Marlowe’s Complaint

Sometime late in 1598, Christopher Marlowe, the brilliant poet and playwright, wrote a scathing letter to his patron and protector, Sir Thomas Walsingham. Accusing him of having an “inconstant mind”, Marlowe threatened to “set down a story of faults concealed” and challenged him to “hate me when thou wilt.”

Sir Thomas, veteran of his “uncle’s” anti-Catholic intelligence service, would immediately have recognized the danger. Marlowe, who most of the English-speaking world believed had notoriously been “stabd to death by a bawdy seruing man” in a sleazy tavern brawl in mid-1593, was very much alive and threatening to reveal a secret that had kept them both safe for more than five years.

Painstakingly-researched, compellingly-argued, Marlowe’s Complaint is a tour-de-force read of Elizabethan intrigue, politics, and intelligence.

Dr Peter Hodges

Peter Hodges is a director, dramatist, and the author of Marlowe’s Complaint. He is the founder of the Caravan Theatre Company.