Christopher Marlowe was the bad boy of Elizabethan literature, he pushed the limits of literary form. He challenged the religious status quo. He challenged social norms, legal norms of behavior. In a word, Marlowe pushed limits. There is no record of Christopher Marlowe's birthday, but there are records of his baptism on February 26, 15 64 in Canterbury, England, Marlow was the son of a shoemaker. He attended the King's School and then won a scholarship to Cambridge University.

Cambridge University hesitated to grant Christopher Marlowe his master's degree in 1987 because they suspected that he may have converted to Catholicism. But the crown, or namely the Privy Council, intervened on Marlow's behalf to give him the degree. So this has led scholars to speculate that Marlowe must have been an agent for the Crown.

After his education at Cambridge, Marlowe went to London to produce literature for the public stage. This is the beginning of the professionalization of writing and the concept of a person living as a writer.

Marlowe managed to figure out what his audiences wanted violent, sensationalistic fiction.

And he provided that Marlos first play. Dido, queen of Carthage, was performed in London in the late 1980s. Marlowe was just before Shakespeare in terms of achieving popularity and fame in the Elizabethan theatre.

Marlowe's second play, Tamburlaine, was performed in the London stage around 1097, and it's one of the first plays to use blank verse in an effective theatrical way blink first on rhymed iambic pentameter.

And so it's a big deal to try to develop that.

After Tamburlaine, Marlowe wrote only four additional plays. Dr. Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward the second and massacre at Paris, Christopher Marlowe had a wonderful influence on Shakespeare.

Marlow's plays often resulted in a similar play by Shakespeare, which dealt with very similar themes as if Shakespeare were one upping Marlowe, which is the way Elizabethan Theatre often worked, Mahler wrote for plays that are famous. Today, Shakespeare wrote 38, but those four plays that Marlowe wrote provided Shakespeare with a plot material for four of his most popular plays. So that Drew of Malta becomes Merchant of Venice. Dr Faustus becomes Macbeth, Edward, the second becomes Richard.

The second in Tamburlaine becomes the Henriette.

Marlos most famous play was the tragical history of Dr Faustus. Dr Faustus was incendiary during a period of time when you had Puritan's outside of the theatre rallying against it as Devil's Cauldron, Marlowe puts on a play where the title character summons the devil on stage. This is a period of time when people are new to the theatre, and if you can imagine having a title character, draw a whole bunch of circles and pentagrams on stage and mumble in Latin and poof, a devil appears, you have a sense of just how frightening that play might have been.

Christopher Marlowe never married and died when he was only 29 years old on May 30th, 1993, Marlowe died in typically sensationalistic circumstances.

He was stabbed in the eye. He was at a boarding house. And presumably there was a dispute over the bill or the reckoning. This is thought by many people to be simply a cover a few days prior. He had been accused of treason and of heresy.

The timing of this death is extremely suspect, despite the fact that Marlowe was only writing plays in London for six years. He is one of the top 10 English playwrights of all time.