Welcome,
I became interested in Marlowe after watching Mike Rubbo's documentary Much Ado About Something on PBS Frontline back in 2002.
While pursuing a Masters degree in science education, I wrote a paper on the history of scholarship of Shake-speare's Sonnets, and the shifting fortunes of the attempts to interpret them autobiographically. The prevailing opinion nowadays, see James Shapiro's recent Contested Will, is that there is no autobiographical content in the Sonnets -- they are nothing more than exercises in conventional sonneteering. Their appearance of personal revelation is just that, appearance only.
The thrust of my paper was that this interpretation only became popular when it was recognized that the sonnets could not have been autobiographical of Shakespeare, leaving readers with two choices: either reject their autobiographical nature, as Shapiro has done, or reject the author who wrote them, as people like myself have done.
Mike Rubbo and I went on to become friends, and I proudly consider him my mentor. I asked him to write the foreword to Marlowe's Ghost, which he graciously accepted. That was three years ago. Last spring, in March 2009, Mike and I met up in Montreal. He brought his camera, and spent several hours filming an interview with me, asking me dozens of questions, some expected, some unexpected. This 5 minute clip is a sample of that interview. It addresses the often heard complaint that the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare were too different for Marlowe to have been the writer of the Shakespeare works. Please watch the video for my response.
Cheers,
Daryl Pinksen
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