Poet, playwright, spy: 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.
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........