Christopher Marlowe Trivia
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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
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.
Q 02What was Marlowe's father's trade?
Shoemaker
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.
Q 03In Doctor Faustus, whose is 'the face that launched a thousand ships'?
Helen of Troy
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.'
Q 04At which Cambridge college did Marlowe study on a scholarship?
Corpus Christi
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.
Q 05Why did Cambridge hesitate to award Marlowe his MA in 1587?
A rumour he would join a Catholic seminary
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.
Q 06Which body wrote to Cambridge in 1587 commending Marlowe's "good service" to the Queen?
The Privy Council
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.
Q 07Which spymaster is Marlowe most often supposed to have worked for?
Sir Francis Walsingham
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.
Q 08Marlowe is credited with establishing which poetic form as the standard for Elizabethan drama?
Blank verse
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'.
Q 09Which two-part play made Marlowe's name on the London stage in the late 1580s?
Tamburlaine the Great
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.
Q 10Marlowe's two-part conqueror play is loosely based on which real ruler?
Timur
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.
Q 11What humble occupation does Marlowe give his conqueror hero at the start of the play?
Scythian shepherd
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.
Q 12Which Marlowe play, acted by a company of boys, names Thomas Nashe beside him on its title page?
Dido, Queen of Carthage
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.
Q 13Which demon accompanies Faustus throughout Doctor Faustus?
Mephistopheles
Q 21Literary historians group Marlowe with Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe under which label?
The University Wits
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.
Q 22Which historical event does Marlowe's play about the Duke of Guise dramatise?
The St Bartholomew's Day killings
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.
Q 23Which leading actor of the Admiral's Men played the great title roles in Marlowe's plays?
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.'
Q 14How does Marlowe's Doctor Faustus end for its hero?
Damnation
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.
Q 15In Doctor Faustus, which procession does Lucifer stage to keep the hero from repenting?
The Seven Deadly Sins
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.
Q 16Marlowe took the story of Doctor Faustus from a chapbook first printed in which country?
Germany
Germany. The Faustbuch of 1587 was quickly translated and read across Europe, and its English version gave Marlowe his plot, coarse comic scenes included.
Q 17What is the name of the Jewish merchant at the centre of The Jew of Malta?
Barabas
Barabas. He dies in his own trap, dropping through a rigged floor into the boiling cauldron he had prepared for the Turkish prince.
Q 18Who speaks the cynical prologue of The Jew of Malta, introducing the tragedy of a Jew?
Machiavel
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.'
Q 19How does the Jew of Malta respond when his daughter Abigail enters a convent for good?
Poisons her and the whole nunnery
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.
Q 20Edward II focuses on the king's relationship with which favourite?
Piers Gaveston
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.
Edward Alleyn
Edward Alleyn. His only real rival on the Elizabethan stage was Richard Burbage, and he went on to found Dulwich College in south London.
Q 24Which Roman poet's Amores did Marlowe translate, in a version publicly burned in 1599?
Ovid
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.
Q 25Marlowe's unfinished poem Hero and Leander was completed after his death by whom?
George Chapman
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.
Q 26Which strait separates the lovers in Hero and Leander?
The Hellespont
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.
Q 27Who is credited with "The Nymph's Reply", the famous answer to Marlowe's pastoral love poem?
Sir Walter Raleigh
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'.
Q 28In which port in the Low Countries was Marlowe arrested in 1592 for alleged coin counterfeiting?
Flushing
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.
Q 29Which informer wrote the note listing Marlowe's alleged blasphemies about tobacco and boys?
Richard Baines
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.
Q 30Which fellow playwright, under torture, said a heretical tract found in his rooms belonged to Marlowe?
Thomas Kyd
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.