Christopher Marlowe — Guide to the Elizabethan Playwright and Poet

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Marlowe’s Life, Legend, and Death

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) is the most important English playwright before Shakespeare and one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of the Elizabethan age. He was born in Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, educated at the King’s School and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship that was originally intended for students preparing for the priesthood. The circumstances of his Cambridge education and his subsequent career have given rise to persistent speculation that he worked as a government spy — a theory supported by the fact that the Privy Council intervened to ensure that he received his MA despite unexplained absences, stating that he had “done her Majesty good service.” Marlowe’s life was marked by violence, intrigue, and danger: he was involved in street fights, accused of atheism and blasphemy by the informer Richard Baines, associated with the freethinking circle of Sir Walter Raleigh, and finally killed at the age of twenty-nine in a tavern brawl in Deptford — or possibly assassinated for his political activities.

The Baines Note, a document discovered in the British Library, contains a list of Marlowe’s alleged blasphemous opinions, including the claims that “Moses was but a juggler” and that “Christ was a bastard.” Whether these represent Marlowe’s actual beliefs or malicious fabrications by an informer remains unclear, but they give a vivid sense of the dangerous intellectual currents in which Marlowe moved. The Elizabethan authorities took a dim view of religious heterodoxy, and Marlowe may have been facing prosecution for atheism at the time of his death. The circumstances of his death — the quarrel over the “reckoning” or tavern bill, the presence of known government agents, the convenient elimination of a potential embarrassment to the state — have made Marlowe’s death one of the great unsolved mysteries of English literary history. Some conspiracy theories even suggest that Marlowe faked his death and continued to write under Shakespeare’s name, though this theory has been almost universally rejected by scholars.

Marlowe’s biography reads like one of his own tragedies. His short life was packed with incident: he was arrested for his involvement in a street fight in which a man was killed, he was accused of counterfeiting coins (a charge of high treason), and his name appears in the records of the Privy Council in connection with various intelligence operations. The image that emerges is of a brilliant, volatile, and dangerous young man who lived on the edge of Elizabethan society’s tolerance and who finally pushed too far. His violent death at twenty-nine cut short what might have been the greatest dramatic career of the age — though it is also possible that his death at just this moment, when his genius was fully mature but his reputation was compromised by scandal, contributed to his enduring fascination.

Tamburlaine the Great

Tamburlaine the Great (1587–1588) was Marlowe’s first major play and an immediate sensation on the London stage. It tells the story of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd who rises through military conquest to become the most powerful ruler in the world, driven by an insatiable ambition that finds expression in some of the most magnificent blank verse ever written. The play’s famous opening speech — “And ride in triumph through Persepolis!” — announces a new kind of dramatic poetry, one of unprecedented power and majesty. Tamburlaine’s conquests take him across Asia, from Persia to Turkey to Babylon, and the play is structured as a series of spectacular military triumphs, each more extraordinary than the last. The play’s popularity was immense, establishing Marlowe as the leading playwright of his generation.

Tamburlaine is divided into two parts, the first covering the Scythian conqueror’s rise to power and his defeat of the Turkish emperor Bajazeth, the second covering his later campaigns and his death. The play lacks the tight dramatic structure of Marlowe’s later works, but this looseness is part of its epic ambition: it aims to present the whole sweep of a world-conqueror’s career, from obscure origins to universal dominion to death. The play’s influence on the development of English drama was profound. It showed what blank verse could achieve on the stage, and it created a new kind of tragic hero — the overreacher, driven by limitless ambition — that would become central to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The character of Tamburlaine, with his ambition, his ruthlessness, and his magnetic charisma, established a template that Marlowe would develop in his later protagonists and that Shakespeare would adapt and transform in figures like Richard III, Macbeth, and Coriolanus.

Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus is Marlowe’s most famous play, the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, and it remains one of the most powerful dramatic treatments of the Faust legend in any language. Faustus is a scholar of extraordinary learning who finds himself dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge: he has mastered logic, medicine, law, and theology, but he wants more — the power over nature, the command of spirits, the knowledge of things beyond the human sphere. He turns to magic, conjures the devil Mephistopheles, and makes a bargain: twenty-four years of unlimited power, knowledge, and pleasure in exchange for his soul. The play traces the trajectory of that bargain, from the exhilaration of Faustus’s early adventures through the growing awareness of his predicament to the final terrifying hour of his damnation. The soliloquies of Faustus trace the inner drama of a soul in crisis with a psychological intensity that is unprecedented in English drama.

The play’s treatment of the Faust legend transforms what might have been a simple moral fable into a profound meditation on the nature of knowledge, desire, and damnation. Marlowe’s Faustus is not a simple sinner but a tragic hero whose very greatness makes his fall more terrible. His desire to transcend human limits is presented with such sympathy that the audience shares his exhilaration and his despair. The play’s ambiguity — is it a Christian morality play or a celebration of human ambition? — is essential to its power and has made it the subject of endless critical debate. The final scene, in which Faustus’s desperate plea for more time is answered by the striking of the clock and the arrival of the devils, is one of the most harrowing in English drama.

The Jew of Malta and Edward II

The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) is a play of revenge and dark comedy whose protagonist Barabas anticipates Shakespeare’s Shylock but is a far more amoral and Machiavellian figure. Barabas is a wealthy Jewish merchant whose entire fortune is confiscated by the Christian governor of Malta, and he responds with a campaign of revenge that involves murder, poison, and betrayal. The play is a savage satire of religious hypocrisy and greed, and its ending is one of the darkest in Elizabethan drama. Edward II (c. 1592) is Marlowe’s most mature play and his greatest achievement in the genre of the history play. It tells the story of the reign and deposition of Edward II, focusing on his relationship with his favorite Piers Gaveston and his destruction by his barons and his queen. The play is remarkable for its sympathetic and psychologically nuanced portrayal of a king whose personal desires lead to his political ruin, and its treatment of same-sex desire is unusually explicit for the period.

Hero and Leander

Hero and Leander is Marlowe’s masterpiece of narrative poetry, an Ovidian epyllion that tells the story of the tragic love of Hero and Leander. Though incomplete — it breaks off at the point where Leander swims the Hellespont to meet Hero — the surviving fragment is among the most beautiful narrative poems in English. Marlowe’s verse here is at its most sensuous and lyrical, combining the eroticism of Ovid with the wit and sophistication of the Renaissance epyllion. The poem was completed by George Chapman after Marlowe’s death and published in 1598.

Marlowe’s Dramatic Innovations and the Marlovian Hero

Marlowe’s innovations in dramatic verse were revolutionary. He developed the “mighty line” of blank verse — a verse line of extraordinary power, resonance, and flexibility that freed English drama from the stiffness of earlier dramatic poetry. Before Marlowe, English drama was written mostly in rhymed verse or in a relatively stiff and regular blank verse. Marlowe’s verse, by contrast, is characterized by its use of the full rhythmic resources of the English language, its mastery of the rhetorical figures of classical oratory, and its ability to modulate from grandiloquent magnificence to intimate pathos. His protagonists — Tamburlaine, Faustus, Barabas, Edward II — are defined by their overreaching ambition, their restless desire for something beyond ordinary human limits. Each pursues his desire with a single-minded intensity that is at once magnificent and destructive. The Marlovian hero is a figure of enormous energy and aspiration, a Renaissance ideal of human potential pushed to its limits and beyond. This ambivalence is what gives Marlowe’s plays their unsettling power: they celebrate and critique the Renaissance ambition to transcend human limits simultaneously.

FAQ

How did Marlowe die? In a tavern fight in Deptford in 1593, though the circumstances remain mysterious and some believe he was assassinated.

What is the “Marlovian hero”? An overreaching figure driven by limitless ambition who transcends conventional moral boundaries.

What is Marlowe’s most famous play? Doctor Faustus, the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil.

What is the “mighty line”? Marlowe’s powerful and flexible blank verse that revolutionized English dramatic poetry.

Did Marlowe influence Shakespeare? Yes, profoundly — Shakespeare learned from Marlowe’s use of blank verse, his dramatic structure, and his characterization.

What are Marlowe’s other major plays? Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II.

What is the Baines Note? An informer’s document listing Marlowe’s alleged blasphemous opinions, a key source of evidence about his religious views.

What is the Marlowe-Shakespeare authorship theory? The unfounded theory that Marlowe faked his death and wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.