Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan age. His plays, including Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Edward II, helped transform English drama before his violent death in 1593.
Marlowe’s dramatic career was brief but exceptionally influential. Tamburlaine helped establish blank verse as a powerful theatrical medium, while Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II expanded the possibilities of tragedy and political drama on the commercial stage. His death in a quarrel at Deptford in 1593 generated lasting speculation because of his connections with government agents and the accusations of atheism surrounding him.
M. J. Trow’s Dark Entry turns the young Christopher Marlowe into an investigator when a Cambridge friend is found dead, while Black Death sends the older Marlowe after the killer of the playwright Robert Greene. Crimson Rose sets his theatrical career against the success of Tamburlaine at the Rose and draws him into a case touching Shakespeare and the London stage. In Eleventh Hour, Marlowe is ordered to investigate the suspected poisoning of Nicholas Faunt and must move among England’s leading scientific and intellectual figures. Rory Clements’s Prince uses Marlowe and Thomas Kyd as part of the real theatrical and intelligence world through which John Shakespeare’s fictional investigation passes.
