Real Florida

Marlowe in the Park?

While Roberta Ballantine and others debate the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, I say, O Romeo, Romeo, please pass the Perrier.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 14, 2003

[Times photo: Chris Zuppa] Roberta Ballantine believes that Christopher Marlowe wrote the plays. That Marlowe was killed before the most well-known were written cannot shake her belief.

One of the best things about Florida's spring is the annual Shakespeare in the Park festival that takes place for the next month at Demens Landing in St. Petersburg. I like arriving at twilight, lounging on my blanket and gazing at the seabirds passing overhead. I like eating sharp cheddar cheese and drinking Perrier with a twist while listening to actors annunciate their lines so very crisply. At intermission, I like to saunter through the crowd and look for friends.

I won't bother looking for Roberta Ballantine. She will be MIA, I suspect, until our rite of spring is called "Marlowe in the Park."

Ballantine is one of those notorious Shakespeare doubters. She likes to tell me that the real-life country bumpkin who called himself Shakespeare lacked the smarts, sophistication and travel experience to have ever picked up that quill pen.

"It couldn't have been him," she sniffs.

Passion in the park A young cast brings chemistry and verve to American Stage's under-the-stars Romeo and Juliet.

It could have been only Marlowe, in her opinion -- Christopher Marlowe, the man-about-town playwright who was also a master spy. Of course, Marlowe was murdered before Shakespeare wrote his most famous plays, though Marlovians -- that's what Roberta calls herself and her ilk -- have an answer for every objection to their theory. They say Marlowe actually staged his own murder to avoid a death sentence for being a religious heretic, fled to Italy and wrote up a storm.

Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare? Let me eat my cheese, drink my Perrier and watch Romeo and Juliet in peace. Life is complicated enough.

A doubter early on

Roberta Ballantine, who is 80, who has blond gray hair and sparkling blue eyes, who lives in a big house in Sarasota among hundreds of volumes about Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers, who sprinkles words like "lacunae" and "apocryphal" in her conversations, always has liked complicated plots.

The notorious Shakespeare doubter grew up in Berkeley, Calif., in an upper-class family where tradition was valued. Then she attended California's Pomona College, read Marlowe's plays, read Shakespeare's plays and informed her professor, "They were written by the same man."

Ah, theater. The dramatic life beckoned. She headed for New York and did summer stock, not in the city but on Long Island. When summer was over, she had to look for a new job. She doesn't like to brag, but she was what old-fashioned men might call a "bombshell." Among other things she stood 6 feet -- and that was before stepping into 5-inch heels. It wasn't Shakespeare, but she got a job in Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe Review as a leggy showgirl.

Shakespeare -- and Marlowe -- could wait.

She worked in Vaudeville. She stopped working in Vaudeville. "I was so poor I was surviving on carrot sticks," she says. A man stopped her on a Manhattan street. His name was John Murray Anderson. A show-biz big shot, he admired her hourglass figure and suggested she audition at Madison Square Garden for a job with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. She was hired as a showgirl, loved the circus life, wintered in Sarasota, got rid of her pallor and met a clown -- meeting a clown in the circus is a good thing -- who asked her out for a dinner of slimy, garlicky snails. She married him anyway.

Bill Ballantine later wrote notable books about the clown life and helped establish the famous Clown College in Sarasota. When their kids were grown, when that nest was indeed empty, she needed a hobby.

Gardening? Well, she liked flowers but not that much. Pottery? Pottery is an art, but it's kind of messy. She had read Shakespeare all of her life and wondered about him. Who was he? What was the inspiration for his genius? The more she read, the more she learned, the more she came to doubt that it had been Shakespeare's ink-stained hand on the quill pen.

That's how Shakespeare's history became a romantic showgirl's new love.

Roberta Ballantine was not the first Shakespeare doubter, of course. Over the centuries there have been many disbelievers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Mark Twain to Orson Welles.

Many believe the real Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Unlike the man who called himself William Shakespeare, de Vere was well-educated and well-traveled and, among other things, managed a theater company. So why didn't he write under his own name? Oxfordians, as his proponents call themselves, argue he kept his authorship a secret because it would have been embarrassing for an "Earl" to write plays for the amusement of greasy, smelly commoners.

What are the arguments in favor of William Shakespeare? Well, four centuries worth of scholars, for the most part, have never doubted his authorship for an instant. Hey, if he had been a fake, wouldn't it have been discovered by his contemporaries?

But Shakespeare doubters never stop wondering. The man was poorly educated and apparently never traveled to the countries where he often set his sophisticated dramas. His handwriting was awful; some say the man never owned a book. His background was in business. Perhaps he was a front for the real Shakespeare and received a piece of the action.

"Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun."

"As a teacher of Shakespeare," says University of South Florida professor Sara Deats, "I really don't care who wrote these wonderful plays, but I think that the controversy is interesting and provocative."

The case for Marlowe

Roberta Ballantine cares. For her, being a Marlovian is a passion. "He was a dashing man," she says. "Kind of like James Bond."

Like 007 he was a member of Her Majesty's Secret Service. He was elegant. He was a cad. He wrote Tamburlaine the Great and Dr. Faustus. He could jump off cliffs. He could be a lady's man. He had a quick temper and sometimes talked without thinking. He probably was too outspoken about his atheism; the Church marked him for torture and worse. Before the inquisition could take place he was stabbed to death in a bar fight, though the Marlovians think it all was faked.

They say that Marlowe, hiding out in Italy, wrote as Shakespeare. They say he wrote sentences heavy with secret meanings, understandable if you could understand the code. They say a lot of his words and sentences were anagrams. Figure them out and there it is: Marlowe talking and joking to the friends back in England who knew his secret, knew he was Shakespeare.

For a quarter of a century Roberta Ballantine has been reading and writing about the subject, published only on the Internet. Check out www.geocities.com/shakesp_marlowe/marlowe.html to see. At home she lays out sentences from Shakespeare's plays -- the versions published in Elizabethan English -- on a kind-of Scrabble board. She rearranges letters to create new words and new meanings.

"I have found hundreds of hidden sentences," she says. "I know that nobody in academia wants to listen to us. But my plan is to gather so much evidence that people will have to pay attention eventually. I am 80 and want to get as much done before it's my time to go."

Do-it-yourself conspiracy

Playing word games, like eating cheddar cheese and swilling Perrier, ought to become a spring Shakespeare in the Park ritual.

The Montagues hated the Capulets. Rearrange the letters of those family names and it is possible to come up with a Marlovian conspiracy theory regarding the churchmen who supposedly wanted Marlowe dead: "Gaunt men plot, cause deaths."

Try your own name.

Perhaps you will come up with something more poetic and elegant than I did.

All I got from mine was "Feb Glen Jerk Fink."

Shakespeare, it ain't. But maybe, deep down, it's some kind of springtime truth.

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