The Massacre at Paris

About

Marlowe's Massacre at Paris (c. 1593) dramatizes the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, in which French Catholics murdered thousands of Huguenots. The play survives only in a shortened octavo text that may represent a theatrical cut rather than Marlowe's full version. It is the most politically Protestant of Marlowe's plays — the Guise's villainy is drawn with exceptional ferocity — and its topicality would have been intense for an Elizabethan audience still living with the aftermath of the massacre and the French Wars of Religion. As it survives it is episodic and somewhat rough, but historically important.