| Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe, an Elizabethan dramatist and poet second in greatness only to Shakespeare, is primarily recognized for a handful of excellent plays--Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and The Jew of Malta--along with his narrative poem Hero and Leander (1598) and the much imitated "Come live with me and be my love" (1599).
By 1589, Marlowe was living in London and probably writing and producing his major plays. His companionships made him one of the University Wits. In 1592 he and Richard Baines were arrested in Flushing for counterfeiting. Because of Baines's later testimony, Marlowe also was alleged to have been connected with Sir Walter Raleigh's so-called "school of night"--a group supposedly dabbling in the sacrilegious, alchemy, and the occult. This group's very existence is now in dispute. At any rate, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe's arrest because certain heretical papers found in the possession of Thomas Kyd were claimed by Kyd to be Marlowe's. Questioned and released, Marlowe was murdered by Ingram Frazier at Eleanor Bull's tavern in Deptford on May 30. No clear evidence exists that it was a political assassination.
Marlowe drew most of his dramatic plots from sources that indicate his wide reading. Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2 (published 1590) is drawn from histories of the Mongol conqueror; Edward II (published 1594) is based on English history; The Massacre at Paris (published 1600) makes use of contemporary pamphlets describing the Catholic-Huguenot conflict in France; Doctor Faustus (published 1604, 1616) is indebted to a translation of the German Faustbuch; Dido, Queen of Carthage (published 1594) follows Vergil's Aeneid. Only The Jew of Malta (published 1633) lacks a known direct source. Because all but one of Marlowe's plays were published posthumously, their production dates and chronological sequence remain unclear.
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