Kit Marlowe's Tamburlaine swagger ended in mystery
Christopher Marlowe, baptized Canterbury 26 February 1564, dominated pre-Shakespeare London drama with Tamburlaine's imitators yet died at twenty-nine in 1593 amid spy rumors, atheism charges, and coin-counterfeiting in Flushing. Privy Council praise saved his Cambridge MA.
Marlowe was the second of nine children born to John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker, and his wife Katherine, whose father came from Dover. Baptised at St George's Church on 26 February 1564, he was roughly two months older than Shakespeare, who was christened that April in Stratford. A scholarship put him in The King's School by the age of fourteen, and another carried him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was expected to become an Anglican clergyman. He took a BA in 1584 instead, having mastered Latin by reading and translating Ovid.
In 1587 Cambridge hesitated over his MA amid talk that he planned to enter the English seminary at Rheims, which would have broken Elizabeth's 1585 law against Englishmen seeking Catholic ordination. The Privy Council intervened, thanking him for loyal service on unnamed business that benefited his country; its letter is lost, and only a vague minute survives. Scholars agree such phrasing typically shielded government agents, and Park Honan and Charles Nicholl suspect he was recruited while at Cambridge, possibly for Sir Francis Walsingham. College records also show long absences in 1584–1585 and lavish spending on food and drink that his scholarship could not have covered.
Most of what we know of his adult years comes from legal papers. In September 1589 a deadly street quarrel involving the poet Thomas Watson put him in Newgate for a fortnight; he was acquitted that December. In 1592 he was seized in the Dutch garrison town of Flushing over counterfeit coins and sent to Lord Burghley, yet no charge followed, and one theory says he was meant to be spying on followers of the Catholic plotter William Stanley. After another arrest in 1593, the informer Richard Baines listed eighteen blasphemous opinions he pinned on Marlowe, and Thomas Kyd, possibly under torture, linked him to the circle around Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot.
He died on 30 May 1593, and explanations still range from a tavern brawl or blasphemy to sexual intrigue, betrayal by a rival writer or espionage directed from the top. A coroner's report found only in 1925 failed to end the arguments. On stage, the many imitations of Tamburlaine suggest he was London's leading dramatist in those final years; he was the first to earn critical praise for blank verse, and some scholars believe he strongly shaped Shakespeare. Censors apparently objected only to his Amores.
Source: Christopher Marlowe
