Books: Marlowe Murder

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE — John Bakeless—Morrow ($3.75).

Contemporary books on Elizabethan literature range all the way from scholarly volumes, complete with footnotes and a dozen suggested readings for doubtful passages, to out & out romances telling tall tales of the Mermaid Tavern in phoney blank verse. Between these two extremes there are a few studies like Logan Pearsall Smith's On Reading Shakespeare, designed for readers who want to know what modern scholarship has unearthed, but do not want to spend their lives studying such academic posers as what Shakespeare meant by "a mermaid...