Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be written about. He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son of an eminent shoemaker at Canterbury. He was educated at the King's School of that city, where he held a little scholarship of a pound, quarterly, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with one of the scholarships founded there for Canterbury boys by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took his Bachelor's degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and three years later put on his Master's gown. His translations of Ovid's "Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not publish them. His first public work was the first part of the play of "Tamburlaine," acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both parts, is destitute of construction; the hero, Tamburlaine, "the scourge of God," merely overruns a vast extent of country, subduing kings, massacring maidens, and glutting his unbounded rage for universal conquest. His only human weakness is his passion for "divine Zenocratê," his wife, and he might be called a martyr to "megalomania," trampling on divine names no less than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters in his chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria, bit in mouth, and cries:-- Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity of the drama. In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all... but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown". The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:-- If all the pens that poets ever held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds and muses on admired themes, If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.