Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt; W. W. Norton, 352 pp., $31.99
If William Shakespeare had died at 29, there would be no Hamlet. No Twelfth Night. No Tempest. No King Lear. The author of Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, and Henry VI would be forgotten and rarely performed. However, the plays that Christopher Marlowe wrote before his murder at 29 were enough to establish him as the second greatest playwright of the Elizabethan stage. More than three centuries later, poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne still recognized the author of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus as “the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse.” Had Marlowe, who was born just a few weeks before Shakespeare in 1564, died in 1616, as Shakespeare had, there might today be a Royal Marlowe Company. Dozens more Marlovian masterpieces might be in production every week somewhere in the world.
Stephen Greenblatt, one of the leading scholars of Shakespeare, now turns his attention to Marlowe, whose biographical facts are even more elusive than the Bard’s. Nothing in his handwriting survives, and except for Tamburlaine, which was published anonymously, everything Marlowe wrote was put into print posthumously. There are no diaries and no letters—either from or to him. For considerable stretches of his life, he disappears from the 21st-century gaze. Like astronomers who infer the existence of exoplanets from the slight wobble detected in their stars, Marlowe biographers must trace their subject through his effect on others.
Greenblatt concedes that he must resign himself to probabilities, even possibilities, rather than definitive pronouncements. Reporting on Marlowe’s visit to the Netherlands in 1592, for example, he acknowledges: “Possibly Marlowe’s presence in the Netherlands had nothing to do with government service.” However, Greenblatt thinks it likely that Marlowe was working as a spy for Queen Elizabeth.
Greenblatt also offers no new information beyond the discoveries already made in the dozen or so earlier biographies of Marlowe that he draws upon and acknowledges. But what is striking about Dark Renaissance is both its detailed depiction of the world that Marlowe inhabited and the conclusions it draws about his place in that world. Although we can only speculate about Marlowe’s upbringing as the son of a cobbler in Canterbury, we do have details of the curriculum at The King’s School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, both of which he attended on scholarship. His immersion in Greek and Latin poetry, whose content would have been outlawed in English, encouraged Marlowe’s wayward impulses. His conception of himself as a scholar set him apart from the theater people with whom he would later work and reinforced his sense of being an outsider among the gentility in London. He was, writes Greenblatt, “reckless, daring, unscrupulous, transgressive.” Nevertheless, he lived in perilous times and had to be circumspect. It was and is hard to pin down just what he thought.
Battered by the bubonic plague and the meteorological adversities of what came to be known as the Little Ice Age, London in the late 16th century was, according to Greenblatt, a backwater of cultural mediocrity. The threat of a Catholic restoration through Spanish invasion or the assassination of the Protestant queen encouraged fear, conformity, and repression. Marlowe was not the only writer to die a violent death: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Walter Raleigh; Robert Southwell; and Chidiock Tichborne, were all executed, and Ben Johnson and Thomas Wyatt spent time in prison. Under torture in a prison cell, Thomas Kyd accused Marlowe of atheism and blasphemy. Nevertheless, Greenblatt portrays Marlowe as a liberator: “In the course of his restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and his stupendous achievements, Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.”
That awakening occurred most dramatically with the hugely popular success of Tamburlaine, an audacious play about an aggressive Scythian emperor who conquers much of Asia and Africa. “Nothing so outrageous had ever been staged before,” Greenblatt contends. What was revolutionary was not just the adaptation of iambic pentameter blank verse for theatrical purposes but also the tone of amoral defiance that excited an audience accustomed to cowering. “It was a bit like the arrival of talkies in the cinema,” claims Greenblatt.
Each of Marlowe’s major plays is a fantasy of exorbitance—Tamburlaine of unlimited power, The Jew of Malta of boundless cunning, and Dr. Faustus of absolute knowledge. Greenblatt is particularly partial toward Dr. Faustus, which, slighting Hamlet, he dubs “the single greatest tragedy about an alienated intellectual ever written.” He analyzes Faustus’s seduction by Mephistopheles as analogous to Marlowe’s own capitulation to the lure of espionage, his willingness to serve in Sir Francis Walsingham’s spy network rooting out Catholic enemies of the English Crown. However, above all, Faustus the obsessive scholar is an avatar of Marlowe himself, as he surely is of Greenblatt as well.
The greatest mystery of Marlowe’s enigmatic life was his death, described by Shakespeare as “a great reckoning in a little room.” What exactly happened on May 30, 1593, in that Deptford inn—where, following an argument over the bill, Ingram Frizer stabbed Marlowe through the eye—remains unknowable. Greenblatt examines theories advanced by several biographers but sides with David Riggs, whose 2002 book The World of Christopher Marlowe concluded that the author was assassinated for his atheism. Although he had worked on behalf of the Queen against her Catholic enemies, Marlowe’s irreverence and blasphemy had become intolerable to the Tudor theocracy. Through direct orders from either Elizabeth herself or minions who thought to fulfill her implicit wishes, he had to be eliminated. In a troubled society still hovering between the medieval and the modern, a rebel who could write, “I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance” was a danger to the state.
