Dark Renaissance
The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
by Stephen Greenblatt
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Pub Date Sep 09 2025 | Archive Date Aug 31 2025
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Description
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 sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son 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 skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought 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.
About the Author: Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is author of the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning The Swerve.
Advance Praise
"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 Marlowe’s 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 staggering achievement in character study, about the man who could have been king of the poets had Shakespeare not supplanted him: Christopher Marlowe. This engaging book brings to vivid detail the tremendous arc of Marlowe’s life, complete with a cast of fascinating characters, all within the tapestry of events shaping the beauty and brutality of the Elizabethan Era. From the formidable 21st-century mind of Stephen Greenblatt, this is an all-inclusive exploration of one of the 16th century's most consequential and extraordinary talents." -John Douglas Thompson, Tony Award nominated actor in Tamburlaine, Parts I and II
"The era-and genre-transforming radicalism of Christopher Marlowe’s work has never been examined more cogently or with such immediacy than in this genuinely thrilling, almost terrifying account of his shockingly reckless and courageous life. In gorgeous, gracefully authoritative prose, Stephen Greenblatt makes the miracle of artistic genius inhabit a recognizably human plane." -Tony Kushner, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of Angels in America
"Stephen Greenblatt’s writing is effortless, his humor superb, his arguments unanswerable. He brings to life Marlowe in the way that he did Shakespeare. Through their writing as well as through the scant historical details of their lives, Greenblatt make them live for us. In short, he has done it again: written a totally engrossing, compelling read." -Eric Idle, Grammy Award winning lyricist, and the co-creator of the Monty Python comedy group
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393882278 |
| PRICE | $31.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 336 |
