Christopher Marlowe
Quotes & Wisdom
Christopher Marlowe: The Blazing Comet of Elizabethan Drama
Before Shakespeare, there was Marlowe. A shoemaker's son who won a Cambridge scholarship, likely spied for the Queen, and was stabbed to death at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl - Christopher Marlowe lived fast and wrote faster, singlehandedly inventing the blank verse drama that would define the English stage. His overreaching heroes - Tamburlaine the conqueror, Doctor Faustus the damned scholar, Barabas the scheming merchant - were unlike anything audiences had seen: magnificent, terrifying, and morally ambiguous. In barely six years of writing, Marlowe transformed English theater from a crude entertainment into a vehicle for poetic grandeur and philosophical daring. His mysterious death at the height of his powers remains one of literature's great unsolved puzzles.
Context & Background
Christopher Marlowe was baptized on February 26, 1564, in Canterbury - just two months before William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. The coincidence of timing is striking: the two men who would define Elizabethan drama entered the world within weeks of each other, though their backgrounds could hardly have been more different.
Marlowe was the son of John Marlowe, a prosperous shoemaker and freeman of Canterbury, and Katherine Arthur, believed to be a clergyman's daughter. Canterbury in the 1560s was a cathedral city with deep religious traditions - the site of Thomas Becket's martyrdom and a major pilgrimage destination. The young Marlowe grew up in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, surrounded by the drama of religious ritual and the echoes of medieval faith.
He received his early education at the King's School in Canterbury, one of the oldest schools in England, and in 1580 he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The scholarship had been endowed by Matthew Parker, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and was intended for students preparing for the Anglican priesthood. Marlowe, it seems, had other plans.
Marlowe's years at Cambridge were marked by academic distinction and mysterious absences. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584, but when it came time to award his Master's degree in 1587, the university authorities hesitated. There were rumors that Marlowe had been visiting the English seminary at Rheims - a center of Catholic plotting against Queen Elizabeth - and the university suspected he might have converted to Catholicism.
The Privy Council intervened with an extraordinary letter instructing Cambridge to award the degree. The letter stated that Marlowe 'had done Her Majesty good service' and that he should not be 'defamed by those that are ignorant of the affairs he went about.' This is the strongest evidence for the widely held belief that Marlowe served as a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service, perhaps infiltrating Catholic networks on the continent.
The espionage connection adds a layer of intrigue to Marlowe's biography that no other English writer can match. If he was indeed a spy, it meant that the man who wrote some of the most audacious plays in the English language was also leading a secret double life of deception and danger.
Marlowe's first major play, Tamburlaine the Great (Part 1, c. 1587), exploded onto the London stage with a force that contemporaries compared to a thunderclap. The play tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who conquers empires through sheer force of will, and it was written in blank verse - unrhymed iambic pentameter - with a power and musicality that had never been heard in English drama.
Before Marlowe, English plays were typically written in rhyming couplets or clunky prose. Marlowe liberated the stage from these constraints, creating what Ben Jonson would later call 'Marlowe's mighty line' - a verse form flexible enough to accommodate rhetoric, philosophy, and raw emotion. This was the instrument that Shakespeare would later master, but it was Marlowe who forged it.
Tamburlaine was also revolutionary in its protagonist. Here was no conventional hero or virtuous Christian king, but a barbarian conqueror who defies fate, mocks religion, and conquers the world through ambition alone. 'I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, and with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about,' Tamburlaine declares - and the audience believed him. The play was so successful that Marlowe wrote a sequel, and Tamburlaine became one of the defining characters of the Elizabethan stage.
If Tamburlaine made Marlowe's reputation, Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) secured his immortality. Based on the German Faustbuch, it was the first dramatization of the Faust legend - a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power - and it remains one of the most powerful explorations of ambition, knowledge, and damnation in Western literature.
The play's central tension is devastating in its simplicity. Faustus, a brilliant scholar who has mastered every conventional field of learning, turns to black magic in his hunger for more. He summons Mephistopheles and bargains twenty-four years of unlimited power for his eternal soul. The tragedy lies not in the bargain itself but in how Faustus wastes his time - conjuring pranks and cheap thrills rather than pursuing the cosmic knowledge he craved.
Marlowe's Mephistopheles is one of literature's great creations - not a cackling villain but a weary, melancholy figure who carries his own hell with him. 'Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,' he tells Faustus with quiet despair. And later: 'Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place; for where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be.' These lines anticipate the existentialist philosophy of the twentieth century by four hundred years.
The play's closing scene, in which Faustus begs for time as the clock strikes midnight and the devils come to claim him, is perhaps the most terrifying passage in Elizabethan drama. 'Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, and burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,' the Chorus laments - a line that could serve as Marlowe's own epitaph.
Marlowe's other major works demonstrate his range. The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) is a darkly comic revenge tragedy centered on Barabas, a Jewish merchant whose wealth is confiscated by the Christian authorities of Malta. Barabas's opening monologue - boasting of 'infinite riches in a little room' - introduces a character who is both a figure of anti-Semitic caricature and a devastating critic of Christian hypocrisy. The play's prologue, spoken by Machiavelli himself, announces Marlowe's willingness to embrace moral ambiguity: 'I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.'
Edward II (c. 1592) was one of the first English history plays and arguably the finest before Shakespeare's great sequence. Its unflinching portrayal of the king's love for his favorite, Piers Gaveston, and the political catastrophe that follows, makes it a remarkably modern work - frank about sexuality, brutal about power, and emotionally devastating in its final scenes.
Alongside his plays, Marlowe was a major poet. Hero and Leander (published posthumously in 1598) is an erotic retelling of the classical myth, written in rhyming couplets of extraordinary sensual beauty. Its most famous line - 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' - was quoted by Shakespeare in As You Like It, a gesture of homage from one great writer to another. The poem also contains the line 'It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate' - a statement of philosophical determinism that anticipates later thinkers like Baruch Spinoza.
On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe was killed in Deptford, south of London. The official account states that he quarreled with Ingram Frizer over the 'reckoning' (the bill) at the house of Eleanor Bull, and that Frizer stabbed him above the right eye in self-defense. Frizer was pardoned within a month.
The circumstances have fueled centuries of speculation. Just twelve days before his death, Marlowe had been summoned before the Privy Council on charges of atheism and blasphemy - serious offenses in Elizabethan England. His former roommate, Thomas Kyd, had been arrested and under torture had implicated Marlowe in heretical views. Some historians believe Marlowe was assassinated to prevent him from revealing secrets from his espionage work. Others suspect a more personal motive. The truth is probably lost forever.
Marlowe's reputation during his lifetime was as much about his personality as his poetry. He was known as a free thinker - possibly an atheist in an age when atheism was punishable by death. Accusations against him included denial of the divinity of Christ, mockery of Scripture, and what contemporaries called 'monstrous opinions.' Whether these charges reflected his actual beliefs or were fabricated by enemies remains debated.
His plays were performed by the Admiral's Men, with the towering Edward Alleyn in the leading roles. Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were likely written for Alleyn's imposing physical presence, and the partnership between playwright and actor was one of the most successful in Elizabethan theater.
The relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare remains one of literary history's great puzzles. The 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare credited Marlowe as a co-author of the Henry VI plays, confirming what many scholars had long suspected: the two greatest Elizabethan playwrights collaborated directly. Whether they were friends, rivals, or something more complex is unknown.
Marlowe died at twenty-nine - the same age as Keats, younger than Shelley. In six years of writing, he had invented blank verse drama, created the first great English tragedy, written some of the most beautiful erotic poetry in the language, and set the stage for everything Shakespeare would accomplish. George Peele called him 'Marley, the Muses' darling.' It is as good a summary as any of a life that burned too bright and ended too soon.