Still Educating Sam Hasler: Researching Marlowe/Shakespeare

There is this play I wrote in prison with Christopher Marlowe. It has been an irritant to me for maybe a decade. The execution never gets the idea right.

What has been at the core of my idea is that Marlowe is a rebel, a rock star, who lived fast and died young.

Out of that idea came a comparison of Elizabethan playwrights to English rockers of the mid-Sixties (it could be as easily Memphis, Chicago, or LA - and probably a few more that are not coming to mind right now. Akron, Ohio? Athens, GA?). Scraped to its essence, the participants are both collaborators and competitors; cross-pollination is the process overall.

There are some ideas that circulate and go forward. I would like to get at the ideas. If Marlowe had lived, would he have gotten fat and balding like Byron? Would he have become a fixture of the Establishment like Wordsworth?

Which is a bit like asking what would have become of Buddy Holly (pop star like Del Shannon, a producer?) or Jimi Hendrix (the one what-if I can recall of Hendrix is that he might have followed Jeff Beck into jazz; I wonder if he would not have gone into funk like Eddie Hazel - Hendrix collaborating with Sly Stone?)

Realism is out - there is too little reliable information for a realistic play (for all that Marlowe's life is far more interesting than Shakespeare's); about all I could say is just adapt Anthony Burgess' novel.

Nor do I have the time left to write a text that hews closely to Elizabethan prose or poetry.

Another approach came to me last week. It starts with a bed. The second act is still fuzzy.

I had an idea today - an analogy of Marlowe to Shakespeare being like Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters. Not a perfect analogy, but a working concept. After reading Marlowe's plays, I thought his forms were a bit crude when compared with Shakespeare. What I have not found is anyone writing about subplots in Marlowe. The poetry is grand, but Marlowe's plays work on only one line, where Shakespeare plays on more than one. Hamlet has Laertes. Romeo has Tybalt/Mercutio. Those are the ones that come to mind. It may be due to the textual problems of the texts, but what is the mirror image to Tamerlane? Wagner is a farcical reflection of Faustus. Prince Hal has Hotspur, where is the counter to Edward II? I suppose in the latter, one might say Mortimer, but that character is also corrupt.

Meanwhile, I have an image of two men in a bed, collaborating, the devil visiting.

Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe (Podcast from Folger Library)

Episode 18: Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe (Lapham's Quarterly)

Videos from YouTube:

Recent print materials:

Imagining Shakespeare and Marlowe as collaborators (Folger Shakespeare Library) (A Greenblatt review and excerpt)

Though Marlowe had chosen not to pursue a safe, respectable career in the church and had opted instead for a marginal life, the cachet conferred by his university degrees was important to him. That cachet— being known as a scholar and a gentleman—was compatible, if just barely, with writing plays, but it would certainly have been threatened by any more complete involvement in the public theater, even had he possessed the talent and the inclination for such involvement. Putting on greasepaint and getting up on stage to entertain a crowd that included servants, apprentices, porters, prostitutes, and assorted riffraff would have left a social stain that could not be scrubbed away.

Comparing Shakespeare and Marlowe (Hey, it parallels my opinion, so it's here.)

Sher: As an actor, you get to taste the language of different playwrights—taste it, literally, in the mouth. Shakespeare is full of subtle, complex, delicate flavours; Marlowe is rougher, more raw. And then there’s their use of the iambic pentameter. Marlowe’s mighty lines have a thumping regularity to them. Shakespeare is like a master jazz musician, both keeping to the beat and jamming round it.
So to those people who suggest that Marlowe wasn’t killed, but went on to write all of Shakespeare, I believe it’s simply impossible. Shakespeare couldn’t be Marlowe—or anyone else.

Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Myth of Literary Genius (The Atlantic)

The little we know of Shakespeare’s life calls most of this into question. The man wrote two plays a year for much of his career, worked as an actor, and probably helped manage the theater company in which he was a major shareholder. His work was more conservative when it came to violence and sex than that of his peers. He did not invent any of the major components of his dramaturgy, and he almost always adapted existing source material. He invested wisely, worked hard to attain the rank of gentleman, and retired in his beloved hometown. If Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson wrote, the “soul of the age,” that may be in part because his life was nearly as conventional as any actor’s or writer’s in his time.
Shakespeare was shaped as much by that time as he was a shaper of it, and despite being the English language’s greatest writer, he defies the common vision of a genius at the cultural vanguard. Luckily, another brilliant Elizabethan playwright better suits the Romantic model: Christopher Marlowe.

***

Greenblatt’s myth of a Romantic Marlowe almost singlehandedly pushing England into the Renaissance betrays the principles of New Historicism by shortchanging the roles of so many other key players. There’s Shakespeare, of course—but not only him. As Daniel Swift reveals in his new book, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, another important kind of brilliance is necessary for the flourishing of the arts: business acumen.

Swift’s story is really about the invention of capitalism—and the mad chancers, con artists, and prestidigitators on whom it relies. Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays owe their existence in part to a man named James Burbage. With his partners, Burbage built an outdoor amphitheater, called the Theatre, on which many others, including the Globe, were based. As Swift makes clear, the Theatre endured only because Burbage was good at improvising and snookering his business partners. His shady dealings were also responsible for much of the knowledge we have about this institution. We might not have Marlowe’s day planner, but the legal records of the staggering number of lawsuits in which Burbage was involved as either plaintiff or defendant, thankfully, survive.

***

Looming over both of these books is Shakespeare, whose achievements so eclipse those of his contemporaries that they can become difficult to see. Dark Renaissance and The Dream Factory both serve as timely reminders that no single artist can create a golden age. Periods of brilliance such as the one that flourished during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I require many different forms of genius. Without Burbage, there would have been no Theatre in which Marlowe’s early plays could premiere. Without Marlowe, there might have been no iambic pentameter, and no soliloquies. Without the invention of the joint-stock company, Shakespeare would not have had his greatest asset, a regular group of actors for whom he could write. And we would not be reading about any of these men if Shakespeare had not written plays that would endure for hundreds of years. Dark Renaissance boldly argues that transgressive innovators, far from going out of style, have always been necessary for artistic advancement. But as a scholar who has staked his career on the effect that history has on art, Greenblatt should know that the times are not made by one person alone.

Five Reasons Marlowe Is Better than Shakespeare (Inside the Writer's Mind)

Oh, and the use of more realistic blank verse instead of rhyming lines in drama? That was a Marlovian innovation too. The only genre where Shakespeare excelled and Marlowe didn’t, was comedy.

Collections:

The International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society

We at the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society propose a different view: the work of Marlowe and Shakespeare is so much alike because they were written by the same person. This would eliminate speculation about how Shakespeare managed to equal Marlowe's facility with language and his vast erudition, which Marlowe had been developing since childhood. It would solve many of the problems of the Stratford claim, and supply a rational solution. No other candidate can offer what Marlowe offers.
Read this selection of opinion from scholars to see why:

Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare Studies - Research Guides at New York University

Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare Studies - Research Guides at Mount St. Mary's University

The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection (Blog, dead now)

Bibliography (The Marlowe Society)

Marlowe as Shakespeare history (Shakespearean Authorship Trust)

(PDF) Shakespeare Authorship Doubt in 1593

Materials from or by Ros Barber :

Rethinking Kit Marlowe (Substack)

My Shakespeare (PDF)