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.