The paradox of Christopher Marlowe is that he is both too familiar and rather evasive. The frequent abbreviation 'Kit' suggests an intimacy that the works themselves both solicit and repel; more appropriate, perhaps, is the slippery range of his name in official records: Marlow, Marloe, Marley, Marlin, Malyn, Morley, Merlin, Mar. Atheist, intelligencer, heretic, spy, overreacher, tobacco-loving sodomite, intellectual queen, radical tragedian, who held monstrous opinions, wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, did not die in Deptford in 1593 or did, and was murdered by the Queen: these are some of the rumors that have been attached to Christopher Marlowe. His characters too have correspondingly outrageous reputations – Tamburlaine for 'working words' that conquer kingdoms and dare gods out of heaven, Faustus for a demonic 'form of fortunes' that do or don't produce his damnation (who can tell?), Edward II for queerness, and so on. Marlowe's lyric 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' reverberated across the poetic and musical culture of the period, like the pop hit that is the soundtrack for a generation, and, like all the best pop stars, he died violently and young. Marlowe's literary canon is all essentially juvenilia. In part Marlowe's mythic reputation is an inevitable supplement to the biography of Shakespeare. His life is political where Shakespeare's seems studiedly neutral; his light burns bright and brief, while Shakespeare looks back on a long career in the theatre; Marlowe's own personality seems to shape his writing, while Shakespeare slips behind the mask of his characters; his work is transgressive where Shakespeare's is bourgeois. As Al Pacino found in his vox pop in Looking for Richard (1996), Shakespeare now circulates largely as textual fragments: 'what's in a name?'; 'alas, poor Yorick'; 'to be or not to be'; 'neither a borrower nor a lender be'; 'now is the winter of our discontent'; 'all the world's a stage'.
