A tragical history of the Renaissance, by Christopher Marlowe. Music chosen by Edward Sackville-West . Produced by Barbara Burnham
Other characters include scholars, cardinals, an archbishop, Bruno, and the Seven Deadly Sins
Christopher Marlowe's poetic pageant play has been presented in every century since Edward Alleyn first appeared in the name part' in a surplis, with a crosse upon his breast', at the Rose Theatre in 1594. A spectacular adaptation was produced at the Lyceum Theatre in 1885, with Henry Irving as Mephistophilis, and a special prologue written by Swinburne and spoken by Edmund Gosse. In 1896 the Elizabethan Society, under the direction of William Poel, revived it at St. George's Hall on a stage modelled on that of the old Fortune Playhouse.
Poel toured it in 1904 and produced scenes from it at the Haymarket Theatre in 1925 for the Marlowe Memorial Fund. In 1929 the Norwich Players produced it at the Maddermarket Theatre under the direction of Nugent Monck, also in Canterbury Cathedral in the same year.
In 1934 came the first broadcast, by the .Oxford University Dramatic Society, and other versions have been on the air in 1938 and 1940.