In Shakespeare's Marlowe, Robert A. Logan analyzes the ways in which William Shakespeare's long engagement with Christopher Marlowe's works helped to make him the playwright that he ultimately became. As his book's subtitle indicates, Logan's interest is in Marlowe as an influence on Shakespeare rather than as a source for Shakespeare, and his introductory chapter elaborates on the nature and implications of this distinction. He maintains that while the assertion that one playwright has influenced another presumes the perception of a discernible link between their works, it may not be as concrete and as deliberate as the linkage implied by “source.” Moreover, he argues that the study of influence is intertextual and that elucidating these links thus contributes significantly to an understanding of the creative processes and theatrical practices of both writers.

Logan is conservative in his assessment of what constitutes a linkage between Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, Rosalind's reference in As You Like It to Leander's death is often presumed to allude to Marlowe's Hero and Leander, but Logan notes that nothing in the allusion points specifically to Marlowe's version and, indeed, that Leander's death is not a part of Marlowe's poem. However, even being thus cautious, Logan accepts that at least twenty of Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of Marlowe's influence, including eight plays that contain actual quotations from Marlowe's works.

Logan believes that it is reasonable to think that Shakespeare and Marlowe knew one another in the early 1590s and that almost certainly they would have seen each other's work. Both 1 Henry VI and The Jew of Malta were being performed in repertory at the Rose Theatre in 1592, and within two years after that both Edward II and 3 Henry VI were performed by Pembroke's Men. However, Logan has reservations about the inference often drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets that he considered Marlowe his great rival and contends that we have no reason to assume that their relationship was hostile or contentious. Rather, he urges that Shakespeare seems to have been responsive to the dramatic innovations of Marlowe and was quite open to learning from them. The second chapter focuses on three plays from this period when both playwrights were active in the London theater: The Massacre at Paris, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III. Logan acknowledges that critics have been reluctant to trace parallels among these plays, in part because of the maimed text of The Massacre and in part because of the difficulties they pose concerning their dates of composition. Nonetheless, he finds interesting matter for analysis in their use of Machiavellian villains, their exploitation of familiar historical settings, and their language and rhetoric. Logan concludes that what most affected Shakespeare's development at this stage of his career was not the specifics of Marlowe's texts but “the artistic daring of the mind behind those texts” (50). In short, Marlowe's dramatic innovations opened Shakespeare's own imagination to new possibilities.

Logan's subsequent chapters focus on more common pairings of works by Marlowe and Shakespeare. He sides with those who deny that Hero and Leander is a model for Venus and Adonis. However, he devotes an interesting chapter to these poems, on the grounds that intertextual comparison provides insight into the composition and aims of each text. His discussion of Edward II as an influence on Richard II builds on and extends the notion of the “will to play” that Stephen Greenblatt asserted in his chapter on Marlowe in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980). As Logan uses it, the phrase suggests compulsive, relentless pursuit of pleasure, a willingness to live in the moment, and a disregard of moral responsibility, and he sees both playwrights using it not only as a means of depicting the self-destructive tendencies of the monarch but as a means of creating and maintaining dramatic interest. For Logan, it is in Richard II that Shakespeare wholeheartedly accepted “his full dramaturgical inheritance from Marlowe” (109). Looking at The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, Logan proposes that more important than the many particular points of connection between these plays is that Shakespeare absorbed “Marlowe's freedom of invention” (137). He reaches a similar conclusion concerning the Tamburlaine plays and Henry V, where he indicates that Marlowe's chief influence on Shakespeare is not his high, astounding terms per se, but the fact that Marlowe's stylistic innovations lead Shakespeare to his own. Noting that Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage affected the writing of Antony and Cleopatra some fifteen to twenty years after Marlowe's play was written, that the interiorization of character in Doctor Faustus becomes key to Macbeth, and that aspects of Faustus's black magic are evident in Prospero's white magic in The Tempest, Logan stresses that Shakespeare's engagement with Marlowe is a process that evolved over the entire trajectory of his career. However, in Logan's view this engagement is with Marlowe's rhetorical skills, his rethinking of genres, and his deliberate use of ambiguity, not with his ideas and values. He thinks that Shakespeare would not have become Shakespeare, so to speak, had it not been for Marlowe, but he sees their outlooks and sensitivities as being very different.

Overall, this is a most interesting study. Tracing its way through a thicket of literature and critical assumptions on which there is no clear consensus, it will provoke questions and objections from many readers. Nonetheless, Logan has indeed found new things to say about the long-standing issue of the nature of Shakespeare's debt to Marlowe, and the intertextual analyses in Shakespeare's Marlowe shed helpful light upon the texts of both playwrights.