Elizabethan playwright, England's first great dramatist. A shoemaker's son, Marlowe made it to Cambridge, where a cabal of potentates strongarmed his college into awarding him an MA on the grounds that "He had done her Majesty good service…in matters touching the benefit of his country"—suggesting a sideline in espionage. He was said to be a vocal atheist at a time when free-thinking could be fatal, and wrote boldly about same-sex desire.
Marlowe made blank verse the go-to medium of English drama, pioneered the history play and the soliloquy. Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard credits him with "the invention of inwardness"—laying characters' thoughts and feelings bare on stage. His most celebrated work is "Doctor Faustus", about a scholar who barters his soul to Lucifer. "The Jew of Malta" preceded Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" on a similar theme.
He was also busted in a counterfeiting scam, from which powerful patrons apparently rescued him. In 1593, aged 29, Marlowe was stabbed in the eye in a murky brawl. The killer was pardoned; speculation about the mastermind has roped in Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I.
His relative obscurity beside Shakespeare illustrates a lesson about posterity: being best matters far more than being first. Only around a decade separated "Doctor Faustus" from "Hamlet", but in psychological nuance the gap feels far wider. The laurels available to Elizabethan dramatists have all gone to Shakespeare.
Stephen Greenblatt's biography "Dark Renaissance" aims to resurrect Marlowe's reputation. "Born with Teeth", a West End play, imagines Marlowe trying to seduce and recruit the young Shakespeare as a spy.
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical."