When looking at some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, people often beat their breasts about the slighting of Christopher Marlowe. “He invented it ALL!” they cry, “Shakespeare was just a talented thief!” “If only Marlowe hadn’t died so young, he’s the one we’d be studying, not that hack Will.” Okay, maybe I am overstating the case, but Shakespeare backlash has often been closely tied to support for Chris Marlowe. Yet he, like all playwrights from the Elizabethan-Jacobean period, is always compared to The Bard, the de facto barometer for British playwriting.

Seattle Repertory Theatre’s new production, Swansong, takes this notion in a slightly different direction. Rather than imagining a rivalry/camaraderie between Shakespeare and Marlowe, it instead focuses on one between Shakespeare and his younger contemporary, Ben Jonson. Jonson, who came to prominence late in Shakespeare’s career, was a court favorite who wrote many popular plays, including his seminal comedy of humours, Volpone. Yet, in posterity, he has not enjoyed nearly the acclaim as Will has. His plays have been appreciated more by scholars than by audiences, and have the reputation for being “respectable” (often translatable as “dry” or “out-of-date”). Still, Jonson redefined comedy for the Jacobean period and his plays are deserving of the kind of “rediscovery” that Marlowe’s works have enjoyed. Perhaps that is the point of plays like Swansong. In creating historical fiction about Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, they help highlight talents who might have been overlooked by the historical and literary juggernaut that is Shakespeare.

Mark Rylance is not ready to make nice. The actor, best known to film audiences for his turn in the excellent independent British film Angels and Insects, was the first artistic director of the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from 1995 to 2005. During that time, he took on a slew of Shakespearean characters, ranging from Hamlet to Cleopatra. Now, he is risking all of that Bard cred with a new play he has written that questions whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote his plays.

In his new play, best abbreviated as I Am Shakespeare (the full title is much longer), Rylance creates a scholar character who encounters several historical figures who might have written some or all of the works now attributed to Shakespeare. The usual suspects pop up, most notably Christopher Marlowe, whose life and works have drawn plenty of conspiracy theories of their own. Frankly, I don’t see what the controversy is. Nobody can prove Rylance wrong, nor can he prove himself right. Maybe it’s fitting that we know more about the characters and stories created than the creater him(or her)self.