The Elizabethan society into which Christopher Marlowe was born, in 1564, was no place for the fainthearted. In London, animal cruelty was the acme of high-concept entertainment, with large crowds paying to see a horse with a monkey on its back attacked by fierce dogs; in the same streets, foreigners were advised to keep schtum so as not to provoke rampant xenophobia; sporadic outbursts of bubonic plague ushered in what is now quaintly called social distancing; and women deemed to be scolds were swiftly muzzled with a dastardly device called a “brank.” It is from this savage world that Stephen Greenblatt, in his new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, contends that a new, subversive spirit of creativity arose in England, one that counted Marlowe as its most determined and devil-may-care pioneer.
Marlowe’s rise to prominence as a playwright and poet to rival William Shakespeare—the men were born in the same year—was nothing short of miraculous. As the son of a humble Canterbury cobbler, his prospects were hardly the stuff of dreams, but in 1579 he won a scholarship to the King’s School Canterbury, and then repeated the feat to enter Cambridge University two years later.
The details of Marlowe’s early life are sketchy, and Greenblatt admits that he is at a loss to explain how a shoemaker’s son managed to acquire the skills needed to pass such rigorous exams. As a founder of the New Historicism movement, which emerged in the 1980s, Greenblatt is adept at mining Marlowe’s literary oeuvre to illuminate the period in which it was produced. He is not, however, a literary sleuth in the mold of a David Riggs, whose The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004) is more detailed in its laserlike focus on the minutiae of existing archives.
Yet, while Riggs’s book may remain the gold standard for Marlovians, in Dark Renaissance, Greenblatt provides a rollicking good read, full of cunning conjecture about Marlowe’s life—much as he did with his immensely popular biography of the Bard, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004).
In his book’s acknowledgements, Greenblatt recounts how the screenwriter Marc Norman approached him in the 1990s to solicit his ideas for a screenplay based on Shakespeare’s life. Greenblatt urged Norman to forget about Shakespeare and write a film about Marlowe instead. Norman went on to co-write the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love with Tom Stoppard, but Greenblatt never stopped believing that Marlowe—“in the course of his restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and his stupendous achievements”—was the one to have awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.
This conviction underpins Greenblatt’s broader cultural argument in Dark Renaissance: that before Marlowe’s emergence, in the 1580s, Elizabethan England was a culturally repressed backwater. “It was as if a thick, hardened, protective coating, akin to the heavy white lead-based makeup applied to smallpox-scarred faces, had been spread over all of English cultural life.”
In his violent and provocative plays—Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II—Marlowe dramatized the subterranean anxieties of Elizabethan England: religious and racial persecution, intellectual alienation, and queer love. Marlowe’s innovations as a playwright included introducing blank verse to the English stage for the first time—something that soon became standard—and employing the soliloquy as a way to penetrate a character’s innermost feelings. Both techniques were co-opted by Shakespeare, who admired Marlowe but did not want to share his fate: to be murdered at the age of 29 in a London lodging house, reportedly over a bill for food and drink.
Greenblatt draws on recent studies—including computational stylistic analyses—that have contributed to a growing consensus among scholars: the trilogy of history plays comprising Henry VI, long attributed solely to Shakespeare, were in fact co-written with Marlowe. In Dark Renaissance, Greenblatt imagines the two men collaborating on the plays and swapping notes about religion—Marlowe, after all, was accused of atheism—and the allure of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who was believed to be the “fair youth” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (A similar conceit is at the heart of Liz Duffy Adams’s new play, Born with Teeth, currently running at Wyndham’s Theatre, in London, until November 1.)
But how different the two men seem to have been. The most controversial thing ever known about Shakespeare is that he left his “second-best bed” to Anne Hathaway, his wife of 34 years. Marlowe, by contrast, was arrested at least three times in his brief, combustible life, once for counterfeiting money, another time for sedition, and a third in connection with a fatal duel. He was also believed to have been in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I’s chief spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham—a shadowy role that almost cost him his M.A. in theology at Cambridge.
“Shakespeare was the recipient of Marlowe’s gifts of reckless courage and genius,” Greenblatt writes, “but he did not want to be Marlowe.” History proved him right.
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
