Tag Archives: Christopher Marlowe

A statue for Aphra Behn in Canterbury

The city of Canterbury has many literary connections. It’s the end-point for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, the setting for the murder of Thomas a Becket as dramatized by TS Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral, and the birthplace … Continue reading

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Influences on Shakespeare

The source books from which Shakespeare took the main stories of his plays are well-known, sometimes so important that he quoted almost word for word, as in Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra from Plutarch’s Lives. Other sources seem to have been … Continue reading

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Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare

It’s been a good many years since I looked at Anthony Burgess’s 1970 biography Shakespeare. While working in the library at the Shakespeare Centre I always favoured Samuel Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life, so safely based on verifiable facts. Burgess was a … Continue reading

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Not Shakespeare, and not Blackfriars

It’s always tempting to speculate on what might have happened if things had been different, and in the Artsnight programme Not Shakespeare, broadcast on 19 June Andrew Marr looked at the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and what … Continue reading

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Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta

At the beginning of the RSC’s current production of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta a young man, unacknowledged in the programme, bounds on stage and reveals beneath his jacket a T-shirt bearing the logo Royal Marlowe Company in the … Continue reading

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Two American Shakespeareans: James Hackett, father and son

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre contains a little memorial that has always interested me. Just by the fountain at the base of the spiral staircase is a plaque dedicated to The American actor James K Hackett, 1869-1926, “a generous benefactor to … Continue reading

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Christopher Marlowe, 450 years on

Earlier this week the 450th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe’s birth passed without a lot of media interest. Yet events to celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th are already getting a lot of attention. Although Marlowe is still highly-regarded, and his plays are performed … Continue reading

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Dido, Queen of Carthage: Marlowe and Shakespeare’s visions of Troy

Dido, Queen of Carthage is one of Christopher Marlowe’s least-performed and least-read plays. It’s sometimes been suggested that this unpopularity has been caused by it being an early, perhaps undergraduate effort. Recently there has been a revival of interest in … Continue reading

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Richard II and Edward II take the stage

Next week rehearsals begin for the most high-profile event of the RSC’s year, Richard II starring David Tennant, directed by Artistic Director Gregory Doran. There is a lot of information on the RSC’s website including a brief interview with Tennant, … Continue reading

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Shakespeare and Anonymous: authorship, truth and drama

I’m part of an online group currently running a lively discussion thread on “Was Shakespeare a fraud?”. This is based on the soon-to-be-released film Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerlich and written by John Orloff, on the subject of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and … Continue reading

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