Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of being approached in the 1990s by a screenwriter who wanted to make a Shakespeare -biopic. Greenblatt repeatedly told him to forget Shakespeare and look instead at his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. The screenwriter knew what he was about and ignored Greenblatt’s advice – the result was Shakespeare in Love . The fact of the matter is that Marlowe’s life is the sort of thing that people assume would make a good film but in reality it was just too full of violence, passion and secret plots. By the time he was murdered at the age of 29 in 1593, Marlowe was enmeshed in far too much for a mere drama to set out.

Biographies haven’t been lacking, many of them excellent. The allure is clear. Two of the most important strands of Marlowe’s short life are, fr

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