Marlowe, Christopher

Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93). English playwright, poet, and spy, reportedly an atheist and probably homosexual. Born in Canterbury (Kent), he was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, possibly beginning his brief career as a spy on the continent while still enrolled there, and receiving his degree only after intervention by the Privy Council. His plays, beginning with Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1587), are energetic, restless, generically daring explorations of selfhood. Success came with his two-part epic of ambition and war, Tamburlaine (1587–8), and between 1588 and 1593 he wrote four more plays: The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II. The last two are generally considered his masterpieces, the former a deceptively simple tale of aspiration and damnation, which reconfigures the morality play tradition for the early modern stage, the latter a remarkably frank account both of a homosexual king's relations with his favourite and of the bleak outworkings of realpolitik. Shortly after a warrant for his arrest was issued in May 1593 on charges of atheism (and before he had completed his narrative poem Hero and Leander), Marlowe was killed, apparently in a pub brawl.

Gordon Macmullan