I sat down for a pastrami sandwich this week with Sam Blumenfeld, author, editor, libertarian, home schooling champion, and . . . Marlovian. At 83, Blumenfeld is sharp, erudite, and charming, but he does have some odd figures of speech. When we were discussing “Twelfth Night,’’ for instance, he called it “one of Marlowe’s greatest plays.’’
“You mean one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays,’’ I helpfully corrected.
“No, Marlowe wrote that. Shakespeare never went to school, and he couldn’t write.’’
When Blumenfeld first contacted me to discuss his research, his blog, and the newly created International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, I sent him a terse e-mail: “There lies madness,’’ unconsciously paraphrasing “King Lear.’’ Captain Kidd’s treasure, the UFO landings at Roswell, where I will be in a year - certain topics just consume more energy than they are worth. Where Shakespeare is concerned - the doubters call him “the man from Stratford’’ - I would want more people to enjoy him and stop fretting about the vaporous authorship controversy.
The search for the “real’’ Shakespeare is a collective madness, one that has gripped (of all people) Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, William and Henry James, and several Supreme Court justices with too much time on their hands. It is a madness with momentum. If you plug “Shakespeare authorship controversy’’ into Google, you will get about 2 million hits - well short of the 7 million for “9/11 conspiracy,’’ but getting there. Two distinguished filmmakers plan to release movies dramatizing the authorship controversy.
“More than ever, people are interested in authorship, and now there are many more tools available to doubters,’’ explains Carlo DiNota, an English professor at Berkeley Preparatory school in Tampa, Fla., and co-creator of the Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection blog. “If we had to rely on the mainstream academics, no one would know anything.’’
Here is the lay of the land. Although Sir Francis Bacon and King James I were once pretenders to the claim of Greatest English Language Author Ever, the field has narrowed to two: Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Marlowe’s ferocious partisans point to the close friendship between the two playwrights (see: “Shakespeare in Love’’), their overlapping interests and publishers, and allege that shadowy forces faked Marlowe’s death, allowing him to continue his work under the name Shakespeare.
If Marlovians seem more jovial than de Vere’s promoters, that is because “Kit’’ Marlowe was cool. He was a traveler, an adventurer, a spy, a heretic, and gay before it was fashionable. Last month, The New York Times reported that Johnny Depp might play the title role in “Marlowe,’’ a movie about the authorship controversy. How cool is that?
The de Vere camp, who call themselves “Oxfordians,’’ seem more austere in their enthusiasms and, truth be told, more boring. The case for de Vere seems modest at best. He wasn’t much of a poet, and his greatest champion is a now-forgotten author named Looney. Two of his main fans are the superannuated Supreme Court justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia.
I interviewed a prominent Oxfordian, who insisted that our conversation be off the record. When I mentioned this to a friend of his, the friend explained that the Oxford man had recently been gored by a columnist at The Times of London. I found the clip: “crank . . . condescending . . . snobbish.’’ The Timesman compared the Shakespeare truthers to Holocaust deniers. Hey, it’s England.
The next big event in Shakespeare Truth World will be the 2010 publication of Columbia professor James Shapiro’s “Contesting Will.’’ There is already considerable trembling in the blogospheres, because (1) Shapiro is well regarded, and his book will be widely reviewed, and (2) he has “Stratfordian’’ credentials, meaning he thinks Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Shapiro doesn’t want to talk about his book yet. But truthers noted some disparaging comments he made about the authorship controversy to The New Yorker last year, when he criticized a prominent anti-Stratfordian, and said, “We know a great deal about Shakespeare’s life.’’
“We are all waiting for that book to come out,’’ my Marlovian acquaintance Blumenfeld told me. “We’ll be like a pack of hounds descending on him. It will be the Stratfordians’ last stand.’’
Poor James. Poor Will.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
