Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include: Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them; the importance of his scholarly background; his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled; the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government; and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.

Lisa Hopkins is Senior Lecturer in English, Sheffield Hallam University.

'Hopkins's literary insights are confident, and invaluable...Marlowe emerges from this up-to-the-minute essay as a complex figure.' - Michael Caines, The Times Literary Supplement