As You Like It

As the "Dead Shepherd," or slain love poet invoked in the magical forest of Arden, Christopher Marlowe's spirit permeates As You Like It. Marlowe's early plays, including Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta, revolutionized the London theatre and popularized blank verse. Following a heresy investigation in 1593, the secret service for whom he performed "good service" for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, staged his death, and Marlowe went on to pen the Shakespearean plays with the actor from Stratford. This edition of As You Like It vividly recreates the harrowing climate of religious persecution and artistic censorship in which As You Like was written. The Bishops' Bonfire on June 4, 1599, in which Marlowe's newly published version of Ovid's love poems, The Elegies, was publicly burned by the archbishop of Canterbury, is alluded to in the play. AYLI was finally published more than 20 years later in the First Folio after the prelate was dead. Ros Barber’s new verse novel The Marlowe Papers (St. Martin’s, 2013) has popularized the Marlovian cause. This edition of AYLI provides the historical and literary evidence. Praise for Marlowe's As You Like It "Alex Jack's As You Like It reveals so many new allusions to Marlowe's 'death,' along with a multitude of glances at the poet-spy's literary resurrection under Shakespeare's name, that Marlowe himself becomes the subject of the play's subplot—a subplot that is now, for the savvy eager, more riveting than the main romantic storyline."—Cynthia Morgan, editor/publisher, The Marlowe Studies Praise for Marlowe's Hamlet edited by Alex Jack "An attractive edition of the play . . . a provocative view of Elizabethan society spiced with an entertaining dash of Arthur Conan Doyle."—Kirkis Discoveries "Alex Jack's new book . . . is enormously impressive as a detective work in literature. His analysis of Hamlet is remarkable . . . breathtakingly imaginative."—Howard Zinn, historian and author of A People's History of the United States "I'm enjoying Alex Jack's new book on . . . Shakespeare very much . . . it makes me realize how mysterious and complicated that world was, how unbelievably brilliant in language. And I've taken a much greater fondness for Marlowe than ever before."—Robert Bly, poet and author "You think like a director."—Mark Rylance, artistic director, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London