Introduction

Summary

How might a biographer today challenge the established narrative of Marlowe studies? As several literary scholars, including Ian Donaldson and John Carey, have argued, biography, no longer able to resort to the old methodologies, now aims for increasing scholarly sophistication by taking the approach of rehabilitating the author and establishing their output within their contemporary cultural system. Historians, too, now give more prominent attention to the usefulness of critical biography. Jacques Le Goff, a leading historian of the Annales School, and Giovanni Levi, one of the pioneers of microhistory, are highly sensitive to what sociology, the history of mentalities, political science, and symbolic and interpretive anthropology have all contributed to our understanding of the individual as a historical agent. In other words, a biographer can reconstruct the value systems of the specific social and cultural locale within which the individual was deeply integrated as an agent, and elucidate how the meanings of the texts that they produced were generated within complex systems of beliefs and values.

At the same time, however, we must bear in mind that the fundamental starting point of any Marlowe biography must be the Socratic axiom ‘Knowledge of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom’. It is in vain, an illusion, to seek to reconstruct a complete figure of Marlowe, the man, from the extremely limited volume of his biographical documents. He ‘exists’ only as a slender collection of textual fragments; we know next to nothing about his life. Few biographical documents survive, other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of injury and pecuniary cases in court records, mandates of, and reports to, the Privy Councillors, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his religious beliefs. Moreover, the evidence is fragmentary, discontinuous, and contradictory. There are far fewer residual biographical documents than there are for Shakespeare; thus, the task is still too difficult for Marlowe's biographers to fully reconstruct his whole life.

For these reasons, those who attempt to write a full biography of Marlowe must run the risk of spinning hypothetical scenarios to construct a putative ‘truth’ of his life, and of filling documentary lacunas with contextual information and material derived from his literary works; and they must also confront the considerable temptation to equate conjecture with fact.