Beauty.

[Christopher] Marlowe was irascible and flamboyant. He knew how to have a good time, and also how to anger people. He had devoted friends and devoted enemies. He is rumored to have been a spy for the queen, he started a duel from which he spent some time in prison, and as a skeptic, was fighting charges of blasphemy in front of the Privy Council. At 10am on May 30, 1593, he was eating and drinking with a couple companions. He got in a fight with one of them, grabbed a dagger and wounded his foe, after which the foe got the dagger and killed Marlowe stabbing him through the right eye. At least that is the official story from an inquest. There are many theories that suggest a more complex ending. In any case, so ended a short literary career that almost certainly would have further altered literary history and given Shakespeare a run for his money in taking the dominant position in the Western Canon.

I must throw in one last pitch for the beauty of Marlowe’s writing, despite the example I am about to give not having anything to do with Doctor Faustus. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, a fragment of which was completed when Marlowe died, contains one of my favorite verses in all of English literature. Once again, Shakespeare was influenced by this, in fact taking the last famous line for his own use in As You Like It.

It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For will in us is over-rulde by fate.
When two are stript long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially doo we affect,
Of two gold Ingots like in each respect,
The reason no man knowes, let it suffise,
What we behold is censur’d by our eyes.
Where both deliberat, the love is slight,
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?

Read the rest at Books & Vines.