Christopher Marlowe
(1564–93).English playwright, poet, and spy. Born in Canterbury, he was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His plays, beginning with Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1587), are energetic, ...
Chapman, George (1559–1634) Reference library
Robert Maslen
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...For some scholars, this book identifies him as a member of an exclusive group of intellectuals who surrounded Sir Walter Ralegh . In 1592 the group was dubbed the ‘school of atheism’ by a querulous pamphleteer. One theory, now discredited, holds that Love’s Labour’s Lost ( c. 1594 ) is an attack on the Ralegh circle, and that Shakespeare alludes to this ‘school of atheism’ as the ‘school of night’ (4.3.251), with The Shadow of Night as its poetic manifesto. This theory also proposes that Chapman was the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare’s...
