Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

In this spellbinding biography, literary historian Greenblatt (The Swerve) recreates the short life of English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, arguing that Marlowe’s poems and plays, with their skepticism about religious and political authority, ushered in the English Renaissance. The son of a poor cobbler, Marlowe distinguished himself at King’s School in Canterbury, clearing a path for him to attend Cambridge, where he excelled in Latin, translating Ovid’s love poems. He then turned to playwriting, producing in the 1580s Tamburlaine, a play based on the Central Asian emperor Timur that Greenblatt explains is about the “impious breaking of every rule, the ruthless satisfaction of desire, and the triumph of the will.” Greenblatt examines how Marlowe produced dramatic innovations that Shakespeare would later use in his plays; the soliloquy, for example, appeared for the first time on stage in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Marlowe created the English history play with his Edward II. Marlowe was murdered at age 29 in an apparent struggle over a bill in a tavern. Throughout, Greenblatt vividly recreates the dangerous and dark world of Elizabethan London, with its “narrow streets filled with excrement and offal, severed heads of convicted traitors struck up on spikes for passersby to contemplate.” Readers will be captivated. (Sept.)