It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries

“ It is not for any man to measure, above all it is not for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take on himself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce what it is that Christopher Marlowe could not have done. ”— Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Chicago Donohue, Henneberry & Co. 407-429 Dearborn St.
COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY WILBUR GLEASON ZEIGLER. All rights reserved.
TO MY WIFE, WHOSE PRAISE IS AMPLE MEED FOR MY WORK; AND TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, THE ONE WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT WAS THE KEENEST SPUR FOR BEST EFFORT, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
Wilbur Gleason Zeigler June 8, 1898.
Nature doth strive with Fortune and his stars To make him famous. — I Tamburlaine, ii, 1.
Nature and Fortune joined to make him great. — King John, iii, 1.
A number of years ago I read the plays of Christopher Marlowe; and as evidence of the impression they made upon me, there is still among my recent notes gathered for this romance, the extracts I then wrote down from his Tamburlaine and Faustus. There was something in them to excite more than the passing interest of a boy; and for a long time I mourned over the accepted account of the untimely, and disgraceful ending of that unfortunate poet—“our elder Shelley,” as Swinburne has termed him. Later the Bacon-Shakespere controversy attracted my attention; and while I became skeptical concerning the authorship by William Shakespere of the dramas that bear his name, I could not attribute them to the pen of Francis Bacon.
There are many reasons for my disbelief, in the solution of the mystery as presented by the Baconians, but it has not arisen from my failure to study the proofs and argument. One reason, however, must be mentioned. A man, so solicitous of his fame as to leave it in his will “to foreign nations and the next ages,” would not, if he had written the plays, have departed this life without some mention of them. Whoever wrote them was not blind to their merits; and of his knowledge of their enduring quality we have the author’s own opinion in the lines: