One of the pleasures of reading about Christopher Marlowe is that it provides an antidote to the idolatry conferred on Shakespeare. David Riggs manages to write around 400 splendid pages about Elizabethan theatre while only briefly mentioning the favourite literary genius of the western world. The theatre was well established in London by the time that the lad from Stratford-upon-Avon arrived. It was served by numerous writers, some of them providing pot-boilers, some such as Thomas Kyd ("The Spanish Tragedy") extraordinarily gifted, and all constantly in demand to provide new scripts to fill the city's booming theatres.
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