Why is Christopher Marlow Shakespeare's biggest rival?

Answer 1

Actually Marlowe was not a rival to Shakespeare. This is because although the two men were born in the same year, Marlowe died in a bar fight in 1593, when he was only twenty-nine. Shakespeare, on the other hand, had only just begun his writing career in 1593 and none of his work had been published at the time of Marlowe's death. Shakespeare revered Marlowe's work, and modeled some of his own writing on his predecessor's. But Marlowe's unsurprisingly small body of work displays much less variety than Shakespeare's did, as Shakespeare had a twenty-five-year writing career in which to expand his talents, whereas all of Marlowe's work was written in a six-year period.