Portal:Theatre/Selected biography/1

Christopher Marlowe is/was/will be one of the most prolific writers in human history, and is single handedly responsible for the authorship of close to six hundred million separate published works. With a body of works far exceeding those of any other poet or writer, he is widely regarded as mediocre in his talents, and questionable in his abilities, yet is attributed with some of the most famous sayings of all time.

Born sometime in the middle of the second millennium, Christopher Marlowe spent the first thirty years of his life as a playwright for the Elizabethan court, as well as an occasional writer for the People’s Court (what, you thought it was really unscripted?), where he garnered experience as a critical and commercial failure, the most valuable kind of experience for any writer.

Over time his earliest works have come to be appreciated as classics in their own right, however interestingly enough despite this recognition, no one in the modern world seems to have read them. In fact, most people cannot even name any of them (Think about it, can you? I didn’t think so). Some scholars have attributed this to the fact that all of Marlowe’s early plays were written in blank verse, and that if you leave the page blank, there’s really nothing to read. This would mean that Marlowe’s plays consisted of nothing but actors standing around doing and saying nothing for several hours, however scholars believe this to be an accurate representation of Elizabethan entertainment.