Bibliography

Bibliography

Top 10 Books

Here are our “top ten” books to start reading. All available through Waterstones.

  • Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003)
  • Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. by Stephen Orgel (London: Penguin, 2007)
  • Four Plays by Christopher Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus), Brian Gibbons Ed, New Mermaids/ Bloomsbury 2014
  • Barber, Ros, The Marlowe Papers (London: Sceptre, 2012)
  • Burgess, Anthony, A Dead Man in Deptford (London, Hutchinson, 1993)
  • Honan, Park, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
  • Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Vintage 2002)
  • Riggs, David, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004)
  • Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Pantheon, 2006)
  • The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

You can also look out three classic texts in libraries or second hand:

  • Hoffman, Calvin, The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare” (London: Max Parrish, 1955)
  • Urry, William, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber, 1988)
  • Wraight, Annie Doris, In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography (Chichester: Adam Hart, 1993)

See also…

Full Bibliography

Plays

A good edition for the general reader is:

  • Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (London: Penguin, 2003)

Scholarly editions of individual plays include the Revels series and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. The Mermaids editions of the plays are most suitable for performance.

Poems

  • Marlowe, Christopher, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 2000)
  • Marlowe, Christopher, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. by Stephen Orgel (London: Penguin, 2007)
  • Marlowe, Christopher, The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Biography

  • Hoffman, Calvin, The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare” (London: Max Parrish, 1955)
  • Honan, Park, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
  • Hotson, John Leslie, The Death of Christopher Marlowe ([n.p.]: Nonesuch Press, 1925)
  • Kendall, Roy, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003)
  • Kuriyama, Constance Brown, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (London: Cornell University Press 2002)
  • Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Vintage 2002)
  • Riggs, David, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004)
  • Trow, M. J., and Taliesin Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe? A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England (Stroud: Sutton, 2001)
  • Urry, William, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (London: Faber, 1988)
  • Wraight, Annie Doris, In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography (Chichester: Adam Hart, 1993)

Authorship

  • Blumenfeld, Samuel L., The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question(London: McFarland, 2008)
  • Hodges, Peter B., Marlowe’s Complaint ([n.p.]: New Generation Publishing, 2021)
  • Michell, John, Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996)
  • Murphy, Donna N., The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare & Anonymous Plays (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013)
  • Pinksen, Daryl, Marlowe’s Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (New York: iUniverse, 2008)
  • Price, Diana, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (London: Greenwood Press, 2000)
  • Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, ed. by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • Shapiro, James, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber, 2010)
  • Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Pantheon, 2006)
  • Wraight, Annie Doris, The Story That The Sonnets Tell (London: Adam Hart, 1994)

Fiction

  • Barber, Ros, The Marlowe Papers (London: Sceptre, 2012)
  • Burgess, Anthony, A Dead Man in Deptford (London, Hutchinson, 1993)
  • Judd, Alan, A Fine Madness (London: Simon & Schuster, 2021)
  • Margrave, Jay, The Nine Lives of Kit Marlowe (Guildford: Goldenford, 2010)

Performance

  • Aebischer, Pascale, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • Bowsher, Julian and Pat Miller, The Rose and The Globe: Excavations 1988-90 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2009)
  • Chambers, Edmund Kerchever, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923)
  • Frohnsdorff, Michael and Kenneth Pickering, Great Neglected Speeches from the Elizabethan Stage ([n.p.]: Pen Press, 2010)
  • Gurr, Andrew, Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594-1625, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
  • Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
  • Harraway, Clare, Re-citing Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
  • Lunney, Ruth, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002)
  • Pickering, Kenneth, The Performer’s Anthology (London: Janus Publishing, 2008)

Criticism

  • Bevington, David, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)
  • Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Richard Wilson (London: Longman, 1999)
  • Christopher Marlowe at 450, ed. by Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)
  • Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. by Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage and Page, ed. by Sarah K. Scott and Michael L. Stapleton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)
  • Cole, Douglas, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (London: Praeger, 1995)
  • Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Downie, J. A., and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  • Duxfield, Andrew, Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify (London: Routledge, 2016)
  • Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)
  • Hopkins, Lisa, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)
  • Hopkins, Lisa, Christopher Marlowe: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
  • Levin, Harry, The Overreacher (London: Faber, 1954)
  • Logan, Robert A., Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
  • Mackenzie, Clayton G., Deathly Experiments: A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS, 2010)
  • Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Clifford Leech ([n.p.]: Prentice-Hall, 1964)
  • Marlowe (New Casebooks), ed. by Avraham Oz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003)
  • Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. by Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002)
  • Parker, John, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)
  • Pasquarella, Vincenzo, Christopher Marlowe’s Representation of Love: A Challenge to the English Renaissance Amorous Discourse (Rome: Aracne, 2008)
  • Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. by Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
  • Preedy, Chloe Kathleen, Marlowe’s Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (London: Bloomsbury, 2012)
  • Rutter, Tom, The Cambridge Introduction to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
  • Shepard, Alan, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
  • Shepherd, Simon, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester, 1986)
  • Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
  • Stapleton, Michael L., Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon (London: Routledge, 2016)
  • Steane, John Barry, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1964)
  • The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
  • The University Wits: Christopher Marlowe, ed. by Robert A. Logan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)
  • Weil, Judith, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)

Elizabethan Period

  • Alford, Stephen, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Bloomsbury, 2012)
  • Childs, Jessie, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (London: The Bodley Head, 2014)
  • Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade, ed. by Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Cooper, John, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (London: Faber, 2011)
  • Haynes, Alan, Walsingham: Elizabethan Spymaster and Statesman (Stroud: Sutton, 2004)
  • Mortimer, Ian, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (London: Vintage, 2013)
  • Streete, Adrian, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)