1595 He was stabbed through the eye in a tavern. Was he killed for his outrageous lifestyle? Assassinated as a state spy gone rogue? Or, more prosaically, was he just the victim of a drunken brawl over a ‘trull’? The issue is still undecided to this day. He was 29.
Seen by many as Shakespeare’s closest rival, Christopher Marlowe may be said to have invented the English history play with Edward II (first performed some time before 1594), which examined the conflict between private favour and the public responsibilities of kingship. Before that, his Tamburlaine the Great (first performed, 1587) had explored the amorality of power, while The Jew of Malta (1592) dramatised the struggle between a vengeful Jew and greedy, hypocritical Christians, and Dr Faustus (1594) questioned how far a man could go to reinvent himself beyond the confines of good and evil as conventionally understood.
Which is to say that Marlowe’s plays tested the boundaries of conventional moral thinking, especially about the pleasures of winning and wielding power, and the relative weakness of those who would redress its wrongs.
But the notoriety of his plays was nothing compared to the scandal of Marlowe’s life. Encouraged by his own outrageous self-advertising, his contemporaries invented him as a bad-boy in the convention of the Romantics, long before that literary and philosophical movement was dreamt of. Rumour had it that he was an atheist. He was almost certainly homosexual. ‘All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’, he is famously supposed to have said.
Today no one really knows what to believe about his life, so literary theory has taken over, assigning Marlowe’s notoriety to that tradition of licensed misrule allowed on the South Bank, safely across the river from London, and site of the city’s theatres, brothels and bear-baiting arenas.
Licensed misrule serves, by contrast, to define the social and political norms of the establishment. To add to the mystery, recent scholarship suggests that Marlowe may have been borrowed from his studies at Cambridge to act as a spy posing as a Catholic to entrap other Catholics plotting against the Elizabethan settlement1. If this is correct, we may never know ‘what side of the law he was on’, whether his death was plotted or merely chaotic.
1 See Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.