(no subject)

[no_sin_but]

Your name: Ashie

Your LJ name: tahira_saki

Your email: ashysaki@gmail.com

The character you want: Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Tudor Terror, no_sin_but

Who? (including background) Why? In his twenties, the Cambridge-educated Marlowe was the darling of the Elizabethan theatre with his radical, innovative plays before he was arrested for heresy (among other things) in 1593. After a knife fight with a friend, when a doctor mistakenly declared him dead, Marlowe changed his name to that of his now-dead friend/colleague Nicholas Skeres and continued as an assassin and spy for Queen Elizabeth for nine years until the events of canon, where he plots to kill Shakespeare but is talked out of it.

 

There are a number of reasons why I want to play Marlowe, the first being that he is such an interesting, challenging character. Shakespeare describes him as being hard and cold, despite his lively, boyish demeanour. He is a cynical man who is always holding something back, a radical rebel who utterly changed the way plays, and tragedy, were written, an atheist who can’t help but stir people up – both for his own humour and because he is genuinely, passionately, against religion and faith. He is a highly-educated genius, and a poet capable of beauty and sweetness as much as the grand bleakness of his plays. He has a wry sense of humour, and for all he stirs people up and speaks his mind where he should really shut up, he is discrete and faithful to his employers. He will be a challenge to play, but a fun, multi-faceted one. The other main reason that I want to play him is that he is the first of my characters to actually want redemption; for all that he is canonically a murderer, he can’t take it anymore. After nine years of exile within his own country, nine years of killing and spying for his Queen, Marlowe has reached the limit of how much blood and terror he can take. As I see it, the only reason Meg, Will and Hugh were able to talk him out of killing Shakespeare, a man whom he has nursed jealousy and hated against for nine years (The Bard, after all, can still write and is praised for it while Marlowe is dead and forgotten), is because he can’t bring himself to kill another person. When the trio offer him money to start again afresh, he takes it and vanishes. Marlowe wants redemption, a new life, and he takes the chance, which to me opens up a whole host of interesting possibilities within the context of M’ways, both in character and plot.