Stephen Greenblatt x Tina Brown: A Live Conversation (9/9/25 at 1 PM ET)

Watch Stephen Greenblatt discuss his new book exploring Shakespeare's fiercest competitor in this conversation with Tina Brown on Fresh Hell.

Marlowe is one of literature's most transgressive figures... Greenblatt calls him a 'wild talent who risked everything and paid for it.' But before Marlowe was mysteriously murdered at the age of 29, this son of an illiterate cobbler roared across 16th-century England, translating Ovid's poems in prose so scandalous that bishops burned his books, and inventing blank verse so revolutionary that Greenblatt compares it to the 'arrival of talkies or technicolor in the movies.'