Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeares Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Dark Renaissance is the thrilling story of the writer who transformed culture in Elizabethan England, bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's contemporary, inspiration, and rival. In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler's son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry - a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen's spy service that shaped Marlowe's brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus - dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world - involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

Reviews

This brilliant and riveting book brings Christopher Marlowe out of the shadows, capturing the remarkable and sudden life (and the no less sudden and violent death) of this extraordinary Elizabethan poet and playwright. No critic has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to illuminate Marlowes world and work. Dark Renaissance is a worthy successor and companion to Will in the World. * James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare *
A thrilling portrait of the English theatres great transgressor. Stephen Greenblatt gives brilliant life to Marlowe's vaunting intellect, his reckless sexuality, his double-dealing with the security services and above all his theatrical imagination, which exploded out of nowhere to transform the Elizabethan stage. * Nicholas Hytner *

Author Bio

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve- How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World- How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.