The society in which Marlowe lived and wrote, and the fictional worlds he created in his writings, were highly gender-segregated. Different physical, emotional, and intellectual qualities were ascribed to men and women, and to a significant extent they inhabited distinct social spaces. These gender divisions shaped the ways in which men and women came to know themselves as such, profoundly affecting the possibilities for sexual desire and expression. The theatre Marlowe wrote for did not merely represent this divided world, it also embodied it: as far as the making and performing of plays were concerned, it, too, was an all-male preserve. Yet the playwrights and actors had to speak to and entertain an audience that, although male-dominated, did include women; and poems like Hero and Leander appealed to female as well as male readers. The popularity of works like Marlowe's, depicting a wide range of sexual and social encounters between men and women, may constitute evidence of a shared awareness by his contemporaries of the possibility of testing - and perhaps even transgressing - the boundaries their world had established for itself. Marlowe's plays and poems provide diverse testimonials to the ideals to which the culture of Elizabethan England aspired, and against which it chafed; to its imaginings of alternative ways of organizing gender and expressing sexuality; and to the complex, multifaceted realities of lived experience.

Gender and sexuality can be both orderly and disorderly in the fictional worlds of Marlowe’s poetry and drama, working with and against the grain of the social structures they are shaped by and shape. Tracing the interrelations of gender and sexuality in Marlowe’s plays and poems, this chapter argues that the significance of Marlowe’s treatment of the relations between men and women, and men’s relations with one another, lies in his acute perception of the entanglement of their encounters with the political structures and everyday practices of his social world. These issues are explored under two headings.