If Shakespeare, not Marlowe, had been fatally stabbed as a young man would we even remember him? As the 450th birthdays of both playwrights approach, Andrew Dickson makes the case for the rival writer

If you happened to be in Canterbury on 26 February, you might have glimpsed a peculiar sight: a small flock of people holding a silent vigil around the town's memorial to Christopher Marlowe. It was 450 years to the day since he was baptised in the town's St George's church.

You would be forgiven for having missed the date entirely. This year is all about another 450th birthday – that of William Shakespeare in April. Celebrations for this will be much grander. The RSC will stage every one of his plays between now and 2019. Stratford-upon-Avon is paying homage with a big-budget version of the traditional birthday parade that, this year, kicks off a new annual celebration billed as Shakespeare Week. Academic events are planned in Paris and Weimar.

Marlowe's 450th isn't slipping by completely unmarked: the young theatre company Fourth Monkey is mounting Canterbury-based productions of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris, the last in the spine-tingling setting of the cathedral crypt, and the Marlowe Society is hosting talks and events. In Cambridge, the student-run Marlowe Dramatic Society has launched a year-long celebration. But the contrast is sharp – especially when you consider the uncanny resemblances between these two birthday boys.

Shakespeare and Marlowe were born within months of each other in 1564. Both came from humble provincial backgrounds (Marlowe's father made shoes, Shakespeare's gloves). Both benefited from that great Tudor invention, the grammar school. After school, their paths diverged: Marlowe took up a scholarship to Cambridge just as Shakespeare, who got a local woman pregnant at the age of 18, was preparing for fatherhood. But by their mid 20s, both were in London and writing for the theatre. Together and as rivals, they went on to transform the Elizabethan stage.

Shakespeare lived to the comfortable age of 52, became a well-fed royal servant and retired to a property empire in Stratford. Marlowe wasn't so lucky – killed at 29 in that unfortunate dispute about the "reckoning", or bill, in Deptford in May 1593.

But is that all there is to it? Is that why Shakespeare became Britain's national poet, the world's most performed and translated playwright? And why Marlowe languishes as a relatively minor writer, his poems barely read outside universities, his plays patchily staged?

"It is a puzzle," confesses academic Emma Smith, who has recently edited a volume of essays on Marlowe for Cambridge University Press. When we speak, she's preparing to deliver an anniversary lecture at the playwright's old college, Corpus Christi in Cambridge. "There are many reasons why we're now more familiar with Shakespeare. But it's almost like we've forgotten how to listen to Marlowe. It's as if we don't have room for both of them."

We're selective in what we see of Marlowe. Take his murder, for instance, which has attracted more than its fair share of rubber-necking. Judging by the sheer quantity of crime novels based on the event, we can't get enough of its forensic details, the shady characters involved, the speculation about who killed him, and how, and why – and that's not taking into account the wilder theories that he somehow faked his own death.

We also have difficulty ridding ourselves of two other obsessions: that Marlowe was gay, and that he was a spy, like some long-lost Tudor antecedent of the Cambridge Five. His work for Elizabeth I's government is certainly on record: he was excused failing to qualify for his MA in 1587 by the Privy Council, who said, in enigmatic officialese, that he had "done her Majestie good service". But evidence about his sexual preferences is cloaked in uncertainty. The suggestion derives mainly from a note written by the double-crossing informer Richard Baines, who claimed that Marlowe boasted "all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fools". Like Baines's insinuation that the playwright was an atheist (considerably more likely), it was one of many accusations designed to blacken his reputation. Conclusive proof it isn't.

And all this conjecture, Smith argues, has a habit of getting in the way of what makes Marlowe matter: his writing. "The work is so epic, so innovative," she says. "In Elizabethan theatre, Marlowe's lines were the ones that everyone knew."

Even before leaving Cambridge, he had reinterpreted a play from Virgil: Dido, Queen of Carthage, somehow squeezing it in alongside his studies. In 1587, his epic Tamburlaine the Great, about an obscure bandit from Samarkand who ended up dominating central Asia, was wowing London theatregoers with its mesmeric hero and world-encompassing plot. Tamburlaine was the first real opportunity Marlowe had to show off what Ben Jonson would later call his "mighty line": musclebound blank verse that would become his signature style. "From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits," the prologue proclaims, pouring youthful scorn on its author's elders and supposed betters:

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

Audiences went wild. A second instalment rapidly followed.

Marlowe was also putting his grammar-school education to scandalous use by completing another classical translation, this time of Ovid's erotic Amores, which would later be banned for their "unsemely" content. Next he began on Doctor Faustus, an intoxicating twist on the myth of a man who sells his soul for knowledge. By 1592 he had produced The Jew of Malta, another story of an overreaching misfit, Barabas, who lusts after what he calls "infinite riches in a little room". Perhaps Marlowe's most sardonic play, it takes gruesome delight in its hero's revenge against the Christians who turn his home into a nunnery.

More plays followed, so rapidly that it's tricky to date them. In 1592 or thereabouts came the politically charged Edward II, about a King whose weaknesses – notably a taste for favourites – were compared with Elizabeth I's own. In 1593 Marlowe would get even closer to real life with The Massacre at Paris, a violent but often dangerously funny docudrama on the St Bartholomew's Day massacre 21 years before.

Much in common with Marlowe … William Shakespeare. Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library

Andrew Dawson, based at Canterbury's newly rebuilt Marlowe theatre, is directing Massacre with a cast of students training with Fourth Monkey. When I visit, they are rehearsing one of its goriest scenes, in which the machiavellian Duke of Guise executes a gang of Protestants. Dawson is captivated by the play's power, even now. "He's addressing issues that seem utterly contemporary: sectarian violence and its aftermath. It makes you think of Syria or central Africa."

It's also the youthful kick of Marlowe's achievement that strikes you: seven plays in five years – all of them groundbreaking, several of them undoubted masterpieces, the whole lot written in his 20s. By that age Shakespeare had written just three or four plays we know of, all of them comparative juvenilia. The thought is unavoidable: if Shakespeare had been stabbed in Deptford that day, he would barely merit a notch on the roll call of English drama. Marlowe, by contrast, had already chiselled his name among the greats.

The parallels between the two writers have fed an inevitable speculation – that they were one and the same. Although less numerous than the sectarians who favour the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon, Marlovians have attempted to argue that their man somehow survived and went on to write in Shakespeare's name. Farcically, they have even managed to introduce a question mark next to the date of death on his memorial in Westminster Abbey (stage dagger, presumably, and stage coroner to boot).

But you don't have to buy into farfetched conspiracies to observe how the pair shadow each other. So many of Shakespeare's plays puzzle away at questions already posed by Marlowe. Think of Richard II, a Plantagenet ringer for Edward II; or of The Merchant of Venice, which rescripts the caustic farce of The Jew of Malta as something close to tragedy. Hamlet contains multiple Marlovian echoes, most obviously the resemblance between the Prince of Denmark and Faustus – both Wittenberg students with ideas beyond their sphere – but also in the travelling Players, whose Murder of Gonzago feels like a knowing nod to Marlowe's orotund style (a character called Gonzago crops up in The Massacre at Paris). Here, as so often, Shakespeare's tone is often difficult to decipher: somewhere between rib-nudging parody and heartfelt tribute.

In 1593, Shakespeare published the bittersweet Venus and Adonis, a deliciously sensual narrative poem about the love goddess who fails to ensnare a beautiful young man. It became his bestselling title. But Marlowe was hard on Shakespeare's heels with his own Ovidian verse about love tragically denied, Hero and Leander. Life and art became, yet again, uncannily entwined. While Hero lay unfinished at Marlowe's death, Shakespeare's Venus, with its culminating depiction of a beautiful youth who comes to a gory end, would appear on bookstands just as news of his rival's murder hit London.

What seems like Shakespeare's most direct reference is also, characteristically, his most opaque: a spectral mention in As You Like It. The fool Touchstone, ruminating on the instabilities of fame, observes that "when a man's verses cannot be understood … it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room", which overlies a line from The Jew with the fight over the "reckoning" that killed its author. "One almost wonders," the critic Anne Barton wrote, "whether [the words] were intended to evoke the image of Marlowe for the playgoers at the Globe, or whether they represented some purely private rite of memory."

Jonathan Bate's 1997 book The Genius of Shakespeare makes an even more intriguing case: that, while there's little doubt that the two were separate men, Marlowe's death gave Shakespeare the imaginative room to mature into a great playwright. Even years after his rival's squalid end, it seems that Shakespeare couldn't quite get the great man's image – and the debt he owed him – out of his head.

I wonder if Smith ever fantasises about what would have happened if Marlowe had lived longer. Might we now have a Royal Marlowe Company and commemorative Marlowe festivals? She pauses diplomatically. "Counterfactuals are always interesting. But Marlowe might have changed too. It's a bit like Sylvia Plath, isn't it – we know the life is short, and we read everything back into that."

Audiences are at last being given the opportunity to make up their own minds. Last year the touring company Headlong did an experimental version of Faustus. The National Theatre mounted a witty Dido, Queen of Carthage in 2009, and last year filled the Olivier with Joe Hill-Gibbins's rollicking production of Edward II. Shakespeare's Globe did Faustus in 2011; the Rose on Bankside's current anniversary production of Doctor Faustus has sold out. Fourth Monkey's artistic director, Steve Green, has ambitions on Tamburlaine once their anniversary season is over.

"Marlowe needs a wider audience," he argues. "He's so raw, so visceral. In the contemporary world we're looking for bold voices." Green shakes his head. "And there aren't many as bold as him."

• The Marlowe 450 season opens with Doctor Faustus on 12 March at the Marlowe theatre, Canterbury.