The cloak-and-dagger poet

It is almost impossible to write a good biography of Shakespeare. His plays contain at once too much and too little for the biographer; his extraordinary impersonality means that he hardly ever reveals his hand. Every voice has its counter-voice; no single character speaks on behalf of the author.

Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a biographer’s dream. Whereas Shakespeare vanished into each of his characters, Marlowe stamped his trademark onto his singular anti-heroes: Tamburlaine the Great rising from Scythian shepherd to conqueror of the world, Dr Faustus making his contract with Mephistopheles, King Edward II putting his desires above his crown (with Piers Gaveston in the role of Mrs Simpson). Shakespeare quietly withdraws himself from the worlds he depicts in his plays, just as he eventually withdrew himself from London to his handsome house in Stratford-upon-Avon. Marlowe throws himself into his dramas of power, sex, intrigue and ambition, just as he threw himself into the dangerous world of religious controversy, counterfeiting and espionage. His lurid death in Deptford at the age of 29 was as apt an end to his life as Shakespeare’s leisured retirement was to his.

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Marlowe was born the same year as Shakespeare and from the same kind of stock. Each was the eldest son of a provincial burgher who worked in the leather trade (John Shakespeare the glover, John Marlowe the shoemaker). Both benefited from the Tudor educational revolution that made grammar-school learning available to middle-class boys. But then their paths diverged: Marlowe went to university and Shakespeare did not. Cambridge was the making — and marring — of Marlowe.

David Riggs is right to entitle his splendid new biography The World of Christopher Marlowe. He adopts exactly the right approach, skilfully weaving the fragmentary biographical record into the broader intellectual context.