I’ve always preferred Christopher Marlowe to that upstart William Shakespeare.
Yes, Shakespeare is considered to be a genius who penned 38 plays, 154 sonnets and a few other side projects as well. But Marlowe was just a little more of a badass… and he was there first.
They were born two months apart, in 1564, but while Bill was still working out one end of a quill from the other, Marlowe was shocking the bejesus out of the theatre-going public with ballsy plays featuring devils, kings, tragedy, comedy, blood and guts.
And he’s not just writing drama, it seems that he was living one. There is good evidence that while he was a student at Cambridge University, he was actually working as a spy for Queen Elizabeth.
He was often away for protracted periods of time, presumably returning from time to time smelling heavily of garlic and sporting an unseasonal sun tan.
And when the university started pondering whether he actually deserved the Master’s Degree he was supposed to be studying for - because he had done bugger all work for it - The Privy Council sent a letter ordering the university to grant it anyway because he had been away ‘on matters touching the benefit of his country’.
During his six-year writing career, he penned (or quilled) six plays that we know of. Scholars suggest that four of these became the first draft for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Richard II and the three Henry VI plays.
Then he exits stage left in bloody form, when someone shoves a dagger in his eye during a bar-room brawl over unpaid debts, in Deptford. You couldn’t make it up.
Or maybe you could, because theories abound that his death was faked in some embryonic witness protection programme. The fact that William Shakespeare’s first successful play, Venus and Adonis, surfaced a couple of weeks later is cited by the tin-foil hat brigade that Shakespeare’s plays are actually written by our man Marlowe - perhaps disguising himself by swapping his trademark ruff and Elizabethan goatee for an Elizabethan ruff and a goatee - and throwing any pursuers off the scent by swapping his career as a successful London-based playwright for the life of a successful London-based playwright. Devious eh?
We know for a fact that Marlowe wrote Edward II though.
Next month’s production of his second to last play is being presented as a political thriller by Oxford University’s student company, Drame Fatale, at the Oxford Playhouse. Inspired by tensions created by the fall of the USSR this production follows the fortunes of Edward II - torn between his wife, powerful nobles and his banished lover. The show runs from January 25 to 28. Tickets £11.50 - £19.