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Roundtable to debate Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare play

Kelly Brennan/Daily Bruin

"Marlowe's Ghost in Shakespeare's 'As You Like It'" Wednesday, noon Royce Hall, Herbert Morris Seminar Room 306 FREE

By Hugh Defrance

Nov. 19, 2014 12:00 a.m.

In literature, the story behind the story often reveals something unexpected.

On Wednesday in Royce Hall, author and UCLA Extension instructor Steve Sohmer will be arguing at a roundtable talk hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies that William Shakespeare wrote his play “As You Like It” as a commemoration of the death of fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe. Sohmer’s talk is based on a chapter of his new book, “Reading Shakespeare’s Mind.”

Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” tells the story of an exiled duke usurped by his brother, and his daughter Rosalind’s romantic pursuit of a young man, Orlando. Sohmer said Shakespeare wrote and produced the play as a tribute to Marlowe.

Sohmer said he will try to convince attendees of the roundtable talk that Shakespeare wrote the play to commemorate the seventh anniversary of Marlowe’s death. He will demonstrate that Shakespeare wrote Marlowe into the play as the character Jaques, the melancholy figure who gives the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech.

“I’m going to take them through more than a dozen qualities recognizable in (the character of) Jaques that we would also recognize in Christopher Marlowe,” Sohmer said.

Sohmer said he admits that the historical record does not offer much substantial proof that a relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe actually existed, but he is convinced that an association between them was inevitable.

“Now there’s not a shred of evidence that Shakespeare had ever met Christopher Marlowe, but of course London at that time had a population of 200,000, which means it was the size of Yonkers, New York,” Sohmer said. “So everybody who was anybody knew everybody who was anybody.”

Because these two legendary writers lived in such a small London together at the same time in history, Sohmer said it is reasonable to assume that they would have gravitated toward one another to form a friendship.

“Frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if they had been lovers,” Sohmer said. “You know we have Shakespeare up on a marble statue, but in his lifetime, the guy was a bohemian. He was an actor, a playwright, a poet.”

Without necessarily subscribing to Sohmer’s more speculative claims, English professor Robert N. Watson said he agreed at least that it is likely that Marlowe was a significant influence on Shakespeare’s work.

“Marlowe created a kind of new verbal energy in his plays and wrote popularly successful plays. And those were both things that would have inspired Shakespeare,” Watson said. “I don’t think Shakespeare would have been the writer that he is if it hadn’t been for Marlowe.”

Although evidence of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare is not enough to prove Sohmer’s theory that the character Jaques is based upon Marlowe, Sohmer said he thinks the evidence he will present on Wednesday will make a compelling argument.

“The more you get into this, the more persuasive it gets,” Sohmer said. “That’s not to say that everybody’s going to buy it.

Sohmer’s presentation is part of the ongoing series of roundtable talks hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and will be followed by an open discussion. The roundtable talks, which began in the 1990s when they were called Brown Bag Lunch Talks, give speakers like Sohmer an opportunity to present new ideas, research or findings for discussion and critical review by scholarly peers from across multiple disciplines.

“Some of the presenters will come and have a formal paper they’ll want to read and then discuss afterwards. Other ones just talk off the cuff,” said Karen E. Burgess, assistant director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is an organizational research unit that welcomes scholars of medieval and renaissance studies from any discipline, and so a roundtable talk gives the speaker a venue to present his or her work to scholars outside of his or her field, Burgess said.

“(A roundtable talk) gives them someone else looking at the same information from a different perspective,” Burgess said.

Sohmer said he expects a certain amount of dissent from his audience, but he believes strongly in the importance of the open-minded approach he takes with his work.

“It is altering the paradigm,” Sohmer said. “It’s shifting the goalpost as far as Shakespeare scholarship is concerned, but I think it’s something we really have to do in the 21st century.”

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