Why was Christopher Marlowe killed at 29 in a modest, respectable dining-house at Deptford, and who was responsible? In writing about his life, I felt that his baffling murder had to be solved: it would surely tell us something about his habits, his milieu and his character. Even by Elizabethan standards, his life was meteoric, and I was troubled by curious paradoxes.
Though he mixed with thugs, he was neither crass nor brutal. A new letter at Cambridge makes it more certain that the untitled "putative portrait" of him, at Corpus Christi, does show his own rather vulnerable-looking, sensitive and effeminate features. Probably a homosexual, he became a government spy, traveller, street-fighter and provocative wit while befriending leading scientists, patrons and poets.
He had begun his gorgeous Hero and Leander, and in plays such as Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus had given Shakespeare - his junior by two months - lessons in the art of stage tragedy. But, in some way, had Marlowe abetted his fate?