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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

The life of Christopher Marlowe is an extraordinary and inexplicable tale of profound genius.

Shakespeare's exact contemporary, here was a child with an even less of a head start in life.

He was born into a family of shoemakers in Canterbury to parents who could barely sign their names.

He must have demonstrated something special because he somehow benefited from scholarships to school and university

and received an education that cleaved him from both his parents and the culture of orthodoxy and obedience that should have been his lot.

At some point, he was recruited by the Elizabethan state as a spy.

But typically, we don't know exactly how or what he did, and then in London

he produced over six years an outpouring of drama and poetry that unlocked the door to the

Renaissance in England. His was a profoundly disturbing genius. He was someone who could write of

those two 16th century verities of religion and magic that one was but a childish toy and the other a ceremonial toy.

He put Ovid's verse into iambic pentameter.

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