![]() You would definitely have got that feeling from Marlowe. You know, sometimes you meet somebody and you think, ‘Okay, this, this person is trouble’. He must have been an extraordinarily unsettling person to get to know. And the passage that I’ve just read, is representative of everything that is enthralling and exhilarating, and also dangerous and problematic about Marlowe. He was an amazing poet and playwright in his own right. They played off each other, they strove to outdo each other, they very likely egged each other on, and it’s fair to say that Shakespeare would not have been quite the Shakespeare we know without Marlowe’s influence.īut we shouldn’t just relegate Marlowe to an also-ran or accessory to the Bard’s success. And in the 1580s and early 1590s they were rival playwrights, very likely friends, or maybe frenemies. But he was only baptised a couple of months before Shakespeare, so they were almost exact contemporaries. He’s often described as an important precursor of Shakespeare. It struck me that those words are completely apt for Marlowe himself, as well as the tragic hero of his play.Ĭhristopher Marlowe was a brilliant comet lighting up the sky of Elizabethan drama. It felt like an absurdly poetic moment three poets in the graveyard at midnight, and that line from Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, really hit home for me: Near this spot lie the mortal remains of Christopher Marlowe, who met his untimely death in Deptford on May 30th 1593.Ĭut is the branch that might have grown fall straight. Then I suddenly found myself facing a stone slab on the churchyard wall, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight so that I could read the words: ![]() On an autumn evening about fifteen years ago, close to the stroke of midnight, I found myself entering a graveyard in Deptford in the company of two poets: Mick Delap, who you may remember from Episode 13 of this podcast, and Paddy Bushe, who is a wonderful Irish poet.īeing poets, we were there to find one grave in particular, and it took us a few minutes of stumbling about in the dark.
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