Imagining Shakespeare and Marlowe as collaborators

Following the extraordinary success of Tamburlaine, might the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe have brought Marlowe together with Shakespeare to write about the Wars of the Roses?

Today, there is growing scholarly consensus that the trilogy of history plays known as the three parts of Henry VI, plays printed in the First Folio of 1623 as written by Shakespeare, were in fact written collaboratively.

In the excerpt below, author Stephen Greenblatt imagines Marlowe and Shakespeare’s interactions while working on the Henry VI trilogy. He shows the two young artists very different personalities, both the same age but one approaching the zenith of his career while the other was just beginning.

With abundant proof of how gifted his new young playwright was, Henslowe had a strong incentive to draw Marlowe into his stable of writers. The two parts of Tamburlaine had been a spectacular commercial draw. Its religious skepticism may have aroused some hostility, but skating near the edge was good for box office receipts. If serious trouble lay in the future, it would likely befall the imprudent writer and not the businessman who had merely risked some of his money behind the scenes. It seems likely, then, that in the wake of Tamburlaine, the entrepreneur proposed a new project to Marlowe: one or more plays about the Wars of the Roses, those vicious dynastic struggles in England that had left a trail of blood across the preceding century.

Marlowe would not be working alone. A great many plays in this period were written collaboratively, as movies and television series often are today, and Henslowe was accustomed to putting teams together and working out the appropriate rate of compensation. The issue of authorial credit was less important than the money. Even if the plays eventually appeared in print—which happened infrequently—they most often appeared anonymously or on occasion with only the name of the writer who was responsible for the bulk of the writing. And there were no royalties.

Marlowe may have hesitated to join in the project: having been drawn to the classics and to the exotic geography of Central Asia and the Middle East, he had thus far shown no interest in English history. Perhaps he spent a little time reading a chronicle history of the turbulent reign of the ill-fated Henry VI before he agreed that it could make for interesting theater. He would then have found himself in a room with one or probably two other playwrights. One of them remains unknown; it might have been Thomas Kyd, with whom he would eventually share a room. The other playwright in the room was William Shakespeare.

That Marlowe and Shakespeare were well aware of each other is clear enough from their work. A web of allusions and echoes and borrowings survives, evidence that has been recognized and pored over for several hundred years. Some literary scholars have written about this web as if the two contemporary playwrights never actually met in person, the one presumably going out the door just a moment before the other arrived. But recent studies, including a series of sophisticated computational analyses, have led to a growing scholarly consensus that the trilogy of history plays known as the three parts of Henry VI, plays printed in the First Folio of 1623 as written by Shakespeare, were in fact written collaboratively. In 2016–17 The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion took the step of listing parts 2 and 3 (both written before part 1) as authored by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and at least one other as yet unidentified playwright. (The prequel, known as 1 Henry VI, is credited, in the New Oxford edition, to Shakespeare and Marlowe’s Cambridge friend Thomas Nashe, along with one or more other playwrights.)

Only in their early twenties, Marlowe and Shakespeare had been born a few months apart—the former in February 1564 and the latter in April. They were both provincials, relative newcomers to London. And they were both the sons of artisans, a cobbler in one case, a glover in the other. But here the close parallels stopped. Marlowe’s father was a nobody; Shakespeare’s father, though he had fallen on hard times, had been bailiff—equivalent to mayor—of his town. Shakespeare had a wife and three children whom he had left back in Stratford-upon-Avon. His education had stopped at the end of grammar school; he was probably earning a bit as an actor; and though he was trying to make his way as a writer, he had as yet very little to show for himself. Marlowe, with his BA and MA from Cambridge, was entitled to call himself a gentleman. He was fluent in Latin and Greek. He had a network of talented friends and acquaintances from the university. He knew someone on the Privy Council who had looked out for him. And he was already the author of the celebrated Tamburlaine.

Marlowe might therefore have been surprised to discover that it was Shakespeare, not he, whom Henslowe had tapped to take charge of the writing project on the life of Henry VI and who had drawn up the “plat,” the preliminary plot outline. The resulting plays have many Marlovian phrases and touches, but they are folded into a structure that Shakespeare clearly dominates. “Do but think / How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown,” a character remarks in 3 Henry VI, “Within whose circuit is Elysium, / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy” (1.2.28–31). We are for a moment back in the heady world of Tamburlaine, where the aspiring soul cannot rest until it reaches “That perfect bliss and sole felicity / The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.” But in Henry VI, as in all the plays that Shakespeare fashioned, the crown is far more nightmare than bliss.

The precise scope of Marlowe’s involvement in the project is impossible to determine. He may have been pleased to be paid to do little more than to write a few bits of dialogue and to keep an eye on his less accomplished collaborator. Playing a secondary role in the writing may have surprised him, but there is no evidence, on his part, of resentment. If there was any anxiety or competitiveness in their relationship, either at the start or as it developed over the years, the signs point almost entirely to Shakespeare. Those signs would not have precluded admiration, though it is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare ever let down his guard.

Marlowe was evidently skilled at drawing out what others intended to keep in the dark. That is, after all, a spy’s skill. He might have hinted first at Catholic sympathies to see how Shakespeare would respond. Then, failing to get an interesting response, he might have revealed to Shakespeare that he didn’t believe any of it, Catholic or Protestant—the stories about the Virgin Birth and the Son of God, the raising of Lazarus, the miracle at Cana, and all the rest, stretching back to the primordial garden with the talking snake and the magical trees. Again, no revealing response. Given what Marlowe had already made manifest in Tamburlaine, he could also have conveyed his doubts about the alleged sacredness of authority and the sanctity of royal blood. Was it not after all a matter of sheer power? Could they not agree that, as Machiavelli had written, “All armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed”? Once again Shakespeare is unlikely to have replied in a way that revealed very much. His beliefs, whether about religion or the state, remained elusive.

Then—to continue this imaginary conversation—Marlowe might have looked quizzically at Shakespeare and ventured on the subject of love. True, Shakespeare had a wife and three children, but he had left them back in Stratford-upon-Avon and was free to explore other pleasures. What did he think, Marlowe may have slyly asked, of the alluring teenaged Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? At the theater the earl, with his beautiful long auburn curls, his delicately plucked eyebrows, and his expensive earrings, had been seen intently staring at Shakespeare, who was performing some part or other on stage. And Shakespeare, as Marlowe and others observed, had looked directly back at the earl and smiled.

Shakespeare is unlikely to have responded in kind to any of these provocations, had they come his way. He was far too careful and discreet, and he had no reason to trust Marlowe. The seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey, who went about collecting gossipy anecdotes, was told that Shakespeare was not a “company keeper.” If he was invited out for a “debauch,” Aubrey’s informants told him, Shakespeare would decline, writing that “he was in pain.” Perhaps Marlowe received one of those polite refusals.

It is not that Shakespeare was sublimely indifferent to those with whom he lived and worked. Quite the contrary: throughout his life, he drew on virtually everything and everyone he encountered. How could the brilliant Marlowe, of all people, not be present in his works? His collaboration with Marlowe on the Henry VI plays occurred near the very beginning of Shakespeare’s career, when as a writer he was only half-formed. Shakespeare was likely fascinated not only by his collaborator’s immense poetic skill and originality but also by the reckless, rash, overreaching, and possibly doomed person he seemed to be. There may be glimpses of Marlowe—character sketches to which we have only partial or indirect access—in any number of Shakespeare’s later plays: in the wild, extravagantly imaginative Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, for example, or in Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, or in the skeptic Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. But a great gap lay between Shakespeare and the Cambridge-educated poet with whom he was collaborating and to whom he must inevitably have compared himself. Marlowe’s years of higher education were enough to make Shakespeare feel, or at least claim to feel, what in one of his sonnets he called his own “rude ignorance.” And to compound the difference between them, Shakespeare was not only writing for the stage, as Marlowe was; he was also performing on it.

Though Marlowe had chosen not to pursue a safe, respectable career in the church and had opted instead for a marginal life, the cachet conferred by his university degrees was important to him. That cachet— being known as a scholar and a gentleman—was compatible, if just barely, with writing plays, but it would certainly have been threatened by any more complete involvement in the public theater, even had he possessed the talent and the inclination for such involvement. Putting on greasepaint and getting up on stage to entertain a crowd that included servants, apprentices, porters, prostitutes, and assorted riffraff would have left a social stain that could not be scrubbed away.

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.