Christopher Marlowe

bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20050707.shtml

This link is to a BBC Radio 4 program, hosted by Melvin Bragg. 45 minutes. Click "Listen Again" for the Real Player console to appear. Archived and always available. The three scholars say that the Shakespeare's excellence in soliloquies emerged from his exposure to Marlowe's.

I've no doubt that authors back then--as now--studied one another's work. And I think we are all influenced by what we read. As a college teacher, I see a real correlation between the writing I see in freshman classes and many students' lack of reading. Even for assigned works, they tend to read study guides, watch the movie version, or listen to books on tape. It's difficult to absorb a sene of style or a vocabulary without savoring the words.