[1] One account dates the discovery of the portrait to late 1952,[2] during major renovations to the college's Old Court which destroyed many ancient interiors.

The room's occupant recovered them for reuse, but noticed the dirty and badly-damaged portrait and took the pieces to the college librarian.

A passer-by noticed two pieces of wood amongst a pile of builder's rubble that had laid in the rain for several days, which proved to be the two parts of the portrait.

[2] The portrait measures 24 by 18 inches (61 by 46 cm) and is painted on wood panels, made from Baltic oak imported from Poland or Lithuania.

[1] Author Charles Nicholl suggests that it is a version of Quod me alit me extinguit (That which feeds me extinguishes me), an Elizabethan motto which appears in the poet Samuel Daniel's 1585 work The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius,[4][6] and later in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, c. 1607, and his Sonnet 73, 1609.

[2] Marlowe finished his BA at Corpus Christi in 1584 and began his MA studies there, and it was suggested, based on his baptism date of February 1564, that he would have been aged 21 in 1585.

[4] Bury consulted with Bruce Dickins, chair of Anglo-Saxon, G K Adams of the National Portrait Gallery, John Bakeless, an American biographer of Marlowe, Frederick S. Boas, professor of English Literature and former president of the Elizabethan Literature Society and Rosemary Freeman, reader at Birkbeck College.

[1] Some sources credit Calvin Hoffman, a prominent proponent of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship, with the idea that the portrait depicted Marlowe, although he only proposed this in 1955.

[16][17] According to Nicholl, a general need to put a face on a famous name has worked in favour of the painting being accepted as a depiction of Marlowe.