Roy Kendall

Winner of the Terence Rattigan Society Award for a New Play for the Theatre Based on a true story, The Onion at the End is set in the early 1930s and takes place over the course of a pantomime season in Birkenhead and a summer variety season in Southport, Lancashire. Jimmy, a song-and-dance man and Bob, a comedian, have little in common except a shared dressing room. With work scarce, when opportunity knocks they decide there’s nothing for it but to team up as a comedy double act – First & Last. The twist to the duo’s rise up the comedy ladder is set in motion by the Liverpudlian owner of the theatre in which they are performing. Unhappy with the comics’ act, he gives them an extraordinary take-it-or-leave-it proposal. They must speak in rhyme when offstage – until such time as he is satisfied with their progress. With work at a premium and dole queues everywhere, what choice do they have? And as if all this is not difficult enough for Jimmy and Bob, they have to contend with their theatrical landlady – in rhyme.

This book contains a thorough re-evaluation of the problems surrounding the activities, dramatic, literary, and otherwise, of Christopher Marlowe, particularly in his relations with his associate Richard Baines, in the latter part of Marlowe's life. It is the first full-length biography of Richard Baines, the object of which is to act as a lens through which to view standard Marlovian biography from a new angle and with a fresh eye. This new book thus comprises two interlinking biographical studies which inform both literary criticism and early modern history, puts the Baines/Marlowe relationship into a new perspective, and demonstrates the symbiotic relationship that existed in actuality between the two men in their lifetimes and which, of its nature, sets up a literary, historiographical, cultural, and scholastic virtual relationship on the web of history. Kendall's method is not to give full-scale interpretations of individual plays and poems or to attempt a conventional Canterbury/Cambridge/London appraisal of Marlowe's life, but rather to take the reader along a rough chronological path that traces the life of Richard Baines, picking suitable spots to break off the narrative and analyze Marlowe's writings and actions and reinterpret known events connected with his life and with Baines's (especially where they overlap). By offering fresh primary evidence, Kendall is able to suggest new ways in which each influenced the life of the other - especially how Baines influenced and affected Marlowe.