The Swerve<\/a>,\u201d his book on another such moment. There he argued that the Renaissance began with the discovery of an ancient classical manuscript in 1417. Now he turns his attention to the man who he says kick-started the English Renaissance. \u201cFor the cultural life of England to move forward,\u201d Greenblatt writes in \u201cDark Renaissance,\u201d \u201csomeone had to come along and break through the suffocating carapace of inherited dogma.\u201d That someone was Christopher Marlowe.<\/p>\nGreenblatt, a professor at Harvard, is best known as the leading advocate of \u201cnew historicism,\u201d a form of literary criticism that locates texts and authors firmly in their cultural context. Shakespeare wasn\u2019t just a genius; he was a genius in the world. His output would have been very different if his world had been different too. Yet here we have Marlowe, an outlier of such radical newness and influence, Greenblatt contends, that he personally explains a sudden change. He brought blank verse to the stage and introduced the soliloquy \u2014 \u201cIt was a bit like the arrival of talkies in cinema,\u201d Greenblatt writes. No Marlowe, no \u201cHamlet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Shakespeare, Marlowe was of humble, provincial origins. Born in 1564 (also like Shakespeare), he was a shoemaker\u2019s son from Canterbury, a town of tight alleys and mucky streets. An ancient cathedral city, it hosted a migrant population of French Protestant refugees. But it was also a place suffering decline. The pilgrims who had once gathered at the shrine of Thomas Becket were gone, the relics had long since been smashed and the medieval local economy had drained away.<\/p>\n
Ordinary folk like Marlowe were expected to pursue manual trades. But Marlowe was talented and lucky. At around 14, he won a scholarship to Canterbury\u2019s King\u2019s School, where he gained access to the remarkable library of his tutor, and to the poetic worlds of Virgil and Ovid. Despite the drab pedagogy of the age, the ancient literature was no mere drudgery for Marlowe, allowing for discussion of forbidden topics \u2014 from atheism to homoerotic desire \u2014 and permitting him to break out from the limitations of his class. By 17, he was at Cambridge University, where he learned to argue both sides of a debate \u2014 on whether there was a hell, say, or whether God really existed.<\/p>\n
Marlowe was impulsive, provocative and drawn to danger. At some point the state noticed. Queen Elizabeth\u2019s shadowy servants made contact, and his life changed forever. He was recruited as a spy, or at least that\u2019s what the sparse evidence suggests. Now Marlowe spent much of his time away from Cambridge, probably abroad, and likely trying to infiltrate the Catholic networks that threatened England\u2019s fragile new Protestantism.<\/p>\n
If, as Greenblatt surmises, Marlowe had learned French from his refugee neighbors in Canterbury, then he was an invaluable asset. Spying was like acting: The young scholar had to inhabit a role and be convincing in a persona that was not his. It was likely the kind of role he relished, though the state made it worth his while. When it looked as if he would be denied his master\u2019s degree, the Privy Council wrote to the university to smooth things over. Marlowe earned his degree in July 1587.<\/p>\n
By that fall he was also making a name as a writer. The string of successes that brought him fame began with \u201cTamburlaine the Great.\u201d \u201cNothing so outrageous had ever been staged before,\u201d Greenblatt writes. The language was intense, the action stunning and the moral implications shocking. Tamburlaine\u2019s lust for power should have brought death and damnation. Instead the play ends in triumph. The provocations continued with a sequel, and a run of hits including \u201cThe Jew of Malta,\u201d \u201cDoctor Faustus\u201d and \u201cEdward II.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Greenblatt\u2019s reading, Marlowe\u2019s work shows a fixation on worldly ambition, and on outsiders willing to transgress social norms in pursuit of celebrity and fulfillment of desire. Marlowe staged the unthinkable: He engaged with the anathematic works of Machiavelli, and, in his depiction of \u201call-consuming, hopeless, self-destructive\u201d gay love in \u201cEdward II,\u201d threw caution to the wind.<\/p>\n
Greenblatt wants us to see Marlowe in many of his characters. To be sure, Marlowe\u2019s fascination with Faust\u2019s diabolic pact had something of his own predicament in it \u2014 the demon Mephistopheles standing in for the queen\u2019s spies. Marlowe\u2019s bargain with them, like Faust\u2019s with the Devil in exchange for magical powers, would drag him to hell. For in Elizabethan England, the dark arts of the occult were only a fraction as dangerous as those of the state.<\/p>\n
Marlowe\u2019s taste for provocation eventually went too far. He was alleged to have offered a series of blasphemous opinions, including that \u201cthey that love not tobacco and boys are fools.\u201d He was arrested, and though he wasn\u2019t immediately imprisoned, he was told by the all-seeing Privy Council not to stray too far from London.<\/p>\n
Then, with the same \u201ctrademark suddenness\u201d with which he lived his life, he was dead: killed in a fight over a dinner bill in 1593. Of the three men he was with, at least two were employees of the state. Greenblatt speculates that the deed was ordered by the queen herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cDark Renaissance\u201d is a terrific read. It evokes the fear and danger of late Elizabethan England, where earls drop dead from probable poisoning and where no one can be trusted, least of all the government. The denouement is as propulsive as that of any spy novel.<\/p>\n
Was Marlowe really the singular genius who touched off the English Renaissance, as Brahe\u2019s nova allegedly did the scientific revolution? Readers will make up their own minds. For one thing, Greenblatt\u2019s depiction of England as a cultural backwater is overblown; even a blazing genius like Marlowe needs a clever, appreciative audience. Regardless, \u201cDark Renaissance\u201d is a thrilling, twisty tale that brilliantly captures the horror and the possibilities of that lost, crepuscular world.<\/p>\n
DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare\u2019s Greatest Rival | By Stephen Greenblatt | Norton | 334 pp. | $31.99<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare\u2019s Greatest Rival, by Stephen Greenblatt In the cold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,1026,16856,16851,13470,16854,93,16849,61,60,16855,16850,16852,13936,16362,16853,13471],"class_list":["post-18768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-books-and-literature","tag-canterbury-england","tag-christopher","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-dark-renaissance-the-dangerous-times-and-fatal-genius-of-shakespeares-greatest-rival-book","tag-entertainment","tag-greenblatt","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-london-england","tag-marlowe","tag-shakespeare","tag-stephen","tag-theater","tag-william","tag-writing-and-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}