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Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe's Death 

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Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe's Death 

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On 30 May 1593, Christopher Marlowe was killed.
He was the most famous, the most successful, and the most influential playwright in England.
Shakespeare came to London in about 1587, when Marlowe’s first play Tamburlaine was playing to huge crowds.
In the years after that, Marlowe continued to rule the theatres in London. Other playwrights scrambled to catch up to him, but there seemed to be no one who could beat him.
Until Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s earliest plays, like the Henry VI plays were immensely popular. Like Marlowe, Shakespeare seemed to be an overnight sensation.
While Marlowe and Shakespeare may never have been acquaintances or friends, they must have met each other at one time or another.
Marlowe could not ignore the success of this new playwright, who seemed to be the only one who could compete with him.
As Stephen Greenblatt writes, one of the earliest descriptions of Shakespeare was that he was a good man but that he was not a “company keeper” and he “wouldn’t be debauched.” If he was invited to go out he would be “in pain.”
Shakespeare was a writer and he preferred to stay in his flat and write.
Christopher Marlowe seemed to be the exact opposite kind of man. Not only did he have a scandalous reputation but he was suspected of being an agent for the government. Harold Bloom aptly describes him as "a veteran street fighter, a counterintelligence agent, and generally bad news."
Marlowe seemed to want to be something more than just a writer, and he sought challenges and was willing to risk his life for some greater purpose.
If we look at Marlowe’s plays, it is clear that he was motivated by politics and each play was more controversial than the last.
Shakespeare, at this point, did not seem to be motivated by politics and he didn’t seem to want to run afoul of the Queen and her royal censors.
But all of that changed when Marlowe died.
He died under suspicious circumstances. He may have been murdered by government agents. Was he assassinated, or was it merely an drunken argument?
We may never know the answer.
But more importantly, what did Shakespeare think of his death?
Shakespeare may not have known why Marlowe was killed. He may have heard dozens of rumors and theories. It must have infuriated Shakespeare that he might never know the truth, the full truth.
But in his period of history, at the dawn of the English Renaissance, it was almost impossible to know what was true or not. Stories and myths, like Robin Hood, were considered fact, not fiction.
Shakespeare must have been upset and sad when Marlowe died. Marlowe was a hero to every actor and playwright.
But he couldn’t have been surprised that Marlowe was killed. As far as Shakespeare was concerned, it was just a matter of time before Marlowe was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.
What would Shakespeare have thought when he heard the news of Marlowe’s death? What did he do?
He would have been afraid. The theatres had been closed for many months due to the plague. Marlowe was the greatest playwright, and his death may have meant that the theatres would remain closed permanently.
For all Shakespeare knew, his short career may have ended before it really began.
How he could he properly pay his respects to Marlowe? How could he publicly express the love and the admiration he had for Marlowe?
And most importantly, how to make it funny and entertaining?
Well, Shakespeare was a playwright, so he would have searched his mind for some way to tell a story that was in fact a story about Marlowe.
I Shakespeare took Richard III, a play that he had already staged, or was working on at the time that Marlowe was killed, and re-wrote it for this purpose.
Why did he re-write it? Because in re-writing a history play about King Richard III, he could create a public spectacle which served to celebrate the life and memory of Christopher Marlowe.
Shakespeare's play Richard III would be something of a Requiem Mass.
Much has been written about the influence that Marlowe had on Shakespeare, and on several of Shakespeare's characters including Richard III.
If Marlowe was such an influence on Shakespeare, then it stands to reason that these characters are descriptions of Marlowe himself.
Richard III is considered one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, and probably his very first.
It makes a lot of sense that Shakespeare's first great work was written for the purpose of remembering Marlowe, who was the greatest of them all... before Shakespeare, that is.
Shakespeare knew that this play could announce that he was the undisputed and rightful heir to Marlowe.

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there have been many interpretations of this character, has become almost a "myth".

Shakespeare introduces themes and problems of his society into the work. Hamlet, written between 1600-01 is placed in a crucial historical moment, it is close to the death of Elizabeth. This situation involves, in addition to the end of the kingdom, a struggle for power and the loss of balance created by the queen. We are close to the Puritan revolution and the affirmation of the bourgeoisie.

Shakespeare feels beyond the crisis of the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age: the world is transformed thanks to Copernicus, to the discovery of America and the advance of science.

Hamlet represents human frailty, a new dark world that escapes from the hands of man who no longer has that universal medieval harmony to support him.

Hamlet is the drama itself, always present in the work, and if not present cited. Everything in the work is in its function and there is no sub-plot, everything is focused on the protagonist. His physical presence and his hard and intelligent way of speaking pour all the attention on him.

Hamlet's problem is that he sees everything and knows everything around him.

All of Hamlet is a great question, an image of the modern man facing the mystery of reality that he can not grasp and asks the meaning of everything. Hamlet sees everything, but can not understand the meaning of this who sees and faces this reality without certainties that offers only mystery and ambiguity. He does not take anything for granted (the work opens with the question "who's there").

Shakespeare Can represent the whole life on the stage, the cries laughter, hatred and love, joy and pain, and a thousand different places between them. He succeeds in attracting every kind of person and feeling. a reflected image of life, it is enough to see the "theater in the theater" that is in the amble. Through this piece Hamlet is made through past present and future of the facts and people, precisely for this ability to see the world that surrounds in all its details

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Close relationship between Elizabethan-medieval theater (miracle and morality plays): non-naturalistic language, use of poetry, space-time freedom, comic-tragic mix.

The only spatial unit is the stage (the stage becomes the "world")

Everyone repented of his sins is welcomed into heaven. Marlowe destroys this link with the Middle Ages through the final anguish of Faust, the arrival of the devils and the move to hell. Everyone is a well-radiated character in the medieval landscape, while Faust lives in a dramatic passage between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (relationship between magic and science).

His characters put on the stage anxieties and doubts.

Vision of the modern man reaching out for the conquest of the world. But the ascent of Faust proves to be a descent, the journey towards the infinite leads him towards death. Faust has no way out. infinite emptiness.

The greatest invention of Marlowe is the blank verse, an unending rhubarb, through it the author manages to make refined works of art with his writings, although they were also to be presented to the people, and not only to the bourgeois to invent that Elizabethan word, which manages to build space, time and action by itself, without the help of the set design. The blank verse gives it rhythm, and makes it fully tragic.

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In the show "Shakespeare in love (with Marlowe)" Vittorio Cielo also wants to show the mysterious side of two fathers writers of modern theater, their probable relationship with the secret services of the time and as a consequence the betrayals by those who believed trusted people. Many times in the show the elderly Shakespeare wonders if Marlowe was a spy, and then admit that he was too, in all this, is framed a London devastated first by the war and then by the plague, which created riots in the capital and fears in the nobility enough to make William fear that the representation of Richard II could inspire a coup, and also the period in which the theaters in London were closed to prevent an even more massive contagion of plague and in which a desperate William Shakespeare brought by the court chamberlain to ask to reopen them and help the remaining unemployed actors.All roles are masterfully interpreted by Ennio Coltorti and from his son Jesus, whose talents pass an hour in total speed, as it should be when a work is well done.
This theatrical piece shows not only the relationship of respect between the two writers, but also their differences: pragmatic and direct Marlowe, sentimental and impulsive Shakespeare. It is the story of how two different souls find harmony and above all of how in the end we are all demons of our own ideals and desires.

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William Shakespeare was the greatest dramatist of all time, but may not have written all by himself. The University of Oxford has relaunched the work (started in 2009) of a team of 18 international researchers according to whom the Bard would be helped in the drafting of at least 17 of his works. A number decidedly higher than those reported in the past (it had reached a maximum of an estimate of eight co-writings). The hypothetical "ghost writer" would be Christopher Marlowe, from 1700 credited as the main rival of William Shakespeare: the first would have helped the latter, for example, in writing the trilogy on Henry VI.

The research team has conducted precise comparisons between the works of William Shakespeare and those of artists who are his contemporaries, including Marlowe. "We counted how often certain words were used, certain sentences," one of the researchers, Gabriel Egan (Montford University), told Deutsche Presse Agentur. The professor added how unclear was the way in which Marlowe and Shakespeare collaborated: "It is not to be excluded that the second one would edit the works of the first".
«It's interesting to see the interaction between two different geniality - adds Gary Taylor, general editor of the University of Florida -. This is the reason why the trilogy of Henry VI struck people differently than the works actually written by Shakespeare alone. Now we can understand the differences: Marlowe was very interested in politics, violence and religious conflict, he wrote about these themes in an always different style ».
Shakespeare comes out of it? Not according to Taylor, who concludes by underlining that "these discoveries do not make his works less noble, on the contrary, they make them more interesting".