Born at Canterbury the son of a shoemaker, with the aid of scholarships Marlowe was able to study at Canterbury and then at Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1583, and where he became, almost certainly, a secret agent for the Queen.
After leaving Cambridge, he went to live in London, where he shared a room with Kyd and joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Sir Walter Raleigh, who used to meet to debate philosophy and religion. Accused of homicide, he was imprisoned but soon released. His dissolute life, his alleged profession of atheism and his freethinking made him dangerous in the eyes of the Privy Council, who decided to arrest him, on evidence probably supplied by his former room-mate Kyd. But before being arrested Marlowe was killed. On May, 30th , 1593, while in a tavern with some friends, he was stabbed to death during a braw. It is general opinion, however, that his death was not accidental, but "planned" for political reasons.
If we consider that Marlowe died when he was only 29, we can only be astonished at the bulk and variety of the works he wrote in such a short life.
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His works:
Tamburlaine the Great (1586-87)
Doctor Faustus (c. 1588-89)
The Jew of Malta (1590)
Edward II (1591)
Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1593)
The Massacre at Paris (1593)
Hero and Leander (unfinished), a long epic poem.
