About the work
The Massacre at Paris is Christopher Marlowe's history play about the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, probably written around 1593; Henslowe's diary records eleven performances by Lord Strange's Men and later the Admiral's Men between early 1593 and autumn 1594. The play survives only in a short, textually unreliable octavo edition without a printed date, likely an abridged memorial text.
Plot
Starting from the wedding of the Protestant King of Navarre, the play depicts the massacre of thousands of Huguenots in Paris in 1572, instigated by the Catholic Guise faction and Catherine de' Medici, and continues through to Henry III's later assassination of the Duke of Guise and Henry's own death.
Cultural significance
As one of the first English plays to dramatize a recent continental European event, it fed English Protestant self-assurance against Catholic violence and, despite its fragmentary surviving text, is seen as a forerunner of the English Renaissance stage's political history plays.