Among the plays being performed, this summer, at Colorado University's 2019 Colorado Shakespeare Festival are 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Twelfth Night,' and 'As You Like It', plays that are set in Italy and seem to be written by someone who was able to speak Italian, and was knowledgeable, and had experience of Italian geography, art, culture and theatre.
The abiding mystery of the Italian plays is that William Shakespeare did not speak Italian, there is no evidence that he ever went to Italy, and ever experienced Italian Culture or Italian Theatre.
Yet, scholars have recently uncovered clues to the collaborative writing of Shakespeare and Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe, who spoke Italian and probably knew Italy, intimately.
In November, 2016, Oxford University Press released its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare and credited Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe as being a co-author of the three Henry VI plays. This conclusion is based on scholarship and 21st-century computerized tools to analyze texts. The edition’s international scholars say Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights was 'extensive'.
Marlowe was a spy in the Elizabethan Secret Service. He spied in France and possibly in Italy and Spain.
And yet, there is certainly mystery concerning Marlowe's involvement in the writing of the Italian plays.
Historians
say Marlowe was killed in a brawl, stabbed in the eye, on May 30, 1593.
The Italian Plays were written and performed after this.
And yet, there is evidence that Marlowe's death was faked and he continued to write and spy for England.
In these playwrights' time England was in the midst of the bloody religious wars of the Reformation. Pope Pius V had ordered the excommunication, overthrow and murder of Elizabeth I.
The Privy Council/Star Chamber, became England's version of the Inquisition. People accused of being religious or political opponents of Elizabeth I, The Church of England, the established order, were horribly tortured, broken, executed, or imprisoned for life.
Shakespeare and his London playwright contemporaries, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, lived in fear of the police knock on the door in the middle of the night, the dungeon, the torture chamber, the 'justice' of the Privy Council/Star Chamber.
Thomas Kyd was one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Some scholars believe he was the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet. The play Edward III is included in the Second Edition of the Complete Oxford Shakespeare (2005), where it is attributed to "William Shakespeare and Others". In 2009, Brian Vickers published the results of a computer analysis using a program designed to detect plagiarism, which suggests that 40% of the play was written by Shakespeare with the other scenes written by Kyd.
On May 12, 1593, Kyd, was arrested for allegedly posting "divers lewd and mutinous libels" around London.
He would later say he had been the victim of an informer.
His lodgings, which he had shared with Marlowe, were searched. A tract was found that was said to be "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ..."
Kyd was tortured, and he broke.
He told his torturers the tract belonged to Marlowe. He said Marlowe was a blasphemous traitor, an atheist who believed Jesus Christ was a homosexual, and his mother was a 'whore'.
Kyd died from his injuries less than a year after being tortured.
Marlowe was summoned by the Privy Council/Star Chamber.
He was born in 1564, the same year Shakespeare was born. When Shakespeare arrived in London and the city's world of theater, sometime around 1590, Marlowe was the most prominent, celebrated, business-adept playwright in town.
At the very least he was Shakespeare's biggest literary influence. And yet, there are prominent Shakespearean scholars who claim Marlowe was much more than this.
Elizabeth’s spymaster was Francis Walsingham, outwardly a diplomat and adviser to the queen, and yet, more importantly, Elizabeth's fixer who made the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1584, happen.
For foreign covert missions, he preferred to use Englishmen rather than foreigners. Often the cover for these spies was that they were Catholic exiles. He preferred to recruit his spies from among the poor undergraduates at the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Marlowe would have been an ideal candidate.
He took many extended, unexplained leaves of absence from the university He spent much more money than a poor student on a scholarship would have.
University authorities found out that during an extended leave of absence he had gone to a Catholic English College in Douai, France (a school established on the continent for the education of English Catholic exiles by Philip II of Spain). There, students were recruited and trained to be Catholic secret agents in England.
Marlowe was rumored to be planning to convert to Catholicism.
He was only able to graduate because of a letter received from the Privy Council (of which Walsingham was a member) commending Marlowe for performing an unspecified “good service” for the Crown.
This "service" probably involved revealing the identity of Catholic secret agents sent to England.
After Kyd's torture induced confession in May 1593, Marlowe was taken before the privy chamber. He was released. But he was commanded to report to the authorities, "each day there after until licensed to the contrary".
On the night of May 30, 1593, Marlowe was staying in a boarding house, in Deptford, outside of London.
This boarding house was a “safe house” for British secret agents.
He was probably preparing to flee England. The three people he met at the boarding house would have been the right people to arrange this. They were Robert Poley (a diplomatic courier), Ingram Frizer (another agent of Walsingham) and Nikolas Skeres (a con man and associate of Frizer).
At this time Marlowe, was a tried and proven British secret agent. And yet, he was also an atheist, and homo-sexual. He knew members of the British Aristocracy who were also atheists and homosexuals.
The official story is that there was an argument about the bill. Marlowe drew Frizer’s knife and attacked him with it. Frizer struggled with him in self defense, and as a result Marlowe was fatally stabbed in the eye.
He was 29.
Fizer, admitted killing Marlowe. Yet he was acquitted of the murder.
And the coroner’s report is suspect.
Rules of investigation were not followed, and the body was never independently identified by someone other than the three people at the scene of the crime, all secret agents.
The body was buried before anyone, other than the coroner, could get a close look at it. And the body that was buried in the graveyard at Deptford could have been the corpse of a Catholic priest who was hung the previous evening.
Scholars have not found any record of the hung priest’s body being buried.
Since the 18th Century theories have been proposed that Marlowe's death was faked.
Some believe he went to Italy and continued to be a playwright and secret agent until he died in Padua, Italy in 1627.
There is evidence that Marlowe lived in hiding in Padua for 34 years after his supposed death.
Calvin Hoffman was an American theater critic, press agent and writer who popularized in his 1955 book, 'The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare,' the theory that Marlowe was the actual author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. He published the account of Pietro Basconi, who claimed to have nursed an exiled recluse called Christopher Marlowe when he was terminally ill in Padua in 1627.
Hoffman's theory is controversial and disputed. And yet, there is much in 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Twelfth Night, ' As You Like It,' and the other Italian Plays that indicate the author knew Italy intimately.
The author accurately names churches, canal routes, and pilgrimage sites. In 'Julius Caesar' he describes the kind of summer storm which is common to Rome, but doesn't happen in England.
The place where Juliet dies is a real 13th-century Franciscan convent - the only one outside the city walls - at the time when the events were supposed to have taken place.
Throughout the Italian Plays there is geographic, and cultural accuracy.
The
Italian plays are often about exiles, false identity, gender confusion,
people who are believed to be dead who are very much alive.
These are the themes that Marlowe would have lived with in Italy.
The
Italian Plays would be the further collaboration of Shakespeare and
Marlowe, the kind of collaboration that scholars and computer analyze
have begun to uncover.
Marlowe could have sent
his manuscripts to Walsingham the same way he sent his spy information.
Walsingham would deliver the manuscripts to Shakespeare and he would
send Marlowe the money that Shakespeare paid.