A.D. Wraight stands by the plaque that marks the location of the building where Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was educated when attending King's School, Canterbury. With his scholarly potential acknowledged, in 1578 Marlowe entered King's School on scholarship from Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury to study music, religion, Latin and literature. Two years later he was off to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on another scholarship to study philosophy and history.

The anonymous Elizabethan plays Wraight argues ought to be placed in the pre-1593 Marlowe canon are Edward the Third, Arden of Faversham, The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York.

Edmund Malone was the eminent Shakespearean scholar of the eighteenth century when Shakespeare began to be studied, and it is he who set much of the traditional thinking about the bard that continues today in spite of the expanded knowledge of the sixteenth century and the continual expansion of Christopher Marlowe's connection to the Sonnets and plays. Malone was the first scholar to compare the writings of Christopher Marlowe with those of Shakespeare, and to suggest that Marlowe was the sole author of one, and possibly all of the King Henry plays, The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, along with the complete authorship of Titus Andronicus and The Troublesome Raigne of King John.

In Malone’s time the lack of literary evidence around the Stratford man had not yet congealed, Shakespeare’s debt to Marlowe’s unique talent was yet to be fully realized, and the suspicious Coroner’s Report on Marlowe’s death had not yet been discovered. A.D. Wraight's books utilize the new information available on Marlowe and sixteenth century documents, letters and writings of his friends and acquaintances to build a solid case for his authorship of the Shakespeare Works. The most ideal of scholars, she gives us the traditional point of view alongside her counter-arguments at each step along the way.

The reader will judge for his or her self whether or not Wraight's evidence for these additions to Marlowe's canon ought to be taken into serious consideration by academia. Should one believe Marlowe wrote these plays, a paradigm shift occurs on three counts: a reinterpretation of Marlowe's intentions in his pre-1593 plays, a reinterpretation of his character, and the study of Shakespeare's works from Dido onward, which will reveal the young genius Shakespeare's quick evolution into the "mature" Shakespeare.

Certainly there is nothing unusual about the world’s greatest writer being a threat to established forms of religion in the sixteenth century, and neither is there anything unusual using the charge "heretic" or "atheist" in that century to get rid of someone who threatened the Church.  Historical truth exists as a reasonable approximation of the past. The traditional understanding of history has often proved to be mistaken because nations preserve and teach that which reflects well upon themselves. A nation would prefer its greatest writer to have no personal history than to have it revealed that he was exiled for beliefs that did not uphold that of the Church of his time.

The foundation for the Stratford man rests on an assumption built upon an assumption: It was he that Greene was referring to as "Shake-scene" in the 1592 publication Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, therefore it was he who wrote the King Henry VI trilogy.  These assumptions are very important to uphold because they place Shakespeare as a dramatist before Marlowe's "death", erasing all suspicions around the first appearance of the William Shakespeare name a few weeks later on Venus and Adonis.

In her book Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn A.D. Wraight has crumbled this foundation by presenting irrefutable evidence that it was Edward Alleyn Greene was alluding to as "Shake-scene", not by using supposition but evidence from the writings of Marlowe's contemporaries. It is also from these contemporary 16th century writers Wraight proves Marlowe wrote Edward the Third. In the second half of her book she gives the evidence for Marlowe authoring The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, and that he was the chief dramatist in the first version of 1 King Henry VI.

Edward the Third marks the pivotal point for the paradigm shift in the one-dimensional interpretation of Marlowe’s character as well as his work. To believe Marlowe wrote this play, Tamburlaine and Faustus can no longer be seen as projections of Marlowe’s own ambitious desires, but characters developed with the objectivity of a young artist before his genius had developed an in-depth philosophy.

When Edward the Third is seen to be Marlowe’s, the gap shrinks between Marlowe the "rebel" and Shakespeare the "upholder of the covenants on which honor and civilization depend”; neither does this play show him to be a cold-hearted Machiavellian or an atheist in the modern day sense of the word. A freethinker surely he was, but many modern academics seem to be unaware of the Elizabethan view of an atheist as a freethinker, best described by Marlowe’s contemporary Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Atheism”, where he wrote, “all that impugn a received religion, or super-stition, are by the adverse part branded with the name of atheists.”

Read a synopsis and further commentary on Wraight's Chapter 3: "An 'Armada' History Play" from her book Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn. In this chapter she presents the case for Marlowe's authorship of Edward the Third.

A.D. Wraight at work