Christopher Marlowe wrote the blank verse that made Shakespeare possible, and was dead at twenty-nine. Tamburlaine the Great (1587) put a Scythian shepherd on stage conquering the known world in lines of such propulsive force that Ben Jonson called it Marlowe's mighty line — the moment English drama stopped rhyming and started speaking. He wrote fast and provoked deliberately. The Jew of Malta gave the stage a villain who addresses the audience as a co-conspirator. Edward II dramatized a king destroyed by his love for another man. Doctor Faustus staged a scholar selling his soul for knowledge and then finding the bargain unbearable, and its final hour — the clock striking, the verse accelerating — remains the most frightening scene in Elizabethan theatre. A cobbler's son from Canterbury, he took a Cambridge degree only after the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, which has fed centuries of speculation that he worked as a government agent. He was stabbed above the eye in a Deptford lodging house in 1593, days after a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of atheism.