The latest chapter in the Shakespeare authorship controversy comes in the form of an odd self-published volume by an independent scholar who has been researching Marlowe and his associates since 1978. Ballantine's euphemistically subtitled ‘unconventional’ biography makes a number of provocative claims. Her most surprising assertion is not even that Marlowe escaped death at Deptford and fled to Italy, for Calvin Hoffman said as much in The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’. Far more shocking is her statement – based on extensive reading between the lines of the Calendar of State Papers Venetian and Sir Henry Wotton's letters – that after arriving in Venice, Marlowe changed his name to Gregorio de' Monti and enjoyed a long career there and in Naples, working undercover and serving as Secretary of Compliments for the English embassy in Venice while also writing all the works attributed to Shakespeare until Marlowe's death in November 1621.

Readers will be sceptical given the extent to which Ballantine defies Shakespeare orthodoxy. Still, she adduces a massive amount of documentation in support of her extraordinary arguments and offers a consistent and coherent alternative biography that also squares with known facts. And yet, there is more in stock: what is perhaps the most striking feature of this work is the assertion that Marlowe hid hundreds of pages of personal messages in his verse, using an elaborate system of code. Ballantine makes an extensive effort to decipher these messages, which she says are corroborated by little-known historical facts. Her method is to rearrange the letters of the initial couplets of dialogue – sometimes hundreds of couplets at a stretch – in the early quarto and folio editions of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays, including every play in the First Folio, as well as couplets in the first editions of many of their narrative poems. According to Ballantine, Marlowe wrote these lengthy rambling messages for his friends to decode. That they knew – and were able – to do so, she writes, was confirmed by Marlowe's friend John Marston's statement that ‘H'ath made a commonplace booke [a scrapbook] out of plaies, and speakes in print’ (p. 3). Mark Twain famously made plain why the question of Shakespeare's authorship should trouble us. Diana Price's Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography serves as a recent reminder of how little is known for certain about the man from Stratford. How convincingly Ballantine weighs in on the many mysteries here will surely be debated for some time to come.