Canterbury: birth and early education

The first recorded event of Christopher Marlowe’s life is his christening at St George’s church, Canterbury, on Saturday 26 February 1564. According to the usual practice of his time, this would have taken place a few days after his birth, the exact date of which is unknown. His parents were both migrants to Canterbury from other parts of Kent: his father John from Ospringe, some ten miles distant, in about 1556, and his mother Katherine from the coastal town of Dover. Christopher was their first son; his older sister Mary, born two years previously, would die in 1568.

The family into which Christopher was born might be described as that of a struggling tradesman. John Marlowe was a shoemaker, and gained his freedom – the right to open a shop, take on apprentices, sue for debt, and so on – in the year of Christopher’s birth. His career seems to have been marked neither by outstanding success nor by dismal failure. In 1569 or 1570 he was lent £2 by a local charitable institution, and had yet to pay it back by 1573. He was sued several times for debt and, in the mid 1580s and 1590s, for non-payment of rent; when his term as warden and treasurer of the Shoemakers’ Company ended in 1590 he was unable to provide satisfactory accounts, and was successfully taken to court. At the same time he appears to have been quite an aspiring and energetic man, as his company wardenship might suggest: he took on his first minor official role in his guild in 1570, served as a sideman (assistant churchwarden) and later as a churchwarden, and was in a company of volunteer soldiers at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588. He was also part of a minority within his trade in being able to read and write.