Christopher Marlowe: Life, Education, and Legacy Marlowe, Christopher: Life, Education, and Legacy Author Alexis Neurauter Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Alexis Neurauter, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Theatre Explore the vibrant world of early modern theatre, including plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and the cultural impacts of performance. Playwrights Kyd, Thomas (1558–1594) Marlowe, Christopher (1564–1593) Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Education Gender Homosexuality Education Greek Latin Published file. Updated metadata proofed Changed simple list to bulleted. Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. added two figures and image sources. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Alexis Neurauter Alexis Neurauter

Alexis Neurauter was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Image depicting a young man dressed in a black doublet with orange stripes. His brown hair is chin-length and he wears a small moustache. His expression is neutrally pleasant and his arms are crossed. This image was discovered at Corpus Christi College in 1952. It is presumed to depict Christopher Marlow because Marlowe attended the college and the portrait’s date aligns with Marlowe’s birth date, although some historians find this questionable. The Latin in the top right corner reads ANNO DNI AETATIS SVAE 21 1585 and QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT, meaning Aged 21 in 1585 and that which nourishes me destroys me respectively. Courtesy of Wikimedia and Corpus Christi College. Public Domain.
Early Life

Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564 into the lower artisanal class in Canterbury, England as the second of nine children born to shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Katherine. His birth was not officially recorded. However, it is likely that he would have been born a few days prior to his baptism on February 26, 1564. Fellow playwright William Shakespeare was born only a few months later in April of 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

Canterbury was a small but bustling market town, anchored since the Middle Ages by pilgrims to its shrine to St. Thomas a Becket. In the late 16th century, the city was full of immigrants fleeing religious persecution from France and the Netherlands. Living in Canterbury, it is likely that Marlowe would have heard of the massacre of French Protestants from these immigrants, which would end up being the basis for his 1592 play Massacre at Paris.

Education

In this period, the education system allowed for the basic education of boys from the poorer classes by awarding scholarships to some boys endowed with minds apt for learning (Nicholl). Around six to seven years of age, the boys would begin attending petty school where they would learn the alphabet and catechism, plus the basics of reading in English. After this, they would have attended a local grammar school for six years. In grammar school, they would study Greek and Latin language and literature, and it is here that Marlowe would have encountered Ovid and Virgil for the first time. Virgil in particular was a great influence on Marlowe as his first play was based on Virgil’s Aeneid, called Dido, Queen of Carthage.

We also see multiple allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine The Great: Philemus: Madam, your father and th’ Arabian King, The first affector of your excellence, Comes now as Turnus ‘gainst Aeneas did, Armed with lance into Egyptian fields, Ready for battle ‘gainst my lord the King. (5.2.314-318) Zenocrate: But as the gods, to end the Trojans’ toil, Prevented Turnus of Lavinia And fatally enriched Aeneas’ love, Must Tamburlaine by their resistless powers, With virtue of a gentle victory, Conclude a league of honour, to my hope. (5.2.326–335)

Marlowe enrolled in King’s School in Canterbury on a scholarship when he turned 14, which was considered late to be starting school.Scholars speculate he had the financial backing of Judge Sir Roger Manwood, which may explain the Latin elegy Marlowe wrote upon Manwood’s death. At 16, he won the Parker scholarship funded by the Archbishop Matthew Parker to finish his education at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. After four years of college, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584 and then his Master of Arts in 1587. Interestingly, Marlowe’s scholarship stipulated recipients should become clergyman. Since he was supposed to become a clergyman, he was sponsored for six years rather than the typical three. Joining the clergy was one of the few ways that a commoner like Marlowe could raise his social status. However, Marlowe never ended up becoming a member of the clergy, and he most likely never intended to, because, immediately after graduating, he moved to London and began to write literary works.

Marlowe’s Sexuality

Speculation in his own time existed about Marlowe being what we would call a gay man, although a word for that concept did not exist at the time. The most notable reference is from Richard Baines, who also accused Marlowe of being an atheist; he famously quotes Marlowe as saying all they that love not tobacco and boies were fooles. Scholars do not rely only on Baines’ word, but look to some of Marlowe’s writings in which there are possible same-sex romantic relationships; scenes from the 1585 play Dido, Queen of Carthage and the 1592 play Edward II stand out:

Dido, Queen of Carthage: Jupiter: Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me; I love thee well, say Juno what she will. Ganymede: I am much better for your worthless love, That will not shield me from her shrewish blows: To-day, when as I fill’d into your cups, And held the cloth the pleasance while you drank, She reach’d me such rap for that I spill’d, As made the blood run down mine ears. Jupiter: What! Dares she strike the darling of my thoughts? By Saturn’s soul, and this earth threat’ning air, That, shaken thrice, makes nature’s buildings quake, I vow, if she but once frown on thee more, To hang her, meteor-like, ‘twixt heaven and earth, And bind her hand and foot with golden cords, As once I did for harming Hercules! (1.1.1–15)

This scene offers a loving portrait of the relationship between Jupiter and the boy Ganymede, whose name became a synonym for male same-sex love during the early modern period (McHenry and Baker)

In Marlowe’s 1592 history play depicting the life and death of the English monarch, Edward II (r.1307–1327), the king is very close to a courtier named Piers Gaveston:

Edward II: Enter Gaveston, reading a letter Gaveston: My father is deceas’d! Come, Gaveston, And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend. Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight! What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston, Than live and be the favourite of a king! Sweet prince, I come! These, these thy amorous lines Might have enforc’d me to have swum from France, And like Leander, gasp’s upon the sand, So thou would’st smile, and take me in thine arms. (1.1.1–9)

In referencing the myth of Hero and Leander, Marlowe compares the relationship between Gaveston and the King to the one between the lovers in the myth. It could also be said that Marlowe calls attention to male sexual desire due to Neptune’s extensive pursuit of Leander as he swims towards his beloved.

However, despite what scholars can infer from the language in Dido and Edward II, no concrete proof exists regarding Marlowe’s sexuality. Marlowe could just have been trying to shock the public or capture the attitudes portrayed in classical literature.

Marlowe the Spy?

Besides being a playwright, around the time of getting his Master of Arts at Cambridge, Marlowe also became a government agent in the employ of Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. He missed a lot of classes because of how busy he was on Walsingham’s business, and, at the same time, rumours circulated that he was sympathetic to Catholics. Due to this distrust and sporadic attendance, Marlowe was almost denied receiving his degree. It was ultimaately granted was because officers of Elizabeth I’s Privy council overruled the denial from the University, stating that Marlowe had helped the queen herself.

Shortly before Marlowe died in 1593, his friend Thomas Kyd, a fellow playwright best known for The Spanish Tragedy, was arrested on suspicions of treason. Officials claimed to have found a heretical treatise that Kyd claimed was Marlowe’s (Martin 13). Kyd was tortured until he accused Marlowe of blasphemy, resulting in a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. However, he would never be brought into custody.

Death

Marlowe died on May 30, 1593, at a tavern in Deptford, a town just outside London. Marlowe entered an altercation with a friend of his, Ingram Frizer, over how the bill would be split. Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s dagger and inflicted shallow head wounds. In the struggle following, Marlowe was given a mortal wound above his right eye, of the depth of two inches and the width of one inch and died instantly. This detail comes from Frizer’s royal pardon given to him June 28, 1593, which also states that Frizer acted in self-defence. Many scholars presume that Frizer may have been acting on orders from the government to eliminate Marlowe.

After Marlowe’s death, rumour and speculation surrounding his life and death ran rampant. Marlowe may have been assassinated because he was either a a rogue spy, an atheistic rebel, or a convenient scapegoat (Martin 13). Marlowe was buried on June 1st, 1593, at St Nicholas’s, Deptford and the location of his grave is unknown.

Title page of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1620), by John Wright. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Public Domain.
Important Works

Dido Queen of Carthage -play, 1584 Tamburlaine the Great Part 1 -play, 1587 Tamburlaine the Great Part 2 -play, 1587 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus - play, 1588–1592 Edward the Second -play, 1592 The Jew of Malta -play, 1592 Massacre of Paris -play, 1592–1593 Hero and Leander -poem, 1593

Marlowe’s Legacy

Marlowe in particular is known for his dramatic poetry, which made blank verse, poetry written with regular meter but unrhymed lines, common on the English stage. Often this is referred to as Marlowe’s Mighty Line so dubbed by the slightly younger playwright Ben Jonson in an elegy called To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us, written as an introduction the collected works of Shakespeare’s plays known as The First Folio. Marlowe’s most famous play is Doctor Faustus, a retelling of the fable of a scholar who sells his soul to Satan in return for more knowledge and power.

Chaucer, who wrote centuries before Marlowe in the 1300’s, had used the same line and iambic pentameter, but it had always rhymed. Marlowe was not the first playwright to use blank verse, but he most certainly made it popular. His works are frequently performed in modern playhouses such as The Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe.

Key Print Sources Marlowe, Christopher. Marlowe’s Edward the Second, and Selections from Tamburlaine and the Poems. H. Holt, 1894. Marlowe, Christopher, and Mathew R. Martin. Christopher Marlowe’s Life. Tamburlaine the Great: Part One and Part Two, Broadview Press, 2014, pp. 9–15. Marlowe, Christopher, and Thomas Nash. Dido, Queen of Carthage: A Tragedy. D.S. Maurice, 1825. McHenry, Troy, and Helen Baker. The Public Representation of Homosexual Men in Seventeenth-Century England – A Corpus Based View. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 3.2 (2017). Accessed at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jhsl-2017-1003/html. Naylor, Amanda. Marlowe’s <q>mighty line</q>: Amanda Naylor examines the use of language in Christopher Marlowe’s tragic drama <title level="m">Doctor Faustus. The English Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 2010, p. 10+. Gale Literature Resource Center. Accessed 29 Oct. 2020. Nicholl, Charles. Marlowe <supplied>Marley</supplied>, Christopher (bap. 1564, d. 1593), playwright and poet. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 3 Jan. 2008. Oxford University Press. Stapleton, M. L. Christopher Marlowe in Context. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 1106–1108.
Key Online Sources A Portrait of Marlowe? The Marlowe Society. https://www.marlowe-society.org/christopher-marlowe/portrait/. Accessed 16 May 2024. Bennett, Kristen Abbott. Marlowe, Christopher (Kit). The Kit Marlowe Project, 2017, https://kitmarlowe.org/encyclopedia/. The Marlowe Society. The Marlowe Society, 2022, https://www.marlowe-society.org/. Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine. Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www.rsc.org.uk/tamburlaine/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2023.
Image Source Unknown 21-Year Old Man, supposed to be Christopher Marlowe. 1585. Oil on panel. Corpus Christi College. Wikimedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Christopher_Marlowe.jpg. Wright, John. Title Page of a Late Edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, with a Woodcut Illustration of a Devil Coming up Through a Trapdoor. 1620. Wikimedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Faustus-tragedy.gif.