Dark Renaissance
The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
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4.5 • 20 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Kirkus Reviews, The Economist, The New Yorker, Library Journal, BookPage, Christian Science Monitor, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2025 • One of the Washington Post's "Notable Works of Nonfiction" of 2025 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2025 • One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025 • Featured in the Wall Street Journal Guide to Holiday Gift Books
Poor boy. Spy. Transgressor. Genius.
In 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 of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known—and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, like Christopher Marlowe, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism.
What Marlowe seizes in his rare opportunity for a classical education, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. His astonishing literary success will, in turn, nourish the talent of a collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.
Dark Renaissance illuminates both Marlowe’s times and the origins and significance of his work—from his erotic translations of Ovid to his portrayal of unfettered ambition in a triumphant Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus, his unforgettable masterpiece about making a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge. Introducing us to Marlowe’s transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. Meanwhile, he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world including Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A story of a gay atheist in the ultraorthodox Elizabethan era is fascinating on its own—but add in the fact that he was a playwright who inspired Shakespeare, and you have one mind-blowing biography. Dark Renaissance recounts the life of Christopher Marlowe, a poet and playwright sometimes credited with kicking off the English literary renaissance that gave the world Shakespeare, propelling England from grimy backwater to cultural powerhouse. Historian Stephen Greenblatt paints a multifaceted picture of Marlowe in which he’s not just a liberal-minded writer but a spy, a blasphemer, a money forger, and a man with a predilection for violence who also never quite fully acted on his queer desires. Greenblatt superbly fills out the world around Marlowe, immersing us in 1500s England from the splendor of London’s palaces and abbeys to the dirty streets where commoners made animals fight for entertainment. Whether you’re a literary buff or someone who appreciates a twist-filled biography that’s stranger than fiction, pick up Dark Renaissance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spellbinding biography, literary historian Greenblatt (The Swerve) recreates the short life of English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, arguing that Marlowe's poems and plays, with their skepticism about religious and political authority, ushered in the English Renaissance. The son of a poor cobbler, Marlowe distinguished himself at King's School in Canterbury, clearing a path for him to attend Cambridge, where he excelled in Latin, translating Ovid's love poems. He then turned to playwriting, producing in the 1580s Tamburlaine, a play based on the Central Asian emperor Timur that Greenblatt explains is about the "impious breaking of every rule, the ruthless satisfaction of desire, and the triumph of the will." Greenblatt examines how Marlowe produced dramatic innovations that Shakespeare would later use in his plays; the soliloquy, for example, appeared for the first time on stage in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Marlowe created the English history play with his Edward II. Marlowe was murdered at age 29 in an apparent struggle over a bill in a tavern. Throughout, Greenblatt vividly recreates the dangerous and dark world of Elizabethan London, with its "narrow streets filled with excrement and offal, severed heads of convicted traitors struck up on spikes for passersby to contemplate." Readers will be captivated.
