Good morning.
We’ve a sixty percent chance of afternoon thundershowers this Thursday, on an otherwise partly sunny, with a of eighty-one. Winds will be from the south at 10 to 15 mph increasing to 15 to 20 mph in the afternoon.
On this day in 1593, an English playwright dies an untimely death:
Playwright Christopher Marlowe, 29, is killed in a brawl over a bar tab on this day.
Marlowe, born two months before William Shakespeare, was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker. A bright student, he won scholarships to prestigious schools and earned his B.A. from Cambridge in 1584. He was nearly denied his master’s degree in 1587, until advisers to Queen Elizabeth intervened, recommending he receive the degree, referring obliquely to his services for the state. Marlowe’s activities as a spy for Queen Elizabeth were later documented by historians.
While still in school, Marlowe wrote his play Tamburlaine the Great, about a 14th century shepherd who became an emperor. The blank verse drama caught on with the public, and Marlowe wrote five more plays before his death in 1593, including The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus. He also published a translation of Ovid’s Elegies.
In May of 1593, Marlowe’s former roommate, playwright Thomas Kyd, was arrested and tortured for treason. He told authorities that “heretical” papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who was subsequently arrested. While out on bail, Marlowe became involved in a fight over a tavern bill and was stabbed to death.
I’ll try a new puzzle series, from Puzzability. They’ve a daily puzzle that runs Monday to Friday, each day’s puzzle being a part of a five-day, weekly theme. This week’s theme is “The Beginning of the End” and “the answer to each day’s question is the name of a famous person in which the last two letters of the first name are the same letters as the first two letters of the last name, but in reverse order.” For Thursday, May 30th:
Who responded to a 1950s interviewer’s question about the patent for his lifesaving vaccine, ‘There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’