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The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
by Stephen Greenblatt
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.
"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
"I cannot think of a more effortlessly gripping and unputdownable non-fiction I've read in the last decade or so. Absolutely masterful, written with an extraordinary lightness of touch." ―Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice
This information about Dark Renaissance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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