Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death. Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the preeminent Elizabethan playwright. Marlowe was the first to achieve critical reputation for his use of blank verse, which became the standard for the era. His plays are distinguished by their overreaching protagonists. Themes found within Marlowe's literary works have been noted as humanistic with realistic emotions, which some scholars find difficult to reconcile with Marlowe's "anti-intellectualism" and his catering to the prurient tastes of his Elizabethan audiences for generous displays of extreme physical violence, cruelty, and bloodshed.
Thomas Kyd was an English playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.
Deptford is an area on the south bank of the River Thames in southeast London, in the Royal Borough of Greenwich and London Borough of Lewisham. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne. From the mid 16th century to the late 19th it was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Dockyards. This was a major shipbuilding dock and attracted Peter the Great to come and study shipbuilding. Deptford and the docks are associated with the knighting of Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I aboard the Golden Hind, the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cape for Elizabeth, Captain James Cook's third voyage aboard HMS Resolution, and the mysterious apparent murder of Christopher Marlowe in a house along Deptford Strand.
The Raigne of King Edward the Third, often shortened to Edward III, is an Elizabethan play printed anonymously in 1596, and at least partly written by William Shakespeare. It began to be included in publications of the complete works of Shakespeare only in the late 1990s. Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater, Eric Sams, Giorgio Melchiori and Brian Vickers. The play's co-author remains the subject of debate: suggestions have included Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe and George Peele.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1593.
The School of Night is a modern name for a group of men centred on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the "School of Atheism". The group supposedly included poets and scientists Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Matthew Roydon and Thomas Harriot.
Peter Whelan was a British playwright.
The Herbal Bed (1996) is a play by Peter Whelan, written specifically for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The play is set in the year 1613 and is about Susanna Hall, daughter of William Shakespeare, who is accused of adultery with local haberdasher Rafe Smith. Her husband, Dr John Hall, is suspicious of their relationship, but stands up for his wife when she takes her accuser to court for slander. Though Susanna's father is regularly mentioned, his name is never specified and he never appears. The play ends as he is about to enter.
The Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was the main author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Further, the theory says Marlowe did not die in Deptford on 30 May 1593, as the historical records state, but that his death was faked.
Ingram Frizer was an English gentleman and businessman of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who is notable for his reported killing of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in the home of Eleanor Bull on 30 May 1593. He may have been working with the English secret service. He has been described as "a property speculator, a commodity broker, a fixer for gentlemen of good worship" and a confidence trickster gulling "young fools" out of their money.
John Leslie Hotson was a scholar of Elizabethan literary puzzles.
Annie Doris "Dolly" Walker-Wraight was a British school teacher and writer. Under the name A.D. Wraight, she published in support of the Marlovian theory, the argument that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of William Shakespeare's works.
Eleanor Bull was an English woman, known for owning the establishment in which Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright and poet, was killed in 1593.
Nicholas Skeres was an Elizabethan con-man and government informer—i.e. a "professional deceiver"—and one of the three "gentlemen" who were with the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe when he was killed in Deptford in May 1593. Together with another of the men there, Robert Poley, he had played a part in the discovery of the Babington plot against the life of the Queen in 1586, and at the time of Marlowe's death was engaged in a money-lending swindle with the third of them, Marlowe's reported killer Ingram Frizer.
Sir Thomas Walsingham was a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I and literary patron to such poets as Thomas Watson, Thomas Nashe, George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe. He was related to Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham and the employer of Marlowe's murderer Ingram Frizer. This connection is one of the reasons offered for suggesting that Marlowe's death may have been linked with intelligence work, and not a dispute over a bill for food and accommodation, as in the coroner's verdict.
The Big Bang is a 2011 American action thriller film written by Erik Jendresen and directed by Tony Krantz, starring Antonio Banderas and Sienna Guillory.
Robert Poley, or Pooley was an English double agent, government messenger and agent provocateur employed by members of the Privy Council during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; he was described as "the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld". Poley is particularly noted for his central role in uncovering the so-called Babington plot to assassinate the Queen in 1586, and for being a witness of, and even a possible party to, the reported killing in self-defence by Ingram Frizer of the famous poet/dramatist Christopher Marlowe in May 1593.
Wilbur Gleason Zeigler (1857–1923) was a lawyer and writer who is best known for founding the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship in the preface and notes to his 1895 novel It Was Marlowe. He also wrote on the history of Ohio, the culture of North Carolina, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, of which he was a survivor.
Richard Baines was an Elizabethan double agent, informer and ordained Catholic priest. He is best known for the so-called Baines Note, a list of accusations against the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, which has been described by Paul Kocher as the "master key to the mind of Marlowe" and that "for revolutionary impact and scope it stands alone, an extraordinary document in the history of free thought".
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), English playwright and poet, has appeared in works of fiction since the nineteenth century. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, and has been suggested as an alternative author of Shakespeare's works, an idea not accepted in mainstream scholarship. Marlowe, alleged to have been a government spy and frequently claimed to have been homosexual, was killed in 1593.