Christopher Marlowe
Like many of the underworld playwrights of the era of Elizabethan Theatre, Christopher Marlowe was one among many very strange individuals. His writing career began at an early age; somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty he wrote Dido, Queen of Carthage. Dido’s plot was fused with drama; unreciprocated love, maidenly suicide, are just a couple of the popular plot sets contained. Tragic love affairs were popular in Elizabethan plays, and a much cycled plot device. Dido wasn’t published until the year of Marlow’s death, in 1594, when Marlowe was only twenty-nine years of age. However, the play was performed often stil, and by male actors for as many as fourteen years before the play was finally published as a book.
The play was adapted later, and Marlowe’s fame was preserved, though generally, it was at the time, the publisher who acquired full rights to the play after it was finished and purchased. After Marlowe’s initial foray into the world of romantic tragedy, his literary career blossomed fully when he began writing mainly political drama, aside from his English version of the German story of Faust. While the production of Faust generally maintains his state of fame presently, at the time in which he was a playwright rising in popularity, it was his perspective on affairs of state that won him so much recognition.
On the other hand, it is suspected that the bulk of this recognition was negative, considering that many people at the time suspected Marlowe to be a spy. Several of his most popular plays were labeled as treasonous by the authorities, and Marlowe himself was arrested on numerous occasions, for crimes against the government, and even heresy. More gossip proclaimed him to be a homosexual, as well as a heretic; both were severe crimes at the time, despite homosexuality being even then, widely practiced, and widely ignored because so many of the same proclivity were in political power. Marlowe was also fond of brawling, and it was in one such tavern brawl that he was killed in 1594.
