2. Marlowe was born in Canterbury to shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Catherine. His date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 26 February 1564, and is likely to have been born a few days before. Thus he was just two months older than his contemporary ,Shakespeare who was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was an English dramatist poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonist, and his mysterious death.
3. Of the dramas attributed to Marlowe Dido, Queen of Carthage is believed to have been his first, and performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and 1593. The play was first published in 1594; the title page attributes the play to Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Marlowe's first play performed on the regular stage in London, in 1587, was Tamburlaine the Great, about the conqueror Timur, who rises from shepherd to warrior. It is among the first English plays in blank verse, and, with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, generally is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre. The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe's other works were published after. The sequence of the writing of his other four plays is unknown; all deal with controversial themes. Literary career
4. OTHER WRITING : -The Jew of Malta -Edward the second -The massacre at Paris -The tragical history of Doctor Faustus
5. As with other writers of the period, little is known about Marlowe. What little evidence there is can be found in legal records and other official documents. Marlowe has often been described as a spy, a brawler, a heretic and a homosexual, as well as a "magician", "duellist", "tobacco-user", "counterfeiter" and "rakehell". THE LEGEND
