Calvin Hoffman - The Hoffman Prize

The Hoffman Prize

Anxious that the Marlovian theory should not die with him, Hoffman arranged in 1984 a deal with Marlowe's school, The King's School, Canterbury, that in exchange for his leaving a large sum of money to them in his will they would administer an annual essay competition related to "the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare with particular regard to the possibility that Christopher Marlowe wrote some or all of those poems and plays or made some inspirational creative or compositional contributions towards the authorship of them."

It was also agreed that "If 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...".

Nobody has come anywhere near achieving the latter, and Hoffman's intentions for the essay have been reinterpreted nowadays as a prize for "a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe". Since his death in 1988, when the first Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman Memorial Prize was awarded, only four of the thirty prize-winning essays have actually espoused his theory. On the other hand, the prize has undoubtedly stimulated research into the life and works of Christopher Marlowe, and books have even come out of it which may not have been written without the stimulus of the Calvin & Rose Hoffman prize.