Introduction

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Christopher Marlowe was the second of nine children of a Canterbury shoemaker. Born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, he attended King’s School, Canterbury, before entering Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a six-year scholarship intended to lead to Holy Orders. He duly achieved his BA Degree in 1584, but was awarded his MA in 1587 only following the Privy Council’s insistence. During the intervening three years he is thought to have been acting as a government spy against the French, in the Catholic seminary at Rheims.

Marlowe was probably in London later in 1587 for the first staging of the two parts of his heroic dramaTamburlaine the Great, but it is uncertain whetherDoctor Faustus followed in 1588 or was first performed as late as 1593. The dates of his other plays –The Jew of Malta, Edward II andThe Massacre of Paris – are also conjectural, though their number suggests a young dramatist pursuing a busy stage career. Yet hints of a darker side to Marlowe’s life persist. In 1589 he was briefly imprisoned in Newgate with his friend, the poet Thomas Watson, who had killed an innkeeper’s son in a street brawl. Three years later he was fined and bound over to keep the peace for assaulting two constables in Shoreditch – yet was also apparently back in government service, as a messenger during the siege of Rouen.

A fellow writer, Robert Greene, attacked Marlowe around this time for ‘diabolical atheism’ (the book’s publisher apparently censoring yet more scandalous allegations). Then, in 1593, the dramatist Thomas Kyd, arrested for possessing atheistical writings, alleged that these had belonged to Marlowe, also accusing his former friend of treason