"[1] A committee was formed in reaction to the letter, numbering amongst its officers Sidney Lee and Frederick Rogers of the Society, the former acting as treasurer; Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice of England acting as chairman; and with members including poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, Edmund Gosse, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Andrew Lang, Alfred Austin and Henry Beeching; the publisher Arthur Henry Bullen, editor Alexander Balloch Grosart, actor-manager Henry Irving; writers & critics Leslie Stephen, Richard Garnett; and scholars Horace Howard Furness and Francis James Child.

These were to be (according to Rogers) Irving as Tamburlaine, George Alexander as Faustus, Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Edward II, and W. S. Willard as The Jew of Malta.

[1] Funds were insufficient to realise this plan, and the memorial, situated in the Buttermarket, was unveiled on 16 September 1891 by Irving, with his statuette as the sole plinth decoration.

Rogers asserts that the Memorial awakened a new interest in Elizabethan literature, and quoting Gosse – "Marlowe had been successfully neglected for three-hundred years" noted that "he suddenly became the subject of leading articles in the chief newspapers and magazines, and of paragraphs and leaderettes in minor ones".

[2] Much later, additional funds were raised to complete the vision, and a second unveiling was conducted by the novelist Hugh Walpole, who had briefly attended Marlowe's alma mater, The King's School, Canterbury.