Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised | Letters
The Guardian’s call to re-read and honour Christopher Marlowe is welcome (Editorial, 29 August).But in Canterbury, his birthplace, that work was already done and misrepresented by the Guardian’s review last year.In 2022, I produced The Marlowe Sessions: the first complete performance and recordings of his plays in over four centuries, staged at the King’s School, where Marlowe studied, with award-winning actors, immersive spatial audio and high‑definition filming.This was no vanity project but a bold, community-rooted undertaking in the shadow of the pandemic, paying above-union rates to dozens of creatives when work was scarce.Audiences embraced it, some travelling from abroad.
Yet London critics dismissed the effort with inaccuracies and inconsistency: this article laments the absence of Marlowe on stage while the same publication denigrated the only serious large-scale revival, ever.This metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised for too long.The issue is not whether Dominic West or any star plays Faustus, but whether Marlowe’s full canon is given the stage, recordings and scholarship it deserves.The Marlowe Sessions proved audiences care, technology can renew Renaissance drama, and Canterbury is a fitting crucible for rediscovery.To honour Marlowe, we must also honour those who risk bringing him back.
Methinks the pot is calling the kettle blacker than black.Ray MiaCanterbury, Kent Having read Marlowe a long time ago as an English literature undergraduate, my memory is that he is less accessible than Shakespeare to modern ears.Much of the verse form is hidden in plain sight in Shakespeare.You know it’s there but it’s not in your face like Marlowe’s, which tends to have long-winded bombastic speechifying (sorry, Kit, but it does), not to mention character types rather than the more nuanced Shakespearean characters.So it’s no surprise to me that he doesn’t get the exposure commensurate with his place in English literature.
But we can say the same about other great writers? Who reads them now except English literature students? Milton, Dryden, Pope … it’s a long list.Shakespeare is more accessible (sort of) and somehow transcends time, in a way that few other playwrights can manage.Roger ThomasAndover, Hampshire I enjoyed reading your leader about the neglect of Christopher Marlowe on our current stages.It’s not only Marlowe! Over the last decade at least there has been a neglect of our whole classical repertoire by our major companies except for the most obvious examples.Jonson, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster are rarely, if ever, seen, and it is not only Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Restoration dramatists are scandalously ignored.
As to later writers, Shaw’s huge output is largely neglected except for the obvious, as is the extraordinarily varied range of his contemporaries,We don’t need yet another revival of The Importance of Being Earnest, wonderful as it is,We do need our major companies to broaden their classical range,These plays are not just for libraries or schoolrooms, they are for the stage! In my youth I was able to see many of them,In my old age I am starved by a diminished and repetitive selection.
Richard Digby DayChippenham, Wiltshire Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
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