12 Oct Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, about two months before Shakespeare, and his work had a great effect on the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon. In particular, Marlowe’s influence can be divined in numerous Shakespeare plays including As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Macbeth, Hamlet and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Many scholars believe that the three Henry VI plays were actually co-written by Shakespeare and Marlowe.

Marlowe’s own plays were popular and successful in his own time. Today they are regarded as masterpieces of the English theatre and continue to be performed, including Tamburlaine (1587-88), The Jew of Malta (1589-90), Doctor Faustus (1588-92) and Edward II (1592). What might have followed if Marlowe had not died at the age of 29 in a knife fight in a Deptford (east London) tavern? He is commemorated by an eye-catching statue – The Muse of Poetry – in front of Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre and by a memorial window in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.