Biography: In Shakespeare in Love, Christopher Marlowe is the precociously successful rival constantly keeping Shakespeare in the shade.
It is Marlowe who humiliatingly supplies him with the plot and title for Romeo and Juliet; it is Marlowe's lines that every actor chooses for their audition piece. The final casual put-down comes from the boatman ferrying Shakespeare across the Thames in hot pursuit of the elusive Gwyneth Paltrow: "You a playwright then? I had Kit Marlowe in my boat once".
It's a piquant idea, Marlowe the superstar, the young Shakespeare a mere wannabe. And there is some substance to it. Born in the same year, 1564, from very similar backgrounds - one's father a Canterbury shoemaker, the other's a Stratford glover - Marlowe outshone Shakespeare with a meteoric early career. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, thus ensuring himself automatic gentleman status, and had such a huge London hit with Tamburlaine the Great at the age of 23 that a Tamburlaine II had to be quickly written, the first such cash-in sequel on the English professional stage. He wrote a total of six plays before being killed in 1593. If Shakespeare had been snuffed out at 29, what would he have left to us? Titus Andronicus, the multi-part Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, a few more forgettable comedies; there's nothing there to match Tamburlaine or Dr Faustus in quality or impact.
Shakespeare in Love is a fantasy in the benign mode of screenwriter Tom Stoppard. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a seedy, shadowy John Le Carré world of plots and counterplots. David Riggs maintains that the scholarships that took Marlowe to King's School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge constituted a passport to nowhere. As a graduate you might technically be a gentleman, but the roads to preferment in the professions were effectively reserved for the better-born. If you did not want to become a dutiful member of the lower clergy in the Church of England - the intended destination for poor scholarship boys - the most lucrative opportunities were writing for the acting companies, or spying for the secret service.
The key piece of evidence for Marlowe's having been a spy is the letter written by the Privy Council to the Cambridge authorities in 1587 denying the rumour that he "was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims", that he had "done Her Majesty good service . . . in matters touching the benefit of his country", and should be allowed his MA degree. Rheims held the Catholic seminary where priests were trained as part of the mission to re-convert England in the era of the multiple moves to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. Riggs produces fascinating evidence of the network of double agents, run by spymaster Francis Walsingham, who pretended to go over to Rome/Rheims to uncover or stimulate such plots and incriminate the would-be perpetrators. Even if Marlowe himself was not one of these, several of his associates unquestionably were, and there are suggestive, unexplained absences during his time in Cambridge consistent with periods on government service abroad.
Riggs sees links and connections between Marlowe's background and education, his involvement in espionage, and his career as a writer. His humanist training involved a prolonged drilling through classical Latin texts, the capacity to argue both sides in academic disputation, an intellectual calisthenics without substantive content. For Marlowe, as for his fictional counterpart, the low-born Dr Faustus, "books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority". The Elizabethan church demanded an absolute outward conformism, without, as Bacon put it, "making windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts". You could believe what you liked as long as you did not openly challenge the system. This, according to Riggs, was the milieu that created Marlowe the transgressive writer, choosing to translate the scandalous love-poetry of Ovid, identifying with the rebel spirits Tamburlaine and Faustus, exposing the hypocrisy of Christianity in The Jew of Malta, flaunting the homosexual favouritism of Edward II. It was also the formation of Marlowe the notorious atheist, said to have proclaimed that the first beginning of religion was but to keep men in awe, and - linking ancient and modern vices - that "all they that love not boys and tobacco are fools".
Whether these were Marlowe's actual opinions Riggs leaves open. But the reputation as an atheist, which may have been convenient for a government double agent used to sniff out heresy and sedition, was to be turned into evidence against Marlowe during a political witch-hunt shortly before his death. Riggs is convinced that the one led to the other. Marlowe was ostensibly killed in a fight over who should pay the bill for a private dinner in a house in Deptford. There is nothing inherently unlikely in such a story. Marlowe had a record of violence and street-fighting, including involvement in one incident where a man was murdered. But Riggs builds up a strong circumstantial case for conspiracy. The other men at the dinner were shady characters, one of them undoubtedly a veteran of the secret service. Marlowe had been shielded from the law a number of times: he was under suspicion by the Privy Council, and it might have proved inconvenient to have him tried. On the matter in hand, the word had come from the queen, "prosecute it to the full". Terminate with extreme prejudice.
That, at least, is Riggs's story, a 2004 view of Marlowe, our contemporary. We may have to wait a few more years for another version of Marlowe, the contemporary of Shakespeare.
• Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. His last book, Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002