappearers' aim was to end his persecution by falsely convincing the world that he was beyond the law's reach: positively dead. And it worked for 362 years! — until Calvin Hoffman brilliantly induced the truth in 1955.

The coroner's report said Marlowe died instantly of a stab-wound over his right eye, entering 2 inches into the brain (T1:156, B220).
[Some — including a courtroom-style mock hearing (now appended to the DVD of Edward II) and even R.Barber's brilliant & epochal work (Q2&68) — portray the stab as into the eye; but the coroner's report has it “mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches”.
Another minor oddity in Barber's work: death-sentence-fleeing Marlowe's nocturnal arrival on the Continent is given (Q4&7) as when the Moon is at 3rd quarter & the Sun barely short of the Summer Solstice. (S.Solstice at June 11 Julian, about 17h.) This corresponds in 1593 to conditions from about quarter past midnight [Local Apparent Time] to dawn on June 11 Julian (England) or June 21 Gregorian (France). [It wasn't quite fully night, since the Sun was never more than 16° below the horizon during Marlowe's Channel flight.] Did a wanted Marlowe really linger for 12 days before fleeing to the Continent?! More likely, there's merely a calendar problem here. Having just “died”, Marlowe would start across the Channel perhaps late on May 30 Julian, and might reach the Continent about the early morn of June 1 Julian or June 11 Gregorian. But the book's calculations were made for June 11 Julian.
A parallel mixup by the Journal for the History of Astronomy and Royal Astronomical Society was revealed by DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡8 §G [pp.85-87]. See, similarly: able explorer Sir Martin Conway on Henry Hudson at Rawlins Peary Fiction [1973] p.16.]
Skeptics and even some among the orthodox have long rightly emphasized that such a wound would not kill quickly if at all (T1:182-183, W146, B220) which hints that the body was already dead when the stab occurred.
(Marklessly killing a man after enraging him by a stabbing, would be … difficult.) Indeed, such a wound is usually survivable, though it would handicap thought. But a hitherto-unasked question is: if one wished to substitute a freshly hanged body for Marlowe, wouldn't it help to stab it in the forehead, thereby cloaking the face with blood? (This could help fool an innocent coroner or provide a fail-safe excuse for a nervous bribed one. Recall: H.Poirot's noting the needlessly covered face of a supposed corpse was the solution-key in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun.)
[Curiously, the Deptford body was stabbed in a hard place: the skull. Several commentators remark (e.g., W145) that a real attack would be more effective at torso or neck. Were Frizer's 2 shallow scars in his own scalp pre-arranged to justify his required “counter”-stab to the head?]
It is also more than possible that the face was somewhat disfigured, given the violence of the wound: gossip in 1600 had it that some brains had spilled out of the skull (T1:147).
(Was the skull split — distorting the face — parallel to JFK's ugly death?
[A death which launched a nut-competition as vigorous as anything discussed hereabouts. See DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡8 [pp.72-76]: “The JFK Conspiracy Conspiracy. Professional Paranoid Clique Flunks Paranoia 101. The Warren Report Was Right.”]

Let now go further by asking: how likely is it that a dagger-stab would pierce the hard bone of a human skull? Especially 2 inches into it. It seems doubtful (though not impossible) that a dagger would break the bone at all — unless it was hammered into the corpse of a man already dead.

This is just part of a larger question: whereas stabbing someone in the face (and only in the face) is an unlikely tactic for a genuine fight, it is perfectly consistent with the traditional Marlovian hypothesis (long since already independently arrived-at on other grounds) that the Deptford planners were pulling a body-switch. Obviously, blood-covering & messing-up a substitute body's face would be safeguard-desiderata against the chance of exposure.

The most bizarre of the several mysteries of the Marlowe “brawl” has always been why Marlowe would be stabbed in the top of the head.
This is a classic case of inductive reconstruction. (The equivalent of the Hound of the Baskervilles' seemingly pointless double-theft of a single boot of Henry Baskerville.) The head-stab makes no sense for an actual brawl, but when we entertain the theory that the brawl & death were faked as part of substituting a body other than Marlowe's, it makes excellent sense.
This is the way science advances: find the cohering theory that fits the formerly formless evidence.

So Hoffman's claim that Marlowe lived isn't far-fetched at all. There is no sure guarantee that the theory is true. But it's not kook, despite Stratfordians' insufferably snobbish shun-attempts to paint it so. Marlowe and his also-vulnerable but also-agile fellow spies were presumably in a state of try-anything desperation, with he under the shadow of the Tudor rack and-or noose. But he was backed by powerful, rich allies and a raft of slippery co-spies, who were capable of brotherly teamwork to save one of their own preciously rare species.
So, were someone to ask whether his “death” was a classic espionage ploy for entering him into what we may dub Nonwitness-Protection Program, most of us would deem the probability far from low. As already noted, the odds are probably far better than 50-50, even before we get into the spectacular inductive profit the theory will provide in the Shakespeare Controversy. Which segues us to a startling segue.
[The worst of Shapiro's several key misjudgements on Marlovianism is the astonishing claim (S211-212) that the sole reason anyone would believe in Marlowe's survival is just to make him into Shakespeare. The kindest interpretation of this charge is that Shapiro is confusing Hoffman's original impetus to check out Marlowe's fate, with the strength of the argument his seemingly-wildcatting curiosity ultimately developed so fruitfully. The case that Marlowe escaped obviously now stands on its own (quite independently of the motive for its 1955 unearthing), and stands much more strongly than Shapiro's “evidence” for WS' authorship.]

Advocates for other authorship candidates consistently betray their fears that Marlowe survived by faking surety that he didn't. Why should, e.g., Stratfordians call the idea “far-fetched”, as well as “fantastic” and “preposterous”. Are they REALLY this ignorant of what a resourceful espionage ring (Walsingham's was tops in the world) and his fellows can pull off under emergency conditions? Have they read nothing of the daring schemes that litter the history of politics, espionage, & war?
(Would they disbelieve the astonishing 1942 Doolittle Raid or Otto Skorzeny's improbable 1943 rescue of Mussolini if there weren't film of each?) So: why the religious, even hysterical adamancy? What reason, other than I-can't-have-been-this-wrong-this-long pride (DIO 9.3 [1999] §A2 [p.120]) can explain Stratfordians' eternally immutable insistence that an obviously non-zero, non-trivial probability must be declared EXACTLY zero? Obvious answer: All competing factions — including Stratfordians — know and thus fear the lethal conditional (which they all understand but never speak — one of several indicia that Marlovianism is their secret nightmare): if Marlowe lived on, then he created Shakespeare's plays.

Anyone who's followed the authorship debate can check his memory: has he ever read any Stratfordian state: OK, so maybe Marlowe got away — but even if he did, he didn't write Shakespeare? No. Too ridiculous even for Stratfordians. Would going incognito-via-alias halt Marlowe's creativity? It never had before, during his previous years of international espionage. As Barber empathetically emphasizes (Q211, 290, 374), Marlowe LIVED to create the exquisite beauty, drama, & word-music he had been granting humanity for years before 1593.
[Active Stratfordians can empathize by considering how much Shakespeare-worship is their LIFE. I.e., if they were banished, would they stop reading the plays?]
Yet after 1593, we have not the miracle of two such voices. (If only!) No, there is — immediately (and as maturely as ever) — still but one. (How things do stay the same….) It is the obviousness of this point that elucidates the otherwise inexplicable passion all other cults display in decreeing Marlowe's non-escape and death to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN.
[E.g., due to Stratfordian plants among the WP Administrators, the Marlowe page on Wikipedia was long edit-proof (“protected”). It is lately guarded by watch-list goons who live to swiftly eliminate edits offensive to Stratcult dogma. And there is no question-mark beside Marlowe's official 1593/5/30 death-date — a 100.000%-certain declaration which (given the weird circumstances of the Deptford event) only a fanatic could make. (Note added 2012: since the 2011 posting of the foregoing, the Marlowe WP page has been re-opened.)]

Once we start examining the foregoing in the Shakespeare-authorship context, the Marlovian argument appears less a speculation and more a perfect potential resolution of that long-intractible mystery. Then, on top of the at-least-substantial possibility that Marlowe escaped, we learn that “Shakespeare” 1st appears publicly as a writer immediately afterwards: merely 13 days (or less) after Marlowe's “death” (C175-176n), issuing a dedication of Venus and Adonis which calls the poem his 1st work (S173 vs 234-235): “first heir of my invention”.
[Speculative aside: does “first heir of my invention” use the last word just in reference to alleged creativity? Or additionally to fabrication of a masterful front?]

Further: this WS 1593 poem's creation (and plays following) is so obviously beyond a neophyte's ability that Shapiro — creditably evidencing his expert sensitivity to literature's sophistication — must hypothesize (S226) that Shakespeare had been SECRETLY writing for most of a decade! (S235 refers to 1598 as “a decade into his career”) — i.e., Shakespeare started playwriting back in 1588-1589.
[A speculation Strafordianly presented as fact — this, while on the previous page (S225) Shapiro accuses his critics of speculative zanity.
He seems to imply that WS was trying to publish, but only by 1594 was his dramatic talent recognized with the anonymous printing of Titus Andronicus. Comments:
[a] WS was wealthy and (as a prominent actor) well-connected enough to get a play half as effective as Titus Andronicus performed and published as his own if it were his. Are we being asked to assume that WS spurned the potential extra publicity for himself (and the theatres he performed in) that would follow from announcing that he was author of plays he acted in?
[b] As usual, it is conveniently forgotten that Shakespeare himself said that his 1st work was 1593.
[c] No evidence — public or private — survives, attaching any work to Shakespeare's name prior to 1593's poem V&A. Nor for any play until the retro-claims of 1598.]
Specifically: Shapiro is claiming that WS was writing plays for 5-6 years before 1st publication (anonymously) of Titus Andronicus in 1594.
Notice how close this estimate is to the temporal extent 1588-1593) of Marlowe's acknowledged writing career! — i.e., “Shakespeare” appears out of the blue with a style JUST as mature as Marlowe's — at the same time.
[A further welcome testimonial to Shapiro's literary expertise is that he senses the right quantity of years — even if oblivious to the obvious conclusion from it. (We note that Oxfordians [e.g., R87] propose that the WS plays of the 1590s were actually written much earlier: yet another of their time-line problems — being met as usual by ad-hoc alibypothesis.)
More astonishing obtuseness is found in the standard biography of Marlowe, which (e.g., T2:216) accepts unqualifiedly — a STRICT Stratfordian requirement — that Marlowe died, even while owning (T1:183) that the three witnesses to said death (i.e., those who identified the facially-injured corpse) were “scoundrels …. Friser was a swindler by whose schemes Sir Thomas [Walsingham] seems at least once to have profited. [H.DeKalb's researches found (H84) that Frizer had a long record of being a tool in illegal Walsingham schemes.] Poley [who may have attended Cambridge Univ long before Marlowe (T1:171)] was an adulterer and a spy. Skeres seems to have been a jackal for both…. Where we find records of one we frequently find another of the three associated with him. Is it not odd that they should all be together at Marlowe's death? … And is it not stranger still that the Walsinghams so frequently [e.g., T1:91] appear in connection with Poley and Friser? And is it not strangest of all that they [the Walsinghams] remained on friendly terms with the man [Frizer] who had killed their friend?” Indeed, Frizer was legally acquitted with uncommon speed (T1:100); and (T1:170) “It is startling to find Frizer doing business for Thomas Walsingham the day after his pardon for Marlowe's murder. It is still more startling to find him obviously doing business for Lady Walsingham twenty years later.”
Marlowe-biographer Bakeless says all these things (see also D84) and chronicles in detail (T1:154, 166-182) the slippery bios of the trio, “perjurer Poley, cutpurse Skeres, and the swindler Friser” (T1:183). He adds sharp doubts that the wound would kill or that the quarrel was over a bill (allegedly causing Friser to be stabbed unfatally from behind), rightly asking (T1:183) who argues with his back turned? Yet he claims to trust (T1:182 & 2:216) their report that Marlowe died.
[One would hardly think it necessary, but in the context of the evidence-immune irrationality of English Lit's cult-ridden universe, Barber has to make explicit even the super-obvious (D84): “The testimonies of these witnesses (as to cause of death) are no longer believed by a majority of scholars, and in the absence of independent testimony to corroborate that the deceased was Christopher Marlowe, that, too, is effectively unproven. We are therefore left without reliable evidence that Marlowe died, as supposed, on 30 May 1593.”
Stratfordian Nicholl inadvertently provides a perfect encapsulation of the selectively slack logic that has dominated this issue (N87, emph addes): “I am not the first to doubt the ‘official story’ of Marlowe's death. Most of his biographers have some unease with it, but they have ended up accepting it for lack of any provable alternative.” It was precisely such inertial, every-missing-link-demanding approaches that long delayed the acceptance of Darwin and Wegener, no matter how powerful the argument in favor of the theory.]
Speculative queries:
[a] Was Bakeless so convinced (perhaps by his own of-course-infallible lifetime of textual anaylsis?) that Marlowe wasn't Shakespeare, that he MUST disbelieve Marlowe's survival? For, if Marlowe survived, Shakespeare was he.
[b] Or (a highly shaky speculation) did Bakeless' mind at some level suspect the truth but feared that Harvard could reject his Marlowe bio (Bakeless' 22y dedicated labor) if he promoted — or (even slightly) entertained — a taboo position? (He renounces said heresy as impressively as Galileo, stridently echoing [T2:216] orthodoxy in calling the Marlovian case “fantastic” and “preposterous”. But he has no evidence to back such too-much-protestation [of play-within-the-play overkill-proportions] other than the very death-report that's in question.) If some part of Bakeless was after-all skeptical, did he clear his conscience by leaving his impressive raft of clues and insights for later scholars to mine? He remarks that the “death” occurring right as Marlowe was called before the Star Chamber is “suspicious”. (Yeah, sorta!!) But why does Bakeless then merely say (T1:183) at this crucial juncture that Marlowe was in the toils of the Privy Council “very probably as a witness against someone”. This dodges-distorts the awful terror that necessitated Marlowe's faked death. Bakeless knew better — and says so elsewhere (e.g., T1:185). He had earlier acknowledged that Baines' (and others') charges to the Star Chamber were such as to (T2:110 emph added) “bring any subject in peril of his life”.]
Shapiro smoothly passes off Titus Andronicus' anonymity as irrelevant to the authorship question.
[There was indeed plenty of anonymity in play-production at the time (though less so for plays of the rare quality Marlowe produced: B131), since most authors were selling plays for money not glory. However: WS sought glory in acting. So there is an obviously-unanticipated consequent in Shapiro's (shall we say far-fetched?) explanation of the earliest published WS plays' maturity: are we to believe that WS would turn down stage ultra-glory from 1593 (or even 1588) all the way to 1598 by refusing to admit that he was writing some of the plays he acted in?! Talk about ridiculous….
Anonymity left it open for a wealthy arts-patron or speculator to adopt material. E.g., Venus & Adonis was originally registered (B230) anonymously on 1593/4/18 (during the period Marlowe was planning his escape into permanent anonymity) before Shakespeare's soon-after dedication claimed it for himself. (Perhaps front-establishment was supposed to occur prior to disappearance, but the sudden swiftness of events in late May left insufficient time for that. If so, this failure could have led to putting the front-scheme on hold [until really needed] from 1594 to 1598.) Many of the plays eventually published in the 1623 First Folio (including Romeo & Juliet) had not previously been publicly attached to WS' name. Notably, the 1621-1623 project to publish the scrupulously edited, invaluable First Folio of the 36 “Shakespeare” plays was engineered by Edward Blount, the literary executor of no other than Christopher Marlowe (T1:90, T2:222; B262).
In his ironically-titled and strictly Stratfordian “Documentary” life of WS (which as for all WS “biographies”) recovers not a single document he wrote, S.Schoenbaum speaks of the period 1591-1592: “if the Queen's [troupe] had Shakespeare … we do not know definitely of any plays he wrote for them.”]

The cult of Stratfordian orthodoxy traditionally, invariably, irrepressibly, and improbably has kept trying to contradict their own hero's direct chronological statement (that his 1593 poem was the start of his literary career) by adducing (S234) a lone, ambiguous-at-best (P45f) 1592 Robert Greene pamphlet (Groatsworth of Wit), which obscurely appears (T2:223; P45f; Mxxx, 235, 257-259, 317; B85&184) maybe to be accusing someone (dubbed “Shake-scene”) of actor-showboating and-or literary plagiarism or tampering (B230): “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out [ad-lib or pseudo-ad-lib?] a blanke verse as the verse as the best of you … in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.” (The “Tyger” dig is a play on a line in [discussed at T2:221f] Henry VI Part 3, and in its source-play The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.) Pathetic? Yes, but that's the ENTIRE extent of the Stratfordian cult's feeble (contra-Shakespeare-himSELF) “proof” that Shakespeare composed any work before Marlowe's 1593 disappearance. (And the very same speculators call everybody else's theories “far-fetched”!) To repeat for emphasis: this single-foggy-item based chronology contradicts Shakespeare's own clear chronology — yet it is holy writ among ALL orthodoxologists.
[Comments:
[1] Only a cult that's evidentially up-against-the-wall would be reduced to defending its hero by adducing and glorifying an item that (if it is held to relate to WS' writing rather than acting or — more likely — script-tampering) accuses him of plagiarism. (T2:223 wanly attempts refutation.) But, then, Stratfordians' crusade to (contradict Shakespeare and) argue that WS was a playwright before 1593, have no other “evidence”. This ambigruous work is all there is.
[2] Words such as “Player”, “bombast” and “Shake-scene” seem far more indicative of an actor than a writer as the subject of Greene's scorn.
The suggestion that Shake-scene could bombast a verse “as the best of you” (emph added) is consistent with an alarm-warning to London's playwrights' “union” (which would include WS, were he the Stratfordian vision of a seasoned playwright on the verge of greatness) that an outlander-interloper (a mere player!) is pretending to be as able as they at verse (hardly what one would say of a professional playwright).
Also: “the only Shake-scene in a countrey&rdquo sounds like someone at the top of his chosen profession — which could be (as most Marlovians argue: B103; D107-108 n.18, Q421-422) the leading British actor of the day, writer-dabbler and userer Ned Alleyn. (Groatsworth's hatred for Alleyn is so plain that even ultra-Stratfordian Schoenbaum believes [C152] that Groatsworth's character “Roscius” refers to Alleyn — he just doesn't think that Alleyn is Shake-scene.) But why would Greene attack then-obscure WS, who did little acting in the theater, and had no discernable reputation at all as a writer.
[For one thing, WS was only intermittently in London (Q303), as shown by Price (P32-42; Q303, 428). Also Barber (Q417), who notes that this allowed him to avoid questioners and (Q366) requests for re-writes.]
[3] The sole candidate whose case is affected if Shakespeare were a major writer in 1592 instead of 1593 is Marlowe's — so cultish Stratfordian-cling to the theory that Greene's pamphlet establishes WS as a writer in 1592 not 1593 (a trivial time-difference with respect to all other authorship candidates) specifically suggests that Stratfordianism is quietly, cringily aware that Marlowe's case is the sole dangerously powerful challenger.]
We again emphasize that, of the three main contenders for authorship — WS, Oxford, Marlowe — the last is the only one whose case does not lead to chronological difficulties and-or manipulation.
[Students of cults will recognize the chronology-jugglers' resemblance to Velikoskianism: see Ira Wallach's satirical “Worlds in Collusion” in his 1951 Hopalong Freud.) Also, the sudden 1622-1623 editing and printing of numerous hitherto unpublished plays is hard to reconcile with action by Oxford (d.1604) or WS (d.1616). If Marlowe lost his trusted and uniquely gifted front when WS went back to Stratford but kept writing plays (perhaps for Walsingham's private enjoyment or even private performance) then this makes sense.]
It is odd that Stratfordians regard as authoritative the First Folio versions of previously quarto-published plays, though they contain numerous edits that could not be authoritative unless effected by the author — yet WS (like Oxford) was certainly dead by then.
[The trigger for the First Folio's issuance may have been Marlowe's final health-decline, since he was a heavy smoker [T1:128] now nearing 60y.]
This point is driven home by Blumenfeld (B308) particularly for the case of Othello, where we have a 1622 edition that is not the usual mess of most quartos, yet comparison to the 1623 First Folio version reveals careful in-between alterations & interpolations. So there is clear evidence of authoritative final editing being carried out in 1622-1623.
[In the context of Stratfordianism's complex, rickety, and downright inventive juggling of fact and chronology (vs the uncomplex Marlovian segue), we may note an equally Occamite situation regarding ancient estimates of the size of the spherical Earth, one which is analogous to the Marlovian case's spareness — and is deliciously ironic in light of David Mamet's unthinking comparison (below) of anti-Stratfordians to flat-earthers. Throughout the century 1882-1982, numerous scholars (Hultsch, Lehmann-Haupt, Fischer, Sagan, etc) argued extensively that the huge 40% disagreement between the two standard Earth-size estimates adopted in antiquity — 252000 stades vs 180000 stades — was an illusion merely due to different ancient scientists' differing definitions of the Greek stade. Subsequently, a much simpler explanation appeared (see, e.g., DIO 14 [2008] ‡1 eq.28) — just as unexpectedly as the 1955 Marlowe solution's elimination of the many anomalies in the early-20th-century Shakespeare situation. (Bookless will, no educational vita, instant maturity, but no reasonable explanation for alternate creator's anonymity, etc.) The new 1982 ancient-geodesy theory was found not through arbitrary metrology but from long-universally-accepted physics, and it simultaneously (and very closely: within 1% each) explains BOTH precise but highly disparate ancient Earth-radius estimates — and does so without the slightest inventive fiddling with Greeks' standard macro-measure, the normal 185m stade. Again: the theory — like Hoffman's — passes Occam's test: SIMPLE. While evaporating multiple anomalies at a stroke.]

Question regarding Stratfordians' paralytic inability (e.g., S217) to quote to their readers the documents regarding Marlowe's desperate plight: do Stratfordians find these documents totally uninteresting? Just too boring to pass on? If so, one can reliably and profitably gauge their common sense. But even more revealing is the implicit arrogance (of those who rule most public forums on the authorship issue) in unilaterally, systematically keeping from public awareness (decade after decade) the full range of startling evidence relating to whether Marlowe survived. Obvious question: should anyone make such a judgement FOR everybody else? — even WHILE accusing skeptics of playing-god! It's hard even to imagine (much less actually encounter) funnier irony — or a better demonstration of where the nuts actually are in this controversy.

We now identify which side shows symptoms of crankitude by analysing the rationality of leading Stratfordians, ultimately revealing some unexpectedly establishment-embarrassing parallels to the Evolution-vs-Creationism debate.

Recent ever-more-robust anti-Stratfordianism has enflamed frustrated Stratfordian stalwarts to new heights of arrogant mass-smears. Their loathing of rebellion is now becoming aggressively adorned with psycho-babblic detective-work to identify the supposed megalomania allegedly hidden within the skulls of anyone doing detective-work on the controversy! — oblivious to the self-evident contradictive irony. The proferred psycho-analysis doesn't begin to hang together logically, but that doesn't discourage prominent counter-revolutionaries from adopting some variant of Stratfordian psycho-analysis to portray as kook all doubters of crumbling orthodoxy, because, being culturally insulated literati (long immersed in Freudian-fantasy novels, to the sad exclusion of familiarity with psychology, philosophy, & science — or the history of hoaxes, for that matter) they're unaware that most philosophers of science regard psycho-analysis as kook — a position unwittingly bolstered by the following unhinged Stratfordian rages.

From the already-cited 2010/4/17 article by Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout:

In a saner world … nobody would give [doubters] the time of day, there being no credible evidence whatever to support their claims…. zanies whose theory-mongering has blighted the world of legitimate Shakespeare studies…. It doesn't surprise me that such lunacy has grown so popular in recent years. To deny that Shakespeare's plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself….

Reality-interjection into this typically coolheaded Stratfordian rant: Marlowe's father was a cobbler (B13&16), so Marlovians (alone among major WS-skeptics) are affirming the very proposition — that the “plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background” — which Teachout is in his article's very title claiming that anti-Stratfordians are “Denying”.
(Likewise, the ubiquitous 1959 Folger Library editions of the plays prefatorily disseminate a blanket condemnation of all Shakespeare-doubters for allegedly arguing that “only a noble lord or equivalent in background could have written the plays.”)
Dr.Teachout continues his upside-down shrinko-analysis:

The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else…. [Shakespeare] is the only major artist of any kind who has attracted such attention. Any scholar who dared to suggest that Bach's work wasn't by Bach or that Rembrandt's wasn't by Rembrandt would, I trust, be handled thereafter with the academic equivalent of padded tongs.

In other words (actually Teachout's are perhaps better words than mine): dissenters should be treated as Untouchables.
Comments (before discussing the issue of shunning):
Note the sly shuffle of two quite separate issues: sober consideration of the relevant — no documentary background for WS — is set aside in favor of slanderous and fantastic psycho-obsession with the (doubly) irrelevant: WS' low origin.
[Does any Stratfordian even contend that Oxfordians show standard symptoms of snobbery? Do Oxfordians bar non-nobles from their homes & clubs? Do they talk only in the King's English? (Has any baron of the FreesnickerPress even considered requesting such evidence before engaging in mass-slander-slinging?) With the internet's oncoming new danger to Stratfordian orthodoxy, it seems that centrists have abandoned all standards of logic & decency in their frantic Charles-Martelian desperation to hammer & hurl back the pagan barbarians.]
To wit: if you think evidence of educational background is relevant to the authorship of a superbly erudite literary corpus, you are not merely an elitist snob (a charge which attempts distorting many skeptics' educational argument into a class argument) — said inclination places you beyond megalomania. The same baseless snob-slander has also been copied into Shapiro's International Herald Tribune 2011/10/17 review of the equally baseless Oxfordian-schismatic 2011 film Anonymous. Likewise, Newsweek's 10/24 p.24 Simon Schama review. Likewise, the New York Times' A.O.Scott at International Herald Tribune 11/2 p.12. Comments:
[1] It's ironic to find writers defending Shakespeare from a charge of plagiarism — while committing its essence themselves.
[The bane of the plagiarist is copying another's errors. Thus, our film-critics' virtually universal repetition of the ignorant and idiotically fallacious mass-libel (that skepticism of WS' authorship is proof of snobbery or envy), has exposed the majority of the press' chosen opinion-makers on the subject, as just a mob of herdable pack-animal pretenders.]
[2] Given [a] that the English lit world is itself an exclusive club (where cardcarrying membership requires no [spoken] doubt of Stratfordianism), & [b] the know-it-all airs of every one of the current critics (perhaps excepting Brantley), it's a larf to watch Stratfordians call anybody else a snob.
[Is this primarily hypocrisy or projection?]
[3] These o-so-superior critics' perversion of a reasoned argument (which we happen not to agree with), that the plays' author was upper-class (thus his high writing style & familiarity with court), into a symptom of Oxfordians' snob-elitism and conceit, is pure shrinko-analytic gas — this from cultists who can' stop branding other people as kooks.
[4] Review after review of Anonymous squandered space on such insult or or personal irrelevancy (Brantley), when what is supposed to be at issue (see the reviews' own headlines) is whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

The 2011 reviews reveal embarrassing ignorance of the Marlowe theory — and-or lump it falsely with cases it plainly is multiply distinct from. Stratfordianism's latest knight-in-shining-orthodoxy Shapiro already slyly did likewise — outrageously deeming the Bacon & Oxford candidacies (S4) “the best documented and most consequential …. [and] most representative” — so that he may steal away without ever confronting the elemental power of the Marlovian case.
As for what is (Stratfordianly) well-“documented”: the key manuscript documents that bear on the authorship controversy are (in chronological order):
[1] the daunting 1593/5/18 arrest warrant for Marlowe;
[2] the coroner's 1593/6/1 report;
[3] the invaluable (Stratfordian-recovered!) 1593/6/12 diary entry that is the 1st record of purchase of Shakespeare's 1st claimed work;
[4] Shakespeare's 1616/3/25 will.

While Time's interview (not published in a review dep't) with skeptical Justice Stevens is a welcome if limited exception to the 2011 anti-crimethought orgy of the FreesnickerPress' reaction to anti-Stratfordianism, the public is yet again generally being protected, naturally for its own good — and for its purity of thought (e.g., keep-trusting-the-English-Establishment) — protected from ever learning of Marlowe's danger, the craft of the witnesses to his “death”, the appearance of shockingly-mature WS right afterwards. We do not insist on agreement with the implications of these data and those further listed at our outset (though the data at least imply a reasonable if not ironclad-proven case for Marlowe→WS), but we do condemn the (snobbish?) arrogance of those who refuse, decade after decade, to lay these data before the public with anything like the prominence given to Brantley's utterly un-newsworthy personal reminiscences. (From this front-page article, we learn more about Brantley's biography than about the bio of any of the figures in the Shakespeare controversy! Just one more example of the malleable tactics of censors who wish to appear benignly non-censorial.) I.e., newspapers have a right to conclude what they will from data, but are they justified in suppressing data that favors one side on the implicit grounds that these data do not matter? Are they justified in royally making that evaluation and excision FOR the reader, while never letting said reader know of his data-deprivation? Again, the upshot is that most people (including the supposed experts now [2011-2013]) being trotted out to repel heresy, who hold strong opinions on the Shakespeare controversy, don't even know facts or recognize logic essential to it.
Prior to the film Anonymous, our FreesnickerPress' excuse for suppressing Marlovian data was but-is-it-news? (This, from newspapers that print recipes, horoscopes, comics, etc.) So now that the controversy is news, these same establishment-catering newspapers print fossils' opinions, slanders, and personal babblings instead of central evidential fact. The Marlovian case: persecution for heresy, spies, stabbings, purported murder. Booooring. Who'd be interested? If Brantley could morph into a New York Times-Howard Cosell, he'd just offer: what a yawnah — not fit-to-print.]
In sum: the Mamit-Teachout argument shows that Stratfordians are ignorant of the Marlovian evidence, since it is embarrassingly obvious that said argument collapses upon realization that Marlowe's origin is just as low as Shakespeare's. I.e., the most prominent Stratfordians don't even know something that basic to their argument. Most regular-folk Stratfordians believe largely because they are impressed by the Authority of the English-Dep't establishment; thus, it is worth asking: what is the value of a judgement upon a controversy, when it is rendered by a clique whose judgement and slander is founded on false data?

Most Stratfordians seem naïve about how much ghostwriting and fraud go on in various of the arts, an inevitability on a planet where celebrities are much rarer, richer, and pushier than creators.
[The freshest instance is hilarious: Fox News' Bill O'Reilly — never previously known as a Lincoln specialist — suddenly in 2011 began Billing himself as senior author of a book, Killing Lincoln, on the closing days of Lincoln's presidency. That is, as a specialist not only on Lincoln but specifically on his 1865 April doings. It was obvious from the start that the book's actual creator was the “co-author”, who'd realized that adding a celeb's name to the cover of his book would juice its sales enough to make it worth dividing the proceeds. The sham fell apart hilariously on 2011/12/16 (20:15 EST) when O'Reilly, bloviating on his deep grasp of Lincoln's mind, informed the audience of FOX [aka False-Or-Xaggerated] that one of the best evidences of Lincoln's judiciously slow-but-sure undoing of slavery was his issuance of the (1863/1/1) Emancipation Proclamation after the Civil War, i.e, 1865 April.]
Are Teachout&clo beyond our help in this area? We can only try.
The authorship of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in d has been questioned. And, at leading museums, the number of Rembrandts that have been reclassified (into of-the-school-of ambiguity) is comparable to those which have not (yet?).
Vermeers may now be as expensive as Rembrandts, yet the most ballyhooed of all Vermeers turned out to be a modern forgery by Han Van Meegeren, who made just as big a fool of the “art-expert” crowd, as sly Shakespeare's rôle-of-a-lifetime imposition has made, of the equally cocksure litwit clique.
[See New York Times 2011/12/4 p.1 for the latest exposure of top art-snots' inability to discern real from fake, not to mention their provenance-checking slovenliness.]
The sapphic pseudo-ancient “Songs of Bilitis” turned out to be a prank upon over-arrogant German classicists, the texts actually written by France's Pierre Louys, assisted by friend Claude Debussy's musical accompanyment. Mozart's “Adelaide” Violin Concerto was widely accepted as his, until Marius Casadesus confessed to having written it. (Violinist Fritz Kreisler enjoyed palming off as Beethoven's short pieces he'd written himself.) In the mid-1960s, a Long-Lost recording by Dinu Lipatti of Chopin's 1st Piano Concerto was hailed as one of the grandest pinnacles of Lipatti's legacy. The performance soon turned out actually to be that of an obscure pianist. And there is the more recent case of numerous misattributed recordings allegedly by pianist Joyce Hatto, a deliberate imposition which continued for years before its unmasking.

And in case anyone thinks that literature is purer than music, they should turn to, e.g., Curtis MacDougall's classic book Hoaxes. Chap.16: “Literary Hoaxing” (pp.210-227) lists dozens of literary impostures.
[He even mentions a common view (e.g., T2:205-209) that Marlowe's 1st major play took lines from Spenser. Some of Marlowe's 1588 Tamburlaine agrees virtually verbatim with text from Spenser's Faerie Queene of 1590. Given the chronology, this style-analysis-based charge requires belief that spy Marlowe privately had access to some of Spenser's pre-pub ms. Another text-agreement of the young Marlowe (with Jonson) is cited at T1:155 (and a possible influence of Marlowe on a Jonson passage, at T2:220). Marlowe certainly [T1:210-211] took (for Tamburlaine 2) part of an engineering work (on fortification) by fellow Walsingham-ring spy Paul Ive, and put it into iambic pentameter. Surely a first. (And last?)]
During DR's researches on polar history, he learned that almost no famous explorer wrote his own popular books or magazine articles. Cases known to us (actual writer in parentheses): Peary (Elsa Barker & A.E.Thomas), Byrd (F.Green & C.Murphy), Balchen (Corey Ford — as told to DR by Balchen himself). Reidar Wisting, son of Amundsen's companion Oskar Wisting told us that Amundsen's South Pole was just as ghosted as Peary's North Pole, the main difference being that the latter trip was a 1909 hoax which was near-universally accepted until Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction? (D.Rawlins, Wash DC 1973) induced the 1st non-conspiratorial solution of the fraud (pp.150&158).

Are we to suppose that Elvis & Bobby Darin wrote their songs? That Dear-Abby wrote all her advice-columns? (When her sister Ann Landers' competing column was detected in plagiarism, it was blamed on her stable.) That Frederick the Great [not his court's flute-concerto-fount J.Quantz] entirely composed his flute concerti? That Mozart's 37th Symphony was not (as we now know) mostly written by Michael Haydn? — though a (typically pristine) copy exists in the hand of Mozart, who was an entrepreneur and star-performer. (Like Shakespeare. who was known in Stratford more as actor than writer: S242.) Note that one of the many trenchant points Blumenfeld makes when questioning Shakespeare's authorship is that the actors were struck by the spotlessness of the play-copies they worked from: B233, 245; S239; P171; Q417. (Jonson [C258-259]: Shakespeare “never blotted out line”.)
The problem of credit-appropriation is as old as creativity itself. In antiquity, we have not only Claudius Ptolemy's no-longer controversial 137AD theft of the thousand stars of Hipparchos' 128BC legendary catalog, we also note Pliny's 77AD condemnation (Nat.Hist. Pref.21&23) of the commonness of plagiarism by well-known earlier writers. And see the condemnation of plagiarism by Synesios, Bishop of Kyrene, 3 centuries later: Letters 1926 ed. p.238. (By contrast, some famous modern religious leaders have, instead of opposing plagiarism, actually engaged in it.)
Even in the field of architecture, we find the legend that the 3rd century BC Alexandria lighthouse's designer Sostratus, knowing that Pharaoh Ptolemy would take all the credit for the structure, placed his own name at its base, covered with plaster fragile enough to be sure to flake away after Ptolemy's death.
[Try superblowing up the Postscript diagram of the lighthouse at p.4 of DIO 14 [2008].]

All of the foregoing cases should be kept in mind whenever a Stratfordian decrees to insensitive-you (see, e.g., Wikipedia's orthodoxy-muted articles on the case) that sensitive-he can tell that it's obvious-beyond-any-need-for-discussion that Marlowe and WS have styles so distinct that the case is closed (in WS' favor) on that basis alone — forgetting that for centuries numerous orthodox scholars easily discerned (Q413) Marlowe's hand in early Shakespeare plays (talk about obvious) — right up until doubts of Marlowe's death (e.g., Archie Webster's 1923 article and some prior suggestions in the same direction, culminating in Hoffman's 1955 book), sent the Stratfordian cult reeling into ever-more-insistent denial.

A creditable exception is adamant-Stratfordian Jonathon Bate who says “Shakespeare was very, very deeply involved with the whole life of the theater. Whereas the various aristocratic candidates that have been put forward — Lord Bacon was the first one and the Earl of Oxford is currently the most popular one — they came from a completely different world and had a completely different kind of preoccupation when they were writing. Because Marlowe was a professional man of the theater, it's in that sense that Marlowe is the one sort of theoretically plausible candidate, at a kind of stylistic level.” (Against the most obvious logic, Bate naturally adds [ibid]: “But the evidence that he was actually killed in that brawl is incontrovertible.”)

Given the obviousness (even to layfolk) of the resemblance of the styles of Marlowe & WS, some Stratfordians are increasingly resorting to statistical tests for comparing writing styles, where by choosing which criteria to compare (such as frequency of hyphens! — believe it or not), one can eliminate anybody one doesn't like.
[If we are to trust the instigator of the most recent of the Stratfordian-beloved efforts in this direction, he started as hoping to vindicate Oxford but was forced to Stratfordianism by uneluctable statistics. I.e., he sought exile from the grant-controlling English establishment, but was ultimately forced by pure math into swearing fealty to its most precious tenet.]

Comments: [1] The history of intellectual progress is littered with cases of long-blockage of valid theory through over-dependence upon one fave criterion.
19th century: Darwin's massively evidence-backed theory of natural selection was long doubted since it conflicted with a telelogical view of the universe — which has withered away since among enlightened scholars.
20th century: Wegener's continental drift theory was rejected despite plainly visible indicia in its favor, because of lack of a known mechanism — an impediment later found illusory. 21st century: It was discovered a decade ago that the ancient Greeks mathematically exploited vast eclipse-cycles to determine the mean motions of the Moon, its apse, and its node — all to an accuracy of 1 part in a million or better. This surprise finding was backed by a half-dozen powerful and simple lines of evidence, including the method's direct ancient attestion (Almajest 4.2 & 6.9). Nonetheless — ignoring all 6 unambiguous evidences on the new theory's side — establishment cultists fixated instead on a single long-bungled supposed cuneiform counter-evidence — which collapsed immediately upon close examination.
These three parallels to the Marlowe-Shakespeare case emphasize a key lesson: one should not reject a theory with numerous obvious, potent, and UNdebatable evidences recommending it, in order to cling to old orthodoxology by fixating-depending entirely upon one debatable item, because said (glaringly-lonely) item may ultimately turn out to be wrong.
[2] The word-statistics ploy is reminiscent of the Oxfordians' descent into cryptograms: it's the desperate resort of those who know their case is so anemic and confusing that it longs for salvation via steroid-injection-ex-machina.
[One of several potential flaws in verbal statistical studies is obvious: since public perception that Marlowe survived could be fatal for himself & (maybe even more so) for others, Marlowe (post-1593) presumably altered superficial aspects of his style. (No other candidate would have as strong a cause to do so.) This (as well as CM's improving with time and greater leisure time) might explain the contention (T2:229) that some of the Henry VI plays (written at least partly pre-1593) seem more consistent with Marlowe than does Richard III, though both are widely suspect of Marlovian influence, at least.]
[3] It is notable that the most experience scholars on both sides have recognized (unlike the frantic goons of Wikipedia) the ambiguity of computer-tests, laying little or no stress upon them.
See also on this subject T2:216-217 & 228, as well as some ongoing tests by current Marlovians, which emphasize the obvious point that one must compare plays near the proposed segue.
[Stratfordians' laxity on this point reminds one of the last dying embers of the Peary controversy, when kept dog-sledgers W.Steger & T.Avery would report matching the former establishment hero's average speed, while leaving out the failure to come anywhere near the speeds Peary claimed on the unverified fraction of the 1909 trip.]

This diversion returns us to Frankfurter's point on unequal evidence-power, as we ask: why continue endlessly (and fruitlessly, since no specialist is converted by such studies) arguing ambiguous subtleties of comparative writing styles, by which the most strident and arrogant Stratfordians pretend they can decide and definitively end the authorship controversy simply by the loudness of their surety and insult (note Bakeless' comments at T2:223-224) — when we can instead judge by unsubtle points that cannot be evaded. Why argue hyphens? — when we have the following solid facts:
[1] The styles of the Marlowe and WS plays are nearer each other than to any other of their contemporaries.
[2] Shakespeare's echoes of and allusions to “other” contemporary writers is strictly nil except for Marlowe.
[3] Shakespeare's 1593 writing was just as chronologically mature as Marlowe's 1593 writing. (How can a Stratfordian-biased style-test-by-computer hope to overwhelm that obvious fact?)
[4] Stratfordian Bakeless (T2:214) regards it as non-speculatively established that “Certain plays ordinarily included in the Shakespearean canon reveal definite traces of Marlowe which can hardly be due to mere imitation. Notable among these are the first two parts of Henry VI, Richard II, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Julius Caesar.”
[The last was not published until 1623, 7y after WS' death. The only supposed record of its existence earlier is a tourist's recollection (C209, B219, M322) of seeing a “Julius Caesar” performed at the Globe Theatre 1599/9/21, author not cited. Caesar being a popular subject then for plays (M240), certainty is elusive here.]
Though Bakeless is a believer in Marlowe's death and Shakespeare's genius, he admits (T2:214-215), “The traces of Marlowe consist first of whole lines or short passages from plays known to be Marlowe's; second, of words typical of Marlowe's vocabulary, not typical of Shakespeare's, and not known to be typical of any other playwright; and third, of obvious examples of Marlowe's structure, mood, and style.” (Bakeless then spends pages trying to explain all this with Marlowe dead.)
[5] The very origins (1895 & 1923) of the Marlovian theory were due almost entirely to textual analysis — predating recovery of hard evidences (e.g., [a] arrest warrant, [b] coroner's report, & [c] diary record of Shakespeare's soon-after debut as a writer), which have by now become stronger evidence (than textual comparisons) or the hoax interpretation of Marlowe's death.

Concluding note-in-passing regarding computer-test style-comparisons:
Resort to such is a classic cult tactic of diverting the observer from simple, hard, reliable evidence (segue, WS' maturity, etc) to fixate on dubious, shaky arguments. The only disputants that lean heavily on computer word-tests are the amateur fanatics that Horatiusly harass Wikipedia's Marlovian Theory article. By pregnant contrast, all experienced commentators either ignore such studies or (e.g., C156) regard them as inconclusive. One of the reasons newspapers refuse to print the simple Marlovian evidences cited here at the outset is that whenever their people think of writing on the controversy, they (quietly) go to the most conveniently accessible but least reliable source for any passionate controversy (Wikipedia) and naïvely conclude that word-counts and expert-counts are so certainly against Marlowe — that reporters are justified in ignoring their own common sense and TOTALLY suppressing such obvious spectacular data as Marlowe's 5/18 arrest, 5/20 freedom, 5/30 “death”, & FULLY-mature WS' appearance already by 6/13 all occurring BY CHANCE in a span of c.3 weeks (1593/5/20 to 6/13 or before). In the US' FreesnickerPress, ALL media ape each other — ALL the time — in hypnotically rigid, unbroken adherence to the censorial task of preventing the public from knowing of the information we have just expressed in the previous SINGLE sentence. As we summed it up earlier: on Shakespeare, the US press is permanently, reliably, leaklessly outta ink & outta think.

These five utterly undeniable points (agreed to by all sides) by their very simplicity overwhelm in power:
[a] Any (pro or con) of the various oft-naïvely-cited statistical tests on style.
[b] The Stratfordian orthodoxological chorus that Stratfordians' sense of style is the ultimate arbiter and thus kills any chance that Marlowe authored the plays.
[Does this cult seriously expect their Orwellian dream to obtain? — that their fanatically-promoted Memory Hole will forever gobble up all the dozens of contrary testimonies by leading pre-Webster (Q413) Shakespeare experts. (See, e.g., the mass of examples of such evaluations which Hoffman is able to list for pages; also Bakeless' attempt [T2:216f] to alibi-speculatively refute or buffer the eminent J.M.Robertson's belief that “Marlowe's contributions to the text are important” in no less than eight Shakespeare plays.)]
So what we have is a remarkably close and exclusive Marlowe-WS fit on multiple counts — but not quiiiiiiite close enough for the superior Stratfordian discriminator. To return to the real world of legitimate debate: given that the Stratfordian religion has so lost its balance that it unhingedly rages at any departure from its creed and is prepared to exile heretics, can one seriously trust such an excitable cult to possess the balance and neutrality that are required to reliably render such ultra-fine judgements?
[A modern parallel to depending upon stylistic analyses as against the firm documented facts (Marlowe's hideous predicament & sneaky friends, as well as full-blown Shakespeare's just-after debut): those Dembos who voted for Obama demonstrate their dear imperviousity to the obvious fact that they were taken in, by adoring his image and concentrating not on clear facts but on ambiguities such as his foggy ongoing interactions with the Dumbos (encased in Lib-speeches & promises but unerringly GOP-accordant in plutocrat-enriching result) — meanwhile zombiesquely ignoring Obama's unambiguously oldboypersons-compliant Day-One unilateral appointments of Shrubya's “Defense” Sec'y, plus bankster-stooges Larry Summers & Timi Gofer.]

For those genuinely seeking to solve the Marlowe case, keeping in mind that the debate centers on a dead body, let's recall what ought to be obvious (though inevitably anethema to the Stratfordian cults who seek to own the discussion), a point we emphasize throughout:

So it is more likely to yield to police-types than to literati.

The very fact that Stratfordians must lean so heavily on a style-argument simply reveals the weakness of the rest (the detective part) of their flimsy case.
The literati naturally find their own Expert stylistic comparisons definitively compelling — more compelling than the fantastic-farfetched-preposterous idea that one of the smartest people who ever lived just might find a way to decline the Star Chamber's invite to a torture-fest, by escaping. But has it occurred to Stratfordians that a proscribed writer who was hiding from vicious holy fanatics by being supposedly dead just might alter his style slightly to make it less readily recognizable? More undeniable, a genius is likely to evolve as he matures, especially with more time on this hands in exile.
(Sylvia Plath's Ted Hughes: “The way to really develop as a writer is to make yourself a political outcast, so that you have to live in secret. This is how Marlowe developed into Shakespeare.” Quoted at Qv. See also Q211, 290.)
Finally: did Marlowe now have more undistracted time on his hands than previously, allowing him to craft better plays than ever?
As of the end of 2011, Wikipedia's Stratfordianism-polluted article on the Marlovian theory declares its PRIME Disproof of heresy, unqualifiedly claiming as a fact Stratfordians' opinion that the 2 men's style and world-views were different. Gee, if you merely exile a guy for life, why would his world-view change? What a mystery!
As Webster noted, Exile is a recurring theme in the Sonnets — who could possibly know why ….)
[Of course, if we are talking philosophy not related to Marlowe's exile, one has such a huge array of potential correlations as to weaken the significance of potential arguments. But we can note that Tamburlaine assumes the potency of astrology (while proposing to run his zero-longitude meridian through Damascus) — even speaking of the Ascendant & Midheaven (Act 4 Scene 2) and “wrathful planets” (Act 5 Scene 1) — as does early “Shakespeare” (Romeo & Juliet's “star-crossed lovers”), whereas later Julius Caesar assigns fault to man not stars.
It is such evolutions that are said to fascinate literati. So, why should cult-stolidity rob them of this and similar opportunities which open-mindedness on Marlovianism would open up?]
[Yes, Stratfordian goons determinedly harass-censor-control not only the Shakespeare WP articles but those of all other candidates, a situation which has by now become typical of Wikipedia in its inevitably degenerate later life.]

Again to the issue of whether to decide an issue by resorting
[A] to uncommunicable opinions on fine textual points, or
[B] to plain, visible facts, such as Marlowe's stimulating predicament, his potent circle's likely reaction to it, his body's altered face, etc?
Isn't there something disquietingly familiar about a cult that treats you as an inferior and just tells you to trust-us to sense higher truth in holy documents, regardless of what much more easily-grasped and documented evidence may indicate? Of course: all other mass-religions do the same thing.

The Stratfordians' idea of a clincher (see, e.g., Wikipedia as of the start of 2012) is that all members of the Shakespeare church are Stratfordians. Well, how insulated from reality does a cult have to become? — not to realize that this is about as potent an argument as that virtually every top expert on Catholic canon law is a believing Catholic. As well as every cardinal — and you can't get more expert than that. To understand the world, trust these Authorities' interpretation of the Bible rather than apply your own common sense to visible world events, to gauge the likelihood that an invisible omniscient beneficence is guiding them.
[Another Wikipedia-prominent case-closed argument is that the 1593 coroners' inquest involved 16 jurors, so no judgement in history was more certain etc etc. (Today, in an era of liar-loans and celebrity-murderers walking free, the idea that we are to take such assurance seriously is almost touching.) Question: granted the inquest was indubitably correct that the body was dead, but who identified it? (Of course: Poley, Skeres, & Frizer!) In response to the argument that the Marlowe-is-dead verdict is based on great care by the inquest, it is worth citing a Stratfordian (N20): “If Coroner [Wm] Danby knew anything about the dead man, or about the three witnesses, or about the web of association that brought them together at Deptford — if he knew anything out of the ordinary about the case — he made no mention of it in his report. This was routine business: another casual, sordid Elizabethan death. In a month when the plague killed nearly two thousand people in London alone, death was certainly routine.”]

Widespread unjustified over-certainty explains why outsiders sense that Stratfordianism is a herd-religion faith. Its fervor arises ultimately from a conviction that Shakespeare's style is unique to the point of holiness, but such passion cannot communicate its faith to the commoner or the unenlightened heathen except by non-rational means (indoctrination, censorship, threat) — as we next see by comparison to other faiths.

Stratfordianism has the same ominous flaw as faith. From DIO 16 [2009] ‡4 §F4 [p.45]:

When people differ, they can communicate on realities; but not on faith. (As apologists actually emphasize, to evade empirical testing.) Mass-faith is maintained by insular indoctrination, a robotically inculcated bar to communication: a divider of peoples{\ti }. Which suggests why popular religions are ever busy at mind-control, anti-alienthink censorship…. But empathize with their problem: how many religions win out by logical suasion?

Stratfordian Teachout's precious “padded tongs” rant, delivered in felicitously uncautious rage at the ThoughtCrime of mere disagreement — overtly recommending the shunning of heretics — blurts out the dirty secret of soft academe's purported “free discourse”: the non-science academic world is rife with cliques which shun those who dissent from the views of archons who control funds, appointments, conferences. (Fearing loss of such patronage, the lumpen-rabbitariate [and those many newspaper reporters who so readily confuse pols with scholars] are laughably easy to herd into believing [or at least spouting] the sacred tenets of archonal gooroos.) This reality — as well as the scholarly narrowness (and logic-power non-enormity) of the mass of literati — helps explain how something as obviously false as Shakespeare's authorship has survived for over a century after the emptiness of WS' will and educational vita sank it (logically), as some of the most intelligent leading 19th century writers quickly realized. Bullying, potential shunning, cliquishness, “tremendous fear”, and mental limitations have reduced intellectual mobility in the field to such a point as to gut any significance to the oft-adduced apparent Stratfordian unanimity of Experts.

Contemptuous Stratfordian psychoanalytic ravings similar to Teachout's blanket smear of skeptics have also seized the able if over-selectively cynical modern playwright/screenwright David Mamet (e.g., The Verdict 1982, House of Games 1987, Glengarry Glen Ross 1992), in his 2002 book, Three Uses of the Knife, as quoted by David Aaronovitch. At pp.237-238 of the latter's generally sane and useful (though overprone to assume current-establishmentarians-are-always-right) Voodoo Histories (2010), Aaronovitch approvingly sums up Mamet's position: “The purpose of the [anti-Stratfordians], and by extension the purpose of their readers, is somehow to make themselves greater than even the greatest poet, partly, of course, by making him lesser.”
[Dembos' demonization-smearing of Ralph Nader since 2000 involves similarly fantastic speculations of egoism. See the almost laughably vicious attacks by Demslut Eric Altermann, among others, in the 2006 film An Unreasonable Man, all of which ignored how thoroughly Dem congressmen and Obama have (by domestic & foreign extraction) vindicated Nader's warning that the two parties are a single insatiably corrupt monopoly.]
Aaronivitch then quotes Mamet (emph-caps added here on creationism — for amusingly ironic reasons soon to become evident!):

they invert the megalomaniacal equation and make themselves not the elect, but the superior of the elect …. They … consign the (falsely named) creator to oblivion and turn to the adulation of the crowd for their deed of discovery and insight …. They appoint themselves as “eternity” — the force that shall pass on all things …. The anti-Stratfordian, like the flat-earther AND THE CREATIONIST, elects himself God ….

And the Stratfordians attack doubters for evidence-unsupported speculation?!

The consistent theme of our lynch-mob of outragedly-abusive Stratfordians is that Doubters deny Shakespeare out of envy. Obvious problem here: why, then, do the same Envious doubters heap praise on their candidate for genuine authorship? Poof goes the whole libel. And how much emotional and intellectual balance would it have required for the three to realize that?
[Despite our disagreement with Oxfordians' reasoning, even they do not deserve such sloppy slander.]
Moreover: far from denying-scoffing at the reality of standout-genius, Marlovians are the most genius-glorifying of all the vying parties to this controversy — because their discovery that Marlowe wrote “Shakespeare” means that the dominant English dramas of c.1600 were (as Sam Hopkins emphasizes) not written by two men but by ONE sole unique genius — even while he (at least early on) also carried out delicate espionage operations. Marlowe was obviously one the most brilliant men in the history of the world — and another long-suppressed victim of religious bigotry, in the tradition of Aristarchos and Darwin.

Must we conclude that anyone so brilliant and truth-seeking MUST ultimately run afoul of the mass of humanity, and its herders?

While collaborative theories of the plays' authorship are becoming the latest Stratfordian fashion, Blumenfeld makes the important point [B343] that “it was Marlowe's forced isolation that precluded any collaborative effort. And that is why the plays in the First Folio stand out as the miraculous work of an extraordinary genius working alone. And that is why we must know who he was.”

Since so many prominent Stratfordians pretend to Infallible Taste — while treating the Lessfortunate as idiots with no right to an opinion — our puffed-up would-be-LitPopes are inviting challenges to their poses. I.e., if a club's main argument is We're-The-Experts-and-You're-Nothing, they invite a smart kick in the brains and have nothing but their own haughty pretenses to blame for our present occasional puncturings.
[Look at the back&forth in the “Talk: Christopher Marlowe” page on Wikipedia. A 2004/9/21 entry condemns Marlovians for “crusading against purported blindness of professors who actually spend their live [sic] studying shakespeare [sic].” An earlier entry (by M.Tinkler) on the same page challenges anyone to read both men and still believe they're not different people, expressing utterly unqualified certainty at his expertise on what is for many a subtle issue; but, he explains: he took a college course on the subject.]

Also, the very loudest Stratfordians wish to psychoanalyse those with the effrontery to dispute their party-line, so it will not be unjust to turn-the-unstables — by checking out the psychology beneath the smears.
[An odd-hominem's smears are insufficient justification for going somewhat ad-hominem in return; but when it becomes indisputable that a cult is pronouncing dicta and banishments with a certitude way-insufficiently unsupported by its evidence & arguments, one naturally turns to psychology and group dynamics for explanations. A quote from Bishop Berkeley was a favorite of our late friend Hugh Thurston: “I observed how unaccountable it was, that men so easy to confute should yet be so difficult to convince.”]

As to the Stratfordians' snob-smear: the WS plays were clearly written by an extremely educated author. The Marlovians produce plenty of evidence that their candidate has an extensive and top-echelon educational pedigree, while there is no evidence that Shakespeare had any education at all. (Though he presumably had enough to be able to read scripts.) Whether the ratio of education-evidence makes Marlowe's authorship probable (as against merely more probable than would be the case in the ratio's absence) may be reasonably disputed; however, there is an item here that is not disputable:
The education-evidence ratio is a point on the Marlowe side of the evidence-scorecard. Again, not necessarily a controversy-ending point. But a point.
[Just as Ben Jonson's preface to the 1623 First Folio must be acknowledged by Marlovians as a point (one of the best) on the Stratfordian side — regardless of whether there is a simple explanation of it that is consistent with doubt of WS' authorship and other evidence. (Which there is; though, an explanation's availability doesn't in itself prove it is true, either.]

Those unfamiliar with the true emotional fragility of the superficially-secure Stratfordian establishment will perhaps find it revealing to compare how each side reacts to the opposition's point. In effect, the Marlovians just answer the Jonson-preface point soberly, analytically, and by gauging its relative weight versus pro-Marlowe points.
By contrast, the education-ratio point drives leading Stratfordians to hysteria, as they psycho-analytically convert this unambiguous (if limited) Marlowe evidential victory into a charge of bigotry (against the possibility of genius-out-of-nowhere among the under-educated) — morally-reprehensible bigotry on the part of those who have merely committed the crime of having more evidence of their candidate's education.
[The blustering outrage and baseless speculations of Stratfordians (as to WS' education) were all analysed and gutted in 1955 by Hoffman at H8f, who perceptively notes these religious fanatics' automatic a priori evidential approach — one which is deliciously evident in the slight performed by the mind-behind the boilerplate preface to all 1959 Folger Library Shakespeare editions, which transforms the unsupported possibility that Shakespeare went to Stratford Grammar School into such certainty (expressed 2pp earlier) that any contention to the contrary is monumentally “perverse” and unqualifiedly “false”. Look it up.]
And keep in mind that this bilious bilge issues from a muddled Stratfordian establishment that claims that it's the doubters that are crazy.

We may now adduce our 1st analogy (of a flock yet to come) from the Darwin-vs-creationism history, where only the Darwin side has any coherent scholarly evidence at all.
A rough equivalency to the Mamet-Aaronovitch-Teachout tantrums would be: a religious nut sneering at an evolutionist for defying (and thus supplanting) god by basing opinion upon geological data, rejecting the possibility of Intelligent Design-out-of-nowhere & the nothing-but-faith based Biblical version of creation — a grievous sin because faith is morally superior to reason. (Just as Stratfordian faith in the possibility of creative genius from the uneducated, is morally superior to an elitist strawman.) That no traditional church actually goes quite this far only shows how remotely beyond-the-pale Stratfordianism has inevitably become, due to its Quixotic challenge of taking a virtually non-existent evidential armory into battle against growing heterodoxy. The Stratfordian lion's roar is backed by large and elaborate mane. But no evidential teeth.

We recall that Mamet compared anti-Stratfordians to creationists. It would be hard to pick a worse brand of nut for Stratfordians to compare Marlovians to, for reasons we will now enumerate:

1. It is standard among anti-evolutionists to attack Darwinians by harping on the (inevitably!) fragmentary nature of the evolutionary record, complaining of “missing links” in said record. Similarly, Stratfordians (who meantime plead antiquity of records to alibi holes in their own arguments' supporting data) sneer that the skeptics can't explain all details of (S225) the mechanics behind a hypothesized Shakespeare imposture. Where the parallel to creationists becomes most amusingly obvious is on the point that — like creationists — the missing-link-demanding Stratfordians don't even have any hard evidence to link.

2. The record of Darwinian evolution is a series of fossil layers over time. Marlowe's record, from the mid-1580s at Cambridge University (B23), and on to London up to 1593, is a series of gradually maturing scholarly work known to his colleagues: translations (of classical works that breathe in the “Shakespeare” corpus), as well as poems & plays that are near-universally recognized as resembling those of “Shakespeare”.
   [Though, there is some indication that this clear (and once-routinely-stipulated-to) connexion will become increasingly denied by ever-flexible and frustatingly evidence-bare Stratfordians as Marlovianism comes on.]
   

3. Creationists reject evolution in favor of a sudden miracle by a blithely unpedigreed god who is (on no evidence) posited to have existed for a long time prior to the creation-miracle (and to invisibly script later human events). Stratfordians posit a Shakespeare who also comes out of nowhere (B341, P255; “miracle of genius” C71) with zero known educational vita upon his debut at the (for a poet: Hxiii) advanced age of 29 yet nonetheless is overnight artistically at the top of his field. For the next two decades.
   [See analogous establishment-creationism at DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.23 [p.75].]

4. The only evidence for god's existence is: lots of people believe he exists. Likewise, in the absence of any proof that Shakespeare wrote plays, Shapiro is reduced to the same familiar religionist logic that convinced pre-curtain-drop Ozians that their Wizard was real: Shakespeare was a writer because lots of contemporaries believed he was a writer.
   [And, as with other religious sects, most of academe's Stratfordians believe in Shakespeare's authorship because their mentors and funders do. Several Wikipedia entries on the controversy adduce near-universal English-prof orthodoxy as if this sociological fact were evidence. Stratfordian entries \& edits on Wikipedia are obsessed with stigmatizing Marlovianism's logical argument as “fringe” and accepted-by-no-one in litwit circles, as if this is evidence — when it is only evidence for Stratfordianism's logical anemia: what cult would need to keep repeating ad nauseum its numerical success at holding heresy in check, if it possessed convincing logical counters?]
   Shapiro is driven into this embarrassing corner because of a long-notorious absence of solid evidence on the point from Shakespeare's lifetime.
   [Diana Price tabularly shows that of 25 comparable WS-contemporary writers [incl. WS] he is the least documented: not even an obit at his 1616 death (P301) fact with the obvious implication that many of his contemporaries had long since discerned [Q394] that he was a purchaser of poetry & plays, not a creator of them.) And Price emphasizes (P138) a point that guts the strength of Shapiro's main argument from contemporary alleged witnesses to WS as a writer: “Most of the explicit [contemporary] literary allusions to Shakespeare … could have been written after reading or seeing one of Shakespeare's works. Allusions such as those by Weever, Barksted, or Meres tell us only that these writers knew Shakespeare by his works and name. [Of the] principal ambiguous allusions …, none confirms a personal acquaintance with the author…. Contrary to the impression created in traditional biographies, none of the contemporaneous Shakespearean allusions qualify as personal literary paper trails”.]
   All Shapiro can do is cite (S235f, P112) several admirers of (what they believed were) Shakespeare's writings.
   [We return here to the classic case of the plagiarist-astrologer Claudius Ptolemy, about whom admiring legends grew up after his death — but of whom nothing extant was written during his lifetime. Also relevant: astronomers have known for centuries that though Ptolemy's name is on the ancient thousand-star catalog, it is today unargued that the work was actually accomplished by the prior school of Hipparchos.]

5. The prime testimony for the Christian god is contained in a holy book, the Bible. The prime reason people believe Shakespeare wrote the plays is the First Folio of 36 plays, published in 1623, 7 years after Shakespeare's death, with his name on the title page. Shapiro thinks that this and prior quarto title pages are conclusive (S225): “overwhelming evidence”.
   But, as with the Bible, there are improbabities & contradictions. E.g., Henry VI is in the Shakespeare-titlepaged First Folio, but (B156, 184) it was performed at least in part in 1591-1592, and by 1592 Greene had evidently (though Stratfordians interpret Greene in their own way: see S234-235 or any WS play's 1959 Folger Library Shakespeare edition preface) seen its concluding Part 3 performed on stage (by the “bombastic” actor Alleyn or even Shakespeare?) — well before the 1593 work Shakespeare himself calls his 1st. (As we saw earlier: even orthodox scholars recognize Marlowe's hand in Henry VI.) Moreover, Shapiro goes with the new fash theory (S240) that the late plays were heavy collaborations, which — since no collaborators are cited in the First Folio — means he accepts that its title page — his prime-exhibit evidence — is untrustworthy.
   [Further, there were some works published c.1600 with Shakespeare's name on the title-page that no-one today accepts as his: H20-21&200, P129. Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd, containing his most famous single line (“Come live with me, and be my love.”), first appeared in a book which the publisher put Shakespeare's name on (T2:155). Yet there is now no doubt anywhere that the poem was Marlowe's (from his Cambridge University days: B73). And a 1612 work with Shakespeare's name on the title page as author was (B237) later reissued with his name removed (sole alteration) due to complaints to the publisher (not to WS) from the real author of portions of the work. Such information can make one skeptical regarding whether Shakespeare's name on the First Folio prove his authorship.]

6. The time-line matter brings us to another analogy with the evolution qwasi-debate. Evolution is testified to by time-ordered geological layers. So creationists unshakily cling to shaky cavils, to try throwing doubt on that order. Similar desperation by Stratfordians, accepting junk-evidence in order to re-arrange WS' life-chronology, has produced one of the funniest among Stratfordian Verities: the insistence, despite Shakespeare's own statement (1st work in 1593), that Robert Greene's masked 1592 attack is somehow solid proof that Shakespeare was a playwright then. (Not even the editor of the modern critical edition of the Greene work agrees with them: P46.) As with creationists, flimsy evidence is preferred over clear evidence, even for central tenets.
   [Such mote-beam disproportionalities are typical of cults (thus the need to keep Frankfurter's point in mind). For one of the funniest examples ever, see how the worshippers of the thoroughly exposed explorer-faker Frederick Cook deal with photographic disproof of his claims by Brad Washburn and Rob't Bryce: DIO 7.2-3 [1997], esp. Figs.6&8, 18, 28&29. (Note that none of these evidential clinchers prevented promotion of the family-wealth-driven Cook cause in 2009 by the so-easily-influenced American Philosophical Society [!] and Smithsonian Magazine.) Take particular note of Cookie logic at ibid p.85 and at DIO 9.3 [1999] p.122, and especially Fig.6 (p.116).]

7. Analogous to the foregoing Frankfurtive imbalance is Stratfordianism's obsession with applying uncommunicable faith in textual-arguments, instead of basing overall judgement of the case upon verifiable facts — a blindness already discussed elsewhere here.

8. One of the most revealing analogies to creationism is seen in the projection of haughty certainty — the intensity of which is inversely proportional to the evidential support for it, because intensity is the only sharp arrow in the quiver.

9. Which leads to the next Stratfordian resemblance to creationism: suppression of heresy. In 1925, Tennessee actually outlawed the teaching of evolution in classrooms. (Even today, US high-school students are protected from all but the briefest acquaintance with it.) And what is the only effective weapon for countering Shakespeare-skepticism? Banish it from the classroom (Mxxvi, 411). Even current-top Stratfordian Shapiro agrees (S5&8) it's been “taboo” there for years, due to “the decision by professors to all but ignore the [Shakespeare] authorship question”.
   Irony: the unacademic creationists are less illiberal than the effete perfessers. The former only try to control secondary education. The profs, on the other hand, try to keep their censorship (and cocksure archonal sneering which inhibits curiosity & heterodoxy) intact all the way through college and grad school.
   [In the present grant-dominated academic environment, there appears to be more fear (than 100y ago) of being thought Disloyal to Stratfordian orthodoxy. Why would a careerist risk trouble by glaringly stepping out of line, when every open academic post and grant has dozens if not hundreds of applicants? Would a modern playwright cut off any chance that his work might someday be performed at the Stratford Festival?]

10. In addition to psychological, epistemological, political, & philosophical parallels with creationism, we may compare Stratfordianism with numerous historical cases, especially in science. E.g., when Darwin 1st proposed evolution in 1859, the case for it was crippled by limited knowledge: there was no known mechanism to explain the proposed only-fragmentarily-glimpsed process. Several bungled attempts were made to do so. (But not even creationists go as far as Shapiro, by using these ancient cases to devalue Darwin.) Finally, Mendel and the science of genetics filled the void.
    But while the Darwin theory was (like relativity) accepted quickly among scientists well before Mendel, Wegener's Continental Drift theory was scoffed at for decades for alleged impossibility of there being a mechanism to effect the proposed drift — a supposed impediment that blinded bigots to the many consistent indicia (now obviously compelling in hindsight) which recommended Wegener's idea.
    [After decades of orthodox scholars' failed attempts to explain by unattested methods either the accuracy (better than 1 part in a million) or the 24 exact attested digits of the ancients' adopted lunar speeds, DIO used attested ancient methodology to do so by 1st grade arithmetic: DIO 16 [2009] [p.2]. Immediately, a defender of orthodoxy wrote DIO to claim that — despite all the 24 perfect hits the solution had achieved — it was utterly impossible, because of the sort of seeming-fatal-flaw block we have just been discussing. However, as with Wegener's case: when checked-out, the supposed block collapsed. (And, in this case, it turned out to be shockingly, revealingly, even progressively consistent with — not contrary to — the new solution. See DIO 11.1 [2002] ‡3 §§D1-2 [pp.22=23].)]
    Those who promote decision of the WS controversy almost exclusively by delicate stylistic tests (inevitably involving arbitrary criteria while insensitive to style-evolution) comparing WS to other candidates are falling victim to the same temptation to wipe out theories with one definitive test (which in the case of style-stats, few on either side are accepting as such), while in Marlowe's case ignoring the Occamite power of unarbitrary, uncomplex, facts which are consistent with Marlowe's survival. [Similarly, Plato's Republic complained that math would never explain planetary motion; and, indeed, up through Copernicus' epochal but circle-obsessed 1543 De Revolutionibus, even the best-looking theories (e.g., eccentric or equant models), didn't quite fit actual planetary motion. Until Kepler applied the ellipse. Another example already cited), from geography: for 2000y, no mechanism was known that could explain why the two dominant ancient estimates of the Earth's radius were both wrong by about 20% (in opposite directions) and so differed by the outrageous factor of about 40%. Weird schemes were taught by establishments for decades until it was realized that light-bending by the Earth's atmosphere explained both errors — on the nose in each case. (DIO 14 [2008] ‡1 [pp.2-12].)]
    For over a century, the Shakespeare Controversy suffered the same paroxysms, since no known theory could convincingly explain why (B6) the true author would hide, or identify a candidate who unquestionably had the talent and track-record to show he could have written what WS obviously couldn't. Strange theories were bound to fill the vacuum.
    [Some Oxfordians' excuses for their hero's putative shyness: poetry too homosexual; playwriting too declassé; (S196) or too embarrassing (even after Oxford's death: M374) to actual nobles unflatteringly depicted in the plays. Even after their deaths, too, e.g., Essex (M316) & Cecil (S177). (Hmm. If actors & the theatre were considered so untouchably low, how did it happen [S231-234] that actor Shakespeare was invited to perform Nenry IV Part 2 before the queen? — who was also treated to a performance of Love's Labour's Lost: B235.) The complexity, multiplicity, and hypotheticality of these feeble excuses for Oxford-anonymity happily serve to bring into relief another clear superiority for Marlovianism, where one plain and strong explanation applies to all Marlowe's post-1593 writings: poetry and plays. Very simple. Thus, no need for Oxfordians' page after page of shaky lawyeresque argumentation.]
    But the convincing-candidate vacuum vanished in 1955, when Hoffman's startling solution vaporized at a stroke the very need for such ornate and patently desperate alibis — putting us in a position where just a few lines of raw evidence are now more convincing than the Oxfordians' endless succession of arguments that require whole hefty tomes, each running hundreds of pages of pile-on clue-sniffing. (One runs 900pp! S204.)
    [M381: “There is no single ‘smoking gun’ document that leads one inexorably to the conclusion that de Vere [Earl of Oxford] wrote Hamlet, King Lear, the Sonnets, etc. Instead, one builds the case uopn a series of facts and observations that, when put together like pieces of a puzzle, produce an overall picture that becomes difficult to deny.” ]
    

11. Our final parallel (Darwinism-Marlovianism vs Creationism-Stratfordianism) appears less cut&dried than the ones just enumerated; but it should be the most compelling of all (especially to those of experience in historical — or police — detective work), namely, COHERENCE: the simple Occamite neatness of fit to multiple evidences and the broad resolution of what previously seemed independent, uncrackable mysteries.
    [To the dullards of, the research world, all must be rejected if not attested (e.g., on works' covers). But the pioneers whose inspiration underlies great academic progress look for the hitherto-unseen fertile theory that suddenly solves a range of problems all at once and thereby turns chaos into order.]
    The power of Darwin's idea of Natural Selection is its neat simultaneous solution of several disparate mysteries.
    [Why do lower creatures lie in lower geological layers? Why did man's emergence take so long? Why do men look like apes? How can a chance process produce survivability-progress?]

And the brilliant Ziegler-Webster-Hoffman theory — that Marlowe's death was a shamlet and that he was thenceforth fronted-for by a non-literary businessman & sometime-actor — is the linchpin that has proven productive in that it has elucidated matters beyond those that began the theory, seamlessly sewing together a variety of mysteries; neatly and reverse-Hamletly merging their separate dew-droplets and resolving them into the solid flesh of a reality that at last makes sense. Let us illustrate by now listing several of these mysteries:

1. Why are there no Shakespeare mss?
   

2. Why did the literary world ignore his death? (By contrast with the several obits for Marlowe's.)
   

3. Why no surviving letters of such a supposed stage-celeb?
   

4. Is it a coincidence that Marlowe “died” a few days after arrest for a capital crime?
   

5. Why would a real killer stab someone in the head instead of the torso?

6. Why does Shakespeare suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1593 as a remarkably mature poet?
   

7. Right after Marlowe's exit.
   

8. And why would WS' maturity (upon his 1593 debut) be — according to the leading Stratfordian — almost exactly the same as Marlowe's?!
   

9. How did the plays end up published under the name of a businessman-usurer-actor?

10. Why is there no evidence that Shakespeare was educated?

11. Why is his will that of a non-literary person?
    [The previous two items provide an ideal example of Occam at work: note that while the theory that WS was a front solves both evidences simultaneously, Stratfordians require two separate (independently improbable) alibis, separately designed to try explaining away both embarrassments.]
    

12. Why were the plays' style so Marlovian?

13. Why were their allusions so exclusively Marlovian?

14. Why was the “Shakespeare” First Folio published by Marlowe's literary executor?

15. If Shakespeare was a beard for a genuinely great playwright, why would the true author have to hide?
    

Most spectacularly of all, the Marlovian theory chronologically sews together the careers of Marlowe and “Shakespeare”, with the seam fixable at mid-1593.

We conclude our Occam section here by asking: what is the value and coherence of Stratfordianism vis-à-vis the foregoing items? Answer: none. As a theory to explain the mysteries cited, Stratfordianism is simply sterile — elucidating not a one.

Remember our two requirements for spotting the correct candidate:
[a] he wrote plays like Shakespeare's &
[b] he had strong reasons for vanishing.
Marlowe is not just an ideal fit. He's the only fit.

But there are plodding, it-says-here scholars in all academic fields, who cannot use theory, induction, logic, or imagination to move beyond texts, official accounts, or other surface indicia.
[Energetic trail-chaser & Marlowe-death-believer C.Nicholl concludes his 1992 book [N344] by scorning the Marlovian theory of fake death, calling it “no kind of trail at all.” Not only false (as Peter Farey, David More, & Ros Barber have shown), but a classic case of unrealistically wishing for such explicit missing-link documents that they would have killed Marlowe had they existed. (Domitianus, last of the Caesars, complained that nobody was going to believe in the plots to assassinate him until one succeeded. He ruled by terror for 15 years before his dream of cred was realized.) It is wisest instead to gauge the inevitably-incomplete evidence by just Occamly asking:
[1] what is the simplest theory which
[2] explains the most outstanding mysteries.]
(Given their cults' common entrance-requirement, DIO calls such folk the park-your-brains-at-the-door club.) If the real world accorded with their dull fundamentalist faith, then all truth would be found in a book (or a coroner's verdict).
Scientists have enriched knowledge by instead seeking, sifting, and testing theories, no matter how things appear to be, on the surface (thus eventually stumbling upon such anti-intuitive discoveries as, e.g., round Earth, light-waves, Newton's 1st Law, heliocentricity, nuclear-Sun not-on-fire [Marlowe's Hamlet 2.2 misled Ophelia on the last two]). The discoverer keeps searching open-mindedly until finding the key that fits-unlocks the available data, and fruitfully explains further mysteries. That is what every scientific pioneer has known — Aristachos, Kepler, Faraday, Darwin, Planck, etc. The contrast to soft academe tells us plainly why science has moved ahead so fast and so far, vs other academic fields.
[Robert Boyle & Isaac Newton discovered gravity's inverse-square law by comparing terrestrial gravitational acceleration upon nearby objects vs that upon our Moon — a seminal theory, as it was then found that this originally narrowly-based law also accounted for the planets' as well (explaining Kepler's 3 Laws): thus a plenitude of knowledge (and eons of celestial motions) issued from one tiny but potent gravitation law.]
But one needn't be a scholar to accomplish such solutions: police detectives approach mysteries similarly (and do so far more often than we academics), dealing with cases where contradictions in what appears on the surface require inducing coherent solutions from scattered evidence.
[For another geographical analogy, we return to the above-cited issue of the Earth's shape. The Earth LOOKS flat, doesn't it? It took doubt and experiment for the ancients (e.g., Archimedes) to realize that it was nearly a sphere, with a radius of a few thousand miles. This simultaneously explained ships' vanishing over the horizon, the shape of the Earth's shadow during lunar eclipses, etc — long before space-craft verified the truth.]

To anyone of inductive bent — whether in police work, science, or philosophy of science — Hoffman's solution to the Shakespeare Mystery is a rare delight in its neatness as well as the many clarifications & satisfactions it simultaneously produces, all flowing from a single simple and plausible theory (just as all from Dido to Tempest flowed from a single genius), said theory being that Christopher Marlowe — strange as it may seem to cemental Stratfordians — had chosen to escape and thereby decline otherwise certain torture and execution.
[Our friend Sam Hopkins — who in 2010 April urged a response to Teachout's slanderous piece — has added (2010/6/8) another consideration: Marlowe's anonymity was only partial; unlike Oxford or Bacon, he already had to his public credit a considerable corpus of the most popular plays of the pre-1593 period, so his dramatic immortality was assured, regardless. Possibly this relates to the interesting if secondary question of why he never came forth later to claim authorship of his post-1593 productions, though the (likely very few) involved parties' silence may have more to do with standard spy-ring group-protective discretion in a lethally dangerous political context, in which dissenters heads ended up on spikes on London Bridge.]

A final speculation: was Marlowe one of those who created the lofty King James edition of the Christian Bible?

Fruitful simplicity is why no amount of suppression and derision will dampen Marlovianism's appeal to the brightest scholars, e.g., Colin Wilson (whose evaluation 1st brought Hoffman to our attention: W144f, 344f). It is a shame that Hoffman did not live to see wide acceptance of it. But its ultimate triumph is inevitable among independent informed scholars (if not the general public or academe's litwit-PhD-chain echo-chamber). Perhaps even imminent: it will only require one popular adventure film (preferably starting with the Babington plot, Mary's shortening, & the Armada) based on the Marlovian theory, to crack Stratfordianism's longtime lock on the forums that determine consensus. And some eminent Stratfordians know it.
[Another project that would help make known the Marlowe view would be the issuance of an edition of the plays of Marlowe and “WS” running one after the other in a single huge, rice-paper volume, entitled simply: “The Plays of Christopher Marlowe”.]

[Before we plunge into DIO's speculations on Marlowe's fate, an update-note-commendation is in order:
DON'T miss Ros Barber's reconstruction of Marlowe's post-1593 life: 2012's The Marlowe Papers (St.Martin's NYC).]
Any reader reluctant to accept that Marlowe went incognito after 1593, must consider that name-shiftiness is standard stuff for spies. Which brings us to the obvious answer to the mystery of Marlowe's later life: he naturally went right on being undercover — escaping the Star Chamber by simply taking on at least one more alias (or possibly an earlier-established one), in a career that was perhaps packed with them.

Yet the only Marlowe false name that survives had nothing to do with political espionage. That immortal alias was, of course: “William Shakespeare”.

It is long past time for public forums to face the cohesive power of the Marlovian case — and to recognize and credit at last the unique genius who really created and left us the treasure of the CM-WS plays.
Publication of the entire Marlowe&WS corpus together as The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe may ultimately ease realization that all these plays were the creation of a single unique mind.

And one hopes that celebrations of the anniversary of the Westminster Abbey memorial window will be occasions for leading newspapers to FINALLY do their duty — to that public enlightenment they keep claiming is their mission, by bearing the excruciating expense of devoting a few dozen lines of type to informing the public of the bare facts that suggest Marlowe's authorship.

The foregoing is largely detective-analysis. But there is also a human aspect that asks for deeper consideration.
To escape being hounded for the rest of his life, Marlowe resorted to a fake of extreme ugliness: stabbing a friend in the back, being then bested in combat, and thus dying in a common brawl. Perhaps the Deptford scenario was selected partly because it was so humiliating that it seemed implausible that anyone would tolerate so disgracing his legacy and name. No-one then realized that Marlowe was henceforth merely his former name.
[In fairness to Elizabethan observers: (note that the public then had no access to the coroner's report or arrest warrant. See a similar situation for contemporaries' gauging of the 1861 I.Hayes polar hoax.]

Did Marlowe's writings ever hint at the truth? Hoffman believed so, remarking (H148-149) that of all the ordmag 1000 characters in the “William Shakespeare” plays, only one is named “William”, an uneducated hick who, in a disconnected passage in As You Like It Act 5 Scene 1, is jibed-at by a character called “Touchstone” (i.e., the genuine article) as follows (translating Latin ipse as I-myself): “For all your writers do consent that [I myself] is he; now, you are not [I myself], for I am he.”
[Touchstone is better known (to those examining the authorship controversy) for the line: “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” which is generally understood [N72] to be a reference to the alleged end of Marlowe: from an argument over a reckoning (bill) in a room at Deptford.]
The same play repeats Marlowe's most famous attributed poetic line: “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” (See Stratfordian take on this at N73.)

Following 1593/5/30, Marlowe had to become Shakespeare. No one could write such glorious dramatic word-music absent pride of creation. With his own name and person widely pilloried, compensation came anew with pride felt privately in plays now bearing the name of his new persona (“What's in a name?” Romeo & Juliet Act 2 Scene 2), plus the joy of gaining praise for his pioneering creations.
[Possibly such factors contributed to the 1598 decision to start putting Shakespeare's name on quartos.]
The transference thus effected would pioneer in yet another fashion: the most extreme of its type, ever, for an artistic creator — the nearest a poet could approach in-reality to living the myth of out-of-body experience.
It would be presumptive here to attempt fleshing out the precise way Marlowe adjusted-to his strange fate. (Hopefully, his dramatic heirs will make attempts on the screen.)
But the reader may on his own ponder Marlowe→Shakespeare's situation: gratefully appreciating his determation to go on conjuring-up and crafting dramas which are universal by their creator's out-of-body empathy with humanity. And, through one's own mind-travel, imagine being in his externally lifetime-damned but internally and eternally exalted place.

A = Archie Webster “Was Marlowe the Man?” National Review 1923.

B = Samuel L. Blumenfeld The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection 2008 London.

C = Samuel Schoenbaum William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life 1977 Oxford.
[A useful but standard Stratfordian book which ironically was what triggered Diana Price's suspicion of Stratfordianism: see Pxiii-xiv.]

D = Rosalind Barber “Shakespeare Authorship Doubt in 1593” Critical Survey 21.2:83-110 [2009].

Encycl.Brit = Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edition [DIO Collection has original rice-paper set] or 1961 ed.

G = Graham Phillips & Martin Keatman Shakespeare Conspiracy
[A Stratfordian work, despite the title.]

H = Calvin Hoffman Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’ 1955 NYC.

M = Mark Anderson “Shakespeare” by Another Name 2005 NYC.

N = Charles Nicholl The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe 1992 London.

P = Diana Price Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography 2001 London.

Q = Rosalind Barber The Marlowe Papers 2012 NYC.

R = David Roper Shakespeare: To Be Or Not to Be 2010 Orvid.

S = James Shapiro Contested Will 2010 NYC.

T = John Bakeless The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe 1942 Harvard 2vols.

W = Colin Wilson History of Murder 2000 NYC.

Z = Wilbur Ziegler It Was Marlowe … 1895.

[There are so many websites on the subject that readers' own internet search-finds will quickly exceed any short list that could be provided here.]

Most of DIO's boardmembers are experienced in evaluating cases of suspected fraud. Its founder D.Rawlins (DR) has published detailed academic-journal scholarly investigations of more historical science hoaxes than anyone.
Mention of this fact is merely informational, not in any way an argument-from-authority.
[DIO obviously has none whatever in literature, and DR makes no pretense to infallibility elsewhere; though, by good fortune (despite [extremely infrequent] temporary slips on details [none at all since founding professionally-refereed DIO in 1991]), he has for decades been routinely vindicated on numerous of his discoveries — and DIO has never taken the wrong side of a scholarly controversy.]

But the cited superlative permits mention of another:
of all the hoaxes DIO has searched into, Shakespeare is the most transparent. (Though perhaps in a tie with F.Cook's exploration claims: DIO 7.2-3 [1997]; DIO 9.2-3 [1999].)
The disapparance of Marlowe followed immediately by the appearance of “Shakespeare” is (as we hopefully sensed earlier) about as subtle as the regular synodically repeated phenomenon of the disappearance of morning star Eosphoros followed a few weeks later by the appearance of the evening star Hesperos — merely two apparitions of the same planet, Venus. To repeat:
unadvanced cultures didn't catch on to the identity. Or: their priests never let on. This, despite the blatant clues that each deity was similarly bright (each brighter than any other planet); shone with the same dazzling blanc hue; and, when one was shedding its beautiful light upon the world, the other was not.

[Unaware of atmospheric extinction diurnal variability, ancient gooroo-equivalents of Stratfordian mental flexibility might have noticed that, near the horizon, Eosphoros was less red than Hesperos, and used that subtle difference to reject the unsubtle equivalences. ]

[Doubtless Stratfordianism's swift genii will call the foregoing anthropological tale elitist.
Who can doubt the empathy's genuineness?]
(In 2012 June occurred the last “transit” — in which Venus crosses not slightly north or south but visibly right across the Sun's face — until the 22nd century.

BardBeard concentrates primarily upon induction based on solid facts and simple reason, rather than wallowing in the swamp of literary analysis. (Though we do not ignore the latter — indeed adding a surprise find from Marlowe's plays.) Whether this approach is a debit or advantage in demystifying the Shakespeare “mystery”, readers will hopefully decide for themselves. This entails taking Received-Opinion and media-promoted Experts' evalutions only as seriously as they deserve. From what we have seen above, that's a definite not-very.

Anyway, resort to experts is no way to avoid personal responsility for your opinions — because you are responsible for your choice of experts. So: why not use your own intelligence (instead of a brain-double or backseat-driver) to independently and evidentially choose a theory instead of an expert?
Stick with such discipline, and you'll eventually arrive at the mental freedom of being your own expert. Good hunting.

Francis Walsingham was history's “first spymaster”. (Colin Evans Great Feuds in History 2001 p.21.)
From Joel Levy's book Secret History 2004 (p.92):

Helping to defeat the Armada was to be Francis Walsingham's last great service for his queen [Liz1] …. but his legacy was priceless …. [because of] the impact Walsingham's skilful use of subterfuge and secrecy had had on European power politics, and the extent to which his hidden hand had steered the ship of the English state safely though the dangerous shoals of 16th-century religious conflict. By foiling plots against Elizabeth's life and helping to defeat the invasion threats of Spain and France, Walsingham had ensured the Protestant future of England and sown the seeds for her challenge to Spanish domination in Europe and the subsequent emergence of Britain as a global imperial power. Without his shadowy machinations the history of Europe and the world would have developed very differently. The Counter-Reformation might have triumphed throughout Europe and the colonization of the world would have been a largely Franco-Spanish affair. One man had genuinely changed the course of history.

To find that the same family also hugely changed the course of literature should make admirers of liberty and culture all the more grateful to the Walsinghams.











Original Version Posted 2010/6/14.
[Occasionally augmented and-or re-edited 2010/6/23-2013/2/7.]