Marlowe, Christopher

English poet and dramatist. His work includes the blank-verse (written in unrhymed verse) plays Tamburlaine the Great in two parts (1587–88), The Jew of Malta (c. 1591), Edward II (c. 1592) and Dr Faustus (c. 1594), the poem Hero and Leander (1598), and a translation of parts of Ovid's Amores. Marlowe transformed the new medium of English blank verse into a powerful, melodic form of expression.

He was born in Canterbury and educated at Cambridge University, where he is thought to have become a government agent. His life was turbulent, with a brief imprisonment in connection with a man's death in a brawl (of which he was cleared), and a charge of atheism (following statements given under torture by the English dramatist Thomas Kyd). He was murdered in a Deptford tavern, allegedly in a dispute over the bill, but it may have been a political killing.