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Christopher Marlowe is impossible to tame. His lurid life, which probably included time as a government spy and ended in his violent death at a south London tavern, has overshadowed his work as a poet and dramatist. As a result, productions of his plays – the majority of which are rarely performed at all – feel like approximations of this Elizabethan bad-boy’s biography: gorefests verging on absurdity.
This, of course, is terribly unfair, the cheapening of a quick and lively intellect. I hope, then, that the Marlowe Theatre’s announcement of a complete set of filmed works (to be released next month) will go some way to restoring Marlowe’s reputation, allowing him to step out from the shadow of his contemporary, William Shakespeare.
There are obvious reasons why Shakespeare dominates our cultural life and Marlowe does not. Marlowe doesn’t have the psychological acuity of the Bard: his characters are blessed with little self-doubt and no epiphanic moments, while their trajectory is usually associated with the fetish for power, be it through money or conquest or knowledge. His plays feel direct and often ruthless – manifestations of the violent world in which he lived.
And yet you could hardly describe Marlowe as creatively narrow. A play such as Tamburlaine the Great, about the life of the 14th-century central Asian emperor, contains big ideas. It takes place on a world stage, but nevertheless makes a plea for individualism, while still being acutely aware of its limitations. For those – and I suspect there are many – who feel that Marlowe is boring because he is not (yawn) relevant, they should look at Tamburlaine, which is still timely in this age of despots and features a scene, in which he burns the Koran, that remains one of the most provocative in theatre history. Unsurprisingly, recent directors have removed this scene, notably a 2005 production at the Barbican which saw the director David Farr accused of censorship.
Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s most frequently performed play, is also his most misunderstood. Naysayers claim that it’s steeped in a medieval conception of Heaven and Hell that modern audiences will find alienating. I find this infuriating: what Faustus illustrates so brilliantly is that Marlowe is caught between the Middle Ages and the early modern age, between a belief in demons and rational, scientific thought. This is no surprise: he’d spent his days at Cambridge poring over naughty Ovid when he was meant to be studying theology.
The tussle in Marlowe exists in his religious thoughts (not exactly a non-believer, but certainly a rationalist); in his intellectual world view; and in his sexuality. Homosexual and heterodox, his work was always going to be complicated. And that can pose a problem for theatremakers who might complain that Marlowe tends to intellectualise everything – unlike that brilliantly instinctive son of the soil.
Yet Marlowe’s work, if done right, can cut to the quick emotionally. That’s seen most clearly in Edward II, which examines the doomed relationship between the Plantagenet monarch and his lover Piers Gaveston. Calling Edward II a “gay play” is anachronistic, but it nevertheless feels like a plea for gay rights, because it’s so shockingly open about the king and his favourite. Perhaps that’s a problem for Marlowe even today – this male-centric love can’t matter as much to audiences, or in some cases be tolerated as much, as the conventional love we see in Shakespeare.
Marlowe was dead at the age of 29 – I won’t entertain the conspiracy theorists who believe he survived and went on to write the complete works of Shakespeare – and consequently his plays are young man’s plays, with all the zeal and exuberance that that suggests. That we never saw the mature works of Christopher Marlowe is unutterably sad. Yet we have, I believe, a hint of what was to come in his poetry. In fact, here is where I think you see Marlowe’s brilliance most clearly, and where I would direct anyone unfamiliar with or sceptical about his work.
He’s responsible for the pastoral poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, which gives us the perfect line, “Come live with me, and be my love”; meanwhile, the unfinished narrative love-poem Hero and Leander is as good as anything Shakespeare wrote, and certainly preferable to Venus and Adonis, another romance taken from Ovid. Marlowe’s work is at once touching and funny and spry and over-the-top – “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand; Jove might have spit out nectar from his hand” – its lack of an ending frustrating and heartbreaking at once.
George Bernard Shaw cursed Marlowe when he described him as “the true Elizabethan blank-verse beast”. Shaw was wrong about this, as he was about many things. Marlowe was visionary, clever and, if you look hard enough, humane.
Info: marlowetheatre.com
Christopher Marlowe was as great a poet as Shakespeare. So why do we neglect him?
Marlowe was visionary, clever and had a humanity that could cut you to the quick. It’s time he stepped out from his contemporary’s shadow