The Massacre at Paris

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The Massacre at Paris is a play by the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe. It concerns the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which took place in Paris in 1572, and the part played by the Duc de Guise in these events. The play was first performed in 1593.

This play is a piece of violent Marlovian sensationalism depicting recent religious riots in Paris (known as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre), in which Catholics killed Huguenots in the streets.

The only surviving text is an undated quarto that is too short to represent the complete original play. It preserves a lot of the violence and stabbing jokes but deletes most of whatever social value the play may have had, except for one long soliloquy near the beginning.

One clue to the original substance of the play is a page which survives in manuscript. It is known as the "Collier leaf", after the Shakespearean scholar John Payne Collier, who is said to have been a notorious forger, although modern scholars think that this particular leaf is probably authentic. Despite including a speech where one of the characters mutters obscene jokes to himself before shooting someone, it supplies a much longer and more interesting version of a blank verse speech that appears in the quarto. This suggests that the more thoughtful parts of the play were precisely the ones that tended to be cut.