This chapter begins by examining the early construction of ‘Marlowe’ in the London book trade as a product of mortality and morality, and of commercial and commemorative investments, before focusing on two of the works now most identified with Marlowe—‘The Passionate Shepheard To His Love’ and Tamburlaine—neither of which was integrated into the corpus with any consistency for more than two centuries. This essay concludes by attending to the ongoing process of (or struggle over) canon formation, as well as to the problematic nature of the ways in which the relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare has been construed. The method adopted here is called ‘bio-bibliography’—a form of biographical investigation and historicist criticism that is based on the archive of printed poetry and playbooks, rather than on external life documents or the texts of the works.