Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was William Shakespeare’s exact contemporary, born the same year but cut down early in a tavern brawl. That much we know, or think we do. As with Shakespeare, Marlowe’s biographical details remain sketchy. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, claims him as a member, recording him as a B.A. of the college in 1584. But even in his own lifetime, he seems to have operated in a swirl of rumor and intrigue. If today we don’t know what was true about him, neither apparently did anybody who knew him in his lifetime.

Would he leave for France, to pursue the Roman Catholic priesthood (like another contemporary, the poet-martyr Robert Southwell)? On the strength of this rumor, his Cambridge college hesitated to award him the status of M.A., which follows automatically on the heels of the Bachelor of Arts. Only when the Privy Council of Elizabeth I (1533–1603) intervened, assuring the Master and Fellows of Marlowe’s “good service” to the Queen, did Marlowe receive his degree promotion. But what “good service” did he perform? Nobody seems to have known, even then. Or if they did know, they weren’t telling. 

He’s an easy mark, in our era, for the historical novelist: Kit Marlowe, whose shadowy identity lends itself readily to any Tudor-era plot. A spy? A heretic? A haunter of the criminal underworld? He’s every possible character, precisely because all we really know about him is that he existed. And yet, as with Shakespeare, we have the work itself. Whoever Christopher Marlowe was, he produced the first blank-verse tragedy, “Tamburlaine,” which opened on the London stage in 1587 and heralded a new age of English drama.

And there is today’s Poem of the Day which (like Ben Jonson’s “To Celia,” which ran as the Sun’s Poem of the Day on June 12) prefigures the carpe diem spirit of the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets. Whoever Marlowe really was, in this poem he assumes, like a comic stage character, the shepherd’s guise. In tetrameter couplets, his pastoral persona evokes the rustic joys of love in the springtime. 

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love 
by Christopher Marlowe 

Come live with me and be my love, 
And we will all the pleasures prove, 
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, 
Woods, or steepy mountain yields. 
 
And we will sit upon the Rocks, 
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks, 
By shallow Rivers to whose falls 
Melodious birds sing Madrigals. 
 
And I will make thee beds of Roses 
And a thousand fragrant posies, 
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle 
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle; 
 
A gown made of the finest wool 
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull; 
Fair lined slippers for the cold, 
With buckles of the purest gold; 
 
A belt of straw and Ivy buds, 
With Coral clasps and Amber studs: 
And if these pleasures may thee move, 
Come live with me, and be my love. 
 
The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing 
For thy delight each May-morning: 
If these delights thy mind may move, 
Then live with me, and be my love. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.