Waste of time. You pretend that no one doubts that a Marlowe-Shakespeare influence exists, but the childishly phrased third paragraph of the page lede states that they have completely different styles and world views. I presume you, or someone as mindless, jumped to that conclusion. You don't deal with Bloom's honest concerns about a major scholar like himself being forced to jump through hoops to invent an apprenticeship and a possible appearance by WS at a Marlowe play. If they were in London writing at the same time for rival theatres, it's ridiculous that they would not have met, or that they never indicated that they had. The point is that they didn't. There was no apprenticeship or meeting of minds because Shakespeare did not exist in any documented way as a writer before Marlowe died. Perhaps he never existed in London at all. He was a Stratfordian usurer, if he was anything, whose name was used as a pen-name, as Mark Twain sarcastically pointed out long ago. If you don't appreciate Stoppard's wrong-headed conclusions, neither do I, but at least he's a dramatist. Why cite Mortimer and other old fogies? There are major omissions in Marlovian theory as it sits, and addressing it is central to the debate. What's also central to the debate is the morbid brutalising, and I say again, bowdlerising, of the undoers and conservative gravediggers like yourself, little Englanders who cannot accept that the Bard never wrote a line. If you can't accept that this enormous literary black hole is as warped a paradigm as geocentrism, you might as well get a job for the Stratford tourist trust.  vpcj   

  

  that this denial of reality about the greatest of writers is tantamount to treating other great ideas as flat earth paradigms   vpcj