50 Fun Facts About Christopher Marlowe

In which English city was Christopher Marlowe born in 1564?

Canterbury. He was baptised at St George's Church there in 1564, and a quarrel on a visit home in 1592 brought a legal case against him in the city.

What was Marlowe's father's trade?

Shoemaker. Shakespeare, baptised two months after Marlowe, was a glove-maker's son, so the two great playwrights of the age both grew up in leather-working homes.

In Doctor Faustus, whose is 'the face that launched a thousand ships'?

Helen of Troy. Faustus has her conjured up as his lover, greets her with the line, and begs: 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.'

At which Cambridge college did Marlowe study on a scholarship?

Corpus Christi. In 1952 the college turned up a portrait dated 1585 of a man aged 21, exactly Marlowe's age that year, and it is widely thought to show him.

Why did Cambridge hesitate to award Marlowe his MA in 1587?

A rumour he would join a Catholic seminary. The English college at Rheims trained priests in exile, so going there looked like defection; the government vouched that he had served the Queen, and the degree followed.

Which body wrote to Cambridge in 1587 commending Marlowe's "good service" to the Queen?

The Privy Council. It told the university that no one employed 'in matters touching the benefit of his country' should be defamed by those ignorant of his affairs, and he got his degree.

Which spymaster is Marlowe most often supposed to have worked for?

Sir Francis Walsingham. The Queen's secretary ran her secret service, and college records show Marlowe missing for long stretches while he was still a student.

Marlowe is credited with establishing which poetic form as the standard for Elizabethan drama?

Blank verse. Unrhymed ten-syllable lines had reached the English stage in Gorboduc in the early 1560s; Marlowe gave them such force that Ben Jonson saluted 'Marlowe's mighty line'.

Which two-part play made Marlowe's name on the London stage in the late 1580s?

Tamburlaine the Great. Its welcome was warm enough that Marlowe wrote a second part, as that part's prologue says, and rival dramatists imitated it again and again.

Marlowe's two-part conqueror play is loosely based on which real ruler?

Timur. On Marlowe's stage he keeps the defeated Turkish emperor Bajazeth in a cage, hauls him out, and climbs to his throne using the man as a footstool.

What humble occupation does Marlowe give his conqueror hero at the start of the play?

Scythian shepherd. The play follows him from herdsman and bandit to emperor; the real conqueror is said to have started out stealing sheep rather than tending them.

Which Marlowe play, acted by a company of boys, names Thomas Nashe beside him on its title page?

Dido, Queen of Carthage. It retells Virgil's story of Aeneas and the queen he abandons, and the curtain opens on Jupiter dandling the boy Ganymede on his knee.

Which demon accompanies Faustus throughout Doctor Faustus?

Mephistopheles. Asked where hell is, he gives Faustus a chilling answer: 'where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be.'

How does Marlowe's Doctor Faustus end for its hero?

Damnation. Devils carry him off to hell as the clock strikes midnight on his twenty-four years, and his last desperate promise is to burn his books.

In Doctor Faustus, which procession does Lucifer stage to keep the hero from repenting?

The Seven Deadly Sins. Each steps forward to describe itself, Pride first and Lechery last, and the delighted Faustus cries that the show feeds his soul.

Marlowe took the story of Doctor Faustus from a chapbook first printed in which country?

Germany. The Faustbuch of 1587 was quickly translated and read across Europe, and its English version gave Marlowe his plot, coarse comic scenes included.

What is the name of the Jewish merchant at the centre of The Jew of Malta?

Barabas. He dies in his own trap, dropping through a rigged floor into the boiling cauldron he had prepared for the Turkish prince.

Who speaks the cynical prologue of The Jew of Malta, introducing the tragedy of a Jew?

Machiavel. The ghost of the Italian political writer strolls on to announce: 'I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.'

How does the Jew of Malta respond when his daughter Abigail enters a convent for good?

Poisons her and the whole nunnery. He sends the nuns a pot of poisoned rice porridge, then strangles one friar and frames another for the killing.

Edward II focuses on the king's relationship with which favourite?

Piers Gaveston. The play opens with him reading the new king's letter calling him home from exile, and the barons' fury at his rise sets the tragedy in motion.

Literary historians group Marlowe with Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe under which label?

The University Wits. They were Oxford and Cambridge men who wrote for a living in London, and a tract published as Greene's deathbed work reproved Marlowe for saying there is no God.

Which historical event does Marlowe's play about the Duke of Guise dramatise?

The St Bartholomew's Day killings. The slaughter in Paris was only some twenty years past when the play was staged, and only a badly mangled text of it survives.

Which leading actor of the Admiral's Men played the great title roles in Marlowe's plays?

Edward Alleyn. His only real rival on the Elizabethan stage was Richard Burbage, and he went on to found Dulwich College in south London.

Which Roman poet's Amores did Marlowe translate, in a version publicly burned in 1599?

Ovid. Marlowe's version of the love elegies shared a volume with John Davies's epigrams, and in June 1599 the bishops ordered it burned as offensive.

Marlowe's unfinished poem Hero and Leander was completed after his death by whom?

George Chapman. His continuation was printed with Marlowe's fragment in 1598; he is the translator whose Homer moved John Keats to write a famous sonnet two centuries later.

Which strait separates the lovers in Hero and Leander?

The Hellespont. When Leander dives in to swim across to Hero, the sea god Neptune mistakes him for Ganymede and drags him to the sea bed before realising his error.

Who is credited with "The Nymph's Reply", the famous answer to Marlowe's pastoral love poem?

Sir Walter Raleigh. An early credit comes from Izaak Walton, whose Compleat Angler has a milkmaid sing Marlowe's song and her mother answer with verses 'made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days'.

In which port in the Low Countries was Marlowe arrested in 1592 for alleged coin counterfeiting?

Flushing. The port was in English hands, and its governor, Sir Robert Sidney, shipped him home to Lord Burghley with a covering letter; no charge or imprisonment followed.

Which informer wrote the note listing Marlowe's alleged blasphemies about tobacco and boys?

Richard Baines. The accuser had once been the accused: jailed in Rheims in 1582 as an undercover English agent, he had to write out a long confession of his own.

Which fellow playwright, under torture, said a heretical tract found in his rooms belonged to Marlowe?

Thomas Kyd. The author of The Spanish Tragedy said the pages had got shuffled in among his own papers when the two men were writing in the same room.

Which line opens Marlowe's best-known lyric poem?

Come live with me and be my love. The speaker goes on to promise beds of roses, a cap of flowers and slippers with buckles of the purest gold; John Donne was among the poets who wrote their own versions.

With what does Faustus write out the deed giving his soul to Lucifer?

His own blood. The deed once signed, the first thing he asks his new servant for is a wife, and he is refused: marriage, the demon tells him, is 'but a ceremonial toy'.

In which Thames-side town was Marlowe stabbed to death?

Deptford. The Queen's own coroner held the inquest there two days later, and Marlowe was buried the same day in an unmarked grave in the parish churchyard.

Who owned the house where Marlowe died?

The widow Eleanor Bull. Hers was no tavern, whatever the legend says, but a private house where she let rooms and served meals, and Marlowe and three companions had spent the day there.

Who was named at the inquest as the man who stabbed Marlowe?

Ingram Frizer. The jury accepted that he had struck in self-defence with his own dagger, and the Queen's pardon followed within a month.

According to the inquest, what were Marlowe and his killer arguing about?

Payment of the bill, the "reckoning". By the inquest's account Marlowe was lying on a bed when the quarrel flared, and he snatched the other man's dagger and struck first.

Where was Marlowe stabbed, according to the coroner's report?

Above the right eye. The inquest said he died instantly, and its record then lay unread in the archives until the scholar Leslie Hotson published it in 1925.

Which actor played Marlowe, uncredited, in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love?

Rupert Everett. His Marlowe is the established star who meets a blocked young Shakespeare in a tavern and casually hands him ideas for the plot he cannot get started.

One man with Marlowe when he died had been a double agent inside which plot against Elizabeth I?

The Babington Plot. Robert Poley became Anthony Babington's trusted companion while spying on him for the government; the plot's exposure in 1586 brought Mary, Queen of Scots to trial and execution.

In 1593 the poet George Peele mourned the dead Marlowe as the 'darling' of whom?

The Muses. 'Marley, the Muses' darling' comes in the prologue to Peele's poem The Honour of the Garter; Thomas Nashe wrote as fondly of 'poor deceased Kit Marlowe'.

In which Shakespeare comedy does a character quote Hero and Leander in tribute to the dead Marlowe?

As You Like It. Phebe, smitten at a glance with the disguised Rosalind, sighs: 'Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'

Which Shakespeare works did the 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare credit as collaborations with Marlowe?

The three parts of Henry VI. The edition names him beside Shakespeare on all three title pages, the first to credit the two supposed rivals as co-authors.

What does the fringe "Marlovian theory" claim?

Marlowe faked his death and wrote Shakespeare's works. Calvin Hoffman, who argued the case in a 1955 book, left a trust that still offers half its capital to anyone who can prove it beyond dispute.

Which Hollywood couple starred together in a 1967 film of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus?

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Burton also co-directed, the only film he ever did, and it grew out of a stage production he had played with Oxford University students.

In Marlowe's conqueror play, who is harnessed to pull the hero's chariot across the stage?

Captive kings. He drives them with bits in their mouths, whipping them on as 'pampered jades of Asia', a line so well known that Shakespeare had the braggart Pistol mangle it.

At which school was Marlowe a scholarship boy from the age of 14?

The King's School. The king was Henry VIII, whose charter of 1541 set up places for fifty scholars; Marlowe won one of them, at a school widely regarded as the oldest in England.

What was added to Marlowe's 2002 memorial window in Poets' Corner?

A question mark after his death date. The pane was a gift from the Marlowe Society, which added the mark to put on record its doubts about the official account of his killing.

Marlowe lies in an unmarked grave in a churchyard named for which patron saint of sailors?

St Nicholas. The saint behind Santa Claus is also a patron of sailors; Marlowe was buried in his churchyard two days after he died, and a plaque on the wall recalls him now.

Which great Victorian actor unveiled the 1891 memorial statue in Marlowe's home city?

Henry Irving. No portrait of Marlowe was then known; the bronze that Edward Onslow Ford made, paid for by public subscription, shows not the poet but an allegorical figure of Poetry.

Which Roman poet's Pharsalia did Marlowe translate, in a version printed in 1600?

Lucan. He too died young, condemned in his twenties for plotting against Nero; his one surviving poem is an epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and Marlowe translated only its first book.