
Christopher Marlowe
(1564 - 1593)
Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council quelled the worries of Cambridge University in 1587 over young Christopher Marlowe’s absences, issuing a statement that he was employed in “matters touching the benefit of his country”; it is the earliest record of his clandestine government service. The poet and playwright, best known for his play The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, was denounced variously in his short career: by one man for his “pestilent Machiavellian policy” and by another for supposedly having said, “All they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.” He died in 1593 at the age of twenty-nine from a stab wound.