The Dead Shepherd

1615: A reclusive former playwright, mysteriously retired at the height of his powers, recounts a harrowing tale to the daughter of his estranged patron. He recalls how he began his career in the shadow of Christopher Marlowe, poet, heretic, sodomite, spy and the greatest playwright of the age.

1590: Young Will Shakespeare, newly arrived in London, falls in with Marlowe and is introduced to The School of Night, a secret society whose subversive gatherings come to the attention of the most powerful man in England, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil. Will is plunged into a sinister world of lies, conspiracy, betrayal, torture and revenge, culminating in Cecil’s decree to have Marlowe’s seditious mouth silenced for ever.

1593: As twilight falls across the Deptford Strand a scream rings out from a rooming house on the filthy dockside. Marlowe is dead, taking with him the dark secrets of Elizabeth’s court to an unmarked grave.

The Dead Shepherd is a new play about Christopher Marlowe by Robert Pope & Ian Dixon-Potter.