Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), or Kit Marlowe, was a poet and playwright of the English Renaissance who wrote during the Elizabethan Era (1558-1603). His mastery of the blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter – transformed the way plays were written for Elizabethan theatre and influenced many other dramatists, including William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Marlowe's plays were known for their overambitious and morally ambiguous protagonists, realistic portrayals of emotion, and their use of crowd-pleasing violence; his most significant works include Tamburlaine the Great (circa 1587), Doctor Faustus (circa 1592), and Edward II (circa 1592), as well as the narrative poem Hero and Leander. His personal life was as dramatic as his work – an alleged atheist and homosexual man with ties to the queen's secret service, Marlowe was killed in a mysterious tavern brawl in May 1593.
Early Life & Education
Marlowe was born in Canterbury, England, sometime in February 1564, and was baptized there on 26 February, exactly two months before Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, had come to Canterbury in the mid-1550s in search of work. In 1561, John Marlowe married Katherine Arthur, the daughter of a peasant family from Dover. The marriage produced nine children, of whom Christopher was the second – tragically, four of these children would die before reaching adulthood, including the eldest, Mary. To compound the difficulty of these losses, the Marlowes were a poor family who constantly had to rely on welfare assistance from local charities.
At the age of 8, Marlowe entered grammar school – this was an unusual trajectory, since the sons of tradesmen often abandoned their formal educations around that age to begin apprenticeships. He attended King's School in Canterbury, where he studied Latin, classical literature, rhetoric, and oratory, as well as the hexametric verses of the ancient Roman literature by poets Ovid and Virgil. As scholar David Riggs explains, Marlowe "internalized the basic principles of Latin prosody (figures of speech, metrical resolution rules, relative stress) that underlaid his great contributions to the art of English poetry" (Cheney, 27). In 1580, 16-year-old Marlowe won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge – this scholarship was awarded to students of lower-class status who had proven adept at writing in verse, with the expectation that they would go on to become Anglican clergymen. Marlowe arrived on campus in December to find a student body that included a mix of "fee-paying gentlemen" and "baseborn scholars" like himself; the division between these two groups, according to Riggs, would lay "the groundwork for many scenes of social conflict that arise in Marlowe's works" (ibid).
Early Works
It was likely during his time at Cambridge that Marlowe embarked on his first great project, a translation of Ovid's Amores from their original Latin into English. Written when Ovid was still a young man, the Amores are three books of erotic poetry. These poems were offensive to the moral sensibilities of Elizabethan England, since they celebrated "the delights and excitements of, especially, heterosexual love, of promiscuity, seduction, and adultery" (Wells, 78). As scholar Stanley Wells observes, Marlowe's decision to translate them was therefore "a characteristically transgressive act" against the "religious and moral establishment" (ibid). But Marlowe did not merely translate the work – as he went through it line by line, he transformed the original, unrhymed verses into rhyming heroic couplets, adding his own distinctive flair. An example of the Elegies – as Marlowe's translation of the Amores was titled – is the fifth elegy from Book One, which perfectly demonstrates the raunchy elegance of the work:
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I?
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
I clinged to her naked body, down she fell,
Judge you the rest: being tired, she bade me kiss;
Jove, send me more such afternoons as this.
In July 1584, Marlowe received his BA from Cambridge but decided to remain at the college to work on his MA. During this time, he wrote his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage (circa 1585); though playwright Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) is often credited as having co-written the play, scholars now believe that Nashe's involvement was minimal if not nonexistent. Based on Books 1, 2, and 6 of Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid, the play focuses on the titular queen and her passion for Aeneas, the shipwrecked Trojan hero.
Marlowe's choice to elevate the role of Dido – and thereby minimize that of Aeneas – was unique in his body of work, which never again sees a female protagonist upstage her male lover; indeed, it is the only one of Marlowe's plays to center around heterosexual love at all. Gender roles are constantly subverted. When Dido first meets Aeneas, she praises him and showers him with gifts, thereby taking on the traditionally masculine role of the courtly wooer rather than that of the passive 'coy mistress'. In the final act, when Aeneas sails away, and Dido commits suicide, she speaks eight lines of Latin taken directly from the Aeneid – Marlowe trusted that his audience would be familiar enough with the poem to not have to translate these famous lines. The play was likely first performed by the Children of the Royal Chapel, a company of professional boy actors.
Secret Agent
During the time that he was working on his master's degree, Marlowe spent nearly half of the 1584-85 academic year on a leave of absence and took several other long, unexplained absences. Naturally, rumors began to spread, with college officials worrying that he was a secret Catholic working to subvert the government. Still in the throes of the English Reformation, the country was rife with religious tumult. Queen Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603) had restored the authority of the Church of England but was now facing threats from Catholic enemies, both at home and abroad. She had been excommunicated by the pope in 1570, faced several invasion threats from Catholic Spain (the most famous of which was the Spanish Armada of 1588), and even faced assassination attempts; in 1586, her spies uncovered the so-called Babington Plot, in which the conspirators wanted Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots to ascend the English throne. In the face of these plots, Elizabeth passed several anti-Catholic measures, one of which prohibited Catholic priests from carrying out their functions on pain of death. English Catholics were, therefore, known to sneak off to a seminary in Rheims, France, where they would train before returning to England as secret missionaries.
The Cambridge officials, anxious that Marlowe had been sneaking off to Rheims, were prepared to expel him, but on 29 June 1587, they received a letter from the Queen's Privy Council, informing them that Marlowe was had been doing "Her Majesty great service…in matters touching the benefit of the country" (quoted in Cheney, 29). The letter denied that Marlowe had ever intended to remain in Rheims and insisted that he deserved to be rewarded for his "faithful dealings", although it remained silent on what those dealings were. Among the signatories was Sir Francis Walsingham (1532-1590), the queen's principal secretary and spymaster, who oversaw a vast network of secret agents and whose spies had uncovered the Babington Plot. Walsingham was known to recruit poets, who were often used as messengers and go-betweens, and it is thought that Marlowe had been discreetly working for the queen's secret service as early as 1584. The details of Marlowe's career as a secret agent, sadly, remain unknown, but it is reasonable to suspect that he was sent to Rheims as a double agent, to learn what he could about any Catholic conspiracies unfolding there. After the intervention of the Privy Council, Cambridge awarded Marlowe his MA, and he moved to London.
Master Works
In the autumn of 1587, a new play was performed by the Lord Admiral's Men, one of London's foremost acting companies. Entitled Tamburlaine the Great, it was an instant crowd-pleaser and was bound to forever change the way in which plays were written for Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Marlowe had written the play entirely in blank verse – that is, unrhyming poetic verse usually composed in iambic pentameter – allowing for more versatile dialogue. Though Marlowe was not the first English playwright to make use of blank verse, he was certainly the first to master it; decades later, poet-playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637) would laud Marlowe for his 'mighty line'. Marlowe's verses, known for their "irrepressible energy, thrilling sonorities, and dazzling verbal pictures" (Russ McDonald in Cheney, 56), are on full display in this monologue from the first part of Tamburlaine:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wonderous architecture of the world
And measure every wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
(1 Tamb. 2.7.21-29)
Tamburlaine the Great centers around the titular hero, a power-hungry conqueror who rises from obscure Scythian shepherd to become ruler of a vast Central Asian empire; the character is loosely based on the historical 14th-century conqueror Timur. In the first part, Tamburlaine encounters little resistance – he defeats and conquers Bajazeth, the emperor of Turkey, and wins the heart of the beautiful Zenocrate, all while building his empire. This all comes crashing down in the second part; Zenocrate dies, and Tamburlaine must deal with the disappointment of his sons before he himself succumbs to illness. As would become a hallmark of Marlovian heroes, Tamburlaine is insatiably ambitious and arrogant – in one memorable scene, he burns the Quran while daring the Prophet Muhammad to strike him down. He is also quite cruel, putting entire towns to the sword under his self-proclaimed guise as the 'Scourge of God'. The play's treatment of religion was quite controversial at the time, with rival poet Robert Greene writing that Marlowe was "daring God out of Heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine."
Marlowe's next play was likely The Jew of Malta (circa 1589), which was frequently performed by the Lord Admiral's Men with great success. Set on the island of Malta, the play follows Barabas the Jew as he schemes his way up the societal ladder, all while taking revenge on the men who have wronged him. Barabas is greedy and unscrupulous, but he nevertheless endears himself to the audience by drawing them into confidence. In the end, Barabas dies by his own trap when he falls into a boiling cauldron.
Doctor Faustus (circa 1590), written shortly afterward, is often considered the most explicitly religious of Marlowe's plays; if he was indeed an atheist, as his detractors claimed, Doctor Faustus proved that Marlowe was able to think in a profoundly spiritual way. Bored of his dull academic life, Dr. Faustus sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and magical powers. He is guided by the demon Mephistopheles, who constantly tries to warn him of the consequences of spurning God by telling him of the horrors of Hell. Only when it is time for him to be damned does Faustus realize the folly of the bargain he has made, but it is too late. Just before he is cast into Hell, he delivers one of the most famous and moving monologues in all of Marlowe:
Ah Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come…
The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him.
(Faustus, 5.2.57-61, 67-73)
Late Career
On the afternoon of 18 September 1589, Marlowe got into a fight with William Bradley, the 26-year-old son of an innkeeper, outside the theatre at Shoreditch. As they struggled, Thomas Watson – another poet-playwright and Marlowe's friend – intervened with his sword drawn to 'separate' the two men and 'keep the Queen's peace'. Bradley attacked Watson, who, in self-defense, stabbed him in the chest, killing him. Marlowe and Watson were arrested and incarcerated in Newgate Prison. Marlowe made bail on 1 October, and Watson was released five months later, after convincing authorities that he had killed in self-defense. Shortly after his imprisonment, Marlowe found lodgings with Thomas Kyd (1558-1594), another playwright whose work, The Spanish Tragedy (circa 1589), was among the most popular plays in London. The two men were 'writing in one chamber' for the next year.
But Kyd was not the only playwright Marlowe was interacting with around this time. By the early 1590s, Shakespeare's trilogy of Henry VI history plays was taking London's theatres by storm – there is strong evidence that Shakespeare was inspired by Tamburlaine. It is probable that the two dramatists knew one another personally, with some scholars speculating that they even looked over one another's manuscripts. In any event, Marlowe's next play, Edward II (circa 1592), was a history play that may well have been his answer to Shakespeare's Henry VI. Marlowe's play crams the 20-year reign of King Edward II of England (r. 1307-1327) into five acts, and focuses on the king's relationship with his favorite, Piers Gaveston. This relationship is certainly implied to be homoerotic, with the king's gruesome death at the end often read as a grotesque parody of sodomy. Marlowe's final play, The Massacre at Paris (circa 1593), was written shortly afterward and deals with the massacre of French Huguenots (Protestants) during the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Often disregarded as a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, this play examines the evils that people are capable of committing in the name of religion.
Along with his plays, the poems of Christopher Marlowe were widely read by contemporaries and became even more popular after his death. The Passionate Shepherd to His Love is a pastoral poem, initially misattributed to Shakespeare, in which the speaker entreats the addressee to "come live with me and be my love". Celebrating and romanticizing country life, the poem was often put to music and replied to by other poets. Marlowe's long narrative poem Hero and Leander is a retelling of an ancient Greek myth, in which two young lovers are separated by the Hellespont. Whereas the original tale ends in the lovers' deaths, Marlowe's poem ends prematurely, stopping just after the first night that Hero and Leander have spent together. While some scholars have argued that the poem is unfinished, others contend that Marlowe meant to end it here, wishing to celebrate youthful passion rather than see the story through to its bitter end. Shakespeare's own narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, has much in common with Hero and Leander; indeed, it is thought that Marlowe showed him an early draft of the work, which Shakespeare used as inspiration. The two poems were often purchased and read together by Elizabethan audiences.
Arrest & Death
On 5 May 1593, several pamphlets were posted around London inciting mob violence against a group of Flemish Protestants – one of these pamphlets was written in iambic pentameter and signed 'Tamburlaine'. On 11 May, Thomas Kyd was arrested in connection with these pamphlets and brought in for questioning; when authorities searched his home, they found a three-page heretical tract that denied "the deity of Jesus Christ, our saviour". Kyd was then threatened with – or perhaps even subjected to – bodily torture, forcing him to confess that the tract was not his, but Marlowe's; though they were no longer living together, Kyd protested that it must have gotten mixed in with his own papers when he moved out. He then supplied the authorities with a list of blasphemous statements that his former roommate had made, claims that were supported by another man, Richard Baines. Baines – who had fallen out with Marlowe after the two embarked on a failed counterfeiting scheme in 1592 – alleged that Marlowe had called all Protestants "hypocritical asses" and had said that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest" (quoted in Wells, 98).
These claims were taken very seriously. On 20 May, Marlowe was arrested and ordered to present himself before the Privy Council until a trial could be held. But a mere ten days later, on 30 May 1593, Marlowe was killed in an apparent brawl in a tavern at Deptford, a suburb of London, at the age of 29. According to the testimony of the killer, Ingram Frizer, the two had been arguing about who would pay the dinner bill – or 'the reckoning' – when Marlowe violently attacked him, forcing Frizer to kill the playwright in self-defense. The circumstances surrounding the murder have long been subject to suspicion – Frizer and the two other men present all had ties to the queen's secret service, leading some to believe that Marlowe was killed on the orders of the Privy Council itself. But whatever truly transpired, the incident brought an abrupt end to a remarkable career. In the centuries that followed, Marlowe has been hailed as one of the greatest dramatists of his time, whose work would forever shape the development of English literature.
