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This article focuses on Henry Fielding, first as a playwright and later as a political journalist, novelist, and magistrate. His biographers, however, have been disheartened by the surprising paucity of significant contemporary references to him, by the meagerness of the documentary record. He lived boisterously and extravagantly, had a wide circle of friends, and enjoyed a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist. Within the last few years, however, an extraordinarily rich archive, the Malmesbury Papers, containing the correspondence of Fielding's best friend James Harris and his extensive circle, has been made fully available to the public. Some of these documents, notably almost all of Harris's correspondence with Henry and with his sister Sarah Fielding, have already been published.

This article focuses on the life and works of playwright Christopher Marlowe. The reception of Marlowe has often been marred by a vicious hermeneutic circle within which the play's protagonists are read into Marlowe's biography and the mythographic creature thus constructed informs the criticism of his plays. Marlowe was an atheist, and people who think differently and subversively matter. Marlowe was a homosexual, and sexual difference matters. The configuration of events and personalities that ingenious biographers have managed to relate in one way or another to Marlowe's end have produced rather too many conspiracy theories.