Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford in Anonymous, 2011. Anthony Burgess’s Marlowe bio-novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), similarly sees them as star writer and occasional sidekick, and specifically as partners on Henry VI Part One. Yet to pen a single word of “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”, Joseph Fiennes’s Shakespeare, a struggling wannabe with writer’s block, is set on the course to greatness when Marlowe, played by Rupert Everett, suggests an Italian setting, romance entangled with a family feud and the death of Romeo’s best friend in a fight. The idea that the playwrights collaborated is anticipated in John Madden’s Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, scripted by Tom Stoppard, where Marlowe is Elizabethan theatre’s undisputed No 1 (“there’s no one like Marlowe”, says Henslowe, and almost all the audition scene hopefuls choose the same speech from Doctor Faustus). How the partnership worked is unclear: the academic editors behind the project have said the playwrights may have written together, or a draft could have been handed on or around (like team-authored scripts in Hollywood today) for additions and rewrites.
In the Oxford complete Shakespeare, published on 27 October, Marlowe is credited as co-writer on the title pages of all three parts of Henry VI for the first time in a Collected Works and reportedly is regarded as the lead writer on Part One, the debut covering England’s defeats in France after Henry V’s death that gave the young Shakespeare a deceptive reputation as a jingoistic chronicler of war (hitherto Marlowe has been cited among possible collaborators on it, but with others seen as more likely). But there is no documentary evidence of them meeting, let alone pooling resources. Shakespeare, also born in 1564 but a comparatively late starter (he staged his first play in 1590/91), paid graceful homage to him in As You Like It and was clearly influenced by him in choice of subject and individual passages. In the conventional account of his career, Marlowe had written at least five plays, starting with his 1587 smash hit Tamburlaine, and the narrative poem Hero and Leander, by the time of his much-speculated-about death in a knife fight in Deptford in 1593 – but, unlike most of his Elizabethan peers, idiosyncratic Kit is not viewed as having added to his CV as a team-writer. Speculative, challenging and entertaining, the book will appeal to those interested in Shakespeare, movies and the representation of love in narratives.By crediting Christopher Marlowe this week as the previously unacknowledged co-writer of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, the New Oxford Shakespeare’s editors have added another portrayal of Marlowe – the handy helpmeet working with a less experienced writer, and apparently not seeking recognition for the results – to the wildly contrasting other versions of him (and of his relationship, if any, with Shakespeare) offered by novels, plays and screen fiction. The book traces generic links between Shakespeare's comedies of love and screen genres such as romantic comedy, 'screwball' comedy and musicals, as well as clarifying the use of common conventions defining the genres, such as mistaken identity, 'errors', disguise and 'shrew-taming'. The nature of generic indebtedness has not gained recognition because it is elusive and not always easy to recognise.
Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet continues to be an enduring source for romantic tragedy on screen. Shakespeare's 'green world' has a close functional equivalent in 'tinseltown' and on 'the silver screen', as well as in hybrid genres in Bollywood cinema.
This engaging and stimulating book argues that Shakespeare's plays significantly influenced movie genres in the twentieth century, particularly in films concerning love in the classic Hollywood period.