Short answers, pulled from the story.
Christopher Marlowe died on the 30th of May 1593 in Deptford, at age twenty-nine. He had been baptised on the 26th of February 1564 in Canterbury, making him approximately two months older than William Shakespeare.
Marlowe is believed to have worked as a government agent for the Privy Council of Elizabeth I. In 1587, the Privy Council intervened to ensure Cambridge awarded him his Master of Arts degree, commending his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen, language scholars associate with protecting government agents. His unusual absences from Cambridge and lavish spending beyond his scholarship income, along with his 1592 arrest in Flushing for suspected counterfeiting linked to Catholic networks, further support the theory.
Marlowe spent his final day at the house of the widow Eleanor Bull in Deptford with three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. All three had connections to the Walsingham family, who were central figures in Elizabethan state espionage. The coroner's inquest, uncovered by scholar Leslie Hotson in 1925, found that Frizer killed Marlowe in an argument over payment of the bill and was pardoned within a month on a finding of self-defence.
Marlowe was the first English playwright to achieve critical recognition for using blank verse in drama; his Tamburlaine, first performed in 1587, is recognised as the first English play in blank verse on the commercial stage. Modern scholars identify him as the foremost dramatist in London in the years before his death, citing the many imitations of Tamburlaine. Together with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine is considered the beginning of the mature phase of Elizabethan theatre.
The informer Richard Baines submitted a document to authorities in 1593 listing eighteen charges against Marlowe, including that Christ "was a bastard," that St John the Evangelist "was bedfellow to Christ," and that Marlowe actively persuaded people to atheism in company. Thomas Kyd, after imprisonment and probable torture, gave similar testimony linking Marlowe to the circle of Sir Walter Raleigh. Another document claimed Marlowe had "read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others."
In As You Like It, Shakespeare directly quoted a line from Marlowe's Hero and Leander, attributing it to a "Dead Shepherd." The clown Touchstone's speech about a man struck "more dead than a great reckoning in a little room" references both Marlowe's death and a line from The Jew of Malta. Scholars have also traced Marlovian themes through Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Macbeth.