1Christopher Marlowe Detail from the 1585 portrait, believed to be of the 21-year-oldChristopher Marlowe, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES If you met Christopher Marlowe, you might not like him.But he would probably fascinate you.Marlowe was a fiery genius whose brief career resembled the trail of a meteor across the night sky. Marlowe was not just a writer.A hotheaded swordsman, he was arrested twice for street fighting and spent some weeks in prison for his role in a fatal duel.He was also a spy, involved in a dangerous, though not fully understood, ring of secret agents. At one extreme, Marlowe was a social climber who hobnobbed with the rich and powerful of his day.He was friend to Sir Francis Walsingham, head of the government’s secret service.And he knew Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite at court.the other extreme, Marlowe had a taste for London low life.He haunted the taverns till dawn in the company of thieves and confidence men. Marlowe combined a thirst for adventure with wildly speculative opinions.In Elizabethan times, when law strictly enforced church attendance, Marlowe was an atheist. Like Faustus, he scoffed openly at established beliefs.He called the biblical Moses “a juggler,” or second-rate magician, and referred to Christ as a not-so-pious fraud. Not surprisingly, when Marlowe died at 29—stabbed through the eye in a tavern brawl— many people saw in his fate the hand of an angry God.But let’s start at the beginning. Marlowe was born in 1564, two months before William Shakespeare, in the cathedral town of Canterbury.He was a shoemaker’s son and, in the normal course ofevents, would have taken up his father’s trade.Destiny intervened, however, in the form of a college scholarship.In the sixteenth century, even more than in the present day, college At
