A talk by Rory Loughnane

Marlowe Vs Shakespeare

🗓️ Saturday 7 November |🕑 Duration: 1.5 hours |💷 £6 / £5 (Members' price)

Talk by Rory Loughnane

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were born just eight weeks apart in the spring of 1564. One was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker who studied at Cambridge before transforming London’s commercial stage with Tamburlaine. The other came from Stratford-upon-Avon, married young, and arrived in London at about the same time to begin a theatrical career that would eventually eclipse all others.

Were they rivals, collaborators, or simply two ambitious dramatists emerging from the same rapidly changing theatrical world? This talk traces their intertwined early careers from the late 1580s until Marlowe’s untimely death in 1593. It explores how both authors helped shape England’s new commercial theatre, transformed poetry and drama, and—if recent scholarship is correct—may even have collaborated on several history plays.

Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, a General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works, and author of Shakespeare at Thirty (Princeton University Press, 2026) and The Ends of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2027).

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