Christopher Marlowe, (baptized Feb.

26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died May

30, 1593, Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important
predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of
dramatic blank verse.
Early years
Marlowe was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a Canterbury
shoemaker. Nothing is known of his first schooling, but on Jan. 14, 1579, he entered the
King’s School, Canterbury, as a scholar. A year later he went to Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge. Obtaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1584, he continued in residence at
Cambridge—which may imply that he was intending to take Anglican orders. In 1587,
however, the university hesitated about granting him the master’s degree; its doubts
(arising from his frequent absences from the university) were apparently set at rest
when the Privy Council sent a letter declaring that he had been employed “on matters
touching the benefit of his country”—apparently in Elizabeth I’s secret service.
Last years and literary career.
After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into
trouble with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and
probably also engaging himself from time to time in government service. Marlowe won a
dangerous reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Elizabeth I’s time, indicate merely
unorthodox religious opinions. In Robert Greene’s deathbed tract, Greenes groats-
worth of witte, Marlowe is referred to as a “famous gracer of Tragedians” and is
reproved for having said, like Greene himself, “There is no god” and for having studied
“pestilent Machiuilian pollicie.” There is further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in
the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter of Thomas
Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe’s death. Kyd alleged that certain papers
“denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his room belonged to Marlowe,
who had shared the room two years before. Both Baines and Kyd suggested on
Marlowe’s part atheism in the stricter sense and a persistent delight in blasphemy.
Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for
Marlowe’s arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily attendance on their
lordships “until he shall be licensed to the contrary.” On May 30, however, Marlowe was
killed by Ingram Frizer, in the dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at
a lodging house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the day and where, it was
alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill.

In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements
were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already
written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587;
published 1590). Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had
translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the
Latin. About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in
1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production
of Tamburlaine he received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major
concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts of Tamburlaine were published
anonymously in 1590, and the publisher omitted certain passages that he
found incongruous with the play’s serious concern with history; even so,
the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe’s. No other of his
plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but
splendid poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic
Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598.

There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent
to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held that Faustus quickly
followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social”
kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have
been The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground. It is known
that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral’s
Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly
played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.

Works. of Christopher Marlowe

In the earliest of Marlowe’s plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587;
published 1590), Marlowe’s characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it)
established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatic writing. It appears that originally Marlowe intended to write only the first part,
concluding with Tamburlaine’s marriage to Zenocrate and his making “truce with all the
world.” But the popularity of the first part encouraged Marlowe to continue the story to
Tamburlaine’s death. This gave him some difficulty, as he had almost exhausted his
historical sources in part I; consequently the sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of
padding. Yet the effort demanded in writing the continuation made the young
playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he had chosen, and thus part II
makes explicit certain notions that were below the surface and insufficiently recognized
by the dramatist in part I.

The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the bloody 14th-
century conqueror of Central Asia and India. Tamburlaine is a man avid for power and
luxury and the possession of beauty: at the beginning of part I he is only an obscure
Scythian shepherd, but he wins the crown of Persia by eloquence and bravery and a
readiness to discard loyalty. He then conquers Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the
town of Damascus to the sword, and he conquers the sultan of Egypt; but, at the pleas of
the sultan’s daughter Zenocrate, the captive whom he loves, he spares him and makes
truce. In part II Tamburlaine’s conquests are further extended; whenever he fights a
battle, he must win, even when his last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their
three sons provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the preservation of his
wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he refuses to follow his
father into battle. Always, too, there are more battles to fight: when for a moment he has
no immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of leading his army against the powers of
heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the scourge of God”; he
burns the Qurʾān, for he will have no intermediary between God and himself, and there
is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be granted recognition. Certainly Marlowe feels
sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent verse to speak, delighting in his dreams
of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following of Tamburlaine’s lines:

Nature, that fram’d us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering 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.

But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be absurd in his continual
striving for more demonstrations of his power; his cruelty, which is extreme, becomes
sickening; his human weakness is increasingly underlined, most notably in the onset of
his fatal illness immediately after his arrogant burning of the Qurʾān. In this early play
Marlowe already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than one angle,
achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur and impotence.

Marlowe’s most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus; but it has survived
only in a corrupt form, and its date of composition has been much-disputed. It was first
published in 1604, and another version appeared in 1616. Faustus takes over the
dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation,
fall, and damnation and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the
bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles.
In Faustus Marlowe tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells
his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The devil’s intermediary in
the play, Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen angel torn
between satanic pride and dark despair. The play gives eloquent expression to this idea
of damnation in the lament of Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in Faustus’ final
despairing entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed by the devil:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock

will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must

be damn’d.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!—Who pulls

me down?—

See, 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: O, spare me, Lucifer!—

Where is it now? ’tis gone: and see, where God

Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his

ireful brows!

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall

on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of his hero as well
as his magnificence, so here he can enter into Faustus’ grandiose intellectual ambition,
simultaneously viewing those ambitions as futile, self-destructive, and absurd. The text
is problematic in the low comic scenes spuriously introduced by later hack writers, but
its more sober and consistent moments are certainly the uncorrupted work of Marlowe.

In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Marlowe portrays another power-
hungry figure in the Jew Barabas, who in the villainous society of Christian Malta shows
no scruple in self-advancement. But this figure is more closely incorporated within his
society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely
adventurer against God. In the end Barabas is overcome, not by a divine stroke but by
the concerted action of his human enemies. There is a difficulty in deciding how fully
the extant text of The Jew of Malta represents Marlowe’s original play, for it was not
published until 1633. But The Jew can be closely associated with The Massacre at
Paris (1593), a dramatic presentation of incidents from contemporary French history,
including the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, and with The Troublesome Raigne
and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (published 1594), Marlowe’s great
contribution to the Elizabethan plays on historical themes.

As The Massacre introduces in the duke of Guise a figure unscrupulously avid for

power, so in the younger Mortimer of Edward II Marlowe shows a man developing an
appetite for power and increasingly corrupted as power comes to him. In each instance
the dramatist shares in the excitement of the pursuit of glory, but all three plays present
such figures within a social framework: the notion of social responsibility, the notion of
corruption through power, and the notion of the suffering that the exercise of power
entails are all prominently the dramatist’s concern. Apart from Tamburlaine and the
minor work Dido, Queen of Carthage (of uncertain date, published 1594 and written in
collaboration with Thomas Nashe), Edward II is the only one of Marlowe’s plays whose
extant text can be relied on as adequately representing the author’s manuscript. And
certainly Edward II is a major work, not merely one of the first Elizabethan plays on an
English historical theme. The relationships linking the king, his neglected queen, the
king’s favourite, Gaveston, and the ambitious Mortimer are studied with detached
sympathy and remarkable understanding: no character here is lightly disposed of, and
the abdication and the brutal murder of Edward show the same dark and violent
imagination as appeared in Marlowe’s presentation of Faustus’ last hour. Though this
play, along with The Jew and The Massacre, shows Marlowe’s fascinated response to
the distorted Elizabethan idea of Machiavelli, it more importantly shows Marlowe’s
deeply suggestive awareness of the nature of disaster, the power of society, and the dark
extent of an individual’s suffering.

In addition to translations (Ovid’s Amores and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia),

Marlowe’s nondramatic work includes the poem Hero and Leander. This work was
incomplete at his death and was extended by George Chapman: the joint work of the two
poets was published in 1598.