Learn about the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe ahead of 'Born With Teeth'

Liz Duffy Adams's West End play sees Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel star as the famous playwriting rivals – and possible collaborators.

Marianka Swain30 July, 2025, 18:00

It’s a battle of quills at the Wyndham’s Theatre as Liz Duffy Adams dramatises the fascinating relationship between playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Duffy’s play Born With Teeth, co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, stars Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel as the rivalrous, but possibly collaborative, literary icons.

Gatwa has called the play “a sexy cat and mouse game”, while Bluemel said he was drawn into the “high-stakes world” and the “incredible, creative chemistry” between the two men, who were both Elizabethan rock stars. Learn more about the real Shakespeare and Marlowe, and how their lives and careers intersected in 16th-century England.

Book Born With Teeth tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Shakespeare and Marlowe were contemporaries

William Shakespeare was born in 1564. By the 1590s he was an actor in London and beginning to establish himself as a talented playwright. Christopher “Kit” Marlowe was likewise born in 1564 (he was probably around two months older than Shakespeare), but he made a faster start and rose to fame earlier, in the late 1580s.

Marlowe’s acclaimed plays included: Tamburlaine the Great, about the Central Asian emperor; The Jew of Malta, about a Jewish merchant who seeks revenge; Edward II, about the homosexual 14th-century English king; Doctor Faustus, about a scholar who sells his soul to the devil; and Dido, Queen of Carthage, about the classical figure who is betrayed by her lover Aeneas.

In that same period, Shakespeare’s plays likely included: Henry VI (about which more shortly), The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and The Comedy of Errors.

They shared sources, subjects and actors

There is plenty of crossover between Shakespeare and Marlowe’s work. Edward II is a historical drama about an English monarch, just like numerous Shakespeare plays, and there are particular similarities with Richard II — in its structure and in themes, like whether kings have a divine right to rule and absolute power over their subjects.

Additionally, Marlowe used Holinshed’s Chronicles as his source material — as did Shakespeare for his history plays. Edward II was played by Richard Burbage in the original production; Burbage also starred in Shakespeare plays like Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear.

Marlowe’s Dido draws on a classical source, Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare also visited the ancient world — via his preferred source, Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans — in plays like Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

There is also thematic overlap between Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

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They might have written Henry VI together

Born With Teeth, which is set in the early 1590s, dramatises the much-debated idea that Marlowe and Shakespeare collaborated on Henry VI. This trilogy of history plays centres on the 15th-century English king leading up to the Wars of the Roses. The show’s title is from this play: “Oh Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth”.

The theory goes that the slightly older, more experienced, and better-educated Marlowe — who was a scholarship pupil at The King’s School, Canterbury, and studied at the University of Cambridge — aided the rougher-edged but evidently brilliant Shakespeare on the project.

The movie Shakespeare in Love portrayed a similar dynamic, with Marlowe (Rupert Everett) as the great luminary, offering advice to Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) as the latter was struggling to write Romeo and Juliet.

Marlowe may have been a spy

As much as historians differ on the subject of Henry VI’s authorship, so there are dozens of competing theories around why the successful Marlowe would deign to collaborate with Shakespeare. One includes his rumoured secret role as a government spy during a particularly febrile time in English history.

Marlowe might possibly have acted as tutor to Arabella Stuart, niece of Mary, Queen of Scots — Elizabeth I’s Catholic rival to the throne — but was actually monitoring Mary for signs of rebellion against Elizabeth. Marlowe was also arrested in the Netherlands in 1592 for allegedly counterfeiting coins, but that could have been a cover for spying on Catholic activities.

Shakespeare might have been suspected of being a secret Catholic (forbidden under Elizabeth I’s rule) since his mother came from a devout Catholic family. So, might Marlowe have been instructed to keep a close eye on him?

Marlowe could have been attracted to Shakespeare

Another possibility is that there was a sexual spark between them — or at least an interest on Marlowe’s side. Marlowe often explored homosexual themes in his work, such as Edward II and his poem Hero and Leander. Some historians believe Marlowe himself was gay.

We do know Shakespeare deeply valued his time with Marlowe. Following the latter’s death, Shakespeare paid tribute to him in As You Like It, quoting a line from Hero and Leander: “Dead Shepherd, now I find they saw of might, ‘Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?’”. Shakespeare might also have been referencing Marlowe’s death via the line “a great reckoning in a little room”.

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Marlowe’s mysterious death

While Shakespeare continued his illustrious career, until his death in 1616, Marlowe’s was tragically cut short. He died in dramatic circumstances in 1593, aged just 29. Reports differ of what exactly happened. One account suggests Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern in Deptford after getting into an argument with Ingram Frizer over the bill — or, in Elizabeth parlance, the “reckoning”.

But there are plenty of conspiracy theories too. Some suggest his death was linked to his sexuality, or that it was a political assassination: Marlowe had spent the day with other men employed by Elizabeth I’s spymaster Thomas Walsingham (and Marlowe might also have been on his payroll).

There was also speculation that the queen had ordered his death because of his supposed atheism or treasonous intentions. Days before another playwright, Thomas Kyd, had been arrested and found in possession of a heretical tract — under torture, he claimed it was Marlowe’s and that he was a traitor.

One wild theory even claims Marlowe faked his death and fled the country — and later wrote plays credited to one William Shakespeare.

What can you expect in Born With Teeth?

Liz Duffy Adams’s play takes place in the backroom of a London tavern, giving us a tantalising series of meetings between Marlowe and Shakespeare during that potent time of blossoming creativity and dangerous paranoia. Expect to see some of this real history (and endless debates!) reflected in the piece: the trail-blazing pair’s mutual admiration and rivalry, attraction and suspicion.

Edward Bluemel, whose work includes TV shows A Suspicion of Witches, Killing Eve, and My Lady Jane, and stage play Love In Idleness, stars as Marlowe. Shakespeare is played by Ncuti Gatwa, known to audiences from Doctor Who, Barbie, and, on stage, The Importance of Being Earnest. They both also appeared in Sex Education.

Born With Teeth is directed by the RSC’s co-artistic director, Daniel Evans, and runs at the Wyndham’s Theatre – the play’s keenly anticipated West End premiere.