Will Tosh at Literary Review:
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.
more here.
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