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CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
If you met Christopher Marlowe, you might not like him. But
you would probably be fascinated by him. Marlowe was a fiery
genius whose brief career resembled the trail of a meteor across
the night sky.
Marlowe was not just a writer. A hot-headed swordsman, he
was arrested twice for street fighting and spent some weeks in
prison for his role in a fatal duel. He was also a spy,
involved in a dangerous, though not fully understood, ring of
secret agents.
At one extreme, Marlowe was a social climber who hobnobbed
with the rich and powerful of his day. He was friend to Sir
Francis Walsingham, head of the government's secret service.
And he knew Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth's favorite at
court. At the other extreme, Marlowe had a taste for London low
life. He haunted the taverns till dawn in the company of
thieves and confidence men.
Marlowe combined a thirst for adventure with wildly
speculative opinions. In Elizabethan times, when church
attendance was strictly enforced by law, Marlowe was an atheist.
Like Faustus, he scoffed openly at established beliefs. He
called the biblical Moses "a juggler," or second-rate magician,
and referred to Christ as a not-so-pious fraud.
Not surprisingly, when Marlowe died at 29--stabbed through
the eye in a tavern brawl--many people saw in his fate the hand
of an angry God. But let's start at the beginning.
Marlowe was born in 1564, two months before William
Shakespeare, in the cathedral town of Canterbury. He was a
shoemaker's son and, in the normal course of events, would have
taken up his father's trade. Destiny intervened, however, in
the form of a college scholarship. In the sixteenth century,
even more than in the present day, college was a way out of a
laborer's life. It opened up the path of advancement,
presumably within the church.
Today, we think of education as a universal right. But in
those days, it was a privilege. The ability to read--which
meant the ability to read Latin--was still a rare
accomplishment. In fact, under English common law, any man who
could read was considered a priest and could claim, if arrested,
a right called "benefit of clergy." That meant, if you killed a
man and could read, you might go free with a warning. But if
you killed a man and couldn't read, you were sure to swing from
