Dark Renaissance is the thrilling story of the writer who transformed culture in Elizabethan England, bringing it out of the darkness and into the light. Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe - Shakespeare's inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the cultural darkness and into the light. In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler's son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry - which to him is a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of many others, including his youthful collaborator William Shakespeare. By the time of his murder in a Deptford tavern in 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe will be the most celebrated dramatist of his time. Stephen Greenblatt grippingly reconstructs the involvement with the queen's spy service that shaped Marlowe's brief, troubling life and gave us his masterpieces about power and its costs. And he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world - involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still. Dark Renaissance is a scintillating life of a writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of creativity.

Details

ISBN13: 9781847927149
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 352
Edition:
Publication Date: 07 Oct 2025
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.3(H)x15.2(L)x2.2(W)427
Weight (gm): 427

Author Biography

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve- How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World- How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.

Reviews

A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist, Dark Renaissance conjures the Elizabethan age as a place of instability, succession anxiety, and burgeoning theatrical genius. Essential and addictive reading: Greenblatt's Kit Marlowe leaps from the page with all the élan and immediacy of his plays -- Maggie O'Farrell
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 -- James Shapiro
As evocative as any novel, Stephen Greenblatt takes the reader into the biting cold and dark of the little ice age of Elizabethan England and explores the network of spies, patrons, poets and fraudsters who copied, exploited and trapped Christopher Marlowe. A triumphant piece of story-telling -- Philippa Gregory
A terrific read … as propulsive as that of any spy novel … A thrilling, twisty tale that brilliantly captures the horror and the possibilities of that lost, crepuscular world * New York Times *
An unforgettable literary biographical tour de force. Almost single-handed, [Greenblatt] has curated a rehabilitation of Marlowe's reputation as the greatest rival, collaborator and exact contemporary of the glover's boy from Stratford ... Greenblatt nails the playwright's staggering originality ... [A] brilliant portrait of a strangely modern, tragic figure, who's 'fatal genius' became the catalyst for this earthquake in English literature and culture * Independent *
In his riveting new biography, Dark Renaissance, Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores Marlowe’s short, subversive life and argues that it was he, even more than Shakespeare, who ‘awakened the genius of the English Renaissance’ … Dazzling * Daily Mail *
A brilliant and revelatory life of Christopher Marlowe. Dark Renaissance is a gripping, fascinating portrait, seasoned with Stephen Greenblatt’s superb scholarship. Unsurpassable -- William Boyd
This gripping biography focuses on Marlowe's brief, brilliant life ... Greenblatt fills [the book] with lively descriptions of the world that shaped this remarkable mind * The Times *
This is such a gleeful piece of writing. Greenblatt writes with his customary exuberance - which, of course, perfectly suits his principal subject, the life and work of Christopher Marlowe -- Simon Russell Beale
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 -- Nicholas Hytner