Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them, the importance of his scholarly background, his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled, the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government, and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.