Who Are Those Guys: Marlowe and Bacon, and Was One of Them Shakespeare?
Come celebrate the merry month of May on Wednesday, May 22 at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific. Blue Boar Tavern regulars Bonner Cutting, Dorothea Dickerman, Alex McNeil, Phoebe Nir and special guest bartender, Tom Woosnam, will discuss two more fascinating Elizabethan personalities as part of the series “Who Are Those Guys?”
Poet, playwright, translator and suspected government spy, Christopher Marlowe lived large swaths of his life deeply hidden in the shadows. His dissolute reputation as a duelist, counterfeiter and “rakehell” was matched only by his shining reputation as one of the greatest dramatists in Elizabethan London. His mysterious and violent death on May 30, 1593, just one month after Shakespeare’s first work, Venus and Adonis, appeared in print on April 18, earned him an unmarked grave after a coroner’s inquest fraught with irregularities. Some think he was assassinated; others think his death was faked.
Francis Bacon, philosopher, lawyer and statesman, is considered today to be one of the founders of the scientific method of inquiry. Although in 1591 Bacon became confidential advisor to Robert Devereaux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Bacon turned against Essex and became his chief prosecutor in the trial that cost Essex his head in 1601. Bacon himself suffered an irretrievable fall from grace in 1621 that cost him his reputation.
Both of these accomplished men have been put forth by their supporters as the hidden face behind the pseudonym “William Shakespeare” and both were well known to Edward de Vere , 17th Earl of Oxford. Join the Blue Boar Tavern discussion on how their lives wove in and out of his.
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