Marlowe's Massacre at Paris - And so let's forward to the massacre!

Saving the worst for last, it’s Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592?, published soon after), a poor play that is full of Marlovian stuff.  Marlowe dramatizes the 1572 Paris Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the subsequent series of devious betrayals by the principle massacrists.  Just slaughter from beginning to end, as grotesque as Titus Andronicus.  Like the Shakespeare horror show, the Massacre appears to have been a big hit for a while.  Give the people what they want - murders, and plenty of  'em.

The great villain, likely the showcase part for Edward Alleyn, master of these big, loud Marlowe roles, is the Duc de Guise, a classic Machiavellian schemer, the instigator of the Massacre and many other crimes.  “[T]hen toll the bell, / And so let’s forward to the massacre,” declares the Guise in Act I, Scene 5 (p. 550), accurately describing most of the rest of the play.

Whatever his ideological motivation, once he gets going he cannot overcome his momentum, his taste for power and murder, until inevitably someone stronger takes him down.  “Enter the CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD and three MURDERERS” (V.2, 573).  And after the Guise’s death the play still has a strangulation and two stabbings to go.

One reason I wanted to revisit The Massacre at Paris is because it is the only non-Shakespearian Age of Shakespeare play I have actually seen.  In a sense, because what I saw was a 2018 performance at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon of a French adaptation of the play titled Margot.  Of course the French audience is still interested in screwy English versions of French history.  The first few rows of seats were covered by plastic sheets, because the many many many stabbings were represented by the murderer-actors drinking a mouthful of dyed-red water from plastic bottles and them spraying the water as forcefully as possible all over the victim-actors.  Sometimes several people were murdered at once and the stage would explode into a cloud of red spray.  The scene of the murder of the Guise – I am confident the photo I have borrowed is form that scene – went on approximately forever, with the murderers circling the Guise, taking a swallow, spitting, circling, swallowing, spitting.  Disgusting; hilarious; in the spirit of the wreckage of the Marlowe play.

By which I mean, by the way, that the text we have is in terrible shape, maybe a quick job to cash in on Marlowe’s murder.  The play we have is too short, feels rushed, and in places does not quite make sense.  There is not enough “great and thundering speech.”  The French version is likely a better play.

I have returned to the Penguin Complete Plays for the text and page numbers.

Farewell to poor Marlowe.  In two weeks I will move into another era and write about Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) which I remember as pretty good.