1136 Reviews tainly demanding, though it is frequently lightened by itswide-ranging cultural re ferences.The account of JudeLaw's impersonation ofTony Blair on Saturday Night Live in2004, forexample, manages both tobe entertaining and to make a barbed poli tical point. In general, this is a dense, thoughtful, and committed book which shows that a rigorous study can also constitute an independent reflection in itsown right. ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON COLIN DAVIS Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. By PARKHONAN. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. xVi+421 pp. ?i6.22. ISBN 978-0-I9-8I8695-3. The central tension ofChristopher Marlowe's life is captured byRobert Lowell in a sonnet from History (London: Faber & Faber, I973): I died sweating, stabbed with friendswho knewme was it thebar-check? ... Tragedy is todie . .. forthatvacant parsonage, Posterity; my plays are stamped inbronze, my life in tabloid. (Lowell, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 462) Whether expressed inLowell's demotic idiom ('Was it the bar-check?') or the bilin gual termsof thecoroner's inquest ('they could not concur [... .]on [... .] le recknynge' (p. 376)), Marlowe's death remains ambiguous. Why was he inDeptford with 'friends' like Ingram Frizer (an agent ofMarlowe's patron Thomas Walsingham), Nicholas Skeres (a professional conman, implicated in theBabington plot of I586), and Robert Poley (another player in theBabington plot and an informerof the chief Elizabethan spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham)? Lowell gets to theheart of the enigma: though Marlowe's plays are 'stamped inbronze', his life remains a subject for 'tabloid' con jecture: who was paying him todo what?What was this supremely talented playwright doing consorting with cony-catchers? Park Honan's approach is explicit in his title.Rather than segregating poet from spy,he readsMarlowe's lifeand work as an ambiguous totality. His account of The_Jew of Malta linksMarlowe's knowledge of espionage with theplay's disabused account ofMaltese governance: 'He writes from theviewpoint of an agent and dramatist who knows something of official duplicity and subterfuge, and of theTudor policy of encouraging popular fearsofCatholic Europe' (p. 262). He views Edward II as a play concerned more with thegrim dynamics of power thanwith sexual self-actualization: 'The play makes no liberal case for sexual freedom, but takes up the cost of self realization and the follyof impulsive, unheeding will' (p. 303). Inevitably, thedescrip tionofMarlowe's protagonists seems to suggest something of the ambiguous 'will' of theircreator; yet tighterconnections between writer and subject are harder tocome by. Honan's biography is at its best in the reading ofMarlowe's texts.He pays ge nerous attention toworks often overlooked: the translations ofOvid and Lucan and Dido, Queen ofCarthage fleshout the claim that 'Marlowe was dazzled by the clas sics.Nothing in his imaginative lifewas to be the same again, and it may be thatno discovery hemade, and no love he ever felt,affectedhismind and feelings so terribly, so unsettlingly, as thewriters of ancient Rome' (pp. 5 I-52). The blend of caution and hyperbole in this last sentence points up the very real difficulties ofwriting a bio graphy of any earlymodern writer. Though Honan's claim is reasonable, it rests on a conjectural reading of theman based on works far removed from autobiographical disclosure. Yet Honan's hunches are usually illuminating rather than anecdotal. By stressingMarlowe's love of the classics, he is able to give a detailed sense ofMar lowe as aRenaissance writer, for whom theabsorption and transformation of classical culture was of central importance. MLR, 102.4, 2007 I137 Marlowe's career as a spy depends on the interpretation of treacherous evidence. Honan follows the lead ofCharles Nicholl's The Reckoning: TheMurder ofChristo pherMarlowe (London: Cape, I992), the firstsystematic attempt to place Marlowe's murder in the context of Elizabethan power politics. Honan tracesMarlowe's in volvement in espionage to his time as a student inCambridge, his murky relation ships with powerful men such as the Walsinghams and theCecils, and his status as an agent provocateur, variously implicated inatheism and counterfeiting as reported by unreliable witnesses such as Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd, whose account ofMarlowe's 'vile opinion[s]' was extracted after he had been tortured (p. 379). As Honan concedes, 'We know something about thepoet's lastweeks, butmuch remains unknown and...