Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe invented the kind of English tragedy Shakespeare then wrote, and was stabbed above the eye in a Deptford lodging house at twenty-nine. He was a shoemaker's son from Canterbury who reached Cambridge on a scholarship intended for men entering the church, and the university nearly withheld his degree over his absences until the Privy Council intervened to say he had been employed in matters touching the benefit of his country - which is as close to documentary proof of government work as the period offers. Tamburlaine the Great, staged about 1587, put blank verse on the public stage with a force nothing had matched, and its hero is a Scythian shepherd who conquers the world and is punished by nothing. Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II followed in six years. He was accused, by an informer whose note survives, of atheism, of saying that Moses was a juggler and that religion was invented to keep men in awe, and a warrant was out for him when he died. The inquest recorded a quarrel over a bill in a house at Deptford with three men who all had intelligence connections, and the coroner accepted self-defence. Whether it was a tavern brawl or an assassination has been argued for four centuries. He was buried in an unmarked grave, and Shakespeare, born the same year, quoted him afterwards. The portrait at Corpus Christi College, found during building work in 1953 and inscribed with the age of twenty-one in 1585, is the image everyone uses and is only presumed to be him. Nothing on the panel gives a name. The suggestion that he faked his death and wrote Shakespeare's plays is a nineteenth-century invention with no evidence behind it whatever.

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