Check out the excel sheet behind the visual representation! Within this excel sheet you will find the content that makes up the nodes and edges of the Kit Marlowe Network.
The First Degree
The first degree includes people that directly knew Kit Marlowe and had significant interactions with him. As the project continues, this list will grow. Presently, we have identified 21 first-degree connections:
- Thomas Harriot
- Robert Poley
- Robert Greene
- Thomas Kyd
- George Peele
- Sir Thomas Walsingham
- Thomas Dekker
- Thomas Nashe
- William Shakespeare
- Philip Henslowe
- Walter Ralegh
- Thomas Watson
- Cuthbert Burby
- Sir John Puckering
- George Chapman
- Ferdinando Stanley
- Edward Alleyn
- Matthew Royden
- Thomas Lodge
- Henry Chettle
- Walter Warner
The Second Degree
The second degree includes anyone who didn’t interact directly with Kit Marlowe but engaged with someone in his first-degree network. An example of may be Ben Jonson, a playwright and poet who had acted in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and collaborated with Thomas Nashe, William Shakespeare and others. Jonson admired Marlowe’s work, but does not appear to have known him personally, making this a second-degree connection.
This degree is quite a bit more expansive than the first and can be a bit daunting. One source for finding people in the second degree has been The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, a more comprehensive networking platform. Working from this list, research can be done to expand the network, adding more people such as those found in Marlowe’s biographies; the indexes to these provide great starting points for research! The more thorough the research, the more data there is for the visualization.
The Research
As you research each person and add their profiles, there might be some events or groups that include multiple people, such as The School of Night, or The Gunpowder Plot. If you happen upon one of these instances, compile a brief description of the event, including Marlowe’s involvement so it can be added as an encyclopedia entry on the KMP. This grows the information in the database and helps update and advance the KMP!
Click here to explore the most up to date version of the network!
