The Marlowe Festival: Reims and Paris

KentOnline / KMTV

A look into the mysterious life of one of Kent's most famous Elizabethan playwrights

Transcript

00:00In the dimly lit corridors of history, there exists a man whose life and legacy have remained

00:20in the shadows, captivating literature lovers for generations.

00:24An early modern English author who is interested in still highly resonant themes for modern

00:30audiences and readers.

00:32Political questions and questions of sexuality and gender really come together.

00:38The author, the playwright, the heretic, the man about town, but also his characterizations

00:43of different personae in his canon.

00:48He's interested in questions of power, identity, race, gender, sexuality.

00:53This mysterious figure is author and playwright Christopher Marlowe.

00:57Dr Rory Lochnan is one of the editors working on an Oxford edition of Marlowe's works,

01:02which looks to detail and bring his texts together like never before.

01:06For many years now I've been working on the new Oxford Shakespeare and new Oxford Shakespeare

01:10complete alternative versions.

01:12It became increasingly clear to us that such a full textual apparatus around the complete

01:17works of Marlowe just wasn't available.

01:21Every single copy of a Shakespeare quarter has been examined within an inch of his life

01:25for hundreds of years now.

01:26The Marlowe books have been largely ignored.

01:30They turn up in catalogues, we don't know how many we haven't found yet, there could

01:33be dozens more books that turn up.

01:35His work was brought to life at the Marlowe Festival, a week-long set of academic events

01:39in Reims and Paris.

01:41It featured two live performances of a new French translation of Marlowe's play, The

01:45Massacre at Paris.

01:49Professor Catherine Richardson from the University of Kent is the second general editor of the

01:52edition alongside Dr Lochnan, who is looking to delve deeper into the enigmatic playwright

01:58and author.

01:59Marlowe's a much more shadowy figure and so the wider project that we're doing here is

02:04really quite ambitious.

02:05We want to look in detail at what he wrote and when he wrote it and why he wrote it the

02:10way he wrote it.

02:11But we also really want to dig down into Marlowe's life and his experiences to get to grips with

02:17who he was.

02:19We hope to give Marlowe this kind of global status as well as we have with Shakespeare.

02:25Actually Marlowe was a lot more popular than Shakespeare in his own time, it's quite funny,

02:29and he also has a lot of tradition of people engaging with his work and he also himself

02:34was very interested in this relationship between France and the UK.

02:38One of the interesting things about Marlowe is that although he left behind a small body

02:42of writing, there are still massive question marks about what it is exactly that Marlowe

02:46wrote, with whom did he write, when did he write and for whom.

02:51So the Oxford Marlowe edition seeks to address and hopefully answer some of these questions.

02:57Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, but very little is truly known about

03:02him.

03:03You know people tend to think Marlowe, Dr Fraustus, made a bargain with the devil, then

03:08of course worked for the Elizabethan state, got murdered.

03:12But you know the other side of Marlowe is this person who is intensely interested in

03:17eloquent language through his education in Latin.

03:22This has led to a lot of questions and interest in his life, who he was and what he wrote.

03:27Was he a spy?

03:29Was he a heretic?

03:30What were the true circumstances surrounding his death?

03:33Is this iconic image even really him?

03:36There's only one known portrait attributed to Christopher Marlowe and it's today in Corpus

03:41Christi College, Cambridge.

03:43It represents a nice looking guy, round eyes, rosy cheeks, around the age of 21 and it could

03:50be Kit Marlowe, but it's not 100% definitive.

03:54We're really interested in civic engagement and creative engagement, so it made total

03:58sense at the very start of this edition and project to bring in a visual artist to respond

04:04to the notion of Marlowe's canon and how he could be represented.

04:09Lorna May Wadsworth is a contemporary artist from Sheffield who looks to push the boundaries

04:13of traditional portraits.

04:15She's been tasked with recreating the image of Marlowe and exploring the different narratives

04:19around him.

04:20It's a real ripe opportunity to go in and reimagine Marlowe and create a new archetype

04:28perhaps that could be used instead of, that makes people think about what they believe

04:35they know about Marlowe.

04:36I thought of a work that I did called The Art Dealer's Son.

04:40The piece is a grid format of 25 individual panels.

04:45I just thought that that format would be a really interesting way to explore Marlowe.

04:51Marlowe thinks really big, he's not confined to just what he knows, he's exploring the

04:57rest of the world, he's exploring big stories about power and authority and the ways in

05:02which human beings try to exceed it.

05:05He's exploring big questions around society.

05:09My work has been on feminist interpretations of early modern literature and obviously Marlowe

05:15is a goldmine for this as well.

05:19Representations of power and gender are really important but also there's a spectrum in terms

05:24of sexual identity, especially with Edward II and that masculinity and power are conjoined

05:32in ways that are quite critical for instance in the Tamburlaine plays.

05:37As a queer woman with disabilities I think that Marlowe really represents counterculture,

05:42he represents a counter to perhaps maybe what we consider to be safe theatre and a place

05:51for people who are different, especially queer people because as we know there is a lot of

05:58evidence that he was somewhere in that community and I think that's really great to have represented

06:04to young people.

06:05Marlowe is kind of iconoclastic and he likes to lampoon, somewhat praise but also lampoon

06:11the rich and the powerful in other ways and I think it's always applicable to have political

06:20power and otherwise cast in different shades and introspected upon.

06:26The Oxford Marlowe edition is still years away from being published and in the meantime

06:31the University of Kent are working with experts in France to celebrate, mark and acknowledge

06:35Christopher Marlowe's contribution to literature and culture.

06:39Marlowe, there's this rumour about him possibly having come to Reims and to basically study

06:45Catholicism, which at the time would have been absolutely scandalous and treacherous

06:49against the English crown, against Elizabeth I who was a protestant.

06:54So this is maybe all rumours, there's some documents that mention it, official documents

06:58in the UK, and so we thought this would be a nice way to explore the possibility of Marlowe

07:04being very involved with France, especially Reims.

07:102022 marked the 450th anniversary of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

07:16We have done a series of panels and talks related to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

07:23Marlowe would have been deeply aware growing up of the ongoing French wars of religion.

07:28There was already a Huguenot community, that is a French protestant community, who had

07:33left France, migrated to the protestant stronghold of England and had already settled in Canterbury.

07:40Marlowe then writes this play, The Massacre of Paris, which might have been one of his

07:43later plays and only is transmitted to us in a corrupt version, which dramatises the

07:50series of events that led up to the massacre and then the aftermath.

07:54So we've brought together leading scholars of French religious history, especially the

07:58wars of religion, and to think about how that actual major notorious event had a wider impact

08:05within Europe.

08:06Well, to start out with, the massacre took place only a few days after a royal marriage

08:12of Marguerite de France with Henry of Navarre, and so because it was an interconfessional

08:18marriage that had a political purpose, there were protestants that had come from all over

08:23Europe for this marriage.

08:24I think that this also meant that quite naturally then, some of the protestants, the French

08:29protestants, fleed with their foreign counterparts.

08:33Marlowe wrote The Massacre in Paris in English.

08:36Professor Anne-Marie Minna-Blaise and Christine Sukic have translated the text into French

08:40for a special performance at the Marlowe Festival.

08:46There have been very few translations of this play in French, some in the 19th century,

08:54in prose.

08:55Even though, I mean, some of them are really good, we were not satisfied with the work

08:59that had been done on the verse, the French verse, and we wanted a translation that would

09:06really convey the terseness of Marlowe's lines.

09:12He's somebody who has a great respect for the text.

09:42Being inspired by history to reflect on issues still profoundly relevant today is how Marlowe's

10:05work and the stories of many authors are kept safe in the present day.

10:09Discovering what original work still remains and preserving them is what Rob Carson is

10:13doing with an online catalogue of all Marlowe's works that were printed before 1700.

10:18My expectation is that my work on this project is going to yield three different outputs.

10:23To begin with, there's the Marlowe census itself, which is the online catalogue of all

10:27of the surviving works.

10:29We'll show the editor where all of the surviving copies are and notable information about each

10:34one of them.

10:35And where we're heading, which is towards the Louvre, is where Admiral Coligny was shot

10:40from a window.

10:41Okay, so he was walking down.

10:42But Marlowe's works were highly influential for his and the next generation of dramatists

10:47writing for the English stage.

10:48His plays at the two parts of Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus or Edward II set in both tone

10:54and scale the sort of tragic and historical writing that would draw in playgoers and continues

11:02to fascinate readers today and audiences today.

11:05We're hoping that the edition and its various parts and then all these sets of activities

11:11and events will provide a kind of locus for work about this poet-dramatist moving forward.

11:18We're trying to think about what a generation of readers will want in the works of Marlowe

11:23five, six years from now and how that will still serve that community.

11:27He deserves to be much better known than he is.

11:30We want to get him on school curricula.

11:32We want to get our local communities understanding more about their playwright on almost every

11:40continent.

11:41There's an interest growing in Marlowe that we can build on.

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