← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Marlowe & Shakespeare: Rivals or Collaborators?
00:46:20
Exploring Dangerous Times: Playwrights, Politics, and Censorship in Elizabethan England
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
- [00:32]
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Emma Smith
Did you know?
- [01:19]
Liz Duffy Adams
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- [01:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. What happens when two of the most brilliant and dangerous minds of Elizabethan England find themselves in the same room? Christopher Kit Marlow, Cambridge scholar, star of the London stage, rumored spy and writer of plays that blazed with ambition and heresy. William Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford glover, struggling actor just beginning to exercise his quill pen. Marlowe, already famous, living fast and recklessly Shakespeare's still in the shadows, absorbing, biding his time. Now imagine them brought together, forced into uneasy collaboration on the Henry VI plays. Would sparks fly? Rivalry, betrayal, seduction. Or perhaps the birth of something greater. This is the premise of Born with Teeth, a thrilling new Royal Shakespeare Company production starring Shuti Gatwa. The most recent Doctor who as Kit Marlowe and Edward Blumel from Killing Eve and My Lady Jane as Shakespeare. And as you'll hear in this clip from the play, it's a story alive with wit, menace and the electricity of two geniuses circling one another.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
To take us into the fevered, dangerous world of Born with Teeth. My guest today is its writer, the award winning dramatist, Liz Duffy Adams. In Liz's words, this is not simply William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe as the historians know them, but her will and her kit. Two writers in a cramped, dangerous world, daring to speak the truth obliquely and to risk everything in pursuit of immortality. We'll talk about espionage and censorship, about the blurred lines between history and invention, and about what happens when theatre itself becomes an act of defiance. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history Hit. Liz, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:05]
Liz Duffy Adams
Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.
- [05:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What first drew you to write on this subject and to write a play?
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Liz Duffy Adams
Well, it would be a play because that's what I do and it's definitely my form. But I was inspired by reading a news article in which it was announced that the new Oxford Shakespeare editors had proven with computational analysis that Marlowe had collaborated with Shakespeare on the Henry VI play cycle. At least proved it to their satisfaction. I know in the world of Shakespearean scholarship, there's never anything that is undisputed, but that idea just struck me very vividly. It felt as though I had to get in a room with them at that point.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So the heart of this, I suppose, is the nature of the relationship between the two of them.
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Emma Smith
Yeah.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you create a dynamic between Will and Kit as they are in the play, which is rivalry and philosophical disagreement, among other things. I mean, I particularly like the idea that Shakespeare was in awe of Marlowe. What was drawing you to imagine the relationship in this way?
- [06:16]
Liz Duffy Adams
Well, the fact that although they began at such a really strikingly similar place, son of a shoemaker, son of a glover, not in the thick of things. And yet their trajectory diverged so rapidly that Kit became a success in the theater long before Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was getting married and having children and having a life that we don't know that much about in the early stages, while Kit got a scholarship to Cambridge and drawn into the spy world. Daniel Evans refers to him as the first Cambridge spy and beginning to write, writing Tamburlaine, I think, while he was still in university and shooting into London and becoming a star, while Shakespeare followed him. Not deliberately, I don't mean. And started as an actor. A very wildly different trajectory. So the fact that having read them and read about them over many years, just out of interest, as soon as the idea came up of them collaborating, I had a very vivid sense of them as very different people. And, of course, this is one of the reasons they're called Kit and Will in the play. It's not William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, it's my Will and Kit because it has to be right. It's an imagination. It's a speculation, necessarily, but my sense of how different they were out of reading their work and how you can't help but sense who someone is from reading their work, seeing their work. In the case of theater, every play, however wildly, far away from the source. It is an autobiographical play. There's a transparency if you look for it. And so I just had this sense of Marlowe and a sense of Shakespeare as very different personalities, which is inherently dramatic.
- [08:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I want to ask you a bit more about that choice that must be made between the creative imagination and historical veracity. Because there's lots of historical detail in this. It's drawn, you know, Elizabeth I's secret service, religious turmoil in England. Fact. So I'm interested in the sort of sources that you're turning to, but also then the choices that you make to lean away from those or to write into the gaps, I guess.
- [08:42]
Liz Duffy Adams
Right, right, right. I take my cue from Shakespeare in a way. When you're writing a history play, my goal is always for nothing in the play to be impossible, however improbable, whatever liberties are taken, that it is grounded in the facts to begin with. But at a certain point you have to just throw it out the window and let the thing live. And I started out many years ago studying acting and in particular Shakespeare, because I fell in love with Shakespeare as a teenager and that's what drew me into the theater. And I studied acting and I was most drawn to experimental theater and classical theater because it's an expansive aesthetic universe that ringed similar to me. So I first really learned Shakespeare by acting Shakespeare in the classroom or in little tiny Off Broadway productions. So that was the original source of it. And then because of that interest, I read a key source for this play was the Reckoning by Charles Nicholl. And I read that many years ago just for pleasure. Great read and it's fascinating. And then when I read this news about Marlowe and Shakespeare and Henry VI plays, I went back and reread it and I referred to it a lot. I also, as a playwright rather than a scholar. We have crow like minds, right? We seize on shiny objects and we bring them back to our nests, and then we don't remember where they came from, but we make something new out of it. So there's a sense of really decades of shiny objects, of gleaning this and that. So I'm not an expert in a scholarly way on the Elizabethan era, but I've gleaned a lot. I have enough of a context that it's something I can. And then I can double check things. I think it's part of the process going back and forth because I do want there to be some authentic connection with the period. And at the same time, it's not a period play. It's a play about the present moment and it's a modern play. So for me, that's. I've written other history based plays, and that for me is always the sort of exciting tension between being really true in a heartfelt, almost loving way with the source material and at the same time being absolutely ruthlessly irreverent to it in the service of the story and the theatrical experience that you want to give the audience.
- [11:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's so interesting. I mean, speaking as a scholar who so far has only ever written nonfiction, I think that sounds like it must be immensely freeing and exciting. But you definitely are gleaning from the reality of what happened in the past. I mean, in the play, Marlowe talks about his involvement in espionage, courtly intrigue, and we know this is true. So what's your take on this, on the enduring mystery of Marlowe's real life connections to the intelligence world?
- [11:52]
Liz Duffy Adams
Well, it's a funny thing because it's so initially you think, that's so glamorous, that's so thrilling. And in fact it was of course, a horribly grubby. It wasn't James Bond. Right. It was seduction and betrayal. It was, let me get this man to trust me so I can get him killed. And it's not a savory aspect to Marla's character when you look into it, but at the same time you could see falling into it as a very young man that there was a glamour, there was money in it, there was danger. There was, I suppose maybe an element of serving the crown that might have appealed, as I understand it, the fact that while he was at Cambridge, he almost didn't get his degree because he was absent so much. And the Privy Council sent a letter to Cambridge and said he has done good service, give him his degree. Well, you know, and he's a scholarship boy. He didn't come from a connected background. He didn't have an uncle in the nobility or something. It's highly suggestive of the work that he was already doing that took him away from his studies. Although he also wrote, I believe, Tamburlaine while he was still there. So I just had this impression of a young man firing on all cylinders, full of life and drive.
- [13:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And interesting that you refer to the grubbiness of it because in the play Kit offers Will a kind of Faustian bargain. Join the world of the informants and gain protection. And of course, all of us who know what happens to Marlow have a sense here of that anticipation that that protection really isn't that great.
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Liz Duffy Adams
Yeah, it's such a double edged sword because that very protection is what will turn and cut your head off. The proximity to power feels like it's going to protect you. And it's a very dangerous place to be. And you could see why someone like Marlowe would feel that having powerful protectors, having patrons, not of you as an artist necessarily that too, but of you as somebody who's working for them in that world of espionage, that it's a heady sense of protection, of I am two degrees of separation from the Queen of England. And they love me and they appreciate the work that I'm doing for them. I am of value. And so I get arrested and the next day I'm out of prison because they say, all right, let him out. Maybe it wasn't quite that fast, but he was arrested more than once and was sprung. And that makes such sense when you consider how dangerous the period was for anybody with any prominence at all. And yes, as the play makes clear, and as historians know, in the end it got him killed.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Will, in contrast to Kit, wants to keep his head down, just write. And Kit insists that writing is inherently political. So I kind of want to talk with you a bit about this. You know, the play's very much suggesting every line reveals something subversive. Do you think that is genuinely the case for playwrights in the 1590s?
- [15:15]
Liz Duffy Adams
I do. Insomuch that anybody that was visible and playwrights were visible, theater was a dominant art form. Everybody went. And a play is about life, right? It's about the human world. It's about how every play is a political play in that it is about how we humans live in the world, how we organize ourselves, how we relate to each other. It's about human life. And so I always think there's this great quote that the poet Jericho Brown said. Every love poem is political. Every political poem must fall in love. And I think every play, especially a play, is by its very nature political.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So do you see Shakespeare as a political writer?
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Liz Duffy Adams
So I think more in his later plays than his earlier plays, he's openly interested in power, the uses and misuses of power and how good rule, bad rule, how the mob and the common people can be manipulated, and et cetera, et cetera. But I think he was incredibly careful to set these plays in the ancient past, especially the non history plays. But ancient Britain, ancient Rome, Illyria, Twelfth Night's not particularly political. Maybe there's a case to be made for it. But placing them in this, these mythical, almost fabulous settings is a way of putting the point of view at an oblique angle. So safer, right? A play like Lear, it's not set in the present day, but it is profoundly political. In fact, I'm just very belatedly reading the Year of Lear by James Shapiro. How did I not read this before? But it's ringing in an incredibly interesting way for me that, for example, that he wrote Lear after the Gunpowder Plot and they had to take out a line having to do with monopolies, because that was one of the justifications that the Catholic plotters was one of their grievances was something to do with monopolies. So that line had to come out. The scene in Richard II where he gives up his crown. It wasn't performed at the time because it would have been very offensive to the queen. She loved the play, but they didn't do that scene. And then when the Earl of Essex, Lord Essex, paid Shakespeare's company to perform it on the eve of his Rebellion. And they almost got in trouble for that. I think that was probably an alarming moment. They had to make a statement, oh, he paid us a lot of money. We had no idea that he meant it that way because he had them put the scene back in.
- [18:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I did not know that. I knew that that scene was there, of course, and I knew that the Isle of Essex paid for the performance, but I didn't know that it normally wasn't there. That's fascinating.
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Liz Duffy Adams
Yeah. Extraordinary. I just read that in the Year of Lear. So events of my play are previous to that, earlier than that. And at a point where Shakespeare is writing things that were utterly inoffensive, the Comedy of Errors could not offend anybody. And I think ultimately Shakespeare was political, but in a canny way.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In a canny way. So in terms of thinking about how playwrights got around censorship, to what extent were they being closely watched by the authorities? Were the sort of ways in which the Elizabethan estate was controlling print, controlling performance, shaping what writers dared to express, or were they just finding ways to sort of get around the boundaries?
- [18:58]
Liz Duffy Adams
I think it was a little of both. There was, of course, a censor. There was somebody who read the plays before they could be performed. And he would weigh in sometimes, say, you can't have that, but that's not too terrifying. That's just somebody really stopping you before you get into trouble.
- [19:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is it that it's shaping what they're creating?
- [19:15]
Liz Duffy Adams
I think there was some self censorship ahead of the fact you would have to know how to thread the needle, how to be as free as possible, as a poet, as a playwright, while staying on the right side of all of that. And I think one way to get around it, as I said before, is by what this is wonderful essay in Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium about obliqueness as a literary virtue. And he gives the example of, as a metaphor, Perseus being able to slay the Medusa by looking at her in the reflection of his polished shield. So you don't go right at the monster. You have a reflection that you work with. And I think that's what a lot of them were doing. And I think that's what Shakespeare was so brilliant at. You want to talk about power, you said it in another time, even maybe a pre Christian time, you can talk about the gods. You don't even have to offend against the Church of England because it's not. It's pre Christianity, whatever, then I think that's a really creative way to express Things really directly, but at the same time in an oblique and inoffensive way that people can read into.
- [20:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And there's a history to this. I mean, one thinks of poets like Wyatt, one of my favorites, and Surrey, who are expressing ideas about tyranny. Probably, Probably. That's the thing, is it's oblique, so you can't be sure, but it seems very much like they're commenting on the politics of their own age.
- [20:48]
Liz Duffy Adams
And famously, of course, Shakespeare communicating on multiple levels. Right. Something for everyone. There's the jokes and there's the good storytelling and everything, but then there are people in the audience who would be picking up what he was laying down, so to speak, on all different levels. And I think part of his genius was how immensely free he was within those constraints and at a time that was quite genuinely dangerous. Thomas Kyd was a tremendously popular playwright. His Spanish tragedy was a huge hit. He came under suspicion, he was brought in, he was tortured, they let him go. He never wrote another play. And he died, I think, about a year later. He was destroyed. Nobody was safe. My sense is that only the Queen herself belonged to what Graham Greene called the untorturable class.
- [21:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In the work I've done on 16th century France, I came across one case where someone was accused of atheism and to use the word that they used at the time, being a sodomite, as if these two things are obviously naturally aligned and you introduce an element of attraction between will and Kit, or is it kit toying with seduction? You know, what's going on there and what inspired you to do this?
- [22:06]
Liz Duffy Adams
I think my understanding, and I think I gleaned this from Charles Nicholls work, but my understanding is that atheism, Catholicism, any other non conformist, non Church of England belief system, was pretty much lumped together. They would even refer to Catholics as atheists because it wasn't the right God. And all of it was treasonous because the Queen was the head of the Church. On one level that sounds a little intellectual, but at the same time, as we know, Catholics were actively and relentlessly plotting against her life. And they might have succeeded, they didn't. But who would have known that? And the recent history, the recent generation or two behind her was extremely violent and prone to sudden shifts of national fortune when it came to religion. So I know that when she first came in, her idea was to have tolerance. I think she. I'm imagining this, but maybe not wanting to repeat Bloody Mary, because everybody was freaking exhausted, I would think, with that sort of thing. But then she had to get much harsher. She had to get much harder because they were trying to kill her. And I think that an ordinary Catholic in their heart, I don't think would have been in great danger. But anything that was at all active, Jesuit priests doing missionary work in England would be brutally executed in public. So I think that sense of how Catholicism wasn't just pro forma, illegal, there was danger involved.
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If you are not a Catholic, why don't you want to do some of the Queen's work on the sly? Or even if you are the best cover, if you think of it, hunting rats. Will you please shut up? Is this how you spy? You just come right out and ask people things? You would be surprised how often that works. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people tell you all of their secrets out of sheer exasperation. What are your secrets then, darling? I just want to write. Oh, come on. No one is that simple. Not even you. How is that being simple? Because no one gets to just write. You are saying things. Nothing that could be used against me. It's ancient Rome. It's picturesque Ephesus. It's blank verse in entertainment, here and gone, like heat lightning. We give ourselves away with every line. Maybe you do. No one is studying me. You are so much stupider than you look. How is that even possible? What they will see what they want to see. And if you are not in with them, they will see subversion. There is no reason for them to look. I keep my head down, don't I? I don't draw attention. I go to church, I pay my tithes. Why should I even be visible? You remind me of the uses of a university education. And stop scoffing at me for that. I got a perfectly good education. Latin, Greek and rhetoric. That's more than enough to work with. And I won't be condescended to because I didn't waste years getting drunk with titled undergraduates. Latin, Greek and rhetoric. Christ, you missed the point. What you learn from books is the least of it. At university, you learn politics, you learn how the world works. Rubbing up against the sons of power. And yes, yes, of course, I do mean rubbing up quite literally. But not only that. Oh, it's impossible to explain to a naif like you. Yes, yes, you are clever. Yes, you work hard. Yes, you're doing well enough. It will get you nowhere. If you don't know people, it will get you worse than nowhere. It will get you somewhere you don't want to be. I honestly don't know what's happening. Are you recruiting me, spying on me, or warning me? Well, I came in to do one thing, but I'm improvising.
- [26:14]
Emma Smith
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- [26:18]
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- [26:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [26:50]
Liz Duffy Adams
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- [26:52]
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- [27:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [27:15]
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- [28:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So when Kit accuses Will of hiding his true self in the play, that can stand for many things. Talking about being capacious, I mean, that is allowing for all manner of ambiguities that we've discussed. Political, religious, sexual, perhaps. I mean, do you think he was deliberately obscuring his true self?
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Liz Duffy Adams
Well, as far as Kit's motivations, I Think with Kit Marlowe, it's always multiple things happening at the same time, mercurial and multifaceted. There is a, I think, a modern tradition of Marlowe as a queer icon. And I think that's rooted in reasonable conjecture. And I think, reading them, I personally have a sense of Marlowe as not being interested in women in any way. Not just the ordinary misogyny of, I would say, the period, but it's eternal in any period. But that they weren't people to him. He wasn't interested. Again, conjecture. And with Shakespeare, there's a sense of this omnipresent attraction and emotional capacity that feels unboundaried. And of course, as we know, the concept of gay straight, completely anachronistic. It wasn't a point of identity. Men slept with men. Ordinary thing to do. Not every man would perhaps, but, you know, it wasn't that unusual thing to do, as it always is. Sometimes this is a matter of convenience if women aren't as available. But also, in fact, that same sex attraction or multisex attraction is just human nature and it always existed. And the fact that it wasn't an identity, I think, actually would have made it a little bit easier to be fluid. So the other thing is, I didn't know where the play was gonna go. I like to start with what feels to me like a rich starting point. And then I let the characters start to talk, and then I see where it goes. And they went there so fast. I remember thinking to myself, what did you think was going to happen? These are very charismatic, brilliant people, and they're alone in a room together, and they're feeling things deeply and strongly. And yes, seduction is a method of espionage, but I think it's never that simple with people like these.
- [31:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And is that why the theater was so attractive for Marlowe and Shakespeare? You think if we're in this world of spies and informants and secret faiths, here's a place where it may be oblique, but you are expressing who you really are.
- [31:25]
Liz Duffy Adams
Well, the play proposes that. That in his early career he was playing it so safe, that if he had gone on in that way, he would have remained a minor talent. We wouldn't know any more about him than we do about Nash and Greene and Fletcher, et cetera. Lots of people know a lot about them, but they don't have Fletcher festivals. And that the events of the play are what have an effect on Will to turn him into Shakespeare. And that's Marla's point in the play. That's Kit's point. In the play that if you are so afraid to reveal yourself, then you cannot live fully and more importantly to Marlowe, you can't reach your potential as an artist. You won't achieve the glory that is everything to kit the immortality of the artist, which Shakespeare of course, becomes extremely interested in. We see in the sonnets the concept of immortality as an artist, your work living after you. Oh, and I think it is so true. As an artist, you have to be brave enough to expose yourself. You have to be more interested in what you are exploring as an artist than in playing it safe. Like, oh, what will people think if I write about that? I will be revealing something about myself if I write about that. Like Tennessee Williams, right? He was a gay man in a deeply closeted time. I don't think he had any choice. He was out amongst his friends, of course, so sure, he could write A Streetcar Named Desire and it might be considered now queer coded. He put his whole heart and soul into it. So there's a way to expose yourself again obliquely. But I think to write the plays that Shakespeare wrote after he began to hit his stride that weren't merely entertaining and brilliantly written and brilliantly funny or I think takes a sense of owning of self. There's also the way in which to be an artist, to be an actor or a playwright, for them is a way of joining the wider world that you have no other necessarily any other access to. Again, not being connected by birth, family, as you can express your genius, your passion, your sense of the poeticism of life in a way that is rewarded in a way that so few other fields reward you. There's so much fellowship in it. The theatre is collaborative, so you've got a company, you're on stage with people, you're working together. Even when you write alone, you come together and bring it to life together. It is an extraordinarily seductive field. And I think absolutely that if Marlowe is engaged in what we're calling the grubby side of life and very dangerous side of life, this whole side of him writing these gorgeous works of art, gorgeous plays and seeing them produced. And then of course, for Shakespeare, it's very different because he's in the thick of it. He's embodying the work in his own body as an actor, that's a far more beautiful thing to be doing in the face of all that danger. And that brings it back to sex as well, right? Because I think when you're seeing men's heads on spikes, you know, when people are being tortured and mutilated and executed in broad daylight in front of crowds. And then you go to the playhouse and you tell a beautiful story of love and generosity and expansive universal experience. And the reaction to death is always, let me grab hold of somebody. Let me celebrate Life in your body is a part of what I think is active in my play.
- [35:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Given this new evidence about them having worked together on the Henry VI trilogy, how much credit do you give to the Marvlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship or any of the other theories about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?
- [35:56]
Liz Duffy Adams
I have no problem with Shakespeare being Shakespeare. I really have no time for those authorship questions. I think they're, with all due respect to people who are seriously engaged with them and care a lot about it. I think they're nonsensical. I do think they're rooted in snobbery. I think it's a misunderstanding, for one thing, of the kind of education that Shakespeare would have had without going to university with like a PhD in the classics now a far richer education than any of us get anymore. But apart from that, I think it's a misreading and a misunderstanding or an absence of understanding of the creative process, the leaps you take. I didn't live in 1591. I didn't know Shakespeare and Marlowe. I wrote a play about them. Am I Aim Foster? I know that Oxfordian could argue these points with me, but I'm so not interested in the argument. I just don't find it interesting. Gas, groceries, eating out. It all adds up fast. With the Verizon Visa card you get.
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Liz Duffy Adams
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- [37:37]
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- [37:49]
Liz Duffy Adams
Increase your wealth.
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- [38:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let'S talk to that point of snobbery. And because I think it's interesting that we've got Shakespeare and Marlowe as the children of artisans, a glove maker, a shoemaker. They're not aristocrats. I mean, is their success proof of Elizabethan meritocracy? Which seems kind of crazy in this century that's completely dedicated to an imposing order and hierarchy. But actually, here we are, these two great, brilliant people who rise.
- [38:40]
Liz Duffy Adams
Yeah. And I think it is, as I said before, I think it was an unusual path to prominence through genius or through craft, through dedication to poetic craft, unlike, I think, perhaps any other, because people respond to the work and you are rewarded for it, and it gives you a place in the culture that is, in a funny way, a little bit outside of the class structure, the orderly structure. I don't know if there's any other example of that for the period, but this is certainly one. And it's an. I think the fact that the word playwright is spelled W, R I G H T, as in something that is wrought. It is something that is built as gloves are built and shoes are built. So I think that's an appealing parallel. There is an artisan element to making plays. It's not just sheer poetry. And there is the way in which you don't have to know everything. The actors and the audience fill in what you don't know. Do you know what I mean? You sketch it for them. You may sketch it as they did, in immense, gorgeous, detailed language, but I almost think that the suspicion that some people have about the idea that he would know so many things that he wouldn't have experienced directly is almost a sign of how brilliant he. They were at heightening their intuition about things in such a way that it's absolutely persuasive to us that they got it exactly right. They must have known. They must have. I don't know. They must have been in Italy. They must have slept with Queen Elizabeth. I don't know what the theories are.
- [40:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think that we see Marlowe's influence, though, in Shakespeare's plays?
- [40:40]
Liz Duffy Adams
Absolutely. I'm not an expert at this, but I know I see some of it again. Marlowe was already a star playwright when Shakespeare got to London. And Marlowe didn't invent blank verse, but he took it to a whole new level. He influenced a generation of playwrights with his magnificent new uses of the possibilities of blank verse. And I know that Shakespeare was directly influenced by that. Then Shakespeare took it the next great leap forward. But, you see, it In Marlowe had Tamburlaine, but a monstrous, tyrannical king. And then Shakespeare comes in with Richard III and Marlowe writes the Jew of Malta and Shakespeare writes far superior Merchant of Venice, however problematic, a far more humanistic portrait. Etc. I think there are many examples. And then after Marlowe's death, there are examples of ways in which Marlowe shows up. There's a sense of Shakespeare thinking about Marlowe forever after.
- [41:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah, a couple of last thoughts then, that have come up in this conversation. You say that plays are about the present moment, so how is this play speaking to this present moment?
- [41:55]
Liz Duffy Adams
Well, one of the things that the play is very much about from the conception, is how do artists survive and how do they make work? What happens to their work under totalitarian regimes, under authoritarian regimes? And when I was first beginning to write this play, it was something that a lot of people in my circles were beginning to talk about, what happens if our country goes that way? And I was really hoping it would become far less relevant. It has kind of gone the other way. So just when I was starting to work on it, I saw a production of the Belarus Free Theater's Burning Doors at La Mama in New York. They came and it's a play about artists under authoritarian regimes, by artists who were trying to survive under a totalitarian regime. They had a company member in prison in Belarus. And that had a big effect on my thoughts about this play. It was, yes, I was excited by the characters, excited by the idea of Marlowe and Shakespeare, but I can't write a play if I don't know why this play now, and that's what it's rooted in.
- [43:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And then lastly, you say that plays are autobiographical. So how does this play speak of you?
- [43:25]
Liz Duffy Adams
Do you know, I'm not sure I can speak to that.
- [43:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Obliqueness is a literary virtue, she says, demonstrating it.
- [43:35]
Liz Duffy Adams
There you go, raising my polished shield.
- [43:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you very much for a word, wonderful conversation. It's been deeply thought provoking and enjoyable and it makes me feel that we must all get to see your version of Will and Kit.
- [43:52]
Liz Duffy Adams
Oh, I hope you do. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
- [43:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You're most welcome. My thanks to Liz Duffy Adams for such a wonderful and insightful conversation. And the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of her play Born With Teeth is on at the Wyndham Theatre in London until 1st November 2025. Christopher Marlowe is just such a fascinating character. I can't get enough of talking about him here on Not Just the Tudors. Do go back and Check out our episode on the murder of Christopher Marlowe with none other than Charles Nicholl, author of that seminal book, the Reckoning, which Liz was referring to earlier. And I also spoke a while back to Professor Emma Smith about Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, a work that would forever change English drama as it dared to humanize the devil and challenge religious orthodoxy. Here's a little taste of that episode. I began by asking Professor Smith, how was Dr. Faustus initially received when it was first performed in 1594?
- [44:56]
Emma Smith
I think the fact that we've got those records dating from after Marlowe's death death suggests that it was well received because most plays in this period really have one go, they have one run, they're not being revived. This is not a theatre of revivals or old plays. It's a theatre which is absolutely avid for new things. So the very fact that in 1594 it can't have been a new play, and that the best guess probably right now puts it maybe four or five years earlier than that already tells us this was a hit. And we've got lots of other information too, particularly about the sort of spectacular aspect of it. There was clearly some great devilish play with fireworks and so on. And there are some wonderful uncanny stories about. There's one story about actors rehearsing it and going through the incantation to the devil and suddenly realizing there was an extra person in the room with them and running away. So it's got a mystique around it, which is about spectacle, I think, and about the extent to which the play could be true, could really happen.
- [46:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so perhaps the fact that it seems to have been inspired by a real life Faust is one of the reasons why it could have been popular. What is the link to this alchemist and necromancer?
- [46:15]
Emma Smith
We think that Marlowe takes the play from a pamphlet account of this, as you say, necromantic figure in the German tradition. So that in that way, like all the playwrights of the period, he is building a play out of pre existing material. So he's looking for a source. This is a relatively topical source. In fact, we don't have an extant copy of this pamphlet which predates the play, although we're pretty sure it must be the source. But there's also a whole range of folklore type stories about bargains with the devil, which actually have a very interesting. Maybe they create some expectations of this play which I think the play avoids fulfilling, and that may be part of its appeal. You began by saying it's a Morality play. And it's inevitable what happens. And there's definitely an element of that, isn't there? But I think there may also have been just a sort of hint perhaps, that the end could be different. And that's one of the brilliant tensions of the play.
- [47:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And why was the supernatural such a popular subject for early modern drama?
- [47:21]
Emma Smith
The extent of belief in the supernatural is a really interesting topic. How far supernatural activity or investigation is absolutely distinguishable from natural science, for instance. So a figure, John Dee, the Elizabethan magician John Dee must be, I think, also somewhere behind Dr. Faustus. And Dee is an absolute polymath. Who is both developing highly mathematical formulae to understand navigation and so on and astronomy. And he has this famous, highly polished stone mirror to commune with the dead. And all kinds of necromantic activity as well. So in his case, and a little bit in Dr. Faustus, in Marlowe's play. The supernatural is perhaps at one end of a spectrum. Rather than being a completely separate kind of activity. And that may have just been very sort of tantalizing about it. At what point does learning and investigation. At what point does religion, particularly perhaps Catholicism. Butt up against this forbidden fruit of the supernatural?
- [48:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so let's try and pull some of those things out and talk about them. Because if we think about art reflecting the world in which it's made. And this idea of advancing oneself as much as anything else. This is a tale, in part, about ambition and personal desire. And. And of course, that's what Dee's doing, among other things. How true is it to say that Marlowe's play is reflecting a world in which there is that desire and that capacity for stretching oneself?
- [49:04]
Emma Smith
I think it's a really interesting way to think about the play. As a sort of document of some of the ambivalences. About the whole humanist project of self improvement through knowledge, through study, through education. I mean, we see that in the English Tudor context. With all those King Edward schools and the grammar schools. That are such a part of Elizabethan culture, aren't they? And then the growth in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The expansion in the activities of the Inns of Court and so on. So this is a world which is inherited, I guess, from Erasmus and from European humanism. A sense that to be learned, to be knowledgeable, is to be more godly. And Faustus really beautifully turns that on its head. That we encounter Faustus right at the beginning in his study. The stage direction's very clear. So he's in this sequestered place of education. And learning. And he is bored. He's picking up books and throwing them down and saying, I've done that, been there, done that. What's the next thing? And in order to go further, he goes into this infernal pact. So he is the limit case, in a way, for the humanist, intellectual hero. And I think a lot about how audiences would have taken it. Your audiences at the Rose, are they like modern audiences or modern readers of hello. Magazine or something who think, poor little rich girl, you know how sorry I am for these people. I will never be like that. Whatever my problems, it's never going to be, in our case, having too much money or in their case, it's never being so clever and so, so learned that I fall into a pact with the devil. Whatever my life is, this isn't what I'm going to do. So how far Faustus is a kind of everyman figure in the morality play tradition. That's to say he represents all of us. And how far he is constructed as a figure rather unlike audience members is quite fascinating for that sense of what he's saying about education and ambition in the period.
- [51:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit and to my producer, Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at notjusthetudors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [51:40]
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