Christopher Marlowe was one of the original bad boy rebels. He lived fast, died young (aged 29) and left a beautiful corpus of exhilarating plays and sensuous poetry. Marlowe’s half dozen plays are the first to use blank verse, demonstrating its power and flexibility, and so can be said to have established the entire format of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre.
Early life
Marlowe was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker. There’s a record of his being baptised on 26 February 1564. He won a scholarship to King’s School, Canterbury, then another to Corpus Christi College Cambridge where he was awarded a degree in 1584. However the authorities hesitated to award him an MA in 1587 because of rumours that he had spent time abroad, at Rheims, consorting with English Catholic exiles who were ordained as Catholic priests there before being smuggled back into England. If true, this amounted to treason…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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