Calvin Hoffmann
his ground-braking book 1955Indeed, the great disappointment for Calvin Hoffmann came in December 1955, when — after years of campaigning — he was finally granted permission to open the tomb of Thomas Walsingham and his wife Audrey at St Nicholas Church in Chislehurst, Kent. Hoffmann, a passionate advocate of the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory, had long speculated that Walsingham, Marlowe’s known patron and close associate, might have preserved documentary evidence of Marlowe’s survival and authorship of the Shakespeare works — perhaps in the form of letters or manuscripts buried with him.
Hoffmann believed that such documents might have been placed in the grave either deliberately by Walsingham or later, as a way to safeguard the truth for posterity. With great anticipation, and under the watchful eye of local officials, the grave was opened. But to his immense disappointment — and that of his few supporters — no papers, no hidden manuscripts, not even a fragment of parchment was found. Just the remains of Walsingham and his wife, undisturbed by literary intrigue.
This moment was a turning point. It dashed any immediate hope of a sensational material discovery and reinforced the perception — especially among mainstream scholars — that Hoffmann's theory was speculative at best. Yet Hoffmann did not give up. He continued to write, publish, and promote the idea that Marlowe faked his death in 1593 and lived on to write under pseudonyms, most notably that of William Shakespeare.
Ironically, though the tomb yielded no physical documents, the very absence of such evidence was interpreted by Hoffmann not as disproof, but as an indication that the secret had been better kept than expected
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