Contributions
The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, a scholarship boy at the King's School and then at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine yet transformed English theatre in a handful of blazing plays. With Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587) he brought to the public stage a blank verse of new amplitude — the "mighty line" later praised by Ben Jonson — carried by outsized heroes hungry for power and knowledge. There followed The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, in which a scholar sells his soul to the devil; The Jew of Malta; Edward II, one of the first great English history plays, startlingly frank about a king's desires; and The Massacre at Paris. As a poet he left a translation of Ovid's Amores, the unfinished Hero and Leander, and the famous pastoral lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. Written just before Shakespeare's, his drama opened the way directly: without Marlowe, Elizabethan dramatic verse would not have found its tongue.
Significance
Marlowe was the first to prove that blank verse could be the natural instrument of the great English stage, at once supple and powerful: he literally invented the music on which Shakespeare would write. His protagonists — the conqueror Tamburlaine, the damned Faustus, the Machiavellian Barabas — embody a restless modernity, the man who defies God, morality and the limits of knowledge. He was also the first to carry the ambition of the continental Renaissance into London's popular theatre. Yet his path is shot through with shadows that make him as scandalous as he is brilliant. Documents place him within the Elizabethan intelligence world, probably employed by Walsingham's network during his absences from Cambridge. Shortly before his death an informer's "Baines note" accused him of atheism, blasphemy and seditious talk — charges that could lead to the stake. His reputation as a freethinker, even a provocateur, blurs myth and fact: we still do not know whether the man held the opinions ascribed to him, or fell victim to denunciation. His violent death sealed the legend of the damned poet before its time.
Influence
He gave English theatre its first great tragic voice and its benchmark blank verse, inherited directly by Shakespeare, his exact contemporary. His titanic, transgressive heroes — Faustus above all — haunt European literature down to Romanticism (the Faust myth, Goethe) and the modern image of the damned scholar. He drew in turn on Ovid, whom he translated, on Lucan, on Machiavelli's thought and the conquest narratives of his age, bursting the Senecan and university moulds from within.
Anecdote
On 30 May 1593 Marlowe spent the day in a house at Deptford, on the Thames, with three men of murky ties to state intelligence — Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. A quarrel broke out, the report says, over the "reckoning," the bill to be paid. Frizer struck: the blade entered above the right eye and killed the poet on the spot. He was pardoned three weeks later, the case closed as self-defence. The coroner's report stayed lost until the scholar Leslie Hotson rediscovered it in the archives in 1925 — reviving, rather than quieting, the suspicion of a political killing dressed up as a tavern brawl.