no_sin_but

Name: Ashie

Email: ashysaki@gmail.com

LJ: tahira_saki

AIM: lamorgne

Character name: Christopher “Kit” Marlowe

Character LJ: no_sin_but

Canon: Tudor Terror

History: (note, I am using historical fact, theory and my own imagination to flesh out Marlowe’s background, but where his canon differs from history, I am using canon. In some cases this makes me wince, but canon is canon. Also, I do apologize for the length – this is actually my sorting it all out so I don’t trip myself up later. Say sorry?)

Marlowe was one of nine children born to a well-to-do shoemaker and his clergyman's daughter wife, and the first of the two sons to survive infancy. Receiving a scholarship at the age of fourteen, he began attending the prestigious King’s School in his native Canterbury. Two years later, he went on to attend the Corpus Christi College at Cambridge (again on a scholarship). It was while at Cambridge that he came to the attention of Lord Burleigh and Sir Francis Walsingham, who recruited him into their secret service. This service required him to spend time away from college, but when the college refused to give him his degree, the Privy Council itself intervened on his behalf; stating twice that the queen herself had an interest in the young man, and that he had been doing work on her behalf in France.

Needless to say that he got his MA as well as his BA after that.

It was also while at Cambridge that he started writing plays, and the London theatre loved them. He made the Shakespearean ‘blank-verse’ popular, paving the way for Shakespeare himself, and all of Marlowe’s plays were on controversial topics. The young Shakespeare deeply admired him, and after Marlowe saw Titus Andronicus, the two became friends and friendly-rivals. It was Marlowe who suggested to Shakespeare that he join the secret service, in return for gaining protection, and Shakespeare agreed. Marlowe, however, always worked harder at his spying then his friend, and he got himself in too deep to get out. His fearlessness in speaking his mind, and the double-cross world of Elizabethan spying led to Marlowe’s arrest on the 20th May, 1593. He was let off on bail, and early in the morning one night, he met up with Shakespeare pale and twitching from lack of sleep and desperation. He tells Will that the Catholic books were planted on him, probably on orders of their new spy-master, Robert Cecil. Shakespeare tries to calm him down, but in the end Marlowe just smiles and tells him that the English theatre is now Shakespeare’s, and in good hands. The same day, this time during actual daylight, Marlowe meets up with a Nicholas Skeres and an Ingram Frizer, two colleagues from the spying underground. They talk for eight hours in a respectable tavern in the port town of Deptford.

What happens next is never out right stated in the book, merely theorized by the character Meg (more to stall Marlowe from killing Shakespeare then anything else), but it is roughly what I am going to go with (admittedly with some added detail from my own research).

After eight hours of most likely fruitless discussion about how to save his life (Marlowe faces torture and burning at the stake), twitchy, sleep-deprived, cornered Marlowe looses his temper, and attacks Frizer. In the resulting fight, he is stabbed in the right eye. He looses consciousness, and it is then that Frizer and Skeres have their brilliant idea. They talk the coroner into declaring Marlowe dead, and substituting another body for his – which the coroner can actually do as he has another body handy. They hurriedly bury the false Marlowe in the plague pit and set to work hiding the real, and now right eyeless, Marlowe. Nicholas Skeres dies soon after in London, of the plague, and Marlowe assumes his identity and his work. Taking care to avoid people who would know him, and staying the hell away from the theatre world, Marlowe becomes a government assassin for the sake of the Queen.

Skip nine years of that, and we reach the events of canon. In a convoluted plot to kill Shakespeare before the now famous and successful playwright-spy can reveal who Nicholas Skeres actually is, he kidnaps his daughter, Judith. Shakespeare, with the aid of his friend, Hugh Richmond, and the two main heroes of the series, Will Marsden and Meg Lumley, comes up with the idea that he pretends to die while they all rescue his daughter. However, when Hugh, Will and Meg finally reach the tomb ‘Skeres’ is already there, sitting on a coffin with a dagger in his hand and watching the drugged Shakespeare. He threatens to kill him, but in the end Meg talks him out of it, telling him her theory of what really happened before adding some cold hard facts – his ‘Skeres’ name won’t be protection once Elizabeth is gone - but also pointing out that Marlowe could have killed them and didn’t. Hugh adds, genuinely, that if Marlowe had lived he would have been the greater playwright. Skeres/Marlowe takes ten pounds offered by Mistress Shakespeare to start again somewhere else, and vanishes into the night. It’s from this point that I will be taking him.

Personality: To begin with, he is a genius. He has a remarkable gift for languages, knowing at least three others aside from his native English (Latin, French, German) and most likely more (Italian, if nothing else), and an even more remarkable gift with words – he paved the way for Shakespeare with his daring, innovative plays. And with those plays Marlowe shows that he is not afraid to be different, not afraid to not only break the rules but shatter them for his own purposes. Of course, this willingness to break rules and do, and say, what he likes is what landed him a whole lot of trouble, along with his infamously hot temper. A rebel against society, he isn’t afraid to inform people of their stupidity. And he thinks religion is very, very stupid.

About Marlowe, Shakespeare-in-the-book says this: “ I also believe that he went to those cheap taverns because he enjoyed the atmosphere. He loved the crime and filth and the very danger. Marlowe loved danger. Marlowe was danger.”

In a lot of ways, that speaks for itself. Marlowe is a hard, cold, dangerous man who sought the kind of society where he fit right in. For all his book-genius and poetic-turn-of-word, Marlowe is, or rather was a man capable of very base things – talk, acts, and murder. By the end of the book, though, he is tired of it. He is tired of the killing, tired of the darkness and grim that he has been exiled to. World-weary and sick of blood and terror, when he is offered a chance of something better he actually takes it.

Why do you want to play this character?: For multiple reasons, none the least that I have always found his character intriguing in the book; a hard, dangerous man who loved to slum it despite his scholarships, a spy and assassin who could write poetry and plays. He is an older character then I am used to playing, with the world-weariness and cyncism that comes with it. He is normally rough in speech, but as a highly educated poet he can have a lyrical turn of phrase if he chose, which makes a contrast to my other characters in Eden. He is also atypical of most poets in fiction, being a very, very dangerous man instead of the normal fops.

What is also interesting about this Marlowe is that he is tired of the life he has been living, the secrecy and the killing. In the end, he could have killed Shakespeare, and he didn’t. He could have killed Will, Meg and Hugh Richmond, and instead he chose to walk away. I do not think this is because of any sense of conscience, just more a tiredness of blood and terror, and a rememberance that once there had been more to life. I think that would be an interesting thing to play with, another dimension to his character that could all to be easily lost.

Like I have said the personality section, Marlowe takes the offer of something better, and this is perhaps one of the main reasons why I want to play him. Perhaps it is a question of redeemption for him, maybe a chance to humanize himself, whatever it is I really want to discover why he took the money and left without killing them, and I feel that Eden – away from the Elizabethen world – offers that chance, both for him and for me.

Entrance Post:

Marlowe is, not to put too fine a point on it, drunk. He has been drunk, in fact, since he reached the Hanged Man early this morning. The tavern was back with its normal owner, now that he and Frizer have finished with it and anyway it doesn't matter anymore.

Elizabeth is dying. And none of it mattered. Mattered, matters, matter and Marlowe is very, very drunk because his Queen is dying and once she is gone, he will be killed. Way of things and God he hates Cecil. Fucking Robert Cecil, and because Marlowe is in that kind of mood, the mood where cheap wine and self-pity have combined, he remembers Walsingham. Both of them, Franics and Thomas and he had always been Walsingham's man...

"Little Cecil trips up and down, he rules both court and crown," Marlowe sings to himself, bitterly, and blinks as his voice echoes back at him. Slowly, he turns around. Slowly, his legs fold underneath him and he lands on his back, staring at the stars.

"Been decorating?" He asks the world at large. "Decorating. Stars. Like the Globe..."