Marlowe Up Close: An Unconventional Biography with a Scrapbook of his Ciphers. By Roberta Ballantine. Philadelphia: Roberta Ballantine, 2007. Pp. xii + 676 + 17 illus. $34.99; £23 Hb; $23.99; £14 Pb.

Reviewed by Todd Gilman, Yale University Library

The latest chapter in the Shakespeare authorship controversy comes in the form of an odd self-published volume by an independent scholar who has been researching Marlowe and his associates since 1978. Roberta Ballantine’s euphemistically subtitled “unconventional” biography makes a number of provocative claims. Her most surprising assertion is not that Marlowe escaped death at Deptford and fled to Italy, for Calvin Hoffman said as much in The Murder of the Man who was “Shakespeare”.  Far more shocking is her statement – based on extensive reading between the lines of the Calendar of State Papers Venetian and Sir Henry Wotton’s letters – that after arriving in Venice, Marlowe changed his name to Gregorio de' Monti and enjoyed a long career there and in Naples, working undercover and serving as Secretary of Compliments for the English embassy in Venice – while also writing all the works attributed to Shakespeare – until his death in November 1621. Readers will be skeptical given the extent to which Ballantine defies Shakespeare orthodoxy. Still, reasons to take a close look include the massive amount of documentation Ballantine adduces in support of her arguments and the fact that her version of events offers a consistent and coherent alternative biography that also squares with known facts. Yet what is perhaps the most important feature of this work is the effort Ballantine has expended to decipher hundreds of pages of personal messages that she insists Marlowe hid in his verse. Ballantine translates these sentences, all of which she claims corroborate little-known historic facts, by rearranging the letters of the initial couplets of dialogue –sometimes hundreds of couplets at a stretch – in the early quarto and folio editions of Marlowe’s and “Shakespeare’s” plays, including every play in the First Folio, as well as couplets in the first editions of many of their narrative poems. According to Ballantine, Marlowe wrote these lengthy rambling messages for his friends to decode. That they knew – and were able – to do so, she writes, is confirmed by Marlowe’s friend John Marston’s statement that ‘H’ath made a commonplace booke [a scrapbook] out of plaies, and speakes in print’ (p. 3).

Mark Twain famously made plain why the question of Shakespeare’s authorship should trouble us. Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography serves as a recent reminder of how little is known for certain about the man from Stratford. How convincingly Ballantine weighs in on the many mysteries here will surely be debated for years to come.