Stephen Greenblatt’s superb skills as a literary historian and critic are thrillingly on display in “Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival.”
In this riveting reassessment of the short, turbulent life of the Elizabethan dramatist and poet Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Greenblatt argues that Marlowe, with his dazzling eloquence, “offered poetic liberation” to an English culture that had been stifled by onerous government censorship.
But Marlowe was actually more of a trailblazer than a competitor to the Bard of Avon, the subject of Greenblatt’s Pulitzer prize-winning “Will in the World” and several other books. The two men were born just two months apart, although Shakespeare outlived Marlowe by 23 years.
Why We Wrote This
Before Shakespeare, there was Christopher Marlowe, whose poetry lifted up Elizabethan drama and augured a rivalry with the Bard of Avon. A Latin scholar who loved language, Marlowe broke through rigid conventions and government censorship to write plays that set the culture on its head.
Greenblatt’s gripping portrait of Marlowe is set against the backdrop of Queen Elizabeth I’s brutally repressive regime. It was a society in which dissent of any kind was met with imprisonment, torture, hanging, or beheading. Punishable offenses included blasphemy, heresy, homosexuality, and any suspicions of Roman Catholic leanings (or a desire to replace Queen Elizabeth with her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots).
“Dark Renaissance” makes an eloquent case for the provocative beauty and sly unorthodoxy of Marlowe’s major plays, “Tamburlaine the Great” and “Doctor Faustus.” Greenblatt writes: “He had made it possible to write in a new way about violence, ambition, greed, and desire.”
Marlowe, the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler, and Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford glover and alderman, were both unlikely artistic geniuses, provincials in a nation in which social class was rigidly fixed. Shakespeare’s formal education ceased at around age 14, but Marlowe, who attended The King’s School in Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University on scholarships, earned B.A. and M.A. degrees, tickets to gentleman status.
As in “Will in the World,” Greenblatt describes the harshness of an educational system in which Latin was literally beaten into students. Yet Marlowe thrived at school. Reading Homer, Sophocles, Erasmus, and Aesop, he encountered ideas that opened up the world to him – and awakened his curiosity and skepticism.
Instead of following the safe path to a position in the Anglican ministry for which he felt no calling, Marlowe chose a riskier pursuit that offered less stability and no guarantee of success: writing. While still in Cambridge, he translated Ovid’s “racy, urbane” “Amores” from Latin, capturing the quickness of the original by adroitly reducing the syllables in each line of the rhyming couplets from 14 to 10. Greenblatt notes that pentameter quickly “became the standard meter for classical translations in English.”
In 1587, 23-year-old Marlowe moved to London, where he wrote “Tamburlaine,” the first of the seven plays he would produce in what turned out to be his last six years. He delighted in shocking his audiences with dramas which, like the times in which he lived, were rife with violence.
Greenblatt does yeoman’s work untangling the backstabbing, dog-eat-dog network of government spies in which it was all too easy to become ensnared. Marlowe lived in “a world in which virtually everyone was in disguise and it was fantastically difficult to know whom to trust,” he writes, though the particulars of Marlowe’s involvement in these activities remain elusive due to lack of documentation.
Greenblatt doesn’t stint on praise for his subject. He credits Marlowe with awakening “the genius of the English Renaissance,” and calls “Doctor Faustus” “the single greatest tragedy ever written about an alienated intellectual.” He flags Marlowe’s innovative, unrhymed iambic pentameter as a literary game-changer that influenced Shakespeare and succeeding generations of playwrights.
Oh, to be a student in one of Greenblatt’s Harvard classes! As a scholar, he earns our trust by backing up his bold accolades with the careful research and astute textual analyses for which he is justly celebrated. But then he goes a step further, and admits when he is unable to nail down details with certainty. These include the exact circumstances of Marlowe’s death (he was stabbed in a pub brawl, according to popular lore), and whether the portrait of a young man at Corpus Christi College on the cover of this book is actually Marlowe. In the book’s endnotes, Greenblatt explains – with evident regret – that because of the paucity of records of Marlowe’s life, he has had to resort to speculation and guesswork, “conspicuously marked by words like perhaps and phrases like may have and could have.”
With its mix of fastidious scholarship, storytelling chops, and educated guesswork, “Dark Renaissance” illuminates a cause for celebration in an age of darkness: the daring life and work of Christopher Marlowe. It also brings home the importance of studying history and the humanities, and serves as a potent reminder of the damage wrought by unchecked power and a society in which “new frontiers of inquiry were kept shut.”
