A look into the mysterious life of one of Kent's most famous Elizabethan playwrights
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00:00In the dimly lit corridors of history, there exists a man whose life and legacy have remained
00:20in the shadows, captivating literature lovers for generations.
00:24An early modern English author who is interested in still highly resonant themes for modern
00:30audiences and readers.
00:32Political questions and questions of sexuality and gender really come together.
00:38The author, the playwright, the heretic, the man about town, but also his characterizations
00:43of different personae in his canon.
00:48He's interested in questions of power, identity, race, gender, sexuality.
00:53This mysterious figure is author and playwright Christopher Marlowe.
00:57Dr Rory Lochnan is one of the editors working on an Oxford edition of Marlowe's works,
01:02which looks to detail and bring his texts together like never before.
01:06For many years now I've been working on the new Oxford Shakespeare and new Oxford Shakespeare
01:10complete alternative versions.
01:12It became increasingly clear to us that such a full textual apparatus around the complete
01:17works of Marlowe just wasn't available.
01:21Every single copy of a Shakespeare quarter has been examined within an inch of his life
01:25for hundreds of years now.
01:26The Marlowe books have been largely ignored.
01:30They turn up in catalogues, we don't know how many we haven't found yet, there could
01:33be dozens more books that turn up.
01:35His work was brought to life at the Marlowe Festival, a week-long set of academic events
01:39in Reims and Paris.
01:41It featured two live performances of a new French translation of Marlowe's play, The
01:45Massacre at Paris.
01:49Professor Catherine Richardson from the University of Kent is the second general editor of the
01:52edition alongside Dr Lochnan, who is looking to delve deeper into the enigmatic playwright
01:58and author.
01:59Marlowe's a much more shadowy figure and so the wider project that we're doing here is
02:04really quite ambitious.
02:05We want to look in detail at what he wrote and when he wrote it and why he wrote it the
02:10way he wrote it.
02:11But we also really want to dig down into Marlowe's life and his experiences to get to grips with
02:17who he was.
02:19We hope to give Marlowe this kind of global status as well as we have with Shakespeare.
02:25Actually Marlowe was a lot more popular than Shakespeare in his own time, it's quite funny,
02:29and he also has a lot of tradition of people engaging with his work and he also himself
02:34was very interested in this relationship between France and the UK.
02:38One of the interesting things about Marlowe is that although he left behind a small body
02:42of writing, there are still massive question marks about what it is exactly that Marlowe
02:46wrote, with whom did he write, when did he write and for whom.
02:51So the Oxford Marlowe edition seeks to address and hopefully answer some of these questions.
02:57Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, but very little is truly known about
03:02him.
03:03You know people tend to think Marlowe, Dr Fraustus, made a bargain with the devil, then
03:08of course worked for the Elizabethan state, got murdered.
03:12But you know the other side of Marlowe is this person who is intensely interested in
03:17eloquent language through his education in Latin.
03:22This has led to a lot of questions and interest in his life, who he was and what he wrote.
03:27Was he a spy?
03:29Was he a heretic?
03:30What were the true circumstances surrounding his death?
03:33Is this iconic image even really him?
03:36There's only one known portrait attributed to Christopher Marlowe and it's today in Corpus
03:41Christi College, Cambridge.
03:43It represents a nice looking guy, round eyes, rosy cheeks, around the age of 21 and it could
03:50be Kit Marlowe, but it's not 100% definitive.
03:54We're really interested in civic engagement and creative engagement, so it made total
03:58sense at the very start of this edition and project to bring in a visual artist to respond
04:04to the notion of Marlowe's canon and how he could be represented.
04:09Lorna May Wadsworth is a contemporary artist from Sheffield who looks to push the boundaries
04:13of traditional portraits.
04:15She's been tasked with recreating the image of Marlowe and exploring the different narratives
04:19around him.
04:20It's a real ripe opportunity to go in and reimagine Marlowe and create a new archetype
04:28perhaps that could be used instead of, that makes people think about what they believe
04:35they know about Marlowe.
04:36I thought of a work that I did called The Art Dealer's Son.
04:40The piece is a grid format of 25 individual panels.
04:45I just thought that that format would be a really interesting way to explore Marlowe.
04:51Marlowe thinks really big, he's not confined to just what he knows, he's exploring the
04:57rest of the world, he's exploring big stories about power and authority and the ways in
05:02which human beings try to exceed it.
05:05He's exploring big questions around society.
05:09My work has been on feminist interpretations of early modern literature and obviously Marlowe
05:15is a goldmine for this as well.
05:19Representations of power and gender are really important but also there's a spectrum in terms
05:24of sexual identity, especially with Edward II and that masculinity and power are conjoined
05:32in ways that are quite critical for instance in the Tamburlaine plays.
05:37As a queer woman with disabilities I think that Marlowe really represents counterculture,
05:42he represents a counter to perhaps maybe what we consider to be safe theatre and a place
05:51for people who are different, especially queer people because as we know there is a lot of
05:58evidence that he was somewhere in that community and I think that's really great to have represented
06:04to young people.
06:05Marlowe is kind of iconoclastic and he likes to lampoon, somewhat praise but also lampoon
06:11the rich and the powerful in other ways and I think it's always applicable to have political
06:20power and otherwise cast in different shades and introspected upon.
06:26The Oxford Marlowe edition is still years away from being published and in the meantime
06:31the University of Kent are working with experts in France to celebrate, mark and acknowledge
06:35Christopher Marlowe's contribution to literature and culture.
06:39Marlowe, there's this rumour about him possibly having come to Reims and to basically study
06:45Catholicism, which at the time would have been absolutely scandalous and treacherous
06:49against the English crown, against Elizabeth I who was a protestant.
06:54So this is maybe all rumours, there's some documents that mention it, official documents
06:58in the UK, and so we thought this would be a nice way to explore the possibility of Marlowe
07:04being very involved with France, especially Reims.
07:102022 marked the 450th anniversary of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
07:16We have done a series of panels and talks related to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
07:23Marlowe would have been deeply aware growing up of the ongoing French wars of religion.
07:28There was already a Huguenot community, that is a French protestant community, who had
07:33left France, migrated to the protestant stronghold of England and had already settled in Canterbury.
07:40Marlowe then writes this play, The Massacre of Paris, which might have been one of his
07:43later plays and only is transmitted to us in a corrupt version, which dramatises the
07:50series of events that led up to the massacre and then the aftermath.
07:54So we've brought together leading scholars of French religious history, especially the
07:58wars of religion, and to think about how that actual major notorious event had a wider impact
08:05within Europe.
08:06Well, to start out with, the massacre took place only a few days after a royal marriage
08:12of Marguerite de France with Henry of Navarre, and so because it was an interconfessional
08:18marriage that had a political purpose, there were protestants that had come from all over
08:23Europe for this marriage.
08:24I think that this also meant that quite naturally then, some of the protestants, the French
08:29protestants, fleed with their foreign counterparts.
08:33Marlowe wrote The Massacre in Paris in English.
08:36Professor Anne-Marie Minna-Blaise and Christine Sukic have translated the text into French
08:40for a special performance at the Marlowe Festival.
08:46There have been very few translations of this play in French, some in the 19th century,
08:54in prose.
08:55Even though, I mean, some of them are really good, we were not satisfied with the work
08:59that had been done on the verse, the French verse, and we wanted a translation that would
09:06really convey the terseness of Marlowe's lines.
09:12He's somebody who has a great respect for the text.
09:42Being inspired by history to reflect on issues still profoundly relevant today is how Marlowe's
10:05work and the stories of many authors are kept safe in the present day.
10:09Discovering what original work still remains and preserving them is what Rob Carson is
10:13doing with an online catalogue of all Marlowe's works that were printed before 1700.
10:18My expectation is that my work on this project is going to yield three different outputs.
10:23To begin with, there's the Marlowe census itself, which is the online catalogue of all
10:27of the surviving works.
10:29We'll show the editor where all of the surviving copies are and notable information about each
10:34one of them.
10:35And where we're heading, which is towards the Louvre, is where Admiral Coligny was shot
10:40from a window.
10:41Okay, so he was walking down.
10:42But Marlowe's works were highly influential for his and the next generation of dramatists
10:47writing for the English stage.
10:48His plays at the two parts of Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus or Edward II set in both tone
10:54and scale the sort of tragic and historical writing that would draw in playgoers and continues
11:02to fascinate readers today and audiences today.
11:05We're hoping that the edition and its various parts and then all these sets of activities
11:11and events will provide a kind of locus for work about this poet-dramatist moving forward.
11:18We're trying to think about what a generation of readers will want in the works of Marlowe
11:23five, six years from now and how that will still serve that community.
11:27He deserves to be much better known than he is.
11:30We want to get him on school curricula.
11:32We want to get our local communities understanding more about their playwright on almost every
11:40continent.
11:41There's an interest growing in Marlowe that we can build on.