The English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the same year as his frenemy William Shakespeare. Yet unless you majored in English in college, it is quite possible you never heard of him. Except you have.<\/p>\n
The English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe<\/a> was born in 1564, the same year as his frenemy William Shakespeare.<\/a> Yet unless you majored in English in college, it is quite possible you never heard of him. Except you have.<\/p>\n Marlowe was the guy who wrote about Helen of Troy: \u201cWas this the face that launched a thousand ships\u201d (\u201cDoctor Faustus\u201d). Who penned the much-imitated line \u201cCome live with me and be my love\u201d (\u201cThe Passionate Shepherd to His Love\u201d). Who virtually invented Elizabethan theater by writing his first play for the London stage, \u201cTamburlaine,\u201d in unrhymed blank verse.<\/p>\n In his riveting new biography, \u201cDark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare\u2019s Greatest Rival,\u201d Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores Marlowe\u2019s short, subversive life and argues that it was he, even more than Shakespeare, who \u201cawakened the genius of the English Renaissance.\u201d<\/p>\n Born to a poor cobbler in Canterbury, \u201cKit\u201d Marlowe was a prodigy from the start. He won a scholarship to a private secondary school, where he was first exposed to Greek and Latin poetry and \u201ca whole world opened up.\u201d From there, it was on to Cambridge, again on a scholarship, where he earned his bachelor\u2019s and master’s degrees.<\/p>\n Under ordinary circumstances, a boy from his humble background could have looked forward to a career in the church. But nothing about Marlowe was ordinary. Indeed, Greenblatt argues that during the years he was pursuing his master’s degree, he was likely recruited as a spy for the royal court, tasked with hunting down Catholic subversives plotting to overthrow the Protestant monarch. Then, at age 29, he was killed in a bar fight for reasons that are not entirely clear, though Greenblatt suggests he had run afoul of authorities because of his \u201ctransgressive\u201d personality, including being an atheist and queer.<\/p>\n In previous books including \u201cWill in the World,\u201d his best-selling biography of Shakespeare, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cThe Swerve,\u201d Greenblatt emphasized the importance of cultural context in understanding literature, the so-called \u201cnew historicism.\u201d In \u201cDark Renaissance,\u201d he does so with dazzling effects, evoking England circa 1580 as an almost dystopian backwater:<\/p>\n \u201cNarrow lanes were filled with excrement and offal. On London Bridge\u2026 severed heads of convicted traitors were stuck up on spikes.\u201d The queen was paraded \u201clike a weird religious icon,\u201d \u201cher face painted a ghastly white\u2026 her teeth turning black.\u201d Then, Greenblatt writes, \u201cnot instantly but with startling rapidity,\u201d everything changed, with one \u201cremarkable figure\u201d embodying the \u201cferocious energy and daring\u201d of the era. That figure wasn\u2019t Shakespeare, it was Marlowe.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n