Several theories about these characters, the Rival Poet included, have been expounded, and scholarly debate continues to put forward both conflicting and compelling arguments.
Among others, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, Gervase Markham,[1] and Richard Barnfield[2] have been proposed as identities for the Rival Poet.
Scholars speculate that Shakespeare was familiar with his work, having read part of his translation of the Iliad for his own Troilus and Cressida,[3] a dramatic reworking of Chaucer's epic poem.
In Shakespeare and the Rival Poet, Acheson conjectures that Chapman's erotic poems were written with a view to gaining Southampton's patronage.
Chapman was both then and now regarded as being particularly erudite, whereas, as Ben Jonson writes, Shakespeare had "small Latine and lesse Greeke".
[5] Marlowe was more highly regarded as a dramatist than a poet, his chief poetical work, Hero and Leander, remaining incomplete at the time of his death (it was subsequently completed by Chapman).
[6] Shakespeare strove to outdo Marlowe and through their artistic competition they would push one another to higher achievements in dramatic literature.
[15] Shakespeare received high praise for his dramatic work but Marlowe and Chapman were deemed England's "two excellent poets".