Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was an English Elizabethan playwright, poet, and translator whose revolutionary dramatic blank verse paved the way for William Shakespeare. Born into a shoemaker's family in Canterbury in the same year as Shakespeare, Marlowe attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was recruited into Queen Elizabeth I's royal espionage network under Sir Francis Walsingham.

Marlowe electrified the London stage with theatrical power and overweening ambition in Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. His career was violently cut short at age twenty-nine when he was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house under murky circumstances involving espionage and heresy charges.