/lit/ - Literature

Christopher Marlowe, without question.

This is the man who basically invented blank verse as a poetic form, and single-handedly sculpted Shakespeare into what he became. I'm too lazy to re-find the page I recently read containing a whole slew of quotes written about him, but will mention that the man was basically considered to be the only person who could have rivaled Shakespeare as a poet during their day, and it should be noted that Marlowe was the same age as him too, exactly two months younger according to their dates of baptism.

For those who don't know, he was stabbed to death at the mere age of 29, for reasons still not fully known, though there is much speculation about him being a spy. Either way, this is the man who made Shakespeare into what he is, with Shakespeare's earliest work apparently referencing or outright borrowing many of Marlowe's lines, and whose death Shakespeare is theorized to have been deeply and profoundly affected by. Though Shakespeare may have shown us perfection in blank verse through his own hand, it will never not be a loss to literature that we did not get to see what realms it could have been taken to by the man who birthed the form itself. For me, Marlowe's "Was this the face..." line is an example of perfection of the form, a line as good as Shakespeare's greatest, and to think how young he would have been at the time of its writing, and how much better he could have become if life had not been so cruel to him, is a train best left untaken.

Let us simply say that had fortune not been so unfair, our stage today may have had two Shakespeares.