DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, by Stephen Greenblatt
In the cold last months of 1572, a new star appeared out of nowhere in the icy heavens. It was a supernova, bright in the constellation of Cassiopeia, and among those who watched it was the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who calculated that it lay beyond the orbit of the moon. The old Aristotelian idea that the celestial sphere was unchanging must have been wrong. The scientific revolution had begun.
So, at least, goes the legend. For we love a bright star out of nowhere, a veering in the path that leads us to a new world. Stephen Greenblatt won a Pulitzer for “The Swerve,” 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. “For the cultural life of England to move forward,” Greenblatt writes in “Dark Renaissance,” “someone had to come along and break through the suffocating carapace of inherited dogma.” That someone was Christopher Marlowe.
Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard, is best known as the leading advocate of “new historicism,” a form of literary criticism that locates texts and authors firmly in their cultural context. Shakespeare wasn’t 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 — “It was a bit like the arrival of talkies in cinema,” Greenblatt writes. No Marlowe, no “Hamlet.”
Like Shakespeare, Marlowe was of humble, provincial origins. Born in 1564 (also like Shakespeare), he was a shoemaker’s 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.
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’s King’s 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 — from atheism to homoerotic desire — 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 — on whether there was a hell, say, or whether God really existed.
Marlowe was impulsive, provocative and drawn to danger. At some point the state noticed. Queen Elizabeth’s shadowy servants made contact, and his life changed forever. He was recruited as a spy, or at least that’s 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’s fragile new Protestantism.
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’s degree, the Privy Council wrote to the university to smooth things over. Marlowe earned his degree in July 1587.
By that fall he was also making a name as a writer. The string of successes that brought him fame began with “Tamburlaine the Great.” “Nothing so outrageous had ever been staged before,” Greenblatt writes. The language was intense, the action stunning and the moral implications shocking. Tamburlaine’s 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 “The Jew of Malta,” “Doctor Faustus” and “Edward II.”
In Greenblatt’s reading, Marlowe’s 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 “all-consuming, hopeless, self-destructive” gay love in “Edward II,” threw caution to the wind.
Greenblatt wants us to see Marlowe in many of his characters. To be sure, Marlowe’s fascination with Faust’s diabolic pact had something of his own predicament in it — the demon Mephistopheles standing in for the queen’s spies. Marlowe’s bargain with them, like Faust’s 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.
Marlowe’s taste for provocation eventually went too far. He was alleged to have offered a series of blasphemous opinions, including that “they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.” He was arrested, and though he wasn’t immediately imprisoned, he was told by the all-seeing Privy Council not to stray too far from London.
Then, with the same “trademark suddenness” 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.
“Dark Renaissance” 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.
Was Marlowe really the singular genius who touched off the English Renaissance, as Brahe’s nova allegedly did the scientific revolution? Readers will make up their own minds. For one thing, Greenblatt’s depiction of England as a cultural backwater is overblown; even a blazing genius like Marlowe needs a clever, appreciative audience. Regardless, “Dark Renaissance” is a thrilling, twisty tale that brilliantly captures the horror and the possibilities of that lost, crepuscular world.
DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival | By Stephen Greenblatt | Norton | 334 pp. | $31.99
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