Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe studied at Cambridge on a scholarship meant to train clergymen, but disappeared for long stretches the university later connected to secret government service, likely espionage; the Privy Council itself intervened to secure his degree over the college's objections, citing 'good service' to the Queen.

He became London's leading playwright almost overnight with Tamburlaine, whose thundering blank verse set a new standard for the public stage, and followed it with Doctor Faustus, the story of a scholar who trades his soul to the devil Mephistopheles for unlimited knowledge and twenty-four years of power, then watches the clock run out in real time onstage.

In 1593, weeks after being charged with atheism and blasphemy, he was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern in circumstances still disputed: a barroom quarrel over the bill, by the official account, though his intelligence work has fueled centuries of conspiracy theories since.