Exploring Christopher Marlowe's Representation of Queer Desire in Literature

Today's special guest is Will Tosh, Head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe, London, and the author of a new book, “Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.” Having answered the obvious question in the prologue, the book becomes a sort of emotional biography of Shakespeare’s private life, but uses that his life and his work to ask broader questions about Elizabethan England, and especially how they understood their own sex gender system at the time. On today's special episode, we talk about one of his contemporaries, someone probably less well known but who has been deeply influential for queer writers and theatre practitioners through the ages: Christopher Marlowe.

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SOURCES:

Lukas Erne, 'Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe', Modern Philology 103.1 (2005), 28-50

Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)

Stephen Orgel, 'Tobacco and Boys: How Queer Was Marlowe?', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.4 (2000), 555-576

Christopher Shirley, ‘Sodomy and Stage Directions in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward(s) II’, Studies in English Literature 54.2 (2014), 279–296

Sydnee Wagner, 'New Directions: Towards a Racialized Tamburlaine', in David McInnes (ed.), Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Our intro is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner