Historical Miniature

I don't know a lot about Christopher Marlowe, but I know enough to know that this summary of Marlowe in NYT is one-sided (it is not at all clear, for instance, that Marlowe was gay). Nonetheless, I like its bullet approach:

Marlowe (1564-93), unlike Shakespeare, is not the writer to comfort an audience with a jolly evening in the theater. A contrarian of epic stature, he's most often celebrated as an embodiment of rebellion in every form: a cynic about all received ideas of society and religion; almost certainly a homosexual; most likely a government spy; probably an atheist; possibly even a dabbler in the occult; and, to round off the list, a glorifier of violence who died in a tavern brawl. Much of the eyewitness testimony we have of Marlowe was supplied by people anxious to depict him, for their own petty reasons, as an evil influence: he is the man who supposedly said that Jesus' mother was "dishonest" and that "all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Among Renaissance bad-boy artists, he ranks in the top echelon . . .

I also found this characterization of 16th-century persecution of Catholics interesting:

In Tudor England, religion and politics were one: roiled by sectarian strife, the country was menaced on one side by Catholics, with support from France and Spain, and pressured on the other by Puritan extremists who viewed the official Church of England as too dangerously close to "papistry."

"Menaced"? I suppose so, but it makes it sound like Roman Catholics were the aggressors. Try characterizing it that way to Thomas More, Edmund Campion, and John Fisher.