'School of Night' at Mark Taper doesn't do its homework

Few life stories are as densely packed with intrigue as Christopher Marlowe's, the subject of Peter Whelan's 1992 drama, "The School of Night," which had its belated American premiere Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum. In addition to being the second-greatest Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare, Marlowe was a rowdy Cambridge-educated poet-rebel, a profane apostate given to sententious drollery, probably a homosexual (as suggested by his infamous tag line, "Them that love not tobacco and boys are fools") and very likely a spy.

By CHARLES McNULTY

November 11, 2008