A Guardian report on William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe being literary rivals and collaborators has inspired a play that will be staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in London’s West End this summer.
The RSC’s co-artistic director Daniel Evans will direct Born With Teeth by Liz Duffy Adams, an Irish-American playwright, who has imagined two of the greatest dramatists of all time working together, wrestling creatively, both envious and admiring of each other.
Adams thanked the Guardian for having inspired the play with a 2016 news report about Marlowe being acknowledged alongside Shakespeare as co-writer of Henry VI, Parts One, Two and Three.
The article reported that while Marlowe’s involvement in parts of those plays had long been suspected, he was being given joint billing on the title pages of those plays in the New Oxford Shakespeare, a project from Oxford University Press (OUP).
Adams said of the Guardian report: “I do remember the emotional impact it had on me. It’s not too much to say a thrill shot through me. It instantly created the context for the play I never knew I needed to write – and then I had to write.
“Instantly, it was a fully formed sense of those two in a room working together. What would that lead to? What would that be like?”
Born With Teeth will be staged by the RSC at Wyndham’s theatre in London from 13 August. It is a “significantly different” reworking of a play first seen in the US in 2022.
The actors Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who and The Importance of Being Earnest) and Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve and Sex Education) will portray Marlowe and Shakespeare respectively.
Describing Adams’s play as “glorious”, Evans said: “It’s like a steamy wrestle between the two of them, where they are deeply attracted, but partly because they have a mutual talent crush.”
He added: “Marlowe is a kind of rock star ‘experience seeker’. He wants to experience all of life. He’s a risk-taker. At the time we meet him in the play, which is 1591, he’s at the top of his game. [His play] Tamburlaine has been the great success, followed by Faustus, so he’s celebrated.
“Shakespeare is an actor who’s come to London not long before the play begins and is starting to write plays. He has written The Comedy of Errors and Titus, which, of course, is probably the most Marlovian play Shakespeare ever wrote. So Shakespeare is, at the beginning of the play, almost in awe of the rock star Marlowe.
“What’s interesting about the play is that as they collaborate over this period of three years for the three plays, you see this seesaw of power and status between the two flip over.”
The OUP research involved 23 academics from five countries, headed by four professors as general editors. They drew on computerised textual analysis, highlighting combinations of words such as “glory droopeth”, for example, as unique to Marlowe in that period.
Evans described evidence of Marlowe’s collaboration as “pretty convincing” and said he had spoken to many academics: “Everyone seems to accept the theory.”
He said: “In one sense, Shakespeare has become a kind of saint. We think of him as this playwright who could write any voice – the upper classes, the lower classes, the mad, the sane. So we tend to think of him as this endlessly empathetic character writing alone in his garret, imagining himself into different people’s minds. What the play does is to remind us that he’s also a man and he was writing at a time when collaboration was de rigueur.”
He believes that the collaboration casts light on how Shakespeare’s plays “get into the heads” of so many different kinds of characters.
As few undisputed facts exist about either playwright, Adams was able to let her imagination run riot, she said. “It allows you real artistic licence.”
Gabriel Egan, a professor of Shakespeare studies at De Montfort University in Leicester and one of the New Oxford Shakespeare’s general editors, is excited by the play, as his own computational analysis had convinced fellow OUP colleagues to give Marlowe equal billing on the Henry VI plays.
He argued that even with a fictional narrative, the public were fascinated by authors’ lives, although some of his academic colleagues viewed biographical details as “not essential to the study of literature”.
“But that’s not what the public thinks, as we see from huge sales of biographies,” he added. “People, outside of academia, care very much about the person who wrote the thing. I’m out of line with my profession because I also think authorship really matters.”
