Christopher Marlowe Research Paper

“Okay, technically Christopher Marlowe is a success story. I mean, we are still talking about him 400 years after he died. Some would call that success. But I’d rather be Shakespeare. Wouldn’t you? Poor Marlowe never gets his due.” (Wallace, Mandy, “Why Christopher Marlowe Isn’t Famous: A Cautionary Tale for Writers,” http://mandywallace.com/christopher-marlowe-lessons/)

The entire world knows the works of William Shakespeare. They are studied by eager actors and actresses everywhere. But many young theatre students are not taught about Christopher Marlowe, who was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare. Perhaps it’s because of Marlow’s extra curricular activities, his reputed excess of boys, and fondness for tobacco, the new recreational drug of the 1580s fresh from the colony in Virginia. Or perhaps he has been intentionally overlooked because his enemies wanted it that way, or because he didn’t know how to market himself, as Mandy Wallace suggests in her essay. It

He was a scholarship student, university-educated. Marlowe had a concrete foundation in the works of the classics which helped him become quite the talented wordsmith and poet of dark hip poetry. It could be said that Marlowe is the reason that the way poetry was written has been forever changed, and was becoming the state of art by the 1580’s. He’s what other writers, such as William Shakespeare, aspired to be.

Christopher Marlowe had come to London in 1587, whilst he was writing writing for the theatre, and throwing himself into engaging government service. It’s thought that his very first play Dido, Queen of Carthage which was written while he was attending Cambridge University. Unfortunately, this play was not published until the year 1586. However, church records show that the play was performed by a company of boy actors “Children of the Chapel” between the years 1587 and