Dark Renaissance

Stephen Greenblatt argues that the English Renaissance was catalyzed not by Shakespeare but by his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler's son from Canterbury who was killed at 29. Greenblatt traces Marlowe's brief, turbulent life against the backdrop of a culturally backward England that, around 1580, had produced almost nothing to rival Renaissance Italy. The country was riven by religious conflict, battered by plague, and ruled by a queen whose court enforced conformity through torture and execution. Within this repressive world, Marlowe broke through inherited dogma with a body of work that transformed English poetry and drama.

Greenblatt opens with spring 1593. Plague had returned to London, the theaters were shuttered, and popular anger was directed at foreign Protestant refugees. On May 5, a placard signed "Tamburlaine," the name of Marlowe's most famous theatrical hero, appeared on the wall of the Dutch Church, which served London's refugee community, threatening violence against foreigners. The Privy Council, the queen's closest advisers, ordered a search and authorized torture. Officers raided the rooms of playwright Thomas Kyd, finding no link to the placard but discovering a document arguing against the divinity of Christ. Under torture, Kyd claimed the heretical pages belonged to his former roommate, Marlowe. Less than a month later, Marlowe was killed in what an inquest ruled an argument over a supper bill.

Greenblatt then traces Marlowe's origins. Born in Canterbury in February 1564, he was the son of John Marlowe, a shoemaker, and Katherine Arthur, from a family of menial laborers. The family lived near the cattle market and slaughterhouses in a neighborhood plagued by disease. Yet in December 1578, the 14-year-old won a full scholarship to the King's School, Canterbury. How he passed its rigorous entrance exam remains a mystery; Greenblatt speculates that a learned priest recognized his talent.

At the King's School, Marlowe immersed himself in Latin and Greek classics wildly at odds with Christian values. Greenblatt identifies an "open secret" at the heart of Tudor education: The curriculum celebrated the sexual adventures of pagan gods and posited a universe of atoms and emptiness. Possessing classical languages was the key to intellectual liberation, since dangerous ideas expressed in Latin or Greek would have been fatally punished in English.

In December 1580, Marlowe enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship designed to recruit gifted poor students for the priesthood. He encountered religious ferment: Puritans demanding reform, secret Catholics, and the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno championing the Copernican theory. The academic exercise of arguing on both sides of a question trained students to entertain virtually any position. Marlowe also discovered Abraham Ortelius's Theater of the World, the first modern atlas, and lingered over a map depicting the tomb of Tamburlaine, a Turco-Mongol shepherd who had conquered much of the known world.

During his graduate years, Marlowe was frequently absent for unexplained periods. When the university refused his master's degree in 1587, an extraordinary letter from the Privy Council certified that he had done "her Majesty good service" (91) and commanded Cambridge to grant the degree. The letter implies he had been recruited into the spy network run by Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen's principal secretary, to infiltrate Catholic conspiracies aimed at assassinating Elizabeth I. Greenblatt profiles key agents, including Richard Baines, who posed as a Catholic priest at the English seminary in Rheims, France, and Robert Poley, who helped entrap the Babington Plot conspirators, leading to the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1587, Marlowe moved to London and wrote Tamburlaine the Great, about a Turco-Mongol shepherd's rise to world conqueror. Its unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, revolutionized English drama, displacing the clumsy 14-syllable lines that had dominated the stage. The play refused to punish its ruthless hero, and the actor Edward Alleyn became famous playing the title role at the Rose Theater, owned by the entrepreneur Philip Henslowe.

A succession of major works followed. The Jew of Malta presented life as a ruthless struggle for survival. Edward II staged the most explicit representation of homosexual desire in Renaissance literature, tracing the destructive bond between King Edward and his male favorite, Piers de Gaveston; Greenblatt argues Marlowe was portraying homosexual love as the defining force of a life, decades before any terminology for sexual orientation existed. Shakespeare, whom Greenblatt identifies as Marlowe's collaborator on the Henry VI trilogy, closely tracked these innovations while avoiding their extreme risks. Greenblatt frames them as secret sharers, noting that Shakespeare was always more self-protective.

Marlowe also entered the orbit of powerful patrons. Sir Walter Ralegh gathered scientists and intellectuals at Durham House on the Thames, among them Thomas Harriot, an Oxford-educated mathematician whose account of how Algonkian peoples in Virginia mistook English technology for divine miracles confirmed the hypothesis that religion originated in popular credulity. Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, known as the "Wizard Earl," shared Marlowe's fascination with hidden knowledge. In this milieu, Marlowe also composed "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," a pastoral lyric whose luminous simplicity inspired replies from Ralegh, the poet John Donne, and many later poets.

Greenblatt argues that Marlowe drew on these circles in creating Doctor Faustus, which he calls "the single greatest tragedy ever written about an alienated intellectual" (82). The play depicts a scholar of humble origins who has exhausted every discipline and sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge. Its vision of hell is not a medieval underworld but an awareness of how limited life is: the progressive loss of fascination with knowledge and the collapse of ambition into mere entertainment. The contract scene, in which Faustus signs away his soul while the devil is devastatingly candid about the consequences, is charged with Marlowe's own decision to enter the spy service.

In his final months, Marlowe retreated to the Kent estate of his friend Thomas Walsingham, a second cousin of the late spymaster, and wrote the joyous, unfinished poem Hero and Leander. In an episode of his own invention, the sea god Neptune mistakes the naked Leander for Ganymede, the mythological cupbearer of the gods, and pursues him with lustful embraces. Greenblatt identifies "a new note of amused tolerance" (266) in the poem, a departure from Marlowe's earlier bitterness.

The idyll ended on May 18, 1593, when a royal messenger arrived with a warrant for Marlowe's arrest. He was not imprisoned but was commanded to give his daily attendance on the Privy Council. Unknown to Marlowe, testimony from Kyd, an anonymous report, and a note from Baines were building against him, listing accusations that Christ was a bastard, that "Moses was a juggler" (274), that religion existed "only to keep men in awe" (272-73), and that "all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools" (272-73).

On May 30, Marlowe spent the day at a house in Deptford with three men tied to the intelligence world: Ingram Frizer, Walsingham's business agent; Nicholas Skeres, Frizer's accomplice; and Robert Poley, the spy who had entrapped Babington. According to the inquest, an argument about the bill led Marlowe to grab Frizer's dagger; Frizer recovered it and drove the blade above Marlowe's right eye, killing him instantly at 29. The inquest ruled the killing self-defense, and no charges were brought. Greenblatt surveys competing theories but does not settle on one.

Greenblatt concludes that through the fissures Marlowe made, light began to flow. Shakespeare, who never elsewhere quoted a contemporary, paid tribute in As You Like It to the "dead shepherd" whose words he found so powerful. Marlowe had no stake in the existing system, nothing to lose except his life. He was "reckless, daring, unscrupulous, transgressive" (284). The wonder is not what he might have accomplished had he lived longer, but "that he existed at all and that he made it to the age of 29" (284).