Today’s Poem: Ovid’s Amores, Book One, Elegy 5

Christopher Marlowe translates Ovid. Cue the curtains stirring in the wind.

Corinna (via imagine.art)

What’s sexy about Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), first of all, is that we know hardly anything about him. Allegedly today is his birthday, though all that’s documented is his baptism, on February 26, 1564. His biography provides us with the loosest of sketches. Son of a Canterbury shoemaker. Scholarship boy at the King’s School, Canterbury, whence he was translated, also by scholarship, to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. College rolls and bursary accounts record his conspicuous absence there, not his presence. When present, he spent more money in the college buttery than was possible, let alone prudent, for a normal scholarship student. 

When he was absent, where did he go? When he was present, where did his money come from? Nobody knows. Nobody knew then, either. The theory floated at the time was that he was a spy, under the auspices of the Queen’s Privy Council. The rumor persisted that he was at any moment to be sent to the English seminary at Rheims, …