Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

• B-Movies
  1. Tower of London: (1939) — horror Richard III, starring Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price
  2. Yellow Sky: (1946) — Western Tempest
  3. A Double Life: (1947) — film noir Othello
  4. Joe MacBeth: (1955) — gangster Macbeth
  5. Jubal: (1955) — Western Othello
  6. Forbidden Planet: (1956) — sci-fi Tempest
  7. All Night Long: (1961) — jazz-scene Othello
  8. Carry On Cleo: (1965) — low-budget British comedy Julius Caesar & Antony and Cleopatra
  9. Johnny Hamlet, aka Quella sporca storia nel west: (1968) — spaghetti Western Hamlet
  10. Theatre of Blood: (1973) — Vincent Price murders critics in Shakespearean fashion
  11. Tromeo and Juliet: (1996) — Troma films Romeo and Juliet
  12. Romeo Must Die: (2000) — action/martial arts Romeo and Juliet
• B-Movie genres, but with pretentions (more serious; less fun?)
  1. King Lear: (1987) — post-Chernobyl SF King Lear
  2. The Godfather, Part III: (1990) — mafioso King Lear
  3. Men of Respect: (1991) — mafioso Macbeth
  4. Let the Devil Wear Black: (1999) — Hamlet
  5. King of Texas: (2002) — Western King Lear
• Teen movies
  1. My Own Private Idaho: (1991) — Henry IV, Part 1
  2. 10 Things I Hate about You: (1999) — Taming of the Shrew
  3. Get Over It: (2001) — Midsummer Night's Dream
  4. O: (2001) — Othello
  5. Rave Macbeth: (2001) — Macbeth
  6. She's the Man: (2006) — Twelfth Night
• Other Modern Spinoffs (sound interesting, but not B-movie genres)
  1. Tempest: (1982) — Tempest
  2. Strange Brew: (1983) — comedy Hamlet
  3. The Lion King: (1994) — Disney animated African Hamlet
  4. Scotland, Pa.: (2001) — Macbeth
  5. Deliver Us from Eva: (2003) — romantic comedy Taming of the Shrew
• Shakespeare Porn
  • See compilation/reviews by Daniel Radosh
• Akira Kurosawa
  1. Throne of Blood: (1957) — Macbeth
  2. The Bad Sleep Well: (1960) — Hamlet
  3. Ran: (1985) — King Lear
• Musicals
  1. The Boys from Syracuse: (1940) — Comedy of Errors
  2. Kiss Me, Kate: (1948) — Taming of the Shrew
  3. West Side Story: (1961) — Romeo and Juliet
• Bollywood
  1. Angoor: (1982) — Comedy of Errors
  2. Kaliyattam: (1997) — Othello
  3. Kannaki: (2002) — Antony and Cleopatra
  4. Maqbool: (2004) — Macbeth
  5. Omkara: (2006) — Othello

Brooklyn Academy of Music will be staging Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart, from February 12 thru March 22.

Patrick Stewart will play Claudius and David Tennant (Doctor Who) will star in an RSC production of Hamlet, opening late July/early August. Starting October, that will be playing in repertory with Love's Labour's Lost, in which Tennant will play Berowne. [Personally, I think the latter sounds more interesting than the former.]

I've seen rumors of Christopher Eccleston doing Macbeth on the West End, but haven't found firm details regarding when and where.

[I recently learned that Eccleston was in talks to play Marlowe in a revival of Peter Whelan's The School of Night, but it appears the production was cancelled.]

Finally, Penn and Teller have been planning their own production of Macbeth, playing in Red Bank, NJ from January 15 thru February 3, and at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC, February 28 to April 6.

Avery Brooks as Tamburlaine at the The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC:

Tamburlaine, Part 2 Act 4, Scene 2: Holla, ye pampered Jades of Asia: What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day, And have so proud a chariot at your heeles, And such a Coachman as great Tamburlaine? But from Asphaltis, where I conquer'd you, To Byron here where thus I honor you? The horse that guide the golden eie of heaven, And blow the morning from their nosterils, Making their fiery gate above the cloudes, Are not so honoured in their Governour, As you (ye slaves) in mighty Tamburlain. The headstrong Jades of Thrace, Alcides tam'd, That King Egeus fed with humaine flesh, And made so wanton that they knew their strengths, Were not subdew'd with valour more divine, Than you by this unconquered arme of mine. To make you fierce, and fit my appetite, You shal be fed with flesh as raw as blood, And drinke in pailes the strongest Muscadell: If you can live with it, then live, and draw My chariot swifter than the racking cloudes: If not, then dy like beasts, and fit for nought But perches for the black and fatall Ravens. Thus am I right the Scourge of highest Jove And see the figure of my dignitie, By which I hold my name and majesty.

• Sovereignty and intelligence: spying and court culture in the English Renaissance by John Michael Archer (Symposium speaker)
• Battle of wits: the complete story of codebreaking in World War II by Stephen Budiansky (Symposium speaker)
• Reforming Marlowe: the nineteenth-century canonization of a Renaissance dramatist by Thomas Dabbs
• After Shakespeare by John Gross
• Shakespeare's Marlowe: the influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's artistry by Robert A. Logan
• Becoming Shakespeare: the unlikely afterlife that turned a provincial playwright into the bard by Jack Lynch
• Monstrous adversary: the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford by Alan H. Nelson
• Rival playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare by James Shapiro
• Shakespeare and co. by Stanley Wells
• and the books by Richard Burt:
  • Shakespeare, the movie: popularizing the plays on film, TV, and video
  • Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: queer theory and American kiddie culture
  • Shakespeare after mass media
  • Shakespeare, the movie, II: popularizing the plays on film, TV, video, and DVD
  • Shakespeares after Shakespeare: an encyclopedia of the Bard in mass media and popular culture

Sir Francis Walsingham was a remarkable man, but whenever I hear his talents lauded too reverentially, I can't help thinking of this story from Giles Milton's Big Chief Elizabeth about his interrogation of David (Davy) Ingrams.

Somebody was asking about the variant spellings of Marlowe's name, and I can recommend no finer resource on that subject than The Spelling of Marlowe's Name by Peter Farey

At the Theatre gift shop, I picked up Roaring boys: Shakespeare's rat pack by Judith Cook, which I'm enjoying very much.

Over the course of the conference, I found myself distracted by the vases of roses around the stage.

To my eyes, they looked a bit like the Christopher Marlowe Rose, and I couldn't help wondering if that was the case.

Unfortunately, I've never seen the flower in person, and didn't have web access to look up photos of the flower.

Someone else in the audience, a horticulturist or florist of some sort, said he thought they were probably Circus roses.

Anybody else in attendance care to compare and possibly confirm?

Many entirely plausible interpretations, particularly in the espionage panel, make Marlowe seem exceptional. But without further context, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the level of certainty given to particular claims.

Peter Farey has already done a lot of legwork investigating into other coroner inquests of the period and region, and I want to see more of that kind of research. For example:

• Has Elizabeth's Privy Council ever intervened in anyone else's college degree?
  • If not, that's something worth knowing.
  • If so, who were they? Intelligencers? Otherwise well-connected? Or just regular students?
    And how does the wording compare to what was written about Marlowe?
     
• Regarding the Corpus Christi portrait, assuming that the subject was somehow affiliated with the college, who are the other possible candidates for the portrait subject? Which other students were 21 years old in 1584/1585? Did any faculty, administrators, donors, influential locals, have sons of the appropriate age? And what can we find out about them? That may provide us with a more likely sitter. Or, if the other candidates are equally disqualifiable, maybe that's another point in Marlowe's favor.

Basically, I want to see somebody approach the evidence trying to disprove Marlowe's exceptionalism -- a process which could, in fact, demonstrate the opposite.

Then, giving this idea further consideration, I realized I was probably describing Constance Kuriyama's intent in writing Christopher Marlowe: a Renaissance life.

I should probably reread that, but in the meantime there's definitely room for further research...

Regarding authorship

There were a fair number of Marlovians (people who believe Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare) in attendance.

Sorry, I just don't buy it.

While I certainly recognize Marlowe's unfulfilled potential and wish he had lived longer (and had written more), it's just too improbable to believe, even before adding in the Shakespeare angle.

I slake my cravings for more Marlowe by reading honest fiction about Marlowe.

As far as the "question" of Shakespeare authorship is concerned, too many of the theories seem to boil down to wishful thinking, often with an underlying whiff of elitism.

I'll close this section with two short quotes from elsewhere:

• In September, Robert Brustein had the best laugh-line of a panel discussion when he observed:

  "The best argument why Will Shakespeare wrote the plays?
    Because Ben Jonson didn't say that Shakespeare didn't write the plays.
    And he would have..."

• And David Propson once asked whether "those who espouse conspiracy theories" ever actually tried to organize a surprise party.

1) In his introduction, Akiva Fox showed the Corpus Christi portrait. Though he acknowledged there's no evidence it pictures the playwright, he also stated "he looks the way we think he looks."

In Was this the face?, Paul Dean critiques a similar sentiment as expressed by Park Honan:

[T]he portrait "matches our 'sense' of the playwright [. . .] the picture looks right". But "our sense of the playwright" is what prompted him to believe the sitter was Marlowe in the first place; mutually sustaining intuitions do not make a fact.

2) End of the day, I listened in on one speaker's take on the purpose and perpetrator of the Dutch Church Libel (an anti-immigrant screed which started the series of events leading to Marlowe's death). And I have to agree with J.A. Downie in Marlowe, May 1593, and the 'Must-Have' Theory of Biography that some of the explanations seem "outrageously Marlowecentric."

[T]he suggestions that the Dutch Church libel was not simply another example of the extensive English xenophobia evident at this time but was 'cooked up' as a deliberate attempt to point the finger of suspicion at Marlowe, or that the purpose of Kyd's arrest and interrogation was to incriminate Marlowe, or that his death warrant was effectively signed the moment the Queen commanded that the investigation into atheism be prosecuted 'to the full', only make sense if it is assumed that he was in some way a serious threat to the stability of the state.

As a hypothesis, this seems to me to be highly unlikely, if for no other reason than that, after ordering Marlowe's apprehension on 18 May, the Privy Council released him 2 days later [...] If Marlowe was such a security risk, then why was he released at all? On the other hand, if Marlowe had simply been set at liberty so that he could be murdered in Deptford [...] then it was a decidedly odd way of proceeding. The trial of John Penry began the day after Marlowe was released. Penry was executed on 29 May, the day before Marlowe was killed. It is difficult to believe that a judicial murder would not have been less messy to arrange than a contract killing 'within the verge' at Deptford, which inevitably implicated figures within the Elizabethan intelligence community.

3) Regarding the acts of censorship alluded to in As You Like It -- yet another example of how Marlowe upsets the authorities -- Stephen Orgel, in Tobacco and boys: how queer was Marlowe?, calls that further Marlowecentrism:

It is true that [Marlowe's] Ovid translations were called in, banned, and burned by episcopal order six years after his death, but it is not clear that the proscription was aimed at Marlowe: the book was a collection of satiric epigrams by John Davies followed by ten of Marlowe's translations from the Amores -- "Davyes Epigrams, with Marlowes Elegys" is the way the order puts it. The offensive material may well have been Davies's

4) Finally, several speakers made similar interpretations of the prologue of Tamburlaine which made me glad that I'd read Lukas Erne's Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: the life and works of Christopher Marlowe (though I regret not having a copy on-hand):

Our tendency to pretend that we know Marlowe's beliefs and intentions affects and disturbs not only our reception of the playwright's biographical persona but, I would like to argue, also that of his plays. [...] Let me begin with Tamburlaine, perhaps Marlowe's earliest play, written around 1586-87 and first published in 1590. One of the most famous passages, perhaps the most famous passage, of the play occurs in the prologue:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay
We'll lead you to the stately tent of War,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

Marlowe scholarship has been strangely unanimous in its interpretation of these lines. Arriving in London when the public theater is still in its infancy, several years before Shakespeare makes his debut, the stage being still dominated by lesser dramatists ("rhyming motherwits") who write lesser plays in what the prologue refers to as "jigging veins," Marlowe, prophetically aware of the turn English drama was to take, sweeps away his dramatic predecessors in the prologue to his very first play. As the play's editor in the New Mermaids series puts it, the prologue constitutes "Marlowe's expression of his contempt for the popular theatre of the day, with its low comedy, rough metre and rhyme." David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, in their fine edition of Marlowe's plays for the World's Classics series, similarly comment that "Marlowe contrasts the high seriousness of his mirror for princes with the doggerel style and 'clownage' of much popular theatre of his day." Editors and critics seem to agree that the prologue's subject is Marlowe's break with theatrical fashion.

Yet in fact, to suggest that Marlowe's prologue is reacting to "the popular theatre of the day, with its low comedy, rough metre and rhyme" is not unproblematic. From the vantage point of literary history, this is what it may look like, but did it look the same in Marlowe's own time? What "the popular theatre of the day" was like when Marlowe arrived in London is something we know next to nothing about. Only two plays written for the commercial stage and performed by adult companies had been published before Tamburlaine appeared in 1590. In fact, we know very little about pre-Marlovian commercial drama. To build our interpretation of the prologue to Tamburlaine around it therefore does not seem entirely safe.

It is then at least surprising that no one appears to have advanced another reading that seems no less straightforward: the prologue to Tamburlaine, like other prologues in roughly contemporary plays, including that of Shakespeare's Henry V, announces the play to come in which we will be led from "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" to the impressive blank verse of "the Scythian Tamburlaine / Threatening the world with high astounding terms." This description seems to correspond rather well to the play itself.
     [...]
In other words, we have reason to believe that the prologue describes and announces what Marlowe's play enacted. The facts that no one appears to have come up with what I think is not an overly fanciful interpretation and that Marlowe scholarship has repeated time and again that the prologue constitutes a grand Marlovian gesture, self-advertising, defiant, and provocative, have much to do, I think, with our mythographic conception of the playwright himself. Marlowe was outrageous and defiant and so, consequently, are his plays, starting with the prologue to what may have been his first play. If the same prologue had been written by someone else, the alternative I have suggested would quite possibly long have been in circulation. Marlowe mythography and the reception of Tamburlaine have shaped and reinforced each other, resulting in readings in which a heterodox "Marlowe" inhabits his texts, texts that, in turn, come to corroborate our image of their creator.

Riggs said that in writing his book, he purposely "kept Marlowe's mighty rival on the sidelines"

"I'm never comfortable with Marlowe taking a back seat to anyone."

Riggs pointed out that for seven years, Marlowe could truthfully say he was "better than Shakespeare" and is the last English writer who could make that claim.

Christopher Marlowe is the only contemporary playwright William Shakespeare quotes in his work -- and vice versa. [Given how many scripts are lost to time, I wonder whether we can really say that so certainly.]

There's no evidence they knew one another, but they certainly knew of one another.

Riggs went into the influences demonstrated in plays by both men, and I didn't take terribly detailed notes of these.

First, Shakespeare imitated. Then, once he had "assimilated" Marlowe's style, he parodied it. [1597-1600, with the aside that this was the time that Ben Jonson introduced the word "parody" to the English language.]

In Henry IV, Part 2, Ancient Pistol references five plays in 22 lines. Something like that "you're not just doing from memory -- you've been thinking about it."

And, of course, he reviewed all the usual suspects in As You Like It.

Riggs considers Hamlet to be Shakespeare's farewell to Marlowe, pointing out not just the Player's speech, but reading a certain personal recognition into the following soliloquy ("O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!").

And Hamlet is the last time Shakespeare references Marlowe in his works.

It's very important to keep in mind that there was no overarching notion of sexuality in the period.

Among the consequences of that: no sense of orientation. People didn't have modern ways of thinking about their sexual selves. There were no clubs or organizations or community. One's desires or inclinations didn't make you part of a minority.

Also, as shown in Edward II, preferences for the same-sex did not exclude men from their responsibilities to marry and produce heirs.

So which fields of knowledge did attempt to address issues of sexuality?

DiGangi named four: (1) Medicine/anatomy, (2) morality/theology, (3) law, and (4) imaginitive/poetic language.

Regarding (1), it was apparently a common belief that there was only one sex. Everyone had the same organs, the only difference being men were outies and women were innies, and that was because men were hotter. Some French philosopher told a story of a woman who was running and overheated and *pop* turns male.

Tangentially from this, it was pointed out that Shakespeare was much more into crossdressing (at least in his plays) than Marlowe was.

So, how original or revolutionary was Marlowe in all this?

Christopher Marlowe was the first to translate Ovid's Amores into modern vernacular.

Deats described Marlowe's as the "most sympathetic treatment of homoerotic passion of the period." Shakespeare minimized the roles of Bushy, Bagot and Green in Richard II, while Marlowe put Edward II's minions squarely in the foreground. Shakespeare has some homoerotic elements in the comedies, such as the gay Antonios (in Twelfth Night and Merchant), but they're not central. And think about the opening scene of Dido, with Ganymede dandling on Jupiter's knee.*

Akiva, who was moderating, then restated Peter Earnest's question from the espionage panel: Does Marlowe's biography matter? How much can or should we read into these?

DiGangi: "If it is important, it's because he's the only writer of his time who articulated these ideas. We don't want to let go of this myth.
It's also important in a political sense. In the 19th Century, this was one of the ways people elevated Shakespeare over Marlowe. And nowadays, gay people have tried to seize that to make their own points."

An audience member described past scholarship of Shakespeare's sonnets as a history of homophobia.

DiGangi pointed out that people consider Shakespeare's sonnets autobiographical because of the first person "I". Marlowe didn't write a sonnet sequence. Make of it what you will, he did translate Ovid's Amores which are first-person poetry, and decidedly not homoerotic.

Deats quipped that in some ways, Shakespeare's sonnets were more transgressive than anything attributed to Marlowe.

The session closed with a comment from the back of the room by David Riggs.

Riggs pointed out that before marriage, everyone had same-sex bedfellows -- there was no central heating, so people bedded together for warmth. [And gd only knows knows what else might've happened besides sleep.].
Marlowe died unmarried, so he almost certainly slept with more men than women (almost exclusively, except for prostitutes).

If the subject of sexuality in the period interests you, I strongly recommend Michael B. Young's King James and the history of homosexuality.

*Given all the agendas in the audience, I wanted to reserve Q&A time for actual questions, rather than making statements. But I was sorely tempted to point out several matters:

Michael Milligan read "The Passionate Shepherd" and Ovid's Elegies I.1, I.5, II.3 and II.15

Colleen Delany read Book III, Elegy 4.

And then came an extended excerpt from "Hero and Leander."
Robert Jason Jackson (who completely blew Ian and me away with his Holofernes at the Huntington Theatre a few years back) narrated, with Colleen Delany reading Hero's lines and Aubrey K. Deeker reading Leander.

Akiva Fox said that if Shakespeare is the poet of time, and Milton is the poet of space, then Marlowe is the poet of desire.

And that's so true...

The panel was moderated by Peter Earnest, founding executive director of the International Spy Museum, and a 35-year veteran of the CIA. So incredible personal expertise in multiple aspects of espionage in the real world.

Stephen Budiansky, author of Her Majesty's spymaster (a biography of Sir Francis Walsingham) spoke first, about the Elizabethan secret service under Walsingham.

Since I have read the book, I didn't take many notes.

He was followed by Leslie Silbert, a PI who studied Elizabethan drama, and combined these fields to write The Intelligencer, a novel about Marlowe (which I've also read).

She does believe Marlowe was some kind of secret agent, and offered five pieces of evidence:

1. the Privy Council letter regarding Marlowe's degree,
2. the dining hall records -- his absences and evidence of more lavish spending afterwards,
3. the 1582 arrest record in Flushing,
4. insider knowledge in Massacre at Paris, and
5. the Coroner's report.

After this recitation, Peter Earnest noted that he was struck by the wording of the Privy Council certificate: "It's so ambiguous; it says nothing" about what Marlowe actually did. He said it reminded him of commendations he's seen -- and some that he's written.

When the Agency discovers a mole, it generally takes a year or two to build the case before they act upon it. So, it's highly unlikely we will ever encounter bulletproof evidence whether or not Marlowe was an agent.

However, based upon the descriptions presented, Marlowe sounds like precisely the sort of person that Earnest would've sought to recruit.

While this supposition is all very interesting, does it really matter? Does it make any difference to Marlowe's dramaturgy?

John Michael Archer has written a book about the portrayal of spying in Elizabethan literature, and tried to answer that question.

Many plays of the period includ