Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was an English playwright and poet, the most gifted of Shakespeare's predecessors. The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he went to Cambridge on a scholarship and was probably already working for the government's intelligence service when he took his degree. In six years he wrote Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and other plays whose blank verse, which Ben Jonson called his mighty line, set the standard for the Elizabethan stage. He was arrested for heresy in May 1593 and ten days later was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house, in circumstances still argued over.