Shakespeare? More Like Fakespeare!

Christopher Marlowe
Feb. 23, 1564 - May 30, 1593

Christopher Marlowe was a prolific English playwright who died in a bar fight at the age of 29. He is little remembered when you compare him to his more famous contemporary, William Shakespeare. So why bother remembering him at all?

That's because he was Shakespeare. Maybe.

More than a few scholars believe that it was Marlowe wrote most, if not all, of Shakespeare's plays. He was a marked man in a lot of trouble with the law for his writings and it's believed that he faked his death and continued to write plays, but recruited an uneducated actor to claim he wrote them.

There's actually a pretty strong case to be made that Marlowe faked his own death. The first Shakespeare plays began to suddenly appear only weeks after Marlowe's funeral, there was a great similarity in the writing styles, and then there's the matter of average word size. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe had an average word size of 4.2 letters, and many scholars point toward this as the best proof that both writers were the same individual.

But again, and this can not be stressed strongly enough: Shakespeare had absolutely no education. In no way could he have had the understanding of history and the monarchy that he did. He seems to have appeared from nowhere and been instantly possessed by the spirit of Marlowe, with all of his writing abilities and knowledge. This is why Queen Elizabeth, during the Essex Rebellion, suggested that Marlowe had been the author of Richard II.

Sadly, as with JFK and the Loch Ness Monster, no one will ever know for sure. The only thing that can be said is that it defies common sense that a poor, unschooled actor would suddenly gain the ability to become the most famous playwright in the history of the world. It's as if Carrot Top suddenly won Best Actor at the Academy Awards...not impossible, mind you, but highly unlikely.

I'm just sayin'.