In a dedicatory letter to Edward Blount that appears at the start of Lucan’s First Book (1600), the bookseller Thomas Thorpe refers to ‘the memory of that pure elemental wit Chr. Marlowe, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets’. While Thorpe punningly invokes the image of a person’s ghost walking abroad in the winding sheet in which he or she was buried, he is referring primarily to sheets of paper: Marlowe lives on in print form in St Paul’s churchyard, a locale inextricably associated with bookselling at that time. Seven years after his death, then, Marlowe’s contemporaries were very much aware of his literary afterlife, and it is with various forms of that afterlife that this chapter is concerned. The first section will deal with early modern responses to Marlowe and his work; the second will discuss some examples of his plays’ afterlife in performance; and the third will cover two appropriations of Marlowe in non-theatrical media. It is impossible to provide anything like a comprehensive survey in the space available; readers looking for that might want to consult MacLure (1979) (which covers critical responses to Marlowe until 1896), Hopkins (2004), and other works referred to below. Instead, this chapter aims to provide a sense of some of the meanings that Marlowe has had both for readers and for other artists in the time since his death.

Marlowe in the early modern period

When Hero and Leander was printed in 1598, the dedicatory epistle by Edward Blount referred to it as an ‘unfinished tragedy’ and the second part concluded with the Latin phrase Desunt nonnulla (‘something is missing’). Two poets evidently felt impelled to complete what was apparently unfinished: 1598 also saw the publication of Hero and Leander: Begun by Christopher Marlowe; and Finished by George Chapman (which included Marlowe’s 818 lines, split into two ‘sestiads’, and four further sestiads by Chapman), and The Second Part of Hero and Leander; Containing Their Further Fortunes, by Henry Petowe. Hero and Leander thus offers a striking example of the power of Marlowe’s work to stimulate other writers.