Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was a shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, a Cambridge scholar, probably a government spy, and the first great English dramatist, dead at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl in Deptford under circumstances never explained. Tamburlaine gave the stage its mighty line; Doctor Faustus the scholar who sells his soul for knowledge and power; Edward the Second the first English history play with a real tragic centre. He was accused of atheism and blasphemy and would probably have hanged. Shakespeare, born the same year, learned blank verse from him and then went further.