ABSTRACT
Elizabeth gave John Roydon age to be twelve years and his name to be ‘Mowle’, ‘onelye a boye called Christopher Mowle’. Though the age is wrong and the name is wrong, the possibility exists that the boy may have been Christopher Marlowe. In May 1573, moreover, Christopher Marlowe would have been only nine years and three months old but Elizabeth Dyer’s twelve is unlikely to have been an informed and precise description, more likely a means of indicating a threshold, in this case, perhaps, the customary threshold of service. The Marlowes’ house in 1605 perhaps suggests a modesty of means and a ‘precious word-picture of a household which must have been similar to that in which Christopher Marlowe grew up’. The formative years of Christopher Marlowe were inevitably influenced by the translation, in domestic terms, of the tensions of these processes of transition.
