By Stuart Mitchner

When I realized last Saturday was George Washington’s birthday, I looked up former president Bill Clinton’s foreword to Shakespeare in America (Library of America 2013), which refers to Washington leaving the “legislative haggling” at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to see a production of The Tempest, which, as editor James Shapiro points out, was “based on the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609.” The 42nd president — who remembers a high school assignment requiring him to memorize 100 lines from Macbeth, among them “Life’s but a walking shadow” (“an important early lesson in the perils of blind ambition”) — makes sure to mention the time presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford-upon-Avon. Later in the book, as Abigail Adams recalls, Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it” while Adams “cut a relic from a chair claimed to have belonged to Shakespeare himself.”

In the huryburly of February 2025, stories like these suggest a Monty Python sketch in which the current president and his entourage leave a wrestling match between Kit the Kat Marlowe and Will the Shake at the Kennedy Center for a production of Titus Andronicus at the Folger Library, but only if “that’s the play where some loser gets eaten in a pie.”

Time for Marlowe

It’s typical of the Bard’s grip on the national imagination that he begins a column meant for Christopher Marlowe, who was baptized on February 26, 1564, two months before Shakespeare, who was born on April 23 and baptized three days later.

The only viable remaining image of Marlowe has been dominating the right hand side of my computer screen for days like an elegant Elizbethan screen saver. When it comes to fashion, Will the Shake will never match the sheer magnificence of Kit the Cat and the fabulous garment that seems to be consuming him right before our eyes, even as he calmly sports a night-black fabric with hellfire blazing through a woven frenzy of slashes.

I’ll admit I’ve been susceptible to Marlovian overkill ever since a failed graduate dissertation titled “Language and Action in Marlowe and Shakespeare.” For days instead of looking Marlowe in the eye, I’ve been dazed by his sartorial splendor. Best not to look him in the eye anyway because his is not a friendly or forthcoming gaze. He seems to know people are examining him, asking themselves can this be the Real Christopher Marlowe? His dates indeed agree with those in the upper lefthand corner of the painting. He would have been 21 in 1585 and the little we know about his life and art can be read into the motto under the dates (Quod me nutrit me destruit, That which nourishes me destroys me). The line, which appears nowhere in Marlowe’s work, turns up (wouldn’t you know) in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 (and in act 2, scene 2 of Pericles, a fact that would have thrilled the Brooklyn-born theater critic and press agent Calvin Hoffman (1906-1986), who spent most of his life attempting to prove that Marlowe was the true author of the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare. Hoffman is also said to be the first to suggest that Marlowe was the man in the painting after it had been found at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1953. This was obviously a significant moment in Hoffman’s quest since his book was published two years later.

In The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (Messner 1955), Marlowe, a shoemaker’s son who studied at Cambridge, is Hoffman’s answer to the riddle of how an unschooled glovemaker’s offspring who merely studied life could have written Shakespeare. Hoffman’s theory is based on the idea that Marlowe’s fatal stabbing in a tavern brawl was staged, allowing him to escape hanging for “subversive atheism,” and to live out his life abroad, writing the poems and plays credited to Shakespeare. What particularly motivated Hoffman was the idea that Marlowe/Shakespeare “should have been forced to live his high-noon hours a pariah in his native land; that when he should have been enjoying the fruits of his prodigious labors he was, instead, living in perpetual exile; walking forbidden coasts in silence and in fear; perhaps slipping his completed manuscripts under a bolted door; running forever like a thief in the night.” A less melodramatic possibility, recounted in the Guardian on July 11, 1983, was that Marlowe had died in Padua in 1627, nursed in his last illness by one Pietro Basconi, a scenario that, like numerous others, was eventually discredited.

Though I didn’t believe in this, “the weirdest cloak-and-dagger tale ever conceived,” as Hoffman himself puts it, I’ve long been intrigued by the thought of Marlowe’s afterlife abroad, writing the plays in their the actual settings, like Verona, Venice, Rome, and Cyprus. Wondering if Shakespeare ever stood eye to eye with this portrait of Marlowe and the Latin inscription, Quod me nutrit me destruit, I looked up sonnet 73 and found it amid death-themed sonnets 71 through 74. The translated line follows a reference to “black night” as “Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.” Did the sight of Marlowe in his night-black regalia, plus the inscription, have anything to do with these lines? — “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death-bed whereon it must expire, / Consum’d with that which it was nourished by.”

In the next sonnet, Shakespeare imagines “my spirit is thine, the better part of me,” which is followed by “The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife / Too base of thee to be remembered.”

Dying with Marlowe

Born on February 25, 1917, Anthony Burgess ended his extraordinarily prolific life as a writer with a novel about Marlowe. In the author’s note that concludes A Dead Man in Deptford (Carroll & Graf 1995), Burgess recalls typing his university dissertation on Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus shortly before the Battle of Britain began. Thus Marlowe’s “visions of hell” seemed “not too irrelevant.” Quoting from the play (“I’ll burn my books — ah Mephistophilis”), Burgess adds “The Luftwaffe was to burn my books and even my thesis.” Whether or not this claim is true, the Luftwaffe did “trundle over” Moss Side, Manchester, where Burgess was living, as if to demonstrate that Mephistophilis “was no mere playhouse bogeyman.”

Having timed his Shakespeare novel Nothing Like the Sun (1964) for release on the Bard’s 400th birthday, Burgess wrote his Marlowe novel on the 400th anniversary of Marlowe’s May 30,1593 death, “to pay such homage as possible to an ageing writer.” Anthony Burgess died half a year later on November 22, 1993.

Seeing Marlowe

“Indeed about Kit there was something of the cat” is the first thing Burgess’s actor narrator observes about Marlowe, who “blinked his green eyes much and evaded as cats will, the straight gaze either from fear of fearful aggression or of some shame of one order or another.” Of Kit’s “feline face,” on the “overlip” it was “a matter more of whiskers than of true mustachio, the beard scant also, and it may be said that he never grew to hirsute manhood. The hair of his head was an abundant harvest, though not of corn. Let me speak rather of hayricks burning. In dry weather that augured thunder it would grow horrent.” In case you doubt that the narrator had carnal knowledge of his subject (one day he will play Tamburlaine’s queen “the divine Zenocrate”), he makes sure you know that Kit’s underlip was “burning and thrustful,” and that his bared body had “but little hair, the mane thin above the fairsized thursday. The flesh was smooth, the shape fair, the belly flat.”

Finery and Power

Having been well paid for his first mission as a spy for the crown, Kit was “dressed in purple and primrose and a shirt with a cobweb collar” when spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham’s secretary visited him at Cambridge. Noting that the books in Marlowe’s chambers have nothing to do with divinity, the secretary says, “So this is your study, Tamerlaine and Techelles.” When Kit mentions the play he’s writing and is asked the theme, he’s clearly already brainstorming his hero: “Power. Pitiless, merciless, absolute …. Power, yes, power cut up and anatomica. I want the power of chronicling power. I have read my Machiavelli.”

In fact Machiavelli appears onstage to deliver the prologue to Marlowe’s next play, The Jew of Malta. After proclaiming “Admired I am of those that hate me most,” he vows that though “some speak openly against my books,” yet “will they read me,” and “when they cast me off” will be “poisoned by my climbing followers.”

Marlowe in 2025

Rereading Marlowe makes an amusing fit with the early reign of a president who calls himself king, claiming countries, bodies of water, and global domains that recall Marlovian overreachers such as the Duke of Guise in The Massacre of Paris: “Set me to scale the high Pyramides, and thereon set the diadem of France, I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught, or mount the top with my aspiring wings.” Or Dr Faustus: “I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore and make that country continent to Spain, and both contributory to my crown; the Emperor shall not live but by my leave, nor any potentate of Germany.” And don’t forget Tamburlaine: “I will confute those blind geographers that make a triple region in the world, excluding regions which I mean to trace, and with this pen reduce them to a map, calling the provinces, cities, and towns after my name.”

A Town Called Marlow

The front page of Tuesday morning’s New York Times directs readers to a feature about an English town “fighting the building of a film studio.” Although the town of Marlow, located on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, dates back to the Domesday Book, the happy convergence with my subject infects me with the Marlovian conceit that Kit somehow employed his magic to “call it after his name.” The town also has interesting roots, with former residents like Percy and Mary Shelley, who worked on Frankenstein (1818) there; Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote Nightmare Abbey (1818) in a nearby house; and T.S. Eliot who lived in Marlow during the First World War. The Marlow film studio’s chief executive Robert Laycock says the town is the “right and only” location, because it is less than 10 miles away from Pinewood Studios, where many of the James Bond movies were filmed. Mr. Laycock is a great-nephew of Ian Fleming, the author of the Bond books, “a connection he emphasizes amid accusations that he and his team do not have enough experience in the film industry.”