Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival

The short and eventful life of Christopher Marlowe—at least what we know of it—would have provided enough drama for one of his own tumultuous plays, or one by his one-time collaborator William Shakespeare. The son of a cobbler, raised by ambition and education to the near-gentlemanly status of poet and playwright, he was likely a spy in Queen Elizabeth's service, possibly an avowed atheist (a capital crime at the time), and certainly murdered with a dagger at the age of 29. The few actual documents of Marlowe's life make this lively biography inevitably a tissue of "likelys" and "might haves," but if Marlowe himself remains a cipher, Greenblatt's unmatched understanding of the era makes it a fascinating portrait of a time more than a man, showing how a backwater culture, stalked by plague and intense political repression, whose most popular entertainment was bear-baiting, could suddenly produce the greatest flowering of dramatic art in our language,