Our Unwanted Journey (2001)

“Soon after we got out of the hospital, my brother Harrol asked if we wouldn’t like to stay with him and his family in London. They had a couple of free weeks in June. June. We hadn’t thought of life past the due date. The summer was supposed to spent with a new baby. We accepted their invitation immediately.” - I Hate This (a play without the baby)

Father's Day, 2001

When we took our massive, three week Southern road trip in the year 2000, it was intended to be our last vacation for a while. We made plans. And God said, “Fuck you.”

Looking over our materials from that trip, I was surprised by many things, not least of which is how much made its way into I Hate This. I shouldn’t have been too surprised.

Sun., June 17: Father’s Day. No ties or socks, please. I’d just like my dead son back.

Finished “The Sparrow” late last night. Toni finished its sequel, “The Children of God” almost an hour before, and was very sad. That one ends with someone holding a baby.

Lots of things end with someone holding a baby. In fact, I may have said everything ends with someone holding a baby. Nothing ends with someone holding a dead baby. Maybe we should change that.

I hadn’t yet read Buried Child, but still. I was onto something.

I Hate This has been noted for my stoicism, or my dispassionate accounting. My journal from this trip tells another story, where I make note of no fewer than four times I had to excuse myself to go cry somewhere alone in one of the many rooms in the house my brother and his family were managing.

We also saw a remarkable number of plays, remarkable in that my wife didn’t feel like doing much of anything at all at that time, or not much more than to sit in parks and watch the birds. I was still (theoretically) managing a theater company, seeking inspiration and desperate for distraction. Also, our eldest brother had also joined us and what do you do on vacation but go and see things.

Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber
"Night Manager"

Night Manager created by Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber (LIFT: the London International Festival of Theatre)

Wed. June 13: A boat ride down the Thames at dusk. We wore headsets and listened to poetry about life underwater (the fear, the subconscious) while attendants served us a mint, warm milk and species, gave us a blanket, while we watched London drift by in the dark. It was a pleasant experience. (DH)

“Despite the discreet revelation of this stretch of the Thames at dusk … you find yourself gazing more at the dark grey water itself than at the cityscape on its banks. [Björner] Torsson's text encourages you to slip into reverie; after a while, the words are there not so much to be listened to as to maintain the semi-hypnotic state into which you have drifted.” 

- Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times

Howard Katz by Patrick Marber (National Theatre)

I have already written about this. The timing was poor.

Thu., June 14: I like it better upon reflection than I did watching it … a modern cross between King Lear and the story of Job where one awful man loses everything … his epiphany comes as a result of remembering what it felt like when his son was born. It upset Toni a lot. Made for a shitty trip home. We did have hot chocolate and Bailey’s in the kitchen, the five of us, and a nice time talking there.

Stephen Mangan, Lynn Redgrave
"Noises Off" by Michael Frayn

Noises Off by Michael Frayn (Piccadilly Theatre)

My junior year in high school, we conducted a workshop of first act of Noises Off and during my senior year the Cleveland Play House produced the first professional production I had seen. This was my second, a National Theatre transfer that now starred Lynn Redgrave and Stephen Mangan, who would later star in the fucking hilarious TV show Green Wing.

Fri., June 15: Lynn Redgrave. Man. She is a loon. First act was all right. The second they shouted too much. Gave me a headache.

Father’s Day proper we eschewed theater altogether, my brother and his wife thoughtfully proposing a drive to the New Forest Otter, Owl & Wildlife Park.

Sun., June 17: The park was very big; boards, wallabies, deer, ferrets, polecats – and lots of otters. Europeans, Asian, British, Canadian, big, small, swimming, galloping, dry, wet … very fun, very moving. We stayed a lovely, long time.

And then we had dinner at Outback Steakhouse.

Bill Nighy and Chiwetel Ejiofor
"Blue/Orange" by Joe Penhall

Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall (Duchess Theatre)

Every time I see professional theater in Britain, inevitably one or usually more of the actors in any given production eventually become stars in America. They were probably already famous in Britain, on stage and the Beeb but I’d never heard of them.

I have caught more than one play about the National Health Service (NHS). Two years ago that would have been People, Places and Things by Duncan Macmillan, a quarter century ago it was Blue/Orange, a three-hander in which two doctors debate whether or not a man who claims to be the son of Idi Amin (and believes oranges are blue) deserves his state-sponsored hospital bed.

All three actors were very good. They also happened to be Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy.

Remember when everyone was writing plays that had two word titles with a slash in the middle?

Tue., June 19: I read the new Neil LaBute, “The Shape of Things,” now playing at the Almeida. Honestly. What is wrong with that man? I think he is a good writer, he just doesn’t write good. Here he’s trying to write something like "Closer" only it’s closer to Oleanna in its lack of balance and treatment of women and his male protagonist doesn’t deserve anything that happens to him.

Jasper Britton and Eve Best
"Macbeth" by William Shakespeare

Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Globe)
Tim Carroll, Master of Play

This was my first experience hearing a play at Shakespeare’s Globe, though as of 2026 I have only seen two. We participated in a tour the last time we were in town, shortly before the grand opening. Since that time, and under the artistic direction of Mark Rylance, the company had distinguished itself by its dedication to historical accuracy in design and, as near as can be ascertained, performance.

This production of The Scottish Play, however, was controversial for its nontraditional conceit, with the entire cast (including witches) dressed in tuxedoes, with the exception of Lady M. (Eve Best) in a silky, silver gown. The cool jazz score was composed by Claire van Kampen, and I am so grateful to have had the foresight to purchase that CD.

“It is welcome and right that the Globe should start to experiment and move on from what was in danger of becoming museum Shakespeare, but Carroll's production doesn't even tell the story clearly. There is too much paraphernalia, as if every bright idea has been indiscriminately incorporated rather than carefully considered. So we get blood and death represented not just by gold tinsel, but also by coloured feathers and pebbles thrown in buckets.”
- Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

Well. I enjoyed it a lot.

Peter Capaldi and Henry Goodman
"Feelgood" by Alistair Beaton

Feelgood by Alistair Beaton (Garrick Theatre)

Not all political dramas have a freshness date, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui still holds up, but this one was a bit whiffy when it premiered. I was excited to see Nigel Planer (The Young Ones) live on stage, but the delight of the evening was Peter Capaldi (who?) as a frazzled No. 10 speech writer. It would not surprise me if this turned out to be his unintentional audition for The Thick of It a few years later.

Wed. June 20: Well. I am sick of bad playwriting. Saw "Feelgood” tonight. Wish I hadn’t. Left me depressed. Stupid, preachy, unfunny comedy. It’s a TV movie on-stage. I hate that.

School Play by Suzy Almond (Soho Theatre)

Our final production – in London. A play which puts the lie to the time-worn story of the teacher with a heart of gold who helps disenchanted students discover their true selves. What if the teacher isn’t actually very good, in a very real and troubling way?

“The situation is ripe with sentimental opportunities, all of which Almond strenuously resists. What she actually shows is two solitary misfits with a ruthless eye for each other's weaknesses.”
- Michael Billington, The Guardian

Returning home, we had made plans to spend a few days in NYC before taking a train home. This turned out to be an error, we were emotionally spent from our journey and ready to just not do anything.

And yet. We spent a lovely morning getting tickets to see Mary Zimmerman’s production of Measure for Measure at the Delacorte, starring Billy Crudup, Sanaa Lathan and Joe Morton. As it happened, we would be back in August to see the other free summer offering in the park, but to attend The Seagull we would need to spend the night.

See also:
Howard Katz (play)
The Seagull (2001)

Sources:
Review: Macbeth by Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 6/7/2001 
Review: School Play by Michael Billington, The Guardian. 6/24/2001

"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Berthe Morisot
with Bouquet of Violets
etching, Édouard Manet, 1872

Last week, I was out with a friend, it was trivia night at The Bottlehouse. She was talking about the future, I was talking about the past. I have a future, at least I believe I do, but oh man, I have been overwhelmed by the past lately.

For example, on Saturday evening, I caught the Seat of the Pants production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias, playing through May 31 at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Tremont. In the 1990s I performed in a surprising number of shows in Pilgrim, beginning with the 1992 Working Theatre production of Jean Racine’s Andromache, and concluding with Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton, and produced by Red Hen Theatre in 1998.

  

Lisa Lewis & David Hansen
"Andromache"
by Jean Racine
The Working Theatre, 1992

The Book Club Play takes place in a nice living room in modern America, and as SOTP specializes in site-specific plays, they found a pleasant sitting room at Pilgrim for the performance. This room is adjacent to the actual theater space (with a platform stage and traditionally seating) and was one we used as a dressing room for Eight Impressions.

I shared a bit about that production a couple years ago, one of those experiences I used to have, when I took myself seriously as an actor. I read several books on the character I was playing, Édouard Manet, and on the subject of the play, Berthe Morisot. For the first time in my life, I studied painting. I grew my hair out. I added to my shallow education in everything.

Manet & Morisot
David Hansen & Tracey Field
"Eight Impressions of a Lunatic"
by Sarah Morton
Red Hen Productions, 1998
Photo: Anthony Gray

It is a marvelous thing to be so prepared, so attired, so transformed. And I had it so easy; Morisot and her mother, speaking of my character before I entered, the great man, generating expectation and anxiety in them and in the audience. There is a particular moment, when the charming and confident man appraises the woman’s work, when he is surprised, sees beauty, originality, remarkable talent, and he is amazed, even threatened.

I have a good friend who has told me he was taken with that brief moment, that I succeeded in communicating all of those things. Good for me. What I remember is that no matter how much self-confidence, even arrogance, that I was able to maintain, it was only from the shoulders up. When Tracey Field, as Morisot, handed me a cup of tea, my hands shook so terribly. Every single time. My face can fool people. My hands, not so much.

Berthe Morisot Reclining
Édouard Manet, 1873

Last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to University Circle. First, I explored the Cleveland History Center. I had been looking forward to checking out the Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit, which held a few surprises (I want to know more about those Cleveland-based lithograph houses that were some of the biggest producers of movie posters during the silent era) but was padded out with a lot of photos of movie stars who grew up – or spent a some time – in Cleveland. That’s not really interesting, that’s just trivia.

But as long as I was there, I decided to just wander around. There's a lovely exhibit on community-based health care. I got fairly lost in the Hay-McKinney Mansion, a large wing of the museum I’d never taken the time to experience before. There were no other people around and I became concerned that I had entered some “employees only” area, especially when I encountered the servants’ quarters. But things were labeled for display, and marked “please do not touch” so I assumed the best.

" ... out of a DeLorean?!"

In fact, I saw the servants’ dining room before I saw the main dining room, and I thought, this is cozy. And there’s a lot of natural light. The Hay-KcKinney dining room was grand and opulent and dark and felt dusty.

And I hit the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which I have been to many times (we even attended a wedding reception there in the late 90s) not so much to see the cars, but the peer through the windows of the recreated Euclid Avenue storefronts located along one wall in the lower level.

I was reminded of Yesterday’s Main Street at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which my family first visited some fifty years ago. As an eight year-old, every exhibit made an indelible impression, and in idle moments, or drifting off to sleep, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in a different time and place.

Or maybe just a different time. My kids tease me about my obsession with the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. And it’s true, if you were to use the DeLorean they have at the Crawford Museum, to travel to any time or place in history, I wouldn’t choose the birth of Christ (that might settle some arguments) or Shakespeare’s London (that wouldn’t settle any arguments) I would choose the summer of 1936, Cleveland, Ohio.

For more information, check out the script for my play Cleveland Centennial! or read this blog from the beginning.

The story of Manet and Morisot is one of mutual respect and admiration, and it’s one that still interests me because I seek out such symbiotic artistic relationships in my life.

Morton’s play is a feminist work, one centered on Morisot, and her struggle to create art while also accepting her place in bourgeois society – she wants to be married, to have a child, she also wants to paint and for her work to be acknowledged. Like most of us, she wants happiness.

Self-portrait
Berthe Morisot, 1885

And Manet was just one part of that equation. A mentor, a colleague, even if you will, a muse.

Many of the works currently on display at the the CMA are Manet’s studies and paintings of Morisot, and they are lovely, tasteful portraits of a proper, middle-class woman, often dressed in black, occasionally reclining, though never the subject of a fictional work like Olympia or Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (no, those two aren’t here in Cleveland) though the very best painting of Morisot is the last one we encounter before exiting through the gift shop – a self-portrait, painted when she was forty-four. She painted what she saw in the mirror, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, palette and brush at hand.

She looks happier.

"Manet & Morisot" at the Cleveland Museum of Art continues through July 5, 2026 -- with free admission on Saturday June 6, to celebrate the CMA's 110th birthday.

The Short Play Project: Elven Council (2020, 2026)

2020

Starting in 2019, I began writing one short play, pretty much every day. I mean, I did wrote a short play every day, some of them weren't any good so I never typed them up. But I did create a tremendous number of three or four page plays in a very brief time.

The day the quarantine began, in March 2020, I put out a call for anyone who wanted to participate in a "social distance art experiment" to make a video from one of (at this point) hundred of my short plays, which I would then edit and post. This became The Short Play Project.

Two of my friends recorded their precocious four year old twins to perform the script Elven Council. I forget the prompt, it may have been "fantasy" or "power" or anything, really. I was inspired by some of the poorly thought out plot points of certain works of fiction -- take the Horcrux (please.) I will break up my soul and place it into other things. Nothing dumb about that.

2026

Douglas Adams mocked this in one of the Hitchhiker books; Why have a dozen or so different forms of identification (bank card, passport, work permit) when you can have all of them -- and your DNA and fingerprints -- all packaged in one handy card!

Then someone steals it. Anyway, that’s the joke.

So, back in 2020, the twins put on their Elsa and Anna costumes, created a masterpiece, and the rest is history.

This week, the girls (now ten) recalled that time they made a video about an elven council and were trying to remember the details. Their mom suggested they all watch it, and so they were inspired to try it again.

The coda is entirely their own.

You can watch the entire Short Play Project here.

The Balance of Power (play)

I was asked to create a light entertainment for a judicial conference. The subject, resolved: the balance of power in the United States federal government, as described in that classic School House Rock anthem, “Three-Ring Government."

No one can be
More powerful than any other is
Each controls the other, you see
And that’s what we call checks and balances.

Martin Friedman, who reached out to me about the work, and directed today’s performance, asked that I focus on the case of Marbury v. Madison – you know, that famous 1803 Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison.

In all seriousness, however, when I asked this lawyer acquaintance of mine about it, he was quite familiar, that case is Law School 101, the one which established the Supreme Court’s power to strike down any law deemed “unconstitutional.”

So, I would be describing to a hall of judges and lawyers a case with which they were already very familiar? Got it. We’re making it funny.

Carrie Williams

Researching (and comprehending) Marbury led me backward to the Federalist Papers, and Alexander “THE OTHER FIFTY-ONE” Hamilton, so he’s in there. 

I also learned that Marbury was only time the Supreme Court overturned an act of Congress for fifty-four years, the next time being the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). I tried to drop in a piece about that, but you know what? The Dred Scott Decision isn't funny.

It was suggested that the show culminate with Richard Nixon, and his decision to cleave to his oath and resign the Presidency, even or because he eventually did so only because he was compelled to by the other two branches of government. And the press.

To bridge these century-spanning events, and to bring things into a contemporary context, I staged an argument between the four current, adult, living generations of Americans about the Constitutional crises of their respective youths. Because I had been asked specifically not to mention you-know-who, as if that was even necessary.

This play script is available for reading at New Play Exchange.   

"The Balance of Power" was commissioned by and performed for the Judicial Conference of the Eighth Judicial District at the Hilton Downtown on Friday, April 24, 2026.

The Five (book)

When did serial killers become sexy? Why did serial killers become sexy? Or more to the point, when did they become interesting? Fascinating? A subject of intellectual discourse of heated debate? Because to a man, they are all complete losers.

There was great interest in these losers in the 1990s, due in some part, I guess, to the 1992 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs. It is not, however, the subject of the manhunt, Buffalo Bill, who became iconic, but the already incarcerated murderer, Hannibal Lecter, as performed by Anthony Hopkins. He’s cool, eerie, stylish, witty, brilliant, and, some would say, sexy.

He wasn’t the first murderer to hold my interest, however. That would be David Warner as Dr. John Leslie Stevenson in the 1979 time traveling romp, Time After Time. Malcolm McDowell, playing against type, is the bespectacled, naive and charming H.G. Wells, who (in this fictional tale) invents an actual, functional time machine. The device proves advantageous when the police arrive to arrest Dr. Stevenson, who uses it to escape Wells’ home, the city of London and the 19th Century. For Dr. Stevenson also happens to be the man known as “Jack the Ripper.”

Warner’s character travels through time – and space! – to disco-era San Francisco, where he continues his compulsion for slaughtering sex workers.

Because that’s what we know about him, isn’t it? I queried my brother recently, what do you know about Jack the Ripper? Nothing, he told me. I asked who his victims were. He said sex workers.

Seriously, my sixty-four year old brother said sex workers, not prostitutes. We have Gen Z children, after all.

Warner’s “Jack” was cool, eerie, stylish, witty, brilliant, and, some would say, sexy.

We seem to ascribe an extraordinary intelligence to serial murderers, and I imagine we do so due to the fact that they get away with it. They are "always one step ahead of the police” or that some even manage to stay anonymous, forever.

In the mid-to-late 1990s I read both Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer by Steven Nickel and Paul W. Heimel’s Eliot Ness: The Real Story. The Ness-Cleveland connection greatly interested me (duh) and exposed me to the so-called Torso Murders, a series of grisly killings which occurred in the 1930s, and primarily during Ness’s tenure as Safety Director.

Attempts to connect these crimes are specious, but that hasn’t prevented folks from crafting their own theories about a single perpetrator. I personally cleave to the belief that these murders are unrelated. I was particularly grateful when this theory was put into print by Cleveland true crime author John Stark Bellamy in his book The Maniac in the Bushes (and More Tales of Cleveland Woe) that in the absence of corroborating evidence these tragedies should be assumed to be the work of different individuals.

Much has been made of this one guy, a member of a well-placed political family, who wrote taunting letters to Ness, claiming to be the culprit. But what of that? I send taunting letters to the Vice President every week.

Regardless, this desire to tell stories about these violent criminals … before Dexter, a contemporary cable program in which the serial killer is the hero because he kills other killers (oy) there was the X-Files spin-off Millennium. An FBI agent played by Lance Henriksen has the ability to access the sight of criminals, to see what they see. The first season was all about the crimes of serial killers, and I checked out from that show pretty fast. A network program thick with images of pain and horror.

Because that’s what we’re talking about – pain and horror. And as with fictions (Silence of the Lambs, Millennium, Dexter) or reality (Kingsbury Run or Whitechapel) the focus is on the killer. Ostensibly, to discover who he is, but also, because – as they say – he fascinates us.

Except he doesn’t. If reality has shown us anything, it’s that actual serial murderers are not interesting. They aren’t surgical villains with a penchant for chianti. They are outcasts and losers. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, Wayne Williams and John Wayne Gacy, unremarkable sociopaths.

The Whitechapel murders of 1888 inspired the legend of Jack the Ripper. That’s not even a real name, it originates from an anonymous letter to the editor of a newspaper, and almost certainly fake. Popular subjects have included barristers, doctors, and – of course – those within the sphere of the Royal Family.

The single, unidentified person of “Jack” killed five women over a period of several months, and then never again. These five are referred to as “canonical” which, while accurate because it means – generally – to be accepted as part of a group, is offensive to me as it lends legitimacy to something that cannot be known and is likely to be false.

All five were women, and all five have always been said to be sex workers. My introduction to “Jack the Ripper” was the film Time After Time, and it begins with Warner’s doctor encountering and then murdering a woman who has made it clear that the encounter is meant to be transactional.

In her book, The Five, author Hallie Rubenhold does what no one thought to do before, which is to question the common wisdom and to investigate the lives of the victims. Contemporary police accounts state clearly that all five were “prostitutes.” Rubenhold thoroughly documents the prevailing assumption at that time that all destitute women were, or that they may as well be so.

In describing the lives of each woman, we understand each; their unique descent into penury – which brought each to this locale, a district of London which was just one center for the destitute and unhoused – and their commonality, namely that each had an addiction to alcohol.

Rather than slaughtered in the act of solicitation, the first four were much more likely to have been preyed upon while sleeping out-of-doors, while the fifth – also sleeping – was surprised in her bed, the door to her one-room, ground floor apartment easily opened. To ascribe a (still) socially unacceptable occupation has always diminished their personhood, adding “they asked for it” to their epitaphs. But they were human people, undeserving of their economic status as well as their horrifying demise.

This is an actual, mass-marketed
"Jack the Ripper" costume.

This throws some salt into the works for many “Ripperologists” (a hateful term) whose theories about who the murderer may have been, especially those bespoke theories about an assassin for the Man-mans; eliminating a cabal of sex workers who could bring down the Monarchy, or someone on a Messianic quest to purge the city of lechery.

When we understand who the victims were, their deaths seem random. Each was just a very unlucky woman, sleeping rough (as they say) in the wrong place at the wrong time. And conspiracy theorists hate randomness. In fact, Rubenhold has had to endure a great deal of criticism and abuse for this book, as it does not offer any new insight into who “The Ripper” may be, Worse, it tears down a few theories carefully crafted by men (always men) who fancy themselves experts in a rarefied field.

The point is, we don’t know. We’ll never know. Accepting what we do not know is a very difficult thing. Conspiracy theories are born when men strain to apply meaning to what they do not understand, and in doing so they lose sight of the victims.

See also: Torso Murders (Cleveland Centennial)

Twenty-Five Years On

Click on to enlarge.

Last night, we were celebrating the twenty-fifth birthday anniversary of our first born. We all worked together to create a now traditional meal of our favorite things; spaghetti and meatballs, steamed artichokes, also cocktails and the wife created an incredible almond cake. Our elder living child, in residence for the year, was also present and we FaceTimed with the younger in Cincinnati.

We have a box of items from that time. Like a lot of folks, we hung onto things that made us feel connected to the boy we had lost. We don’t always go through them on March 20, but a quarter century is a benchmark of some kind. We looked through the letters, little baby blankets that had been knit just for him, programs and newsletters, the kitchen calendar from 2001. On May 29, his due date, with two different pens, Toni had first written “baby?” and later, “Memorial”.

My wife asked about a letter we had received back in the day, from a man who told us about having lost his son with the same name as ours twenty-five years earlier than that. I knew right where it was, not with these items. It was filed away in the attic with documents from those years when I was performing I Hate This (a play without the baby); drafts, programs, articles, and also correspondence.

I Hate This was first produced at Cleveland Public Theater in February, 2003, just a month after our first living child was born. It was only one weekend of performances, but the Plain Dealer ran a preview piece that ran up attendance. It also provided awareness of the production beyond attendance.

Playwright's Notes
"I Hate This (a play without the baby)"
Cleveland Public Theatre, 2003

The letter Toni had remembered was from a man who lived elsewhere, whose ex-wife had told him about this play, the details of which must have struck both of them as remarkable. Their stillborn child also arrived at 30 weeks, also named Calvin. The unwelcome advertisements, about which he said, “Tragically funny now, but it was certainly good at the time to have a target for all the rage I felt.” No cap.

He went on to share a personal story, which began, “I went to have lunch at Cal’s grave … when he turned 15 …” So, not twenty-five, only fifteen, at that time. But even that figure seemed absurd, so far into the future. Our Calvin would be fifteen in, what … 2016? That’s not a real year, that’s the setting for some pulpy dystopian tragedy.

It hit me so hard, reading that letter. This was not some passing phase, this unwanted corner of my life was never going to end. And yet, here we are. Life is good. And we keep on.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival (book)

There needs to be a word for someone who knows a lot about the works of Shakespeare, but comes far short of a Shakespearean. Last week, Ian McKellen appeared on Stephen Colbert and delivered “The Strangers’ Case” speech from Sir Thomas More (c.1591-1593). That man, McKellen, is a Shakespearean. He lives and breathes the work, all the work, even work like Sir Thomas More, which isn’t actually Shakespeare.

I have, on occasion, referred to myself as a Shakespearean, but only as short-hand. I do know much more about Shakespeare than your average person, and probably more than you. I can deliver a few speeches by heart, and deliver them well, I think. But that only goes so far. I am Shakespeare-passing, Shakespeare-fluent, Bardophilic.

I am not a Bardolotist. I do not worship him. I am also not a Shakespeare fantasist, one who receives or creates bold theories about Shakespeare the man, and warmly keeps and shares them as a kind of truth. We know nothing about Shakespeare’s personality, or his personal decision-making processes, apart from that which is apparent: He lived, he married, he fathered, he acted, he wrote plays, he was financially successful in business, he died. That’s it.

Like a lot of the cursorily Shakespearean, I do not know early enough about his contemporaries. I just read Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, Stephen Greenblatt’s recent biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I was disappointed, though not surprised, to find that it includes not much more definitive information about its subject that one of the countless Shakespeare biographies.

I have stopped reading Shakespeare biographies altogether – no one knows anything about him and never will.

No, as in those other books, including Greenblatt’s own, the author finds a man (usually a man) who was in the same place and at the same time as Marlowe, and tells us an awful lot about them. He then infers many purely fictional things Marlowe may have done or experienced as a result of these theoretical associations.

Even worse. I did learn one thing for certain: That one portrait which is generally said to be of Christopher Marlowe? That isn’t even him. It was discovered at Cambridge in the 1950s and nearly discarded. It is unsigned and features no name, only the date and age of the sitter. This means it could be a portrait of any number of people, including Marlowe. But it is far more likely not to be him. However, I have seen this painting so many times, having been told that it is Marlowe, and so it has become him. But it’s not.

Marlowe has a fanciful reputation as the “bad boy” to Shakespeare’s married-with-children vibe. Born With Teeth by playwright Liz Duffy Adams (Dog Act) is a great recent addition to the SDU (Shakespeare Dramatic Universe™) depicting the writing relationship between the established Marlowe and the inexperienced Will (note: they were both born in 1564) collaborating on the plays that would become Henry VI parts one and two. Duffy plays upon the mythology of Marlowe – queer, brash, and probably a spy for the Queen. The great thing about Adams's play is how it suggests that our dearth of knowledge about Shakespeare may have been intentional; in brief, during a period of authoritarianism, the best way not to get murdered is never to share your thoughts.

Was Marlowe even queer, though? Greenblatt focuses his attention on three of Marlowe’s most familiar works; Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus, describing how each was terribly transgressive for its time. I have only ever seen Edward II (longer title: The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer) in a solo adaptation that I will describe to you over drinks some day. This play is held up as evidence of Marlowe’s sexual identity,

anonymous sitter, unknown artist
"ad 1585, of his own age 21"
Found: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
(Seriously. It's not him.)

The play centers on the (married) monarch’s intimate, possible romantic relationship with Piers Gaveston, to the neglect of his royal responsibilities. However, depicting a homosexual relationship does not necessarily make for a gay-positive play. While the time, attention and gifts Edward lavishes upon Gaveston enrages members of the monarch’s inner circle, would they not have been as troubled had Gaveston been a woman? The king is portrayed as a lovesick fool, unworthy and incapable of maintaining the crown, in much the same way his descendant Edward VIII would be some six hundred years later, over a woman who was considered unacceptable as a King's consort.

It is true, centering a queer relationship must have been a sensation. But the play Edward II is as homophobic as The Taming of the Shrew is misogynist or The Merchant of Venice is antisemitic. And just as Katherina is gaslit and abused into docility, and as Shylock receives a forced conversion into Christianity, Edward is assassinated in a grotesque parody of sodomy. Not merely conquered, but humiliated.

I mean. It was a different time. By today’s standards Marlowe isn’t so much controversial as he is in bad taste. The lesson of Doctor Faustus is entirely conventional. A mortal man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of receiving pretty much anything he wants. In the case of Faustus, that means learning everything there is to know, and at first that includes standing on far flung mountain tops to view the heavens, and flying through the skies – riding a motherfucking dragon – to examine all the world.

In the end, however, when there is nothing left to know, he is reduced to visiting Rome to slap the Pope and debasing himself by seducing Helen of Troy, which just isn’t as special as you think it might be when you know she may not have been that into you otherwise. The last hour of his life, before he is literally dragged to Hell, Faustus laments and tries to pray and regrets and despairs. How much more devout can a play get? He FA, he FO. The play may have been offensive to the censors, but I can’t imagine a single audience member who didn’t take in this drama and then go straight from the playhouse to the church.

DID YOU KNOW ..? Once Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco to Britain, the English did not first use the verb "smoke" to describe the act of lighting the leaf and inhaling the smoke produced. They called it drinking. They drank tobacco.