Remembering Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593(?)

Monday is Memorial Day in the U.S. ... Originally, the 30th day of May was set aside to honor those killed in the Civil War, but now its memory extends only from WWII to more recent conflicts.

To me (and most Marlovians) however, May 30 stands out as the official date of Christopher Marlowe's "sudden and fearful end" in 1593.

The phrase "Remember Christopher Marlowe"  on the plaque at King's School, Canterbury,  (shown here in 1993 with the great Marlovian scholar Dolly Walker-Wraight) was the theme of a  citywide memorial of Marlowe's passing 400 years earlier—and a celebration of his genius.

But did Marlowe die in 1593? Ever since Calvin Hoffman made an international splash with his book The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare in 1955, many have come to doubt that claim due to the suspicious circumstances of the murder and curious facts regarding the inquest. Even more doubters were created by the pro-Marlovian documentary Much Ado About Something, broadcast in 2001. The next year, Marlowe's murder was further questioned at prestigious Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, where a plaque dedicated to Marlowe was installed with a QUESTION MARK before the date! The interrogative would have been better placed after his death than before his birth, but point taken.

So, on May 30, take a moment to remember "the muses' darling" —an atheist martyr whose early exit from life set the stage for his pseudonymous rebirth as the author known as "Shakespeare.