For a limited season this autumn, Christopher Marlowe will become a star of the London stage again. Enjoy it while you can, for Marlowe has become an ephemeral figure in Britain’s national culture. His plays, once staples, are now produced only intermittently, if at all. Today, Marlowe is probably better known for his dramatic death, stabbed in a London riverside tavern, than for anything he wrote or for being the literary pioneer that he was.
From next week, however, the sexy and brilliant figure of Kit Marlowe will be the centrepiece character, played by Ncuti Gatwa, in Liz Duffy Adams’s two-hander, Born With Teeth, which is currently in previews in the West End, with its offical opening next week. The play teases with the possibility, first reported in this newspaper in 2016, that Marlowe and William Shakespeare, played by Edward Bluemel, collaborated on writing parts of the Henry VI trilogy. But not just that. Perhaps the two playwrights, both born in 1564, were lovers. And perhaps Shakespeare even had a hand in Marlowe’s murder in 1593.
Ms Adams is not the first writer to put Marlowe and Shakespeare on the stage together. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard did the same in their Shakespeare in Love screenplay, adapted for the theatre by Lee Hall. Here too, Marlowe is the more charismatic figure, while Shakespeare struggles in his shadow. It is Marlowe who suggests that Shakespeare, searching for an analogy to start his new love sonnet, should compare his love not to an autumn morning but to a summer’s day, and Marlowe, too, who suggests that Juliet would be a better name for Romeo’s beloved than Shakespeare’s proposed Ethel.
As moments like these suggest, there’s always a clever trick in any play in which Shakespeare himself appears. We the audience know what those on stage never can. We know that Shakespeare will conquer the world for centuries to come. His fellow characters can only see just another jobbing but talented playwright, whose star is obviously eclipsed by that of the dazzling Marlowe.
Yet how strongly does Marlowe’s light shine today? England’s second most famous Elizabethan playwright is still a name. His plays, though, are no longer shared points of reference in the way that Shakespeare’s, thank goodness, still are. The Royal Shakespeare Company still does Marlowe fairly regularly, most recently Edward II earlier this year. So does the Malthouse at Marlowe’s old school in Canterbury, where the city’s theatre is also named after the playwright. But the National Theatre, disgracefully, seems to have given up. In 1976, amid fanfares, the Olivier Theatre opened its doors on London’s South Bank with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. It has never put the play on since. It is now 12 years since the National has done anything by Marlowe at all.
Two things could and should be done to restore Marlowe to his rightful place. The first, obviously and simply, is to study and produce his plays more. Schools and exam boards have crucial roles here, but the subsidised theatre should lead the way. The second is to commemorate Marlowe properly. The playwright’s violent death in Deptford Strand, on the south bank of the Thames, is the stuff of conspiracy theories and speculation. Yet walk along Deptford Strand and you will find no monument there to this baleful event. A wall plaque in St Nicholas’s church graveyard notes that Marlowe’s remains were buried nearby. But the site is littered with empty beer bottles. We surely owe Marlowe greater honour than this.
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