Christopher Marlowe

Of course the actors needed plays to perform and there were on hand a host of scholars who'd graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. They chose now to make their living by their wits, with their quill. Men like Thomas Kidd, and Robert Greene and Chief amongst them, Christopher Kit Marlowe.

Christopher Marlowe was the greatest playwright of his generation. Many acknowledged that fact, even William Shakespeare himself would have admitted it. But it was also well known that he was a braggart, he was a drunkard, some said he was a debaucher, others said he was an atheist, whilst many knew that he was a blasphemer. Marlowe was the same age as Shakespeare born in Canterbury on the 16th February 1654. By his early twenties he had arrive in London, where he had become a dramatist working for the Lord Admiral's and the Lord Strange's men.

No matter how scandal-ridden Marlowe’s private life, he knew how to win over an audience and his plays brought the crowds flocking in their thousands.

But where was Shakespeare whilst Marlowe was pulling the crowds in the London theatres? We have entered upon a period of his life which Scholars have dubbed the 'lost years' because there is little documentary evidence to suggest his whereabouts and many fanciful theories have had him fighting as a soldier, exploring the world as a sailor, working as a school master or even as a butcher.