Stephen Greenblatt conjures the brilliant life of Christopher Marlowe

In Dark Renaissance, his new biography of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Stephen Greenblatt shares a trait with Marlowe and the Elizabethan playwright’s most famous character, Doctor Faustus: a desire to conjure.

Review: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe – Stephen Greenblatt (Bodley Head)

Greenblatt is a giant on the landscape of Renaissance studies. He defined an epoch of literary scholarship by coining the term New Historicism in 1982, encapsulating modes of thought that were already in motion. The thrust was to bring historical context back into the work of literary scholarship, after the New Criticism had orientated it towards the formal qualities of the text.

“I began with the desire to speak with the dead,” Greenblatt wrote in his 1988 book Shakespearean Negotiations. “If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them.”

Shakespeare’s greatest provocation

Dark Renaissance combines fragmentary documentary evidence with informed speculation on the light Marlowe’s plays and poems shed on his life. It is a form of biography suited to Greenblatt as a scholar of literature. It takes a by-heart familiarity to unearth the intricate threads that connect creative writing with historical sources.

My favourite example of this is James Shapiro’s groundbreaking 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005). Shapiro’s “micro-history” breaks some rules of factually detached reporting, but makes vivid Shakespeare’s life and personality, allowing us to “speak with the dead”.

Greenblatt’s full title – Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe – sounds like a neo-Victorian detective novel, but it is misleading. It’s a minor flaw, but the attempts to join the dots to explain Marlowe’s early death are a little too insistent. Repetitions of “possibly”, “may have” and “could have” do a disservice to the rich swirl of evidence that fortifies Greenblatt’s many intelligent suppositions.

Shakespeare seems present in the title as a branding expedient, but the book’s account of what he owes to Marlowe the trailblazing dramatist suggests “greatest provocation” might have been more apt.

I have no doubt that if Marlowe had lived longer, we would be talking about Shakespeare as one of his rivals. Marlowe’s artistic brilliance was arguably more concentrated, his imagination more original and his ideas more daring than Shakespeare’s.

Courting danger

Marlowe’s ascent from his humble beginnings as the son of a Canterbury cobbler was Icarus-like.

He attained bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Cambridge, where, as an undergraduate, he produced the first English translation of Ovid’s Amores. His “stylistic solution” to the problem of translating Ovid’s Latin verses would become, as Greenblatt observes, the standard metre for classical translations into the 18th century.

Marlowe would go on to write at least seven groundbreaking plays. He was also evidently deployed on at least one secret mission to France by Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. The precise details of this mission remain a mystery.

Then, in 1593, at the age of 29, Marlowe was murdered in a tavern at Deptford, under circumstances that have puzzled scholars and historians ever since.

Shakespeare was by comparison a late bloomer. By 1593, Shakespeare had written, with Marlowe, a sequence of three plays about Henry VI, along with Richard III and a few formulaic comedies. If Shakespeare, who was born the same year as Marlowe, had died in 1593, we would not have Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or even Much Ado About Nothing. In short, we would not have Shakespeare.

Uncannily, the concentrated quality of Marlowe’s intellectual daring and creative ambition made his short lifespan seem inevitable. As Greenblatt puts it, Marlowe “courted danger”.

His earliest play, Dido Queen of Carthage, opens with the homoerotic scene of Jupiter dandling his boy favourite, Ganymede, on his lap. In Edward II, Marlowe turns an allusive account by the chronicler Holinshed into a story of disruptive homoerotic passion between a king and his “base-born” favourite, Gaveston.

The Jew of Malta reveals Marlowe’s familiarity with a book prohibited in Catholic Europe and Protestant England: Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Early in his career, Marlowe’s two Tamburlaine the Great plays appalled and delighted audiences, dramatising the meteoric ascent of the 14th-century Turco-Mongol ruler Timur the Lame, who rose from his rustic shepherd origins by pitiless violence and powerful rhetoric. Greenblatt claims that “no one in English poetry had ever spoken with the grandeur and magnificent self-confidence of Marlowe’s Scythian hero”.

The source of the power was not just the story, but Marlowe’s use of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or “blank verse”. This “brilliant technical innovation”, observes Greenblatt, “almost instantly […] became the dominant verse form on the stage”. It has a “peculiar charge of energy”, a “propulsive” force, an “incantatory power” that leads Greenblatt to claim that “virtually everything in the Elizabethan theatre is pre- and post-Tamburlaine”.

Cosmic stakes

Greenblatt shows how the turbulent contradictions of the historical context were working upon Marlowe’s imagination.

What we might think of as the monolith of the “Western tradition” was a boiling cauldron of sensuous rapture and existential terror. A strange mixture of pagan and Christian influences shaped Marlowe’s education. “Ovid, Lucretius and Lucian,” observes Greenblatt, “rubbed shoulders with Thomas More [and] Erasmus.”

Education was, on one hand, associated with religious piety: its explicit aim was to produce Protestant clergyman who would keep county parishes in line. On the other hand, the gruelling discipline of learning Latin and Greek grammar, enforced with physical punishment, opened doors to the wild world of myths from antiquity, in which pagan gods gratified their lusts in congress with humans and satiated their thirst for power with atrocities. There were no trigger warnings.

If this were not morally confusing enough, young minds also had to contend with the religious state of play – or rather, the play of state. Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church was the first of four radical shifts. He was succeeded by his Protestant son Edward, then his Catholic daughter Mary, then his Protestant daughter Elizabeth, whose long reign was beset by violent schemes to return England to Catholicism.

Hence the espionage activity in which Marlowe was evidently caught up. As Greenblatt puts it in his biography of Shakespeare:

In none of these regimes was there a vision of religious tolerance. Each shift was accompanied by waves of conspiracy and persecution, rack and thumbscrew, ax and fire.

In this context, Marlowe’s febrile disdain for religion makes sense. Living as we do in a culture in which “faiths” hover mildly like ice-cream flavours in the corner of most people’s consciousness, it is difficult to grasp the cosmic stakes of his spiritual imagination.