Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was one of the finest playwrights of the Elizabethan Age, and his life is probably the most interesting. While Shakespeare's biography consists mostly of land deeds and tax records, Marlowe's contains street brawls, murders, espionage, politics, scandal, and, of course, some of the finest poetry ever written.

John Bakeless's "Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe" was published in 1942 in 2 volumes, and superseded Bakeless's earlier "Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time." Bakeless endeavored to write a complete --- and I mean complete --- biography of Marlowe, and he examines his work and life in all its details. The first 6 chapters documents Marlowe's life, from birth in Canterbury, education at Cambridge, playwriting in London, to his death in Deptford. Then in chapters 7-14 Bakeless discusses individually Marlowe's plays, his unfinished poem "Hero and Leander," and the shorter poems and translations. Bakeless dates them, discusses them from a literary p.o.v., documents their sources, and charts their influence to his present day. Next Bakeless gives a study of Marlowe's "mighty line," charts the artistic relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare, and concludes his work by discussing the "Marlowe Apocrypha" - writings attributed to Marlowe through the ages, but which have not received general acceptance into the canon.

Now Bakeless wrote this in 1942, and of course some more information has been found since that time. Most important, documentation was found in 1975 that Marlowe was in the Netherlands in January 1592, arrested for coining with a goldsmith and Richard Baines (!), and deported back to England. Then the court records for an altercation Marlowe had with William Corkine in Canterbury in September 1592, also the the famous Marlowe portrait was discovered in Corpus Christi in 1953. It has also since been proven that a poem fragment Bakeless credits to Marlowe - the verses in England's Parnassus - was actually written by Jervis Markham. Despite these later additions to our knowledge of Marlowe, Bakeless's biography has never been superseded because so far no writer has yet attempted a fresh biography on the scope of Bakeless's.

To supplement Bakeless, I recommend William Urry's "Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury," Charles Nicholl's "The Reckoning," and Mark Eccles's "Christopher Marlowe in London." But Bakeless is still the bedrock of Marlowe biography.

Formerly out of print, this softbound book provides a comprehensive overview of intelligence operations during the Revolutionary War. Covering the more common stories about the attempted kidnapping of Washington and the Arnold/Andre affair, it also depicts intelligence conducted before various battles, intelligence failures & successes, and France's intelligence collection prior to their involvement in the War. Worth buying.

This book will be good for those who do not want to read the journals of L & C but want a complete, thorough report. The book gave many specific details, and often got sidetracked off into extra tidbits of information. For those looking for just a general overview of this journey, this book is not the place to find it.