Calvin Hoffman

Hoffman was not the first to argue that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays attributed to him, nor was he even the first to suggest Marlowe as the main candidate.

In fact three people—Wilbur G. Zeigler in 1895,[3] Henry Watterson in 1916,[4] and Archie Webster in 1923,[5] had beaten him to it, but he denied having known about any earlier proponent for the first twelve years of his research into the subject,[6] and he certainly achieved far more than any of them to bring it to the attention of a wider public.

In 1983, Hoffman was left some notes by a journalist friend of his concerning someone called Pietro Basconi who in 1627 had apparently nursed Christopher Marlowe when he was terminally ill in Padua, Italy.

[10] Determined to follow this up he went to Padua in 1985, accompanied by an Italian-speaking couple, Dr. Frank Haines and his wife Jean, but nothing was found to support the story.

It was also agreed that "[i]f in any year the person adjudged to have won the Prize has in the opinion of The King's School furnished irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe then the amount of the Prize for that year shall be increased by assigning to the winner absolutely one half of the capital or corpus of the entire Trust Fund".