Christopher Marlowe

Baptized on February 26, 1564, in Canterbury, two months before Shakespeare's baptism in Stratford, Christopher Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker who won a scholarship to the King's School and then to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The university nearly withheld his Master's degree in 1587 until the Privy Council intervened with a letter hinting that Marlowe had been "employed in matters touching the benefit of his country", the most tantalizing evidence of his rumored career as a government spy. In the six years between Cambridge and his death, he remade English drama. Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587), with its thundering blank verse and overreaching conqueror-hero, electrified the London stage. The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) gave the theater its first great villain-protagonist. Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), the story of a scholar who sells his soul for knowledge and power, remains the most enduring dramatization of that myth. Edward II (c. 1592) pioneered the history play as psychological tragedy. He also wrote the erotic narrative poem Hero and Leander, left unfinished and completed after his death by George Chapman. Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye on May 30, 1593, in a house in Deptford, allegedly in a quarrel over the bill, the "reckoning", with Ingram Frizer, a man connected to the Elizabethan secret service. He was twenty-nine. Whether it was a tavern brawl or an assassination has been debated for four centuries.