A short life of the author
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), born in Canterbury two months before Shakespeare, was the most dazzling dramatic talent of the Elizabethan age before Shakespeare eclipsed all rivals. In a career of barely six years he transformed English drama: his blank verse — Ben Jonson’s “mighty line” — gave the stage a language of power, grandeur, and psychological depth it had never possessed. He was a scholar, a spy, a blasphemer, and a man of violence, and he was murdered at twenty-nine.
Life and Career
Marlowe was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker. He attended the King’s School, Canterbury, on a scholarship and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship endowed by Archbishop Parker. He received his BA in 1584; the university nearly refused him his MA in 1587, apparently because of prolonged absences, until the Privy Council intervened with a letter stating that Marlowe had been “employed in matters touching the benefit of his country” — a phrase universally interpreted as indicating secret government service, probably espionage on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network against Catholic plotters.
Tamburlaine the Great (performed c. 1587, published 1590) was his first masterpiece: a two-part epic dramatising the rise of the Mongol conqueror Timur. Its blank verse — muscular, hypnotic, soaring — was unlike anything the English stage had heard. Edward Alleyn’s performance at the Rose Theatre made him a star; the play made Marlowe famous.
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92) is his greatest work: the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of unlimited knowledge and power. Faustus’s final soliloquy — “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” — is the most powerful single speech in English drama before Shakespeare’s mature tragedies.
The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) is a savage black comedy about Barabas, a Maltese Jew whose revenges escalate from cunning to psychopathic absurdity. Edward II (c. 1592) is the finest English history play before Shakespeare’s — a study of a king destroyed by his passion for his favourite, Gaveston.
Marlowe was accused repeatedly of atheism and blasphemy. The informer Richard Baines filed a note claiming Marlowe had said “all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools” and that Moses was “but a juggler.” On 30 May 1593, at a house in Deptford owned by Eleanor Bull, Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye by Ingram Frizer during what was described as a quarrel over the bill — the “reckoning.” He died instantly. The three men present — Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley — were all connected to the intelligence services. Whether the killing was a tavern brawl, a political assassination, or something else entirely remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of literary history.
Major Works and Themes
Marlowe’s protagonists are overreachers: men of titanic ambition who seek to transcend human limitation through conquest (Tamburlaine), knowledge (Faustus), or wealth (Barabas). Their magnificence and their destruction are inseparable; the “mighty line” that celebrates their ambition also marks their doom.
His lyric poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” — “Come live with me and be my love” — is one of the most famous English poems and has been answered, parodied, and imitated for four centuries.
The Marlowe-Shakespeare Question
The conspiracy theory that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays — supposedly faking his death in Deptford and continuing to write under Shakespeare’s name — has no scholarly support but persistent popular appeal. It was given impetus by the 2016 decision of the New Oxford Shakespeare to credit Marlowe as co-author of the three parts of Henry VI, based on computational stylistic analysis. This attribution is less sensational than it sounds — Elizabethan dramatists routinely collaborated — but it confirms what scholars have long recognised: that Marlowe and Shakespeare were in direct creative dialogue, and that the young Shakespeare learned his craft in part by imitating, competing with, and eventually surpassing Marlowe.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Marlowe is Shakespeare’s necessary precursor. Without Marlowe’s blank verse there is no Hamlet; without Edward II there is no Richard II; without Faustus there is no Prospero. His critical reputation has fluctuated — the Romantics preferred him to Shakespeare’s other contemporaries; T.S. Eliot found him immature and “a most savage comic humourist”; Harold Bloom championed him as “the inventor of the English hero-villain” — but his position as the second dramatist of the Elizabethan age is secure. That he achieved what he did in barely six years of writing, dead at twenty-nine, makes him one of the most tantalising what-ifs in literary history.
Collecting Marlowe
Sixteenth-century Marlowe quartos are among the rarest and most valuable English dramatic texts.
Tamburlaine the Great (1590, Richard Jones) is the earliest published Marlowe play. Copies are almost entirely institutional; those that surface bring $50,000–$200,000 or more.
Doctor Faustus exists in two significantly different versions: the 1604 “A-text” and the 1616 “B-text.” The 1604 quarto is extremely rare; copies bring $30,000–$100,000. The 1616 edition is somewhat more common.
Edward II (1594, William Jones) is equally rare. All early Marlowe quartos are institutional-grade rarities; most private collectors content themselves with the major scholarly editions (Bowers, Bevington) or with early collected editions.