Christopher Marlowe is having a moment. In London’s West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Born with Teeth, a new play by Liz Duffy Adams that imagines the erotic tension crackling between Marlowe and Shakespeare as they collaborate on Henry VI. And right on cue comes the first major biography of Marlowe in two decades, written by the unquestioned eminence of Shakespearean new historicism. This is in some ways a counterpoint to Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt’s gloriously rich evocation of the early modern culture that nourished Shakespeare’s creative genius. It was Greenblatt more than anyone else who taught us to understand the writer by examining the society in which he or she lived, but in Dark Renaissance the Greenblattian method is turned on its head. He shows us an Eliz­abethan England altogether too small, bigoted and fearful to account for the emergence of a shooting star like Marlowe. 

This being Greenblatt, the assertion of inexplicability is a stance. In its sweep, pace and scholarship, the book vividly contextualises Marlowe’s brilliance as a dissident thinker and a wildly innovative writer. Like his exact contemporary Shakespeare, Marlowe’s origins were scrappy. His father was a shoemaker in Canterbury, England’s spiritual capital but a city on its uppers since the eradication of Catholic pilgrimage sites during the early years of the Reformation. But that same blast of cultural vandalism created the conditions of Marlowe’s rise: he was the beneficiary of scholarships to the King’s School, which had been refounded in 1541, and to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, part of a generation of middling-­class students destined to fill the livings of England’s Protestant parishes. It so happened that his training in scholasticism, theology and classical literature enabled him to ‘imagine life … other than it was’, to ‘speak with the dead’ (a favourite Greenblatt phrase) of the pagan and papist past, and to learn from them alternate views of statecraft and religion. Marlowe’s highly conservative education was an accidental gateway to scepticism and literary creativity. 

And it brought him into contact with the operatives of Tudor intelligence. Greenblatt suggests that Marlowe was recruited to pose as a Catholic malcontent while at university. His instructions were to join a ‘secret sodality’ of pious young men yearning for a revolution and to travel as an undercover courier – possibly to Rheims in France, where the English College was preparing a cadre of priests for the reconversion of England. Whatever the details of his mission, it took him away from his studies and in 1587 the Privy Council intervened to ensure that the previously obscure student received his MA. Greenblatt rightly underlines the extravagant unusualness of the country’s main organ of government involving itself in the affairs of a provincial scholarship boy. Marlowe graduated with a command of realpolitik and the slightly unnerving knowledge that he had been noticed. 

The next six years were simply extra­ordinary. Greenblatt says Marlowe’s cascade of invention in poetry and drama ‘awakened the genius of the English Renaissance’, which sounds like hyperbole but really isn’t. He gave us Ovidian verse translated into English pentameter in Amores (paving the way for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis), the mountainous atheism of Tamburlaine the Great, Machiavellianism decocted into drama in The Jew of Malta, a character’s ‘powerful, complex inner life’ in Doctor Faustus and chronicle reconditioned as tragedy in Edward II. Along the way, he inspired Shakespeare, infuriated Robert Greene, shafted poor, doomed Thomas Kyd and got into trouble for making counterfeit currency in the Netherlands. By May 1593, Marlowe was dead, stabbed in murky circumstances by a grifter who may have thought that he was responding to the monarch’s wishes (‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent playwright?’).

Greenblatt dashes along, making lively comparisons between Marlowe’s world and more recent times: the protocols of cowriting in 16th-century commercial drama remind him of the writers’ rooms of Hollywood today; the decades in which England lurched between Rome and Reformation were a period of political derangement analogous to the sixty years of German history from the end of the Weimar Republic to reunification. But the lush world-building comes with a degree of overreach, as Greenblatt insists on Marlowe’s sui generis abilities. Given iambic pentameter’s established place in English poetry by the 1570s, it’s misleading to say that Marlowe came up with a ten-syllable verse line for his translation of Ovid ‘seemingly out of nowhere’. And Marlowe’s achievements are not diminished if we admit that we know rather little about the lost plays of the 1580s. Greenblatt’s claim that Tamburlaine the Great instantly made the existing repertoire seem ‘wooden and old-fashioned’ is a confident conclusion built on shaky ground. 

Shakier still is Greenblatt’s assessment of Marlowe’s emotional and erotic lives. It is a disappointment that the book’s notes feature almost nothing on the history of sexuality published in the last twenty years. He has also chosen not to engage with major recent developments in the study of desire. This leaves him with few avenues to pursue once he has acknowledged that the famous provocations ascribed to Marlowe – ‘they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’; ‘Saint John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ … he used him as the sinners of Sodom’ – were the wisecracks of a man who liked to ‘gibe at prayers’, if they were uttered by him at all. 

What, then, did it mean for Marlowe to centre his great English history play around the conflict between Edward II’s duty to govern and his desire for Gaveston, the king’s soulmate and alternate spouse? Greenblatt decides that ‘the core of the tragedy is difficult to specify’, which is an oddly supine conclusion in a book that abounds with firmly expressed interpretations. Frustratingly, Greenblatt can be really good at teasing out the queer dynamics in Marlowe’s work: his reading of an outrageous episode in Hero and Leander, where Neptune fondles the strapping swimmer, is a delight. But for the most part, he overlooks the discourses and institutions that gave shape to same-sex desire in Renaissance England – where licensed and illicit forms of queerness coexisted in fractious and generative ways. 

It is noticeable that while Greenblatt identifies Hero and Leander as a love poem with an ‘implicitly homosexual’ sensibility, he has nothing to say about the genre of which it was a part. The work is an epy­llion, a vogueish poetic form used for refurbishing saucy classical stories into English tales of desire with a decidedly homo­erotic aspect. Compelling though he is on so many aspects of early modern culture, Greenblatt leaves his subject’s queerness uncontextualised and unaccommodated. This Marlowe certainly stands out from the gloom of the Elizabethan years, but important aspects of his world have been left in darkness.