The New York Times
January 21, 2001
By Celia Wren

The great also-ran of Elizabethan literature has sprinted into the 21st century. Four hundred years after his mysterious, violent death cut short a brilliant career, Christopher Marlowe — playwright, poet, spy and (some hold) radical atheist and homosexual — is on the cultural fast track.

Inspired in part by the 1998 hit movie Shakespeare in Love, which depicted Marlowe as a suave genius with the looks of Rupert Everett, directors and writers are tackling stagings of his dark plays and dramatizing his tragic and fascinating life.

This year, for the first time, the hyper-hip Target Margin Theater Company in New York is devoting its season to a single author. The three-month marathon, to include full productions or staged readings of Marlowe's six plays, plus presentations of his translations and poetry, has begun at the Ohio Theater in SoHo, where Dido, Queen of Carthage, about a woman who kills herself for love, officially opens on Thursday. The play was written (possibly with the collaboration of the satirist Thomas Nashe) in the 1580's when Marlowe was at Cambridge, before going to London in 1587. He had been born in 1564, a little less than three months before Shakespeare. Target Margin's 90-minute version of "Dido," with its declamatory, anti-naturalistic acting and gilt-and-glitter sets and costumes that evoke exuberant carnival kitsch, pokes fun at the stagy qualities of this early Marlowe work while giving free rein to the play's frequent bursts of lyricism.

The company's Marlowe season follows the world premiere of David Grimm's Kit Marlowe, a literary bio-drama, which was given a Gothic staging by the Joseph Papp Public Theater last fall.

Across the Atlantic, the Crucible Theater, in Sheffield, England, has announced that Joseph Fiennes, who played the title character in Shakespeare in Love, will star in Edward II, Marlowe's drama about a homosexual monarch who was tortured with a red-hot spit. That history play seems to be in fashion in England: the Birmingham Royal Ballet composed a dance version, which visited New York last fall.

A Marlowe current is rippling through the film world, too. This spring, Natural Nylon films will start shooting Marlowe, a movie that plays with the often debated theory that another writer, or group of writers, wrote the Shakespeare canon. Johnny Depp has been mentioned for the title role, and Jude Law is a likely candidate for the character of Shakespeare. Natural Nylon, whose founders include Mr. Law and the actor Ewan MacGregor, recently announced that it would start producing works for the stage. Its first theatrical season, which may start this fall, will include Doctor Faustus, the play for which Marlowe is best known.

Until recently, Marlowe's most familiar line for many people may have been, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" from Doctor Faustus. Now, though, the glamour of his biography and the sensationalism of his plays have made him seem contemporary. His works are filled with "bloodthirsty killers, figures of great ambition, people who are of overweening pride, drive and aspiration," in the words of Target Margin's artistic director, David Herskovits.

The company's season — which includes a laboratory festival in which five artistic teams will mount portions of the cumbersome epic "Tamburlaine" — will allow audiences "to hear every word of dramatic poetry that Marlowe wrote," Mr. Herskovits said enthusiastically.

Certainly the group's timing seems right: Marlowe appears to be a fitting cultural figure for this new decade in the same way that Oscar Wilde was for the last one. In the previous 10 years, plays, books and movies latched onto a Wilde legend built less on his literary accomplishments than on his status as a gay icon and the scandals and self- destructive choices of his life.

Scandal clings similarly to Marlowe, who was arrested for fighting in the streets and, some scholars say, for counterfeiting. Historical records suggest that he spied on Roman Catholics as a secret agent for the Queen's fanatically Protestant court. He was also reputed to be an atheist with a penchant for blasphemy — a grave charge in 16th-century England. Just before his death in 1593, in fact, he was denounced for mocking religion and for atheism and, shortly after, arrested and ordered to report daily to the Queen's Privy Council.

Marlowe died in circumstances that are a conspiracy theorist's dream. He was stabbed through the eye in a brawl that could be interpreted as a quarrel over a bill at a tavern in Deptford. But since his killer and several witnesses had criminal and espionage connections, some scholars believe he had been marked for political assassination.

Adding a further twist to the mystery are theories that Marlowe may have written portions of what is commonly known as the Shakespearean canon — even after 1593, if, as the argument goes, the Deptford affair was staged and Marlowe escaped to live and write under another identity.

The Marlowe myth has gained additional momentum from the widespread conviction that the playwright was gay. The belief stems largely from the homoerotic themes of Edward II and its author's alleged statement, reported to the government by an informer, that "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools."

Geraldine Hanning, a retired actress in New York who is a life member of the British Marlowe Society, said that there are "great conflicts" in the organization between those who envision a homosexual Marlowe and those made "avidly angry" by the very idea.

Still, academic proponents of queer theory and others have nudged the playwright toward the arena of identity politics, defining him as an eminent gay historical figure — and even a convenient one.

Mario DiGangi, a professor at the City University of New York and the author of "The Homo erotics of Early Modern Drama," said in an interview, "People who have been uncomfortable with the homoerotic element in Shakespeare — such as the sonnets — have tried to rescue Shakespeare from homosexuality by displacing it onto Marlowe." In the Victorian era, he suggested, critics argued that "one of the things that made Shakespeare a better dramatist was that Shakespeare's sexuality was more `normal' than Marlowe's."

For today's theater and film artists, however, the sexuality issue makes Marlowe more approachable, helping to bridge the gap between the world of Armani suits and one of taffeta doublets. That was the attitude behind Derek Jarman's 1991 film Edward II, which was filled with references to antigay prejudice in Britain. Similarly, Michael Elias, who wrote the screenplay for Dead Man in Deptford and is expected to direct it, said he admired the author of Edward II" because: "He's gay in a contemporary way; that is, he considers it his nature. He has no guilt about it."

But John Maybury, the co-writer and director of the Natural Nylon film Marlowe, objected to "the fascism of political correctness" that he feels is pressuring him to chisel out another gay Christopher M. Noting that sexuality was far less rigidly defined in the Renaissance than it is in the present era, Mr. Maybury said: "I'm not portraying him as heterosexual or homosexual. I think that ambiguity is what's interesting about this character and this period."

Nevertheless, he aims to play up the parallels between Elizabethan sexual dynamics and those of the modern era, linking his movie's 1590's Europe "in a covert way with the renaissance that took place in the 1960's in London, in which social, sexual and political boundaries were being explored."

Boundary-crossing looms large in contemporary conceptions of Marlowe, who more and more seems to stalk the cultural landscape as a sort of hose-wearing James Dean, mutinous and doomed. The playwright's tangles with the law and supposed atheism bolster this image, as does the idea that he was, in Mr. Elias's words, "sexually an outsider."

Certainly his life story, with its cloak-and- dagger flamboyance, begins to seem downright transgressive when compared with that of the more prolific scribbler who was a few months younger. From the little that is known, William Shakespeare's extra-theatrical activities seem to have tended toward investments and lawsuits. "Marlowe was Joe Orton to Shakespeare's Alan Ayckbourn," as Mr. Elias put it.

Lois Potter, a professor at the University of Delaware and a specialist in Renaissance drama, said, "As more became known about Shakespeare, he became more and more like a successful businessman and less and less like a romantic writer." Marlowe, she added, "kind of took over this role because, for people who want their writers romantic, Marlowe is pretty much what you would hope for."

The romantic aura shines brighter still when, as often happens, people conflate Marlowe's personality with the hubristic iconoclasts who populate his scripts: the arrogant warrior Tamburlaine, who dreams on his deathbed of attacking heaven; Doctor Faustus, damned by his own ambition; even Queen Dido, who compares herself to Icarus and then hurls herself onto her own funeral pyre.

Such comparisons seem dangerous; we don't assume that Shakespeare was jealous like Othello or wishy-washy like Hamlet. But Marlowe enthusiasts readily concur with the scholar J. B. Steane, who has said, "It is not sentimental or romantic to see the man in the work to a greater extent than is true of most artists: it is natural and reasonable."

Michael Grandage, the director who will mount Edward II at the Crucible Theater in England in March, believes that Marlowe's "anarchy" is at the very core of the plays, whose every element "seems to be an extension of him." Of the current Marlowe vogue, Mr. Grandage said, "If the time has come that somebody so nonestablishment can have a voice, then that's a very thrilling time for all of us."

It is that antiestablishment energy, David Grimm maintains, that explains the fascination with Marlowe today. "It's time for that rebel character again, in the true sense of that word," said the playwright in an interview last month at the Public Theater, as workmen dismantled the Kit Marlowe set. The story of Elizabethan drama's Kurt Cobain is shock treatment for our complacent times, Mr. Grimm suggested. "We get numbed down," he said: "by the mindset of, `You want a book? You go to Barnes and Noble. You want a cup of coffee? You go to Starbucks.' You have an easy answer to everything in your life."

Mr. Grimm said he asks himself: "Where are the revolutionaries? Where are the heretics? Where are the sexual outlaws? Are there any taboos left to break, or is everything, I'm O.K., you're O.K.?"

The legend of the subversive Marlowe, Mr. Grimm said, answers the modern-day craving for rebels while appealing to the prevalent who-says- you-can't-have-it-all mentality.

"Here's a guy who's writing plays about how the world isn't enough for him," Mr. Grimm said. "He has that feeling of you can do anything and never have to face the consequence of your actions."

Imagining this figure's inner life, Mr. Grimm said, was a way to reflect on our "completely youth-obsessed society that advocates that viewpoint: lack of responsibility, lack of consequence, whether it's the world of advertising or how people view sexuality today."

The Marlowe myth resonates, even though not everyone agrees on the facts. Certainly some fans of the playwright believe his name has been unfairly besmirched. "He wasn't trying to convert the world to atheism," insisted James A. Baffico, a former head of the acting and directing program at the University of Georgia and an avid Marlowe Society member. "He wasn't a bad guy. He was one of the leading figures of his day."

Marlowe is known as a romantic rebel, Mr. Baffico said exasperatedly, simply because of the "libelous slanders attached to his reputation at the end of his life."

SO does Shakespeare's rival deserve his notoriety? Did he opt to burn out, not fade away?

For Mr. Herskovits, the director, the uncertainty only enhances the legend's appeal. A fascination with Marlowe's "viscerally arresting" verse rather than his rebel-without- a-cause persona motivated Mr. Herskovits to develop Target Margin's current program, he said.

Still, Marlowe fascinates, Mr. Herskovits continued, "because we're always trying to figure out what he was up to."

"In some way Marlowe was undercover," the director said. "Was he a heretic? Was he a homosexual? Was he a spy? In all these ways he was reinventing himself. And I think that, especially, that kind of self-making, is something that grabs people today.

"I really think Marlowe is essentially an American figure. Not fitting in, making his own way. And there's certainly no second act in his life, is there? He's a little bit of a Gatsby, I guess — glamorous, appealing and mysterious."

For this kind of mystery, Mr. Herskovits concluded, "We have an enormous appetite."

Celia Wren is the managing editor of American Theater magazine.