A battle of quills
Playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both born in 1564, but Marlowe came to prominence first, when his first play, Tamburlaine the Great, was successfully staged in 1587 by the Admiral’s Men, London’s leading theater troupe. His other great dramas include The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus and Edward II, one of the first plays based on English history.
The Cambridge-educated Marlowe was an exceptionally skilled poet and translator, as well as a playwright, and the perfector of blank verse, with its unrhymed lines that are usually in iambic pentameter. He was almost certainly a spy in the service of Queen Elizabeth and was definitely an irascible and violent figure, notorious for espousing unorthodox religious beliefs. Marlowe was killed at age 29 during a fight with three other men over who should pay the bill at a disreputable lodging house.
Shakespeare probably arrived in London during the late 1580s, still very much an apprentice playwright trying to discover his voice and perfect his craft. The first known performance of a play believed to be his was in 1592, when Harey the VI was staged at the Rose Theater. Recent scholarship suggests it may have been co-authored with Marlowe, an event depicted in Born With Teeth.
KING CHARLES II AND NELL GWYNNE
Restoration comedy refers to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy as Great Britain’s ruling body in 1660, following a 20-year period marked by civil war and rule by Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Lord Protector. King Charles II quickly reopened the theaters, which had been closed since 1642, and almost as quickly such writers as Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, and William Congreve created a new form of fast-moving, witty comedy that gloried in the sexual and other excesses of the upper classes.
Charles II was known as “the merry monarch” thanks to his jovial nature, love of music and theater, and the almost unfettered access his subjects had to him. His marriage to Catherine of Braganza produced no surviving children, a fact he somewhat overcompensated for by fathering at least a dozen offspring with a variety of mistresses.
His favorite among them was the actress Nell Gwynne, who excelled in comic roles and whose life had a Cinderella-like quality. Her mother seems to have run a brothel in Covent Garden, and her first job in the theater was serving as a scantily clad “orange girl,” hawking fruit to audience members during performances.
She and Charles had two sons, to whom the king granted noble titles. On his deathbed in 1685, Charles told his brother, “Let not poor Nelly starve,” and he didn’t, cancelling most of her debts and giving her an annual pension of £1,500. Nelly was poor no more but didn’t enjoy her financial status long; she died from a stroke two years later.