MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper discusses how William Leonard Courtney, an Oxford graduate and prominent theatrical critic in London in the late 19th/early 20th century, wrote a short play in 1890 based on the death of playwright Christopher Marlowe. The play, entitled “Kit Marlowe’s Death”, which was essentially an academic fan fiction. My paper is based around my discovery of papers relating to William Leonard Courtney in Harvard University’s Houghton Library and the fact that Harvard purchased Courtney’s book, containing this play, in 1892 at a critical moment in the development of Harvard’s English Department. A skillful writer who had only somewhat begrudgingly left his academic career behind at Oxford, Courtney combined his journalistic curiosity and dramatic experience to write a one-act play, “Kit Marlowe’s Death”. Courtney’s ever-present, almost effervescent love of Marlowe constantly threatens to sweep the entire play away into the realm of sentimental melodrama. Courtney’s villain, Archer, may well have the best line in the play; when he tries to determine his beloved’s other suitor, he can only helplessly sputter, “Is it - may God confound him - is it that handsome, careless, devil-may-care Kit Marlowe, with his saucy manners and his sparkling eyes, who hath taken the whole town by storm?”. This brief quotation communicates the tone of the whole piece. “Kit Marlowe’s Death” emerges as Courtney’s creative endeavor to satisfy his scholarly curiosity about Christopher Marlowe’s character and the circumstances of his tragic death, and its presence at Harvard indicates that it may have been of interest to the new and highly influential English Department. Finally, I discuss what relevance the play itself and its presence at Harvard has for modern scholars of both the 19th century and the Renaissance.