IN the week when leading actors questioned whether Shakespeare wrote his plays, a Ledbury writer claims he was first with some answers to the mystery.

Christopher Gamble, of Lawnside Road, is the author of Shakespeare's Voyage to America, which puts forward the idea that the real' Shakespeare was the celebrated Elizabethan dramatist, Christopher Marlowe.

Mr Gamble, who studied English at Oxford, also hopes that a new play performed this week at Malvern Theatres, about the true identity of Shakespeare, will raise further interest in his ideas.

The writer, and leading actor in I am Shakespeare Mark Rylance is also the president of the Marlowe Society and one of 300 signatories to a declaration of reasonable doubt' concerning Shakespeare's plays.

Another leading signatory is Sir Derek Jacobi, who says he does not believe that anyone could have written all those plays alone.

Mr Gamble disagrees and claims that man was Marlowe, who wrote a number of highly successful dramas, including Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, and Dr Faustus.

The playwright was apparently murdered in a tavern brawl, in 1593. But pointing to Marlowe's known work for the Elizabethan secret service, Mr Gamble believes the death was faked and that Marlowe was spirited out of the country by the state spymaster, Francis Walsingham.

A book list and a request for payment from a "Frenchman" called Le Doulx may be in Marlowe's handwriting, although it was written in 1596, years after his supposed demise.

Mr Gamble also points out that an analysis of word-length frequencies; carried out by Dr Mendenhall in 1901, shows a 100 per cent match between the known works of Shakespeare and Marlowe. He claims also to have found a secret code in Shakespeare's sonnets, which apparently names Walsingham and the Sea Venture', and says this suggests Marlowe may have sailed for the New World.

Mr Gamble said: "The Sea Venture was the flagship of the third fleet to supply the colony of Virginia. It was wrecked at Bermuda in 1609 but miraculously, no one died."

Eventually two ships were built from one wreck, and both reached Virginia in 1610. Mr Gamble said: "That story is the basis of The Tempest."

That, of course, is a play by Shakespeare, or was the work by Marlowe, instead?