Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was baptised at St George's church in Canterbury on 26 February 1564, and his birth is conventionally dated to earlier that month, on or about 6 February ^[1]. His father, John Marlowe, worked as a shoemaker in the cathedral city, and his mother, Katherine Arthur, came from Dover. The household was neither wealthy nor destitute: John Marlowe belonged to the shoemakers' guild and took on apprentices, though records show him frequently in debt and occasionally in court ^[2].

The boy's abilities won him a scholarship to the King's School, Canterbury, in 1578 or early 1579, when he was about fourteen ^[1]. The school sat in the shadow of the cathedral and offered a rigorous grounding in Latin grammar, rhetoric and classical literature. From there he proceeded to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in December 1580 on a scholarship established by Archbishop Matthew Parker, an award generally intended for students preparing for the church ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Christopher Marlowe before the plays should picture a scholarship boy translating Ovid in a Cambridge college room. At Corpus Christi he took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584 and continued toward the Master of Arts. During these years he probably composed his translation of Ovid's Amores and his version of the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia, work that trained the ear later heard in his dramatic verse ^[2].

Marlowe's Cambridge career ended with a puzzle that has shaped every Christopher Marlowe biography since. In 1587 the university hesitated to award his MA because of prolonged absences and a rumour that he intended to go to the English Catholic seminary at Rheims, a destination associated with treason in Protestant England ^[3].

The queen's Privy Council intervened. In a letter of June 1587 the Council instructed the university to grant the degree, stating that Marlowe had done Her Majesty good service in matters touching the benefit of his country and that he should not be defamed by those ignorant of his employment ^[3]. The letter names no task and no employer, but scholars have long read it as evidence that Marlowe carried out confidential work for the government, possibly connected to Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence network ^[4].

What that service involved remains unknown. Charles Nicholl and other researchers have reconstructed the world of Elizabethan informers, couriers and projectors in which Marlowe seems to have moved, but the documents allow inference rather than certainty ^[4]. The degree was granted, and by the end of 1587 Marlowe had left Cambridge for London and the playhouses.

Among Christopher Marlowe achievements, the transformation of English dramatic verse comes first. Tamburlaine the Great, performed in London around 1587 with Edward Alleyn in the title role, presented a Scythian shepherd who conquers empires through sheer force of will, and it did so in blank verse of unprecedented sweep and confidence ^[5]. The play's success prompted a second part, and its printed edition of 1590 was the only Marlowe play published in his lifetime ^[2].

His later plays widened the range. The Jew of Malta, probably written about 1590, mixed savage comedy with a study of greed and hypocrisy in the Mediterranean world, and it held the stage for decades in performances recorded by the theatre manager Philip Henslowe ^[5]. Edward II, likely from 1592, compressed a troubled reign into a taut chronicle of favouritism, rebellion and murder, and it stands among the earliest great English history plays. Doctor Faustus, whose date of composition is still debated, dramatised the scholar who sells his soul to Lucifer for twenty four years of knowledge and power; it survives in two differing texts printed in 1604 and 1616 ^[1].

Marlowe also wrote The Massacre at Paris and Dido, Queen of Carthage, the latter possibly with Thomas Nashe, and left unfinished the narrative poem Hero and Leander, completed after his death by George Chapman and published in 1598 ^[2]. His short lyric beginning Come live with me and be my love, known as The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, became one of the most imitated poems of the age, drawing a famous reply attributed to Walter Ralegh ^[1]. Ben Jonson's phrase about Marlowe's mighty line, printed in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio, fixed his reputation as the poet who taught the English stage how to sound ^[5].

Marlowe never married, and almost everything reported about his private character comes from hostile or self-interested witnesses. He lived in the restless world of London writers later labelled the university wits, and his associates included the poet Thomas Watson and, at various points, men connected with espionage and coining ^[4].

Trouble followed him. In September 1589 he was involved in a Shoreditch fight in which Watson killed a man named William Bradley; Marlowe was briefly held in Newgate before being cleared ^[2]. In January 1592 he was deported from Flushing in the Netherlands on an accusation of counterfeiting coins, an episode recorded in a letter from the governor Sir Robert Sidney, though he faced no known punishment on his return ^[4]. He was also bound over to keep the peace after incidents in Shoreditch in 1592.

The gravest accusations came in May 1593. The informer Richard Baines delivered a note to the authorities charging Marlowe with blasphemy and atheism, listing outrageous opinions he had allegedly voiced, and the dramatist Thomas Kyd, under interrogation, attributed heretical papers found in his lodging to Marlowe ^[3]. On 20 May 1593 the Privy Council ordered Marlowe to report to it daily. Whether these charges reflect his actual beliefs, the malice of informers, or some combination is one of the enduring Christopher Marlowe facts that resist settlement ^[4].

On 30 May 1593 Marlowe spent the day at the house of Eleanor Bull in Deptford, then a Kentish town on the Thames near London, in the company of three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley ^[6]. All three had connections to the intelligence world or to the household of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's patron.

According to the coroner's inquest, a quarrel arose over the reckoning, the bill for the day's food and drink. The report states that Marlowe seized Frizer's dagger and wounded him in the head, and that Frizer, in the ensuing struggle, drove the blade into Marlowe's face above the right eye, killing him instantly ^[6]. Frizer pleaded self defence and received a royal pardon within a month. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave at St Nicholas church, Deptford, on 1 June 1593.

The inquest document lay undiscovered until 1925, when the scholar Leslie Hotson located it in the Public Record Office and published the findings ^[6]. Its details answered old rumours but raised new questions. Given the witnesses' murky occupations and the timing, days after the Baines note, some historians suspect the killing was connected to Marlowe's intelligence entanglements, while others accept the tavern quarrel at face value. The evidence permits no confident verdict ^[4].

Marlowe's influence on English drama outlasted his short life. Shakespeare, his exact contemporary, absorbed and answered his work: As You Like It quotes a line from Hero and Leander and calls its author the dead shepherd, one of the few direct tributes Shakespeare paid to any fellow writer ^[5]. Edward II shaped the history play that Shakespeare developed in Richard II, and the overreaching protagonists of Tamburlaine and Faustus echo through later tragedy.

Doctor Faustus has proved the most durable of his plays, revived continually from Renaissance stages to modern theatres and adapted for opera and film. The Faust story Marlowe dramatised, drawn from a German narrative translated into English as the Faust Book, entered world literature partly through his version ^[1]. Goethe knew of the play, and twentieth century directors and scholars restored Marlowe to the repertory after long neglect.

His biography attracts as much attention as his art. The so-called Marlovian theory, which imagines that he survived Deptford and wrote Shakespeare's plays, has no documentary support and is rejected by scholars, yet its persistence measures the fascination of his story ^[1]. In 2002 a memorial window to Marlowe was dedicated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, its inscription giving his death year with a question mark, a small monument to a life in which so much remains uncertain ^[7]. Canterbury remembers him with the Marlowe Theatre, and his plays are studied wherever English literature is taught.