Dido Queen of Carthage

Staging History

The Children of the Chapel Royal (1580's?)

The title page of the 1594 Quarto tells us that Marlowe's play of Dido, Queen of Carthage was "played by the Children of her Maiesties Chapell", but as discussed in relation to dating the play, there is no way of telling when that company might have performed the play. Some commentators presume that the play was written for the company in the mid 1580's, and that it was specifically written for production in a private indoor theatre such as the Blackfriars, or at Court. Oliver derives this latter opinion from his view that the play was designed to be staged in such a theatre.1 There are, though, no extant records detailing any such production.

The Admiral's Men at The Rose (1598)

There are, however, records in Henslowe's Diary2 that indicate the play might have been revived early in 15983 by the Admiral's Men:

A run of the play is further indicated by inventories of the property of the Lord Admiral's Men taken in March 1598, published by Malone,4 but since lost (the inventories were not part of Henslowe's Diary5):

and:

There is nothing of course to explicitly state that these records refer to performances of Marlowe's play of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and indeed the prop of a tomb for Dido does not obviously fit with Marlowe's extant play. But no other play of Dido and Aeneas is known from this particular period, and Marlowe's back catalogue was still contributing to Henslowe's income at this time e.g. Doctor Faustus played in October 1597.6 It could perhaps be this 1598 revival of Marlowe's Dido at The Rose that inspired Hamlet's recollections.

Modern Productions

Along with The Massacre at Paris, Dido is certainly the least performed of Marlowe's plays. After 1598, there was perhaps no significant production of the play until Marlowe's quartercentenary celebrations in 1964. In that year, a number of Southampton schools combined to put on a production which Oliver remembers seeing. It was perhaps a boys' company that the play was originally written for, and Oliver "realised ... that when a drama such as Dido is acted by boys, it is the parts of the women that 'come over' realistically".7

Only now in the twenty-first century is Dido perhaps beginning to overcome the neglect of four hundred years, as directors realise that the play has something to offer. Repertory productions have appeared from time to time in both the UK and US e.g. productions by the Target Margin Theater Company in New York (2001), and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge MA (2005). In 2003, Shakespeare's Globe staged a modern-dress production set in a children's playground, directed by Tim Carroll which whilst welcomed as a rare high-profile staging of Marlowe's play, was not generally well received by critics.

Most creative of all was a sequence of adaptations by the Angels in the Architecture company, who specialised in creating 'site-specific' performances of rarely performed plays in unusual London locations. They began their association with the play by undertaking a reading of Dido at the site of the Rose Theatre in 2001. Five years later, a production directed by Rebecca McCutcheon was set in the House of St Barnabas in Soho. In 2008, their critically acclaimed production was adapted to the sumptuous and highly appropriate surroundings of Kensington Palace.

Perhaps inspired by this increasing interest in the play, a major production of Dido, Queen of Carthage directed by James Macdonald ran for nearly four months at the National Theatre during 2009. An impressive cast included Anastasia Hille as Dido, Mark Bonnar as Aeneas, and Siobhan Redmond as Venus. With the popularity of the play re-established, another half dozen or more productions of Dido were staged in the UK during the 2010s, including a well-received staging at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2017, with Chipo Chung and Sandy Grierson in the lead roles.

A list of productions of Dido Queen of Carthage around the world since 2000 can be found in this website's archive of past Marlowe productions, providing details of each production along with links to online reviews, interviews and other information that may be of interest. Ruth Lunney also provides an exhaustive list of modern productions since 1950, including venue, director and cast members.8