History Play - Marlowe Lives?

Rodney Bolt's book is not an attempt to prove that, rather than dying at 29 in a tavern brawl, Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to Europe, and went on to write the work attributed to Shakespeare. Instead, it takes that as the starting point for a playful and brilliantly written "fake biography" of Marlowe, which turns out to be a life of the Bard as well. 

Using real historical sources (as well as the occasional red herring) plus a generous dose of speculation, Bolt paints a rich and rollicking picture of Elizabethan life. As we accompany Marlowe into the halls of academia, the society of the popular English players traveling Europe, and the dangerous underworld of Elizabethan espionage, a fascinating and almost plausible life story emerges, along with a startlingly fresh look at the plays and poetry we know as Shakespeare's. 

Tapping into centuries of speculation about the man behind the work, about whom so few facts are known for sure, Rodney Bolt slyly winds the lives of two beloved playwrights into one.

Turns Out, Elizabethan Playwright and Poet Laureate Ben Jonson was a Murderer

From CrimeReads:

Turns out, Ben Jonson, the renowned Elizabethan playwright and the first poet laureate of England, was a murderer.

On September 22nd, 1598, when he was an (angry) young man of twenty-six, Jonson, a former bricklayer, encountered a young actor named Gabriel Spencer. Jonson was not yet an established playwright, having had his play Every Man in his Humour only very recently debuted at the prominent Curtain Theater (which would later be moved and rebuilt as the Globe). The two men found themselves embroiled in a conflict, which the courts maintained that Jonson started. They ruled this despite Spencer’s violent history; he had previously killed a young boy when the boy had threatened to throw a candlestick at him. Then again, Jonson also had a violent history; in his own accounts he mentions that before the Spencer affair, he had killed someone while abroad in the Low Countries, simply for sport? (Though he was not arrested for it.)

But Spencer and Jonson began a duel, during which he stabbed Spencer with his sword, killing him instantly. Jonson was arrested and thrown into Newgate Prison (where he panicked and converted to Catholicism from a visiting priest, which was also a felony at England in this point in history).

Jonson was arraigned on October 6th, and confessed to the crime of manslaughter, for which crime he would be hanged. But then he did something extremely calculated; he called upon an obscure legal precedent.

read more here @ CrimeReads and his works @ Project Gutenberg