CHARACTER
By Any Other Nameby Jodi Picoult

Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe

Quick Facts

  • Role: Brilliant, provocative playwright; mentor, confidant, and secret collaborator to Emilia Bassano Lanier
  • First appearance: 1591, at a reading of his Dido, Queen of Carthage
  • Occupations: Playwright, rumored atheist, government spy; fixer in the London theater world
  • Key relationships: Emilia (intellectual equal and closest friend); broker and handler for William Shakespeare as a pseudonymous “front”
  • Look: “Handsome in a dangerous way” with thick, chin-length black hair and almost lightless dark eyes—an alluring, slightly menacing glamour that mirrors the instability he courts

Who He Is

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe is the playhouse’s brightest flame and most volatile spark—an infamous wit who lives outside decorum yet guards a fierce ethic of art. He is the first man to look past Emilia’s status and see the writer within, not as a novelty but as a peer. That recognition is not merely flattering; it is enabling. Marlowe gives Emilia the language, the license, and the logistical plan to put her work into the world, even if not under her own name. Operating in the gray zones of faith, politics, and theater commerce, he becomes the conscience of her talent and the architect of its concealment.

His charisma is inseparable from danger: the unruly hair and unreadable eyes foreshadow a life lived on thresholds—between patronage and the underworld, between heresy and brilliance. As long as he lives, Emilia’s genius has an ally; when he dies, the scaffolding drops away and she must stand on the precarious platform he built for her.

Personality & Traits

Marlowe thrives as a provocateur who tests boundaries to make space for truth. His barbed humor isn’t cruelty for its own sake; it’s a diagnostic tool, cutting through pretense to locate talent and hypocrisy. With Emilia, his irreverence is paired with radical respect—he teases, but he listens, edits, and schemes on her behalf.

  • Witty, theatrical provocateur

    • Evidence: In their first exchange of barbs, he mock-bleeds after Emilia’s riposte: “I am wounded. The lady pricks me, and I bleed.”
    • Why it matters: He turns combat into courtship of the mind, establishing their relationship as an arena for intellectual play rather than gendered condescension.

  • Perceptive validator of talent

    • Evidence: “Your tongue is sharp... but it is the tongue of a writer.”
    • Why it matters: He names what Emilia is before she claims it herself; the label becomes a permission slip to ambition.

  • Rebellious, reputation-proof

    • Evidence: His atheism and espionage rumors don’t cow him; he embraces being an “agent of chaos.”
    • Why it matters: Living outside orthodoxy, he can imagine solutions—like a male “front”—that respectable men won’t.

  • Loyal confidant

    • Evidence: “Do you not believe that you are closer to me than my own sisters?”
    • Why it matters: He gives Emilia not only strategy but intimacy—the rare space where her intellect is cherished, not punished.

  • Pragmatic strategist

    • Evidence: “You cannot put your name on a play. That is not the same thing.”
    • Why it matters: He knows art requires both vision and a delivery mechanism; his scheme turns a barred door into a side entrance.

Character Journey

Marlowe arrives as a brilliant stranger who fences with Emilia for sport; within pages, the duel becomes apprenticeship, then collaboration. He reads her poems in the Somerset House gardens, moves from teasing to editorial seriousness, and reframes her gifts from “private” to “public” art by proposing a play. When the obstacle of her name appears immovable, he sidesteps it with a plan: let Shakespeare carry the parchment while Emilia wields the pen. Marlowe himself doesn’t “arc” so much as deepen—his consistency (wit, daring, loyalty) is the scaffolding for Emilia’s transformation. His sudden killing in Deptford tears away that scaffolding. The grief is personal, but the practical loss is just as severe: without her fiercest ally, Emilia must negotiate the theater’s dangers and her uneasy pact with Shakespeare alone.

Key Relationships

  • Emilia Bassano Lanier

    • Marlowe is the first to treat Emilia as a colleague rather than a curiosity. Their bond is fiercely platonic and deeply intimate: he reads, edits, challenges, and champions her work, and he reorients her life from private verse to public drama. The mentorship is reciprocal—her mind delights him in a world that mostly bores him—and together they form a clandestine literary partnership.

  • William Shakespeare

    • Marlowe regards Shakespeare as usefully mediocre—a “beef-wit” whose hunger for money and renown can be leveraged. He brokers the pseudonymous arrangement not out of faith in Shakespeare’s genius but out of shrewd calculation: Shakespeare’s ambition becomes the vehicle for Emilia’s invisibly authored plays. The contempt remains, but the pragmatism wins.

Defining Moments

A handful of scenes define Marlowe’s function as instigator, editor, and shield:

  • First Meeting (1591)

    • What happens: During a reading of Dido, Queen of Carthage, he and Emilia spar; he’s immediately struck by her insight and audacity.
    • Why it matters: Establishes their dynamic—combat as courtship of intellect—and marks the first person to name her brilliance without qualification.

  • Critiquing “Venus and Adonis” (1592)

    • What happens: In the gardens of Somerset House, he snatches her poem, teases, then offers serious edits.
    • Why it matters: The bit flips from flirtatious banter to professional engagement; he treats her as a peer, which solidifies trust.

  • Proposing the Play at the Falcon Inn (1592)

    • What happens: He urges Emilia to dramatize the Alice Arden story; when she balks at the impossibility, he supplies the workaround: authorship divorced from attribution.
    • Why it matters: This is the strategic hinge of the novel’s theater plot—the birth of her secret career and the Shakespeare arrangement.

  • News of His Death (1593)

    • What happens: Emilia learns he was stabbed at Deptford Strand, while she herself was with Southampton that day—a fact that haunts her.
    • Why it matters: The loss is both emotional and infrastructural; Emilia’s bravest reader vanishes, forcing her into an exposed, solitary authorship-by-proxy.

Themes & Symbolism

Marlowe embodies the outlaw artist: talent that refuses to bow to orthodoxy and insists on finding or forging a stage. For Emilia, he is both mirror and midwife—the one who sees her invisible self and ushers it into existence. He crystallizes the book’s meditation on Authorship, Identity, and the Fight for Recognition, proving that while signatures may be gatekept, creation itself cannot be contained.

Essential Quotes

“You have quite the mouth on you, for a woman.”

This backhanded compliment is Marlowe’s first acknowledgment of Emilia’s rhetorical power—crude in form, exact in function. By insisting that her voice is noteworthy, he reframes “outspokenness” (a social liability) as artistic capital.

“Your tongue is sharp... but it is the tongue of a writer.”

A line of pure consecration. Marlowe doesn’t merely admire Emilia’s wit; he names it as craft. The shift from temperament to vocation catalyzes her confidence and redirects her energy toward the stage.

“Because most people bore me, Mistress Bassano. And you... do not. I did not imagine the Lord Chamberlain had a courtesan whose most seductive body part was her brain.”

Marlowe’s irreverence here performs two things at once: it flouts decorum while paying Emilia the exact respect men with power rarely give her. The provocation flatters, but more importantly, it declares that her intellect, not her body, is the axis of attraction in their friendship.

“You are still a writer, even if the words you put to paper have never been read by another. I look forward to the day when you pen your play about this aggrieved Jew.”

He affirms authorship as identity rather than publication, a crucial distinction for a woman barred from print. The invitation toward a play about an “aggrieved Jew” urges her to make political empathy dramatic—to turn moral imagination into public art.

“Why don’t you write a play?... You cannot put your name on a play. That is not the same thing.”

This is Marlowe’s masterstroke of pragmatism: separating the act of creation from the public label. By articulating the workaround, he transforms a closed door into a hidden passage and sets Emilia’s clandestine career in motion.