Christopher Marlowe

As fourth monk in the Pope's Banquet scene in Dr. Faustus, though not fully appreciating the forewarning of the tonsure - I knew a bit about Marlowe!

Ten years later and a Canterbury bookseller, a man entered the bookshop wearing around his neck a long scarf & pair of binoculars. Dressed in an overcoat in July he said it was apt that the building had become a bookshop as this was where Christopher Marlowe's uncle, George Auncell, a grocer had lived. The man was Dr. William Urry, the redoubtable Cathedral Archivist, who had the ability of making Canterbury's history live. I was hooked; I was running a bookshop on hallowed ground. Probably the only vernacular building in Canterbury that Marlowe had actually walked in. I was determined to find out more. Like most I knew the urban myths; fiery homosexual; atheist; died in pub brawl at Deptford; may have written the plays ascribed to Shakespeare.

Canterbury produced three Elizabethan playwrights within 10 years of each other. John Lyly, writer of Euphues (euphemism), Stephen Gosson, failed playwright who turned cleric and wrote an anti-stage tract The Schoole of Abuse, and Christopher Marlowe, baptised at the Church of St George the Martyr on 26th February 1564, son of John Marlowe from Ospringe, - a quarrelsome and impecunious cobbler - and Katherine Arthur from Dover.

In 1578 he went to The King's School for two years. The first of many mysteries. Who paid the school fees? As with so much of Marlowe's life there are many theories from the sensible to the fanciful. The fees may have been a pension for a choirboy whose voice had broken. He might have been sponsored by local worthy, Sir Roger Manwood, for whom Marlowe wrote a Latin eulogy at Manwood's death, and curiously before whom he appeared in Court after a fight in London. Another explanation states that he was the illegitimate son of Archbishop Mathew Parker (the original 'Nosy' Parker) and one of his maids.

At seventeen, he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, paid for by a Mathew Parker scholarship. He gained his BA in 1584 & was admitted for an MA in 1587. He absented himself several times from the University as shown in the Buttery Books, a record of meal payments. As a result the College authorities withheld his MA. However, a letter from the Privy Council, Queen Elizabeth's closest advisers, told the University to give Marlowe his degree: Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims & there to remain, Their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent, but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly & discreetly wherebie he had done her Majestie good service & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing.

The English College at Rheims was a training ground for Catholic priests to infiltrate Protestant England.

In 1587, Tamburlaine, Marlowe's first play was performed in London. Revolutionary in its use of blank verse, a form developed & perfected by Marlowe, it forced plays previously written in prose to he rewritten in blank verse. Algernon Swinburne called Marlowe, 'The father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse'. Plays of the Queen's men, such as The Troublesome Reign of King John were revised into blank verse. Other plays followed, Doctor Faustus', The Jew of Malta, Edward II, The Massacre at Paris, Dido Queen of Carthage, and a lost play George Scanderbeg. He also translated Ovid's Elegies, Lucan's Pharsalia and wrote poetry, Hero and Leander and The Passionate Shepherdess.

Written by: John Hunt, Albion Bookshop