Christopher Marlowe

English dramatist

• Born: February 6, 1564
• Birthplace: Canterbury, England
• Died: May 30, 1593
• Place of death: Deptford, England

Marlowe was complex, lyrical, and frequently erotic in both his dramatic and his poetic writing and was concerned in his work largely with the question of power and how it affects human beings.

Early Life

Dead at twenty-nine from stab wounds suffered in a tavern brawl, Christopher Marlowe (MAHR-loh) led a life of violence, intrigue, mystery, and remarkable productivity. His dramas and poetry have established him as an Elizabethan dramatist second only to William Shakespeare. It is tempting to speculate on what he might have produced had he lived a normal life span.

The son of John and Catherine Arthur Marlowe, Christopher was born on February 6, 1564, and was thus almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, who was born on or near April 23 of the same year. Marlowe was the second child in a family of nine children, six of whom, two boys and four girls, survived infancy. John Marlowe was a leatherworker and a member of an affluent guild in Canterbury, the Kentish cathedral town in southeastern England in which the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket is located.

Despite the prosperity of the guild to which he belonged, John Marlowe was not wealthy. His family had gained the reputation of being contentious and litigious. John, judging from court records of the time, followed in his ancestors’ footsteps, as did his offspring. John was said to be loud, arrogant, demanding, and profligate.

Marlowe was enrolled in the King’s School in Canterbury a noble institution of which Roger Ascham had been headmaster in the generation before Marlowe at fifteen, the top age for admitting new students. The school was renowned for its emphasis on theater and was considered one of the best schools in Elizabethan England. The young Marlowe, fair of countenance, with unruly dark hair and the bright eyes of one ever alert to and aware of his surroundings, read selectively in the extensive private library of the headmaster, concentrating on medieval romances, particularly Sir Thomas Malory’s versions of the Arthurian legends. Marlowe favored blood-and-thunder romances, indicating that perhaps the legendary Marlowe combativeness had been passed on to this young member of the family. Much of his writing appears to have as its source works from the library available to him during his days at King’s School.

In 1581, two years after he had entered King’s School, Marlowe became a student at Corpus Christi College of Cambridge University, where he was considered an excellent student and an accomplished poet, writing at that time primarily in Latin. He was named a Canterbury Scholar for his six years at Cambridge, apparently because he had expressed his intention of entering the clergy.

Marlowe’s college career was marked by long absences from the university, and it is now assumed that he was engaged in some sort of espionage activities in Europe for the Crown. This assumption is substantiated by the fact that when Cambridge moved to withhold Marlowe’s master’s degree from him in 1587, Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council intervened to see that Marlowe received his degree, saying in a letter to university officials that his absences from the university had benefited the Crown. It is known that Marlowe worked for Sir Francis Walsingham, the secretary of state for Queen Elizabeth, who was much involved in espionage.

In the early summer of 1591, Marlowe shared a workroom with Thomas Kyd, renowned for writing The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585-1589). Marlowe and Kyd were at that time both under the patronage of Thomas Walsingham, cousin of Sir Francis, who provided the workroom. Queen Elizabeth finally knighted Thomas Walsingham.

Life’s Work

After he received the master’s degree from Cambridge University in 1587, Marlowe rushed to London, England’s cultural and theatrical center. By that time, he had already completed two plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage (pr. c. 1586-1587, pb. 1594; with Thomas Nashe) and Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, pr. c. 1587, pb. 1590), as well as translations of Lucan’s Pharsalia (first century) and, between 1595 and 1600, Ovid’s Amores (c. 20 b.c.e.).

Certainly, these two plays established Marlowe’s reputation as an important playwright, but they also left him open to charges of atheism by people of established reputation. Charges of atheism and pederasty, both capital offenses in Elizabeth’s England, were to follow Marlowe throughout his brief life. The latter charges stemmed initially from Marlowe’s statements that all men who do not love tobacco and boys are fools and later from the fact that his Edward II (c. 1592, pb. 1594) is about a homosexual king. Because Marlowe reveled in shocking people, it is difficult to know whether he spoke out of conviction or out of a desire to get reactions from his listeners when he made his statements about boys. Certainly, writing a historical play whose protagonist is homosexual does not make the writer homosexual. Marlowe’s own sexuality has not been convincingly established. It is interesting, but not surprising, that one of Marlowe’s most vigorous attackers, Robert Greene, was also his most fervent imitator.

By 1589, Marlowe was living in Norton Folgate, close to London’s theatrical district. In September of that year, Marlowe was involved in a street fight with William Bradley. Marlowe’s friend, the poet Thomas Watson, came to Marlowe’s assistance and killed Bradley by inflicting stab wounds. Marlowe ran from the scene, but soon Watson was arrested and taken to Newgate Prison. Shortly thereafter, Marlowe was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate for a fortnight. Watson was held until February, when he was exonerated on the grounds of self-defense.

In 1587, Historia von Doctor Johann Fausten was published in German in Frankfurt. Although Marlowe is not known to have read this seminal book in German and although it was not translated into English until 1592 as The History of the Damnable Life and the Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, Marlowe appears to have begun working on his renowned The Tragicall History of D. Faustus (known more commonly as Doctor Faustus ) shortly after his two Tamburlaine plays were produced. The Stationers’ Register shows that a play presumed to be Doctor Faustus was registered on February 28, 1589, and other dramatists writing before 1592 show evidence in their work of having borrowed heavily from Marlowe’s play.

In 1589, the Lord Admiral’s Company performed Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta , a play to which Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596-1597) bears a strong resemblance. Marlowe’s play, deemed atheistic by many of his contemporaries, should probably be viewed as a biting satire rather than as the tragedy that some critics have considered it to be. Barabas’s annihilation of a whole convent full of nuns is the sort of bloody, melodramatic theme that Marlowe liked and that Kyd also exploited in The Spanish Tragedy.

The three parts of Edward II, which Pembroke’s Men first performed in 1592, represent Marlowe’s most mature and well-crafted writing. Also, the text for the play is the most reliable extant text of any Marlowe play save Tamburlaine the Great. In Edward II, Marlowe’s chief concern is with the question of civil authority. Edward’s homosexuality is incidental, although Marlowe deals head-on with the king’s proclivity. The death scene in this play is among the most affecting death scenes in the whole of Western literature.

Four months after The Massacre at Paris was first staged on January 26, 1593, Marlowe was arrested as an atheist, a capital charge in his day. On May 12, Kyd was arrested on a charge of atheism, and on the rack, he attributed the documents that had led to his arrest to Marlowe. On May 18, a warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest, and he was apprehended at the estate of Sir Thomas Walsingham, his patron. On May 20, having answered the charges against him to the Privy Council, he was directed to attend the council daily, a lenient sentence for one charged with a capital offense. Ten days later, on May 30, 1593, Ingram Frizer, Lady Walsingham’s business agent, fatally stabbed Marlowe in a tavern in Deptford during a dispute over a bill. Marlowe was interred in the Walsingham tomb in Deptford on June 1, 1593, and Frizer was promptly acquitted of his murder on grounds of self-defense.

Significance

In his short and colorful life, Christopher cut a swath in British drama that no other playwright of his time equaled except Shakespeare. Indeed, Calvin Hoffman, in The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare” (1955), argues that Marlowe, living under a cloud in 1593, was not actually murdered but, rather, went to the Continent and continued to write, producing before his death many of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Hoffman’s claim has been thoroughly discredited but suggests something of Marlowe’s dramatic stature.

After Marlowe’s premature death, which many of his contemporaries took to be God’s judgment of a man who was an atheist and homosexual, a steady stream of his writing continued to appear. His incomplete poem Hero and Leander and his translation of Lucan’s First Book (the first part of Pharsalia) were entered in the Stationers’ Register in September, 1593, the former published in 1598 and the latter in 1600.

In 1594, Edward II and Dido, Queen of Carthage were published, and Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores, publicly burned around 1600 as heretical, appears also to have been published in the late 1590’s, although it is not dated. The Massacre at Paris was probably also published in 1594, followed ten years later by the publication of Doctor Faustus.

Marlowe was a literary giant, a genius who wrote some of the most compelling dramas of his day. He had a lyrical gift that showed both in his drama and in his poetry. His full power as a dramatist has yet to be fully recognized, although it is generally conceded that Marlowe’s only real peer in Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, whose dramatic gifts generally exceeded those of Marlowe.

Marlowe’s Major Works

c. 1586-1587

• Dido, Queen of Carthage (with Thomas Nashe)

c. 1587

• Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (commonly known as Tamburlaine)

1587

• Tamburlaine the Great, Part II

c. 1588

• Doctor Faustus

c. 1589

• The Jew of Malta

c. 1592

• Edward II

1593

• The Massacre at Paris

1595-1600

• Elegies (translation of Ovid’s Amores)

1598

• Hero and Leander (completed by George Chapman)

1599

• The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (in The Passionate Pilgrim)

1600

• Pharsalia (translation of Lucan’s Bellum civile)

Bibliography

Hilton, Della. Who Was Kit Marlowe? The Story of the Poet and Playwright. New York: Taplinger, 1977. This great admirer of Marlowe seeks to explain his alleged atheism and homosexuality and also comments interestingly on some of his mysterious espionage work. The book is at times lacking in objectivity, and the conjecture that Marlowe committed suicide is not credibly presented.

Kendall, Roy. Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys Through the Elizabethan Underground. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. This study is a life of Marlowe disguised as a biography of his associate Richard Baines. It consists of a chronological examination of Baines’s life, but one which is constantly interrupted by analyses of Marlowe’s life and works whenever they were affected by Baines. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Knoll, Robert E. Christopher Marlowe. New York: Twayne, 1968. Knoll provides a useful overall coverage of Marlowe, dealing forthrightly with interpreting his work and with the controversies surrounding some of its interpretation. The standard Twayne format is useful for beginning readers of Marlowe. Knoll is quite successful in identifying Marlowe’s basic themes and in discussing them.

Kuriyama, Constance Brown. Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. A self-consciously speculative approach to biography, asserting that so few facts about Marlowe are known that one must look to his culture and political milieu to invent likely if unverifiable details of his life. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Levin, Harry. The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952. One of the best assessments of Marlowe, this book calls for a less romanticized portrayal of the author than most of the treatments of him have been. Levin shows a Marlowe who was deeply intelligent, highly complex, and given to a hyperbole that many critics have taken more seriously than Marlowe apparently intended it.

Lunney, Ruth. Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama Before 1595. New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. A study of the dramatic conventions that Marlowe inherited and his simultaneous debt to and intervention in those conventions. Looks especially at audience expectations and response to late sixteenth century drama in general and Marlowe’s works in particular. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. 2 vols. Edited by Fredson Bowers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. This standard edition of the works of Marlowe includes introductions to each work. It summarizes bibliographical problems associated with the canon and contains detailed notes of help to both the scholar and the general reader.

Norman, Charles. Christopher Marlowe: The Muse’s Darling. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. A well-written, often-reprinted biography of Marlowe that gives shrewd appraisals of his life and work. A thoroughly readable book that somewhat romanticizes its subject. The 1971 revision of Norman’s 1960 edition includes additional information on Walsingham, Peele, and Watson.

Oz, Avraham, ed. Marlowe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Anthology about Marlowe and his work contains essays by several scholars of Renaissance studies, including Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, and Jonathan Dollimore. Includes timeline, bibliography, and index.

Pinciss, Gerald M. Christopher Marlowe. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. A brief discussion of Elizabethan theater, of Marlowe’s life and contributions, and of each of Marlowe’s seven plays. This is a good starting point for someone unfamiliar with Marlowe’s work.

Trow, M. J., and Taliesin Trow. Who Killed Kit Marlowe? A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2001. Suggests that Marlowe was assassinated by those in power, because he knew too much about their affairs and flouted their wishes in his plays. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.