The Lives And Afterlife Of Christopher Marlowe, Rodney Bolt (HarperCollins, £17.99)

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong - T.S.Eliot

DEPTFORD in 1593 - a seedy, sinful, bustling Elizabethan dockland - was an ideal meeting place for spies.

Within easy reach of London, and less than a mile from Queen Elizabeth I's favourite residence at Greenwich, the docks were a melting pot of humanity.

"Sailors, travellers, foreigners and minor courtiers could mingle unheeded on the streets," writes Rodney Bolt in his new book History Play.

"English and French, German and Dutch might be heard around tables in taverns. Some 4,000 incomers arrived to live in Deptford in the 1590s, and most of them descended on the lodging houses in the riverfront area known as Deptford Strand."

It was in one of those seedy riverfront lodging houses that, according to tradition, Christopher Marlowe, the brilliant young poet, wit, playwright and contemporary of William Shakespeare, was killed on May 30 1593 "in a drunken brawl over a bill".

That was the traditional view. Recent research has suggested that Marlowe was murdered because of his involvement in the shady world of Elizabethan espionage.

But what if he didn't die at all? What if the brilliant young spy and poet, who liked to be known as Kit, only staged his own death, before fleeing to the Continent?

That is the starting premise for Bolt's wonderfully bawdy 'alternative' biography of the playwright-spy, suitably sub-titled "The Lives And Afterlife Of Christopher Marlowe."

Bolt's Marlowe goes on to live a long and eventful 'afterlife' following his faked death at the age of 29, in the course of which, among other things, he finds time to write the plays later mistakenly attributed to a jobbing actor by the name of William Shakespeare.

It's not the first time there have been conspiracy theories about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Not content with the idea that a humble glovemaker's son from Stratford might have penned the greatest plays in the English language, historians and academics down the ages have speculated that they could have been the work of everybody from Queen Elizabeth I to Shakespeare's contemporary, the essayist Sir Francis Bacon.

There was even a claim made a few years ago for John Williams, a 17th Century Archbishop of York.

Bolt isn't the first to suggest Marlowe as the plays' possible author. If you reject Shakespeare himself, who could be more plausible than the age's other great poet?

What makes Bolt's book such great fun, however, is that he cheerfully admits he doesn't have a shred of evidence, and he never once does anything so dull as attempt to prove it. He simply assumes it and goes on from there.

The result is a wonderful blend of fact and invention which brings the Elizabethan period to life like nothing else.

During the course of Kit's eventful life we see him lose his virginity to a Venetian prostitute, discover the delights of sodomy, get recruited by Elizabeth's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, journey undercover across continental Europe in the company of a troupe of English 'Players' (for which read actors), kill a young German student in a fight in Padua, encounter the real-life Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - and meet, then borrow the name of, a dullard wannabe-playwright called Will Shakespere.

It's all so well done that you desperately want to believe Bolt's version of Marlowe's life. His Kit is so energetic, impatient, passionate and full of life, and his re-interpretation of some of the most famous scenes from Shakespeare's plays in the light of Kit's adventures so plausible and refreshing, that it is hard to believe it is all a hoax.

Bolt even goes so far as to invent a childhood friend of Kit, a man called Oliver Laurens (Laurence Olivier, get it?), whose 'diaries' are used as a primary source for this new version of Marlowe's life.

The cod academic style is a joy; how about this for a footnote: "Seb Melmoth's facetious comments in his address 'Rogering Sir Roger: Only a Manwood', reprinted in the Annals Of The Fitzrovian Society, need not concern us here'; it is only in the notes and references at the end of the book that the author comes clean about what he's up to.

The travel writer and journalist is expecting harrumphing from respectable academia.

While the 'afterlife' of his Marlow is fictional, almost everything else in the book (apart from the occasional playful creation of fictional characters) is factual, he says - and based on good evidence.

There is a serious point underneath all the fun, which is to question the way academic biographies of historical figures such as Shakespeare and Marlowe - about whom we know very little - come to be written.

"I'm quite sure there will be some stamping of shoes," he says cheerfully. "There are people that are going to hate it. But as long as they hate it for the right reasons, it will be a success!"

There is another point to his book, too, he says - which is to challenge our popular obsession with the Stratford story.

There is not a single one of Shakespeare's original manuscripts left - in fact, Bolt says, we know that in the Elizabethan age the writing of plays was a much more collaborative affair than today, one in which everyone from poet, actor, manager, stage-hand and secretary had a hand in the final product - and we know almost nothing concrete about the man himself or his life.

"So why are people so concerned that this story of Shakespeare and Stratford holds up?" he says.

It's a good question. You won't find the answer in this book. But you'll have great fun reading it, and you'll learn an awful lot about the time in which Shakespeare and Marlowe lived.

Like me, you'll probably find yourself wishing Marlowe's 'afterlife' could have been true after all.

History Play: The Lives And Afterlife Of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt is published by HarperCollins, £17.99.

Updated: 09:42 Wednesday, July 28, 2004