Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright and poet born in 1564. His plays, including Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Edward II, expanded the power of blank verse and helped define Elizabethan drama before his death in 1593.

Born: 1564 CE
Died: 1593 CE
Role: English playwright and poet

English playwright and poet (1564-1593)

1564-1593 CE

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Portrait of Christopher Marlowe in Elizabethan dress

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Also known as: Marlowe

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Christopher Marlowe timeline facts

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1564-1587: Canterbury and Cambridge
late 1580s: A new dramatic force
c. 1589-1592: Faustus and Edward II
1593: Death and afterlife

Life Journey

Blank verse, ambition and the Elizabethan stage

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1 of 4/Canterbury and Cambridge

Next: A new dramatic force

1564-1587

Canterbury and Cambridge

Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and studied at Cambridge, where his education gave him access to classical and theological learning.

late 1580s

A new dramatic force

Marlowe's Tamburlaine showed how blank verse could carry ambition, violence and grandeur on the public stage.

c. 1589-1592

Faustus and Edward II

In Doctor Faustus and Edward II, Marlowe explored desire, power, knowledge and political collapse with unusual intensity.

1593

Death and afterlife

Marlowe died after being stabbed in Deptford in 1593, leaving a small body of work with an outsized influence.

1564-1587

Canterbury and Cambridge

Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and studied at Cambridge, where his education gave him access to classical and theological learning.

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1564-1587

Canterbury and Cambridge

Christopher Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker. Scholarship carried him to the King's School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His university training gave him a command of classical stories, rhetoric and religious argument, all of which later fed the scale and intensity of his plays.

Education opened a route from a provincial childhood into London's theatrical world.

late 1580s

A new dramatic force

Tamburlaine made Marlowe's reputation. Its sweeping language and huge appetite for conquest showed that English commercial theatre could handle tragic scale, rhetorical force and morally unsettling ambition. Marlowe's blank verse gave actors a flexible, driving poetic instrument. Later dramatists, including Shakespeare, learned from the possibilities he opened.

A formal breakthrough can change what a whole medium thinks it can do.

c. 1589-1592

Faustus and Edward II

Doctor Faustus turned the scholar's hunger for forbidden knowledge into one of the defining dramas of the age. Edward II offered a sharper political tragedy, less grandly imperial than Tamburlaine but more intimate in its study of weakness, favouritism and royal authority. Marlowe's plays repeatedly ask what happens when desire outruns moral, political or spiritual limits.

His drama made ambition feel both thrilling and destructive.

1593

Death and afterlife

Marlowe died at Deptford in May 1593 after a violent quarrel. His death came amid allegations and suspicions that remain difficult to separate from Elizabethan surveillance culture and later mythmaking. What is secure is the literary result: by twenty-nine he had changed English drama's language, scale and appetite. Shakespeare's theatre developed in a world Marlowe had already enlarged.

His short career left a larger mark than its length would suggest.

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