ABSTRACT
During his student years, Christopher Marlowe moved in a circle of smart young men who challenged the foundational beliefs of his period. William Empson uses the evocative term ‘undergraduate atheism’ to characterize the intellectual climate of Marlowe’s Cambridge.1 Whilst charges of atheism were frequently laid at Marlowe’s door, Nicholas Davidson reminds us that it makes more sense to describe his uninhibited investigation of the mysteries and administrative structure of Christianity as ‘religious dissent’.2 But Marlowe undoubtedly struck the majority of his contemporaries as anti-Christian in so far as most of his literary works indict Christianity for its crippling restraints on human growth and development.
