Christopher Marlowe

One of the great authors of the 16th Century is Christopher Marlow. Research papers on Marlowe from Paper Masters discuss his works and his life. Paper Masters can write on any aspect of Christopher Marlowe you need for your own research paper.

Leather craftsmen and shoemakers provided the heritage which Christopher Marlowe's father John hoped to pass down to him as father did for son in that day. Christopher Marlowe had been born in 1564 to the Canterbury family. He attended school for two years at the King's School in Cambridge, leaving quizzical attendance records, noted by scholarship payments made to him. There he was to master Latin, and study neoclassical literature.

His basic familiarity with Latin literature and the Greek mythology and Roman mythology probably originated with his attendance at King's School in 1579-80, but his experience at the Cathedral there seemed to impact him very little beyond a solid background in literature. Marlowe did manage to accomplish an M.A., and, after receiving the title of "Dominus," , became involved in government intelligence of a sort, which, to this day, is not entirely, clear, nor agreed upon. He performed in the Lord Admiral's Company, beginning in 1587,with his most important plays being the following:

• Parts I and II of Tamburlaine the Great (1587)
• Dr. Faustus (1588)
• The Jew of Malta (1589)
• Edward II (1592)

During Marlowe's time in Cambridge, he developed sundry relationships with both peers, governmental activists and scholars. These relationships all played parts in the daily drama of his brief life.

One such person was Thomas Watson, an Oxford-educated poet and translator, who was party to an 1589 row in which Marlowe and another man named William Bradley had engaged in. This incident ended with Bradley's death at the direct hand of Watson, and the subsequent suspicion and clearance of Marlowe (one of many such incidents which would follow in Marlowe's short life).

Another person of high impact in Marlowe's life was Thomas Kyd, with whom Marlowe shared either living quarters or a sort of office. Kyd's arrest and imprisonment due to a heretical manuscript ended their relationship because Kid held that the manuscript was Marlowe's rather than his own.

"Suffering and destruction brought on by the character's own action or perversity is at work in one degree or another in the fates of Barabas, Guise, Edward, Mortimer, and Faustus, affording one major means of making their suffering intelligible". Marlowe's life of only twenty-nine years sadly personified those very human natures that he so eloquently dramatized in his writings; human desire and passion frequently reaps destruction. That he was able within such a short time to exhibit such an array of techniques, attitudes and violence in less than a dozen plays and a few poems makes us question what he would have been capable of had he lived even another ten years!