Marlowe, Marlowe, Marlowe...

Christopher, Christofer, Kit, Marlowe, Marley, Morely, whatever you want to call him. My literary hero. The one man in history I'd love to go back and meet.

The man is absolutely legendary, kept alive by his printed words but also his mysterious death.
'The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe' by Charles Nicholl, the book I'm reading now. An investigation into the mysterious circumstances of Marlowe's death by looking at the people who surrounded Marlowe during this period of his life. The Elizabethan underworld is fascinating, full of death, debauchery, theft and debts.

Now Marlowe himself, a supposed atheist and homosexual, definitely controversial for his time. I'd really love to go back and ask him about it all, find out what was true, what isn't. But then, you know that might destroy the whole mystery of him, he stands out in the crowd. (Actually, after typing that I don't think it would destroy the mystery, I would truly love to have a conversation with the man over some ale and a meat pie in the back room of some dark and dingy London pub) Sure Shakespeare is the famous one, but Shakespeare wasn't arrested for supposed atheism and he most certainly wasn't killed by being stabbed in the eye. Marlowe's life was just as dramatic and full of action as his plays.

His last view of the world, the glinting tip flying towards the eye that saw the world a bit differently, into the brain filled with thousands of words waiting to emerge onto the page. The blade sliced through his blood vessels and 2 inches into his brain. The searing white light engulfing his view of the attacker, the man who rid the world of a genius.

'It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows: let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?'

-Extract from Hero and Leander

Just beautiful don't you think?

So yeah, I don't really know what the point of this post really was, merely just spreading my love of Marlowe across the internet maybe... So yeah, check his work out, the man was a master of words and a sparker of controversy, what more could you want?

I'm sure there will be more posts about Marlowe in the future, I can't get enough of the man.