As you will have noticed, I have been way too taken up with other projects to make much headway here, chiefly because making a living has become something of a challenge since I was made redundant from my Senior Lecturer post.
But interest in Marlowe continues to gain momentum. And though I don’t have time to write an actual essay here, I want to flag up a couple of things that are worth flagging.
You’ll know, no doubt, that Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance was released at the end of last year. I met Prof Greenblatt when he was researching it; a mutual friend put us in touch so that he could pick my brains. He’s a very nice man. We had a coffee and an hour’s chat at the British Library. I was slightly resistant to having my brains picked in one area because I was hoping to make it the centrepiece of my long-awaited Marlowe biography (new information!) but of course, I can’t get anyone to pay me to write my Marlowe biography (I’m not Stephen Greenblatt is the main problem) so his got written, and of course well-received and widely publicised, and the marketability of mine became zero.
I got a review copy (hurrah!) and then failed to review it because I just wasn’t fast enough; this is my story across the board. Due to the fractured nature of a freelance life, I have to run multiple projects concurrently and can’t easily drop everything else to do one thing in a timely manner. Plus, as a person who cares a lot (perhaps too much) about writing at the sentence level, I am very, very slow by journalistic standards. What a journalist dashes off in two hours, I will write in two weeks. I am also, due to the calls on my time, a slow reader. In the end, hell, I didn’t even manage to review it for you guys. Maybe I can time one for the paperback release.
But my daily Google Alert for ‘Christopher Marlowe’ keeps buzzing. Sometimes, annoyingly, it is a US lawyer and sometimes a US sports commentator. Sometimes it is a famous actor talking about playing Kit. But yes, our actual guy does come up too. This week, I learned there is a Marlowe exhibition coming up in Canterbury, for example.
Then this morning, I was notified that a history buff with 777,000 YouTube subscribers had posted a short video about Marlowe:
But oh, ‘bar brawl’, of course it’s there. No, it wasn’t a pub/bar/tavern (or a bawdy house), and no, it is very unlikely to have been a ‘brawl’. My work is Sisyphean, and it feels like a fool’s errand sometimes. But I couldn’t help spending some of my oh-too-precious-time trying to correct that error in the comments. Jump on there and ‘like’ my comments, if you can find them in the slew, so that one or two more people can join in with the mission for an accurate Marlowe biography.
Lord, grant me an independent income before I die, that I can finally set aside the time to write mine 🙏
Several of the comments said, ‘This guy is so interesting. Why isn’t there a Marlowe movie.’ And I answered a few of those, too. I’ve known of three Marlowe movies in the last thirty years that got shelved at different stages of production. The most hopeful of these, and the one that really kills me that it wasn’t made, had Johnny Depp as Marlowe and Jude Law as Shakespeare. Johnny Depp as Marlowe! He was my dream Marlowe, no question. This Guardian article from November 2000 states that production will start in March 2001, in Italy and London. It also uses (of course it does) that bugbear phrase ‘pub brawl’. The film was financed to the tune of $20m (enough in those days), and with those big names, yeah, it would have been made.
The fly in the ointment? The production company was a joint venture of Jude Law and Sadie Frost. By 2002, the marriage was not going well. In January 2003, they split. And that was the end of the Marlowe film. There are two more that got some way down the track, but were not greenlit. And Julien Temple, last I spoke to him (6 years ago), is still, I imagine, looking for a way to make his. Do I have a Marlowe film script to tout? Of course I do. And I am not the only one. But I don’t have any clout or any industry contacts.
Will a Marlowe movie get made someday? With momentum, yes, I think it has to. Will they have the poor bastard dying in a bar fight? You know, that’s what I think is the problem here. It’s a shitty end for an interesting movie. So I continue to hope that a future Marlowe film — and it surely has to happen — will be much more interesting than that.
If you liked this post, ‘like’ this post :-) Very happy also if you…
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Not a Tavern. Not a Brawl.
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August 28, 2024
The first thing anyone will tell you about Kit Marlowe is “he died in a tavern brawl.” Setting up this Substack, I was disappointed to find I was two months too late to get the domain kitmarlowe.subsstack.com, and even more disappointed to se…
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