MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER (1564–1593)

MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER (1564–1593), English dramatist and poet. Marlowe lived an exciting, if short, life—part writer of renown and part—it is claimed—government agent. The son of a Canterbury shoemaker named John Marlowe, he obtained a scholarship to the King's School in Canterbury; from 1580 he attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1584. Although he remained at Cambridge, completing his M.A. in 1587, documents show that his attendance became sporadic, and there is much speculation concerning his activities from 1584 to 1587, the year he left. A Privy Council letter written to the college and dated 29 June 1587 indicates that prior to that date he had been engaged in government business, possibly as an agent spying on the Roman Catholic seminary at Rheims.

What is most discussed about the writer's life is to what extent he was a spy, an atheist, and a homosexual. In 1593, the year of his death, another government agent called Richard Baines reported that Marlowe had uttered heresies against the teachings of the church. He quoted Marlowe as saying that "Moyses was but a jugler," and that religion only evolved in order to control nations. According to Baines's testimony, Marlowe had said: "all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles."

Marlowe arrived in London soon after he left Cambridge, but not much is known about this time. His first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was written in collaboration with his Cambridge associate Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), and may have been completed c. 1586, though it was not published until 1594. It was first performed by the Children of the Queen's Chapel. However, the Admiral's Men, an adult company under the management of Philip Henslowe, certainly performed his famous work for the stage—the highly successful Tamburlaine the Great, about a pagan leader, which appeared in 1587 and was published in 1590. This play along with its sequel, The Second Part of Tamburlaine, has been cited as marking "the beginning of modern drama" (Wiggins and Lindsey). The Admiral's Men went on producing Marlowe's plays into the late 1580s and early 1590s, with Edward Alleyn, the actor-manager of the company, taking the main role in all productions. These included The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (published in 1604), The Jew of Malta (1633), The Massacre at Paris (1594?), and Edward II (1594).

Marlowe's poetry, in particular his Hero and Leander, is also defined as distinctively ground-breaking work of the English Renaissance. All his verse, including Hero and Leander, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and his translations of Ovid and Lucan, were reputedly written during his Cambridge years, although there is no real evidence of this. It was all published during the period 1598 to 1600, with two endings penned by other writers for the unfinished Hero and Leander of 1598.

The traces we have of Marlowe's life indicate a personality of violent temperament. In 1589 he was arrested after a duel with one William Bradley, and he was put into Newgate Prison in London. In 1592, having been sent back from the Lowlands by Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, he was bound over to keep the peace after fighting with two city constables, and in September of the same year he was accused of assaulting a Canterbury tailor. He is known to have shared a lodging with another dramatist of the age, Thomas Kyd, who was to say of Marlowe (in 1593) that he was "intemperate and of a cruel heart," possessing "monstrous opinions" and given to "attempting sudden privy injuries to men." However, Kyd was himself arrested at the time, and doubt may be thrown onto his motives for this description. Marlowe's death makes a bloody end to a colorfully interpreted life. He was killed by Ingram Friser in a brawl that ostensibly concerned a "reckoning" or bill; however, because of the shady people involved, including Friser, who was employed by Thomas Walsingham, the nephew of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state, the doubt has persisted that Marlowe—an early, eloquent, and powerful user of the English language—was assassinated on the orders of a high-ranking official.

See also Drama: English ; English Literature and Language ; Shakespeare, William .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Edited by J. B. Steane. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1986.

——. Edward the Second. Edited by Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey. London and New York, 1997.

Secondary Sources

Healy, Thomas. Christopher Marlowe. Plymouth, U.K., 1994.

Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Sales, Roger. Christopher Marlowe. Basingstoke, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Eva Griffith