Yseult and Tristan was a play by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe. Based on a French legend, it told the story of two medieval lovers whose affair is doomed from the start. Marlowe wrote the play in part as an attempt to retake the mantle of London's greatest playwright from his friend and colleague William Shakespeare, whose Prince of Denmark was considered by many to have surpassed anything of Marlowe's. Although Marlowe did not succeed, Tristan was nevertheless considered better than any of Marlowe's own prior work.