Provides a critical account of the life and works of Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe is studied as a man who staged the birth of the modern author, and for his representations of sexuality and homosexuality. This text portrays a wide range of critical approaches (including Gay Studies, Cultural Materialism, and New Historicism) and provides theoretical grounding to them. It provides studies of Marlowe’s extreme dramatizations of arson, cruelty and aggression and considers the feminist debate, giving reasons as to why Marlowe’s work remains impenetrable to feminism.