'A steamy wrestle': Guardian report on Shakespeare and Marlowe sparks play

A Guardian report on William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe's relationship as literary rivals and collaborators has inspired a play that will be staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in London's West End this summer.

- Dalya Alberge

The RSC's co-artistic director, Daniel Evans, will direct Born With Teeth by Liz Duffy Adams, an Irish-American playwright, who has imagined two of the greatest dramatists of all time working together and wrestling creatively, both envious and admiring of each other.

Adams thanked the Guardian for having inspired the play with a 2016 news report about Marlowe being acknowledged alongside Shakespeare as co-writer of Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3.

The article reported that while Marlowe's involvement in parts of those plays had long been suspected, he was being given joint billing on the title pages of those plays in the New Oxford Shakespeare, a project from Oxford University Press (OUP).

Adams said of the Guardian report: "I do remember the emotional impact it had on me. It's not too much to say a thrill shot through me. It instantly created the context for the play I never knew I needed to write - and then I had to write..."

"Instantly, it was a fully formed sense of those two in a room working together. What would that lead to? What would that be like?"

Born With Teeth will be staged by the RSC at Wyndham's theatre in London from 13 August. It is a "significantly different" reworking of a play first seen in the US in 2022.