Probable Portrait of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593).

This portrait was found in 1953 at Corpus Christi College of Cambridge University, and has been much restored. The subject's age at the date of the portrait fits Marlowe (born in 1564), who attended the College from 1580 to 1587. The inscription says "ANNO DNI AETATIS SVAE 21 1585 - QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESRVIT": "Aged 21 A. D. 1585. That which nourishes me destroys me." This invites notice that Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's minister, was also Chancellor of Cambridge University and so able to recruit clever students as agents under his spy chief, Sir Francis Walsingham. It is a curious fact that the university was coerced into granting Marlowe his degree shortly after the Privy Council intervened, for they wrote that a "Christopher Morley... should be furthered in the degree" because he had "done her Majesty good service & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing... touching the benefit of his country." Thus the university may have educated Marlowe but exposed him to activities which called his academic status into question (and may even have led to his expedient murder in a tavern brawl in 1593).

The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander (Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?") but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words "When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room." This appears to be a reference to Marlowe's murder which involved a fight over the "reckoning" – the bill.

Shakespeare was heavily influenced by Marlowe in his early work, as can be seen in the re-using of Marlovian themes in Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Macbeth (Dido, Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus respectively). In Hamlet, after meeting with the travelling actors, Hamlet requests the Player perform a speech about the Trojan War, which at 2.2.429-32 has an echo of Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage. In Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare brings on a character "Marcade" (three syllables) in conscious acknowledgement of Marlowe's character "Mercury", also attending the King of Navarre, in Massacre at Paris. The significance, to those of Shakespeare's audience who had read Hero and Leander, was Marlowe's identification of himself with the god Mercury. Picture and data licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.