Christopher Marlowe

Badass Literary Guys

Who was he?

Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright who wrote about dynamic antiheroes rejecting society.

But who was he really?

This badass literary figure was a dynamic antihero who rejected society.

The badassery

Marlowe was so mysterious that it's hard to tell which parts of his life are absolute fiction; local legend portrayed him as a bar-brawling duelist and magician.

Cambridge almost denied Marlowe his degree because of a rumor that he'd converted to Catholicism. Soon though, they received a curious royal letter that essentially told them to give him the degree and stop asking so many damned questions. (It's been suggested that Marlowe was working as a spy for the Crown.)

Marlowe's maverick lifestyle dogged him throughout his career. He was arrested for counterfeiting and then went on to make some disparaging remarks about Jesus, and was arrested for that in 1593. Soon thereafter, he was killed in a knife fight, possibly assassinated. It's difficult to manage a more badass death than "assassinated via knife fight."

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