The author of the NY Times best-seller Will in the World and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Swerve reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe — Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.
Forthcoming September 9, 2025
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.
“This brilliant and riveting book brings Christopher Marlowe out of the shadows, capturing the remarkable and sudden life (and the no less sudden and violent death) of this extraordinary Elizabethan poet and playwright. No critic has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to illuminate Marlowe’s world and work. Dark Renaissance is a worthy successor and companion to Will in the World.”
Praise for DARK RENAISSANCE
“A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist. Essential and addictive reading: Stephen Greenblatt’s Kit Marlowe leaps from the page with all the élan and immediacy of his plays.”
“The era-and genre-transforming radicalism of Christopher Marlowe’s work has never been examined more cogently or with such immediacy than in this genuinely thrilling, almost terrifying account of his shockingly reckless and courageous life. In gorgeous, gracefully authoritative prose, Stephen Greenblatt makes the miracle of artistic genius inhabit a recognizably human plane.”
“A staggering achievement in character study, about the man who could have been king of the poets had Shakespeare not supplanted him: Christopher Marlowe. This engaging book brings to vivid detail the tremendous arc of Marlowe’s life, complete with a cast of fascinating characters, all within the tapestry of events shaping the beauty and brutality of the Elizabethan era. From the formidable 21st-century mind of Stephen Greenblatt, this is an all-inclusive exploration of one of the 16th century’s most consequential and extraordinary talents.”
“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.”
“A vivid back-stage tour of the turbulent world from which Marlowe emerged and what may have been his enduring impact on early modern culture. Essential reading.”
“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.”
“A thrilling portrait of the English theatre’s great transgressor. Stephen Greenblatt gives brilliant life to Marlowe’s vaunting intellect, his reckless sexuality, his double-dealing with the security services and above all his theatrical imagination, which exploded out of nowhere to transform the Elizabethan stage.”
Photo by Luke Holwerda
About Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt is the author of the best-selling Will in the World and the Pulitzer Prize – and National Book Award-winning The Swerve. He is a professor of Renaissance Studies at Harvard University.
Books by Stephen Greenblatt
Selected Essays
Volumes edited (with introductions)
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