Christopher Marlowe was one of the most prominent playwrights in early modern England before his untimely death in 1593, at the age of 29 (the circumstances of which are still debated to this day). At the time his plays were being performed, he was arguably more popular than William Shakespeare, whose career did not reach its apex until the seventeenth century, at which point Marlowe had been dead nearly a decade.
Marlowe is best known for his plays Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta, the last two of which engage with questions of religion and the efficacy of belief. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's most religiously complex play, a scholar sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge, and is eventually carried off to hell by Lucifer's demons. The Jew of Malta interrogates the relationships among religious groups, specifically Christians, Jews, and Turks of the sixteenth century.
The focus on religion in Marlowe's plays naturally leads to questions about Marlowe's own religious affiliations. For a playwright whose characters frequently express doubt about or even outrightly criticize the practice of organized religion (a taboo stance in Elizabethan England), Marlowe's own religious past is similarly ambiguous. Despite his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth I and her Protestant regime, rumors still circulated that Marlowe was interested in becoming a Roman Catholic priest. More important, however, is that Marlowe was also rumored to practice Atheism (at the time, Atheism was known as "The School of Night"). That scholars continue to debate Christopher Marlowe's religious affiliations is a testament to both the discretion with which he lived and the ambivalent religious nature of his plays. If anything, one could likely say that Marlowe was a religious skeptic, a sentiment expressed by numerous characters – both heroes and villains – in his dramatic repertoire.
