Christopher Marlowe

English playwright who invented the blank verse tragedy that Shakespeare inherited — Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta — and who died mysteriously at 29 in a tavern stabbing, possibly as a spy.

Created the dramatic template Shakespeare would perfect — the towering individual protagonist who overreaches toward impossible ambition — in a verse form (iambic pentameter blank verse) that Shakespeare inherited and transformed into an instrument of infinite psychological subtlety.