Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe (baptised 1564–1593), called Kit, was the English playwright ranked London's foremost dramatist just before Shakespeare. A Canterbury shoemaker's son educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, he was blocked from his master's degree in 1587 until the Privy Council intervened, praising his unnamed ‘good service’; scholars still debate whether he was a government agent.

His Tamburlaine (1587) was the first English play in blank verse, the age's standard form, and Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II followed. In May 1593 Thomas Kyd, under torture, called a heretical tract found in his papers Marlowe's, and he was ordered to attend the Privy Council daily.

On 30 May, at a widow's house in Deptford, he quarrelled over the bill with Ingram Frizer, one of the Walsinghams' men, and was stabbed to death. Frizer was pardoned within a month, and Marlowe lies in an unmarked grave at Deptford.