Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, and entered Corpus Christi, Cambridge, as a scholarship student. He very probably worked for Elizabeth's secret services. He established blank verse, already used before him, on the popular stage, and his successors would take it up. Under an accusation of atheism, he died at twenty-nine in a house in Deptford, stabbed in a quarrel over the bill according to the official inquiry, which has fuelled the hypothesis of a political assassination.

In the catalogue 1

• TheatreThe Tragical History of Doctor FaustusChristopher Marlowe · 1589LiteraturePublic domain