50 free Christopher Marlowe trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Christopher Marlowe was the leading dramatist of Elizabethan London until a dagger ended his life at 29, and this quiz covers the whole brief blaze: the Canterbury shoemaker's son, the Cambridge scholar whose degree needed a Privy Council letter, the plays that gave English theatre its mighty line, the accusations of atheism and counterfeiting, the reckoning at Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford and the conspiracy theories that followed. Easy questions ask which scholar sold his soul in his most famous play and how Marlowe died; harder ones dig into the boy actors who staged Dido, the informer Richard Baines, the coroner's report found in 1925, the tall actor his heroes were written for and the 2016 edition that credits him as Shakespeare's co-author. It suits English literature students, theatre lovers and history quiz nights that enjoy a good mystery. For his great contemporary, BrainPickle's Shakespeare quiz is the natural next round. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Marlowe, his plays and poems, and the people connected with his death, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which English city was Christopher Marlowe born in 1564?
Canterbury
His father John was a shoemaker, and he was baptised at St George's Church on 26 February 1564.
Q 02What was Marlowe's father's trade?
Shoemaker
Shakespeare, baptised two months later in Stratford, was the son of a glover.
Q 03Marlowe was baptised in the same year as which other playwright?
William Shakespeare
Marlowe was probably about two months older, and Shakespeare succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright.
Q 04At which Cambridge college did Marlowe study on a scholarship?
Corpus Christi
The scholarship expected him to become an Anglican clergyman; he took his BA in 1584 instead.
Q 05Why did Cambridge hesitate to award Marlowe his MA in 1587?
A rumour he planned to join a Catholic seminary at Rheims
The Privy Council intervened, praising his "good service" to the Queen, which fuels the theory that he was a government spy.
Q 06Which body wrote to Cambridge in 1587 commending Marlowe's "good service" to the Queen?
The Privy Council
The letter is lost; only the vague minutes survive, in wording scholars say was typically used to protect government agents.
Q 07Which spymaster is Marlowe most often supposed to have worked for?
Sir Francis Walsingham
College buttery accounts show him spending far more on food and drink than his scholarship could have paid for.
Q 08Marlowe was the first playwright to win a critical reputation for using which metrical form?
Blank verse
Tamburlaine was the first English play written in it, and Ben Jonson praised "Marlowe's mighty line".
Q 09Which Marlowe play about a conqueror was the first performed on a regular commercial London stage, in 1587?
Tamburlaine
Its many imitators are why scholars rank Marlowe the foremost dramatist of the years just before his death.
Q 10Marlowe's two-part conqueror play is loosely based on which real ruler?
Timur
Marlowe turned the Turco-Mongol noble into a Scythian shepherd who rises to emperor.
Q 11What humble occupation does Marlowe give his conqueror hero at the start of the play?
Scythian shepherd
He woos the captured Egyptian princess Zenocrate and defeats the Turkish emperor Bajazeth.
Q 12Which play is believed to be the first by Marlowe ever performed, by a company of boy actors?
Dido, Queen of Carthage
The Children of the Chapel staged it, and the title page also credits Thomas Nashe.
Q 13Which demon accompanies Faustus throughout Doctor Faustus?
Mephistopheles
He offers twenty-four years of worldly power in exchange for the scholar's soul.
Q 21Which two 1594 editions were the first published plays to carry Marlowe's name as author?
Edward II and Dido
Tamburlaine had been printed anonymously in 1590, and Edward II was entered in the Stationers' Register five weeks after his death.
Q 22Which historical event does Marlowe's play about the Duke of Guise, first staged in 1593, dramatise?
The St Bartholomew's Day killings
It features a silent "English Agent" whom tradition identifies with Marlowe himself, and was Lord Strange's Men's top earner in 1593.
Q 23Which unusually tall actor probably had Marlowe's haughty lead roles written for him?
Q 14How many years of worldly power does Faustus receive in exchange for his soul?
24
Unlike earlier Faust stories, Marlowe's hero cannot repent or burn his books at the end and is carried off by demons.
Q 15Doctor Faustus survives in two versions from 1604 and 1616; what are they called?
The A text and the B text
The B text adds scenes probably written by Samuel Rowley and William Bird; the A text is thought closer to Marlowe's manuscript.
Q 16Doctor Faustus was the first dramatised version of which old story?
A scholar's pact with the devil
Its source, the German Faustbuch, had appeared in English translation around 1588.
Q 17What is the name of the Jewish merchant at the centre of The Jew of Malta?
Barabas
The play opens with a prologue spoken by Machiavel, a ghost modelled on Machiavelli.
Q 18Who speaks the cynical prologue of The Jew of Malta, introducing the tragedy of a Jew?
Machiavel
The Senecan ghost, based on Machiavelli, declares that power is amoral and religion a childish toy.
Q 19In The Jew of Malta, what does the merchant do after his daughter Abigail becomes a Christian nun?
Poisons her and the whole nunnery
He then strangles one friar, frames another, and poisons his slave Ithamore and two blackmailers for good measure.
Q 20Edward II focuses on the king's relationship with which favourite?
Piers Gaveston
It was the only play about Edward II written up to that time and portrays the king sympathetically.
Edward Alleyn
Marlowe's plays were the foundation of his company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.
Q 24Which Roman poet's Amores did Marlowe translate, in a version publicly burned in 1599?
Ovid
Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive books sent it to the flames.
Q 25Marlowe's unfinished poem Hero and Leander was completed after his death by whom?
George Chapman
It was printed in 1598, and Shakespeare quoted a line from it in As You Like It, calling Marlowe "Dead Shepherd".
Q 26Which strait separates the lovers in Hero and Leander?
The Hellespont
Hero lives at Sestos and Leander at Abydos, on opposite shores.
Q 27Who wrote "The Nymph's Reply", the famous answer to Marlowe's pastoral poem of a lover's invitation?
Sir Walter Raleigh
John Rutter set both poems in his 1995 Birthday Madrigals, men against women.
Q 28In which Dutch garrison town was Marlowe arrested in 1592 for alleged coin counterfeiting?
Flushing
He was sent to Lord Burghley but never charged; it may have been cover for a mission against the Catholic plotter William Stanley.
Q 29Which informer wrote the note listing Marlowe's alleged blasphemies about tobacco and boys?
Richard Baines
He had also accused Marlowe in Flushing; scholars call the note unreliable testimony from a witch-hunt.
Q 30Which fellow playwright, under torture, said a heretical tract found in his rooms belonged to Marlowe?
Thomas Kyd
Kyd said the papers had been shuffled together when the two shared a writing chamber two years earlier.