Print Price: $50.50

Format:
Paperback
448 pp.
Numerous halftones, 2 line drawings, 2 maps, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199232697

Publication date:
September 2007

Imprint: OUP UK

Christopher Marlowe

Poet & Spy

Park Honan

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge.

The biography uses for the first time the Latin writings of his friend Thomas Watson to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a spy (that is, as a courier and agent for the Elizabethan Privy Council). There are new accounts of him on the continent, particularly at Flushing or Vlissingen, where he was arrested. The book also more fully explains Marlowe's relations with his chief patron, Thomas Walsingham, than ever before.

This is also the first biography to explore in detail Marlowe's relations with fellow playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare, and to show how Marlowe's relations with Shakespeare evolved from 1590 to 1593. With closer views of him in relation to the Elizabethan stage than have appeared in any biography, the book examines in detail his aims, mind, and techniques as exhibited in all of his plays, from Dido, the Tamburlaine dramas, and Doctor Faustus through to The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It offers new treatments of his evolving versions of 'The Passionate Shepherd', and displays circumstances, influences, and the bearings of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' in relation to Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander'.

Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on Marlowe's friendships and so-called 'homosexuality'. Fresh information is brought to bear on his seductive use of blasphemy, his street fights, his methods of preparing himself for writing, and his atheism and religious interests. The book also explores his attraction to scientists and mathematicians such as Thomas Harriot and others in the Ralegh-Northumberland set of thinkers and experimenters. Finally, there is new data on spies and business agents such as Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, and a more exact account of the circumstances that led up to Marlowe's murder.

Readership : Scholars and students interested in Renaissance Literature and History, actors, theatre directors, and general readers.

Reviews

• `Review from previous edition ...the rich, complex vision of Elizabethan life that "Christopher Marlowe" supplies can make his(Marlowe's) poetic gift for cutting to the passionate core of that life seem even more astonishing.'
  The New York Times Book Review
• `He (Honan) gives a sumptuously detailed picture of Marlowe's world..." much-speculated (and previously erroneously reported) aspects of Marlowe's life without neglecting its more ordinary features... The care and depth of this biography honour Marlowe's complexities.'
  Publishers Weekly
• `This impressive volume must surely be recognised as the standard Marlowe biography'
  Roger Hards, The Marlowe Society Newsletter
• `Honan's great strength lies in his ability to capture the physical texture of Marlowe's world...Honan takes it apart with patience and sound judgement.. . .This is a rich and subtle study, combining convincing scholarship with a fluidity and pace that will appeal to the general reader.'
  J. P. D. Cooper, Times Literary Supplement
• `By heaven, this is an excellent, necessary and hugely welcome book. Though it responsibly synthesises previous scholarship, brings new perspectives and enlivens old, its greatest achievement is this: it presents a Marlowe that the sane can live with.'
  The Independent on Sunday
• `Honan's book is more than a fine piece if detective work revealing the seedy underbelly of Elizabethan England. It takes the reader on a round tour of Marlowe's work.'
  Raymond Carr, The Spectator
• `There's plenty of sparkle in this book.'
  Andrew Dickson
• `it is an elegantly written study which must now stand as the best overall biography of one of our most fascinating writers.'
  Stanley Wells, The Observer
• `a splendid book'
  Charles Nicholl, The Sunday Times
• `Honan has some fascinating new material.'
  Leanda de Lisle, History Today
• `Honan's addition to the fleet of books already written about Marlowe is constantly readable and adept at contextualising the history of Marlowe's times around this elusive figure who still fascinates today.'
  Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post
• `Honan frames the scant documentary evidence with great skill, carefully establishing the historical, religious and political context for each phase of Marlowe's career, and incorporating recent research that sheds more light on Marlowe's espionage career and murder.'
  William Grimes, New York Times
• `Honan's biography does more than retell this familiar story...Honan gives a fresh gloss to the old, still undecoded story of the reckoning.'
  Modern Language Review