MARLOWE'S LIFE
Interpreters of Doctor Faustus have been taxed by the problem of reconciling the tempestuous and blasphemous Marlowe of contemporary record with the playwright of the damnation of Faustus. The son of a Canterbury cobbler, born in 1564, scholar of King's College, Canter- bury, then up to Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, as Archbishop Parker's scholar in divinity in 1580, he was much away from the University and probably acting as a government secret agent at Rheims, the centre where En- glishmen were trained as Jesuits in preparation for return to an underground movement reputedly working for the overthrow of Protestantism in England. At least, when he wished to proceed for the M. A. degree of Cambridge