Marlowe's blank verse theatre became popular, and he wrote five additional plays before his death in 1593, including The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus. In addition, he released a translation of Ovid's Elegies. Marlowe's old roommate, dramatist Thomas Kyd, was captured and tortured for treason in May 1593. He confessed to writing several of Marlowe's plays and was hanged. Blank verse is unrhymed verse composed in lines of eight syllables. It is so called because there are no set numbers of trochaic or iambic feet in each line as there are in regular metered poetry. Lines can vary in length and sometimes ends with a full stop (period), a comma, or a semicolon. Some poems are written in dactylic hexameter while others use heptameter septenary lines. Blank verse is used by poets who do not want to restrict themselves to specific metrical rules. Christopher Marlowe was born on April 25th, 1564 in London. His father was a wealthy merchant who had recently returned from working in France, where he may have met up with other Englishmen, including Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who was then traveling around the continent. De Vere would go on to become one of the leading poets of the Elizabethan era. He introduced his friend Marlowe to the world of literature and art.