Who didn't know about this? :D

"How would we remember Shakespeare if he had died at 29? His career as a playwright would have lasted only a few years, starting in 1590 with the crude popular success The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (now known as Henry VI, Part II). His last and best play would probably have been Richard II; scholars would study the fantastically violent Titus Andronicus and the intellectual burlesque Love's Labour's Lost. But the creations that make Shakespeare Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet; Falstaff and Hal; Hamlet, Lear—would be lost forever. Shakespeare would take his place as the second most promising of the Elizabethan dramatists—behind his exact contemporary, the prodigious Christopher Marlowe."

"To put it another way, Marlowe himself seems like a character out of Shakespeare—a real-life Hamlet, or perhaps Iago. Certainly his life, from the little that is known about it, was almost preposterously dramatic. Born on February 26, 1564, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he earned a scholarship to Cambridge in 1581; he would remain there, on and off, for six years, more than a fifth of his life. Like the courtier Baldock in his Edward II, Marlowe could claim, "my gentry/I fetched from Oxford, not from heraldry."


[read on]