17 September 2025

Christopher Marlowe’s stage fright

Stephen Greenblatt’s attempt to reconstruct the playwright’s story is brilliant – but Marlowe the man remains a mystery

In 1952, during building work at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, someone noticed that boards to be thrown in a skip were in fact parts of a painting. Retrieved and restored, they formed a portrait of a pale young man with long auburn hair, dressed in a beautiful doublet with golden buttons. There was an inscription: Aetatis suae 21 1585 (aged 21, 1585). The young man was not named, but the details are consistent with those of Christopher Marlowe, who had recently completed his BA at Corpus Christi. There was also a Latin motto: “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (That which nourishes me destroys me). Egged on by this fiery aphorism, many have persuaded themselves that this must be the only existing portrait of Marlowe, the first great playwright in the English language.

The portrait duly adorns the jacket of Stephen Greenblatt’s stylish account of Marlowe’s life and times, though Greenblatt concedes that there were other young men of this age at Corpus Christi at the time. Irresistible yet possibly completely misleading, the portrait is an emblem of the challenge and temptations faced by Marlowe biographers (and there have been plenty of these down the years). There is remarkably little to go on. We know that Marlowe was the author of half a dozen plays, including the great tragedy Doctor Faustus, and a handful of surviving poems, a couple of them superb. We know where he was educated and who some of his friends and associates were. But we know so little directly about him that some scholars have argued that any attempt at biography is absurd.

So Dark Renaissance is not exactly a biography. It is a picture of the “dangerous times” – as Greenblatt’s subtitle has it – through which Marlowe lived, until he was stabbed to death in mysterious circumstances in a Deptford inn, aged just 29. Greenblatt compensates for what he concedes are “the fragmentary and elusive nature of the traces of his life” by giving us brilliant vignettes of the times in which Marlowe lived and some of extraordinary people he knew (or probably knew).

We do follow the chronology of Marlowe’s life as much as we know it. A mere cobbler’s son from Canterbury, he is picked out by somebody (but who?) to receive a scholarship to the King’s School, Canterbury. Another scholarship takes him to Cambridge, the usual path to a career as a clergyman. In both places, Marlowe is saturated in Greek and Latin literature, which allows a clever young man to escape all the strictures of Christian orthodoxy. (His earliest literary undertaking is a translation of Ovid’s Amores, a sequence of love poems whose sexual frankness excluded it from the classroom.) We do not know what Marlowe got up to at Cambridge, but Greenblatt gives us a vivid capsule account of university life in the 1580s. Early modern universities were “spaces of hidden ferment”, where dangerous ideas circulated among undergraduates in “unlicensed reading and whispered conversations”.

Oxford and Cambridge were also places were Roman Catholics tried to find recruits in their attempts to undermine Elizabeth I’s Protestant regime, and where spies and informers were therefore placed by the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, whose agents and influence are everywhere in this book. We know that, while still a student, Marlowe was involved in secret service to the state. Records show that he was going to be denied his degree because of unwarranted absences from the college, until a letter arrived from the Queen’s Privy Council affirming that he had “done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded for faithful dealing”. He got his degree. The letter said that Marlowe had been “beyond the seas to Rheims”, the location of the main English College for Catholic exiles. Like others before him, Greenblatt suggests that Marlowe had been spying on them. England was a place of spies, and our few records of Marlowe’s infamous opinions (“Moses was a juggler”; “Saint John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ”) come from untrustworthy informers with scores to settle.

Cambridge gave Marlowe something else. Students regularly wrote and acted in plays, staged in college halls, and Marlowe was thus exposed to the delights of drama. After leaving university, he somehow (as ever, we do not know how) ingratiated himself with the leading theatrical entrepreneur of the day, Philip Henslowe, who had just opened a new theatre, the Rose, on the south bank of the Thames. Here Henslowe staged Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the play with which he “conquered London”. Its eponymous anti-hero is a grandiloquent, self-vaunting conqueror, the son of a shepherd, who irresistibly rises to power. It is a play all about power: we see how Tamburlaine enjoys penning an emperor in a cage and making conquered kings draw his carriage.

Tamburlaine is utterly hubristic, you might think, but there is no comeuppance. Only in the sequel play, written swiftly at the insistence of Henslowe, do his conquests end, but only with his death from illness. Bloody and noisy, both Tamburlaine plays were great crowd pleasers. Greenblatt is attentive to the literary qualities that make them still absorbing. Marlowe pioneered blank verse, new to English verse drama. Indeed, it is eloquence – egomaniacal eloquence – that takes Tamburlaine from one conquest to the next.

Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced by Marlowe’s verse but we do not know how well they knew each other. Greenblatt accepts the highly contested claim of some scholars that Marlowe co-wrote the second and third parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, without having to lay out the evidence or the counter-arguments. He relegates such disputes to the bibliographical notes at the end of the book. He feels free to imagine the conversation between the two men and toys with the possibility (“It is remotely possible…”) that the rival poet in a couple of Shakespeare’s sonnets was Marlowe. Who knows?

After the success of The Jew of Malta (anti-Semitic, certainly, and also anti-everything else) came Doctor Faustus, the work that really possesses Greenblatt. He cannot resist finding Marlowe in Faustus. Marlowe invented the intellectually insatiable necromancer because he knew men who were dangerously smitten by the quest for knowledge, especially when it risked undermining religious orthodoxy. He was one of them. Greenblatt takes us into the circle of intellectually audacious men around Walter Raleigh, in which Marlowe mixed. Greenblatt is so smitten with his own description of Raleigh that he cannot help declaring, “Raleigh was the demonic magician, or close enough to make the magician seem real.”

From the sprightliness of his prose, you might not think that Greenblatt is now in his eighties, and a grave and reverend Harvard professor. He began as the enfant terrible of Renaissance literary history, a founder of “new historicism”, a species of critical ingenuity whereby new light could be thrown on a much-studied literary work by analysing the political or religious allegiances of one of its tangential sources. The approach is put to good use here. We are asked, for instance, to understand Marlowe’s scepticism about all religious beliefs, implicit in Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta, by considering a work written by one of his associates, Thomas Harriot, a brilliant mathematician and astronomer who also belonged to Raleigh’s circle. Greenblatt takes us through Harriot’s account of the beliefs and practices of the natives in the new colony of Virginia, which showed how religious credulity was fostered. Here “Marlowe’s darkest suspicions about the origins of his own religion” were confirmed. As throughout this book, you glimpse Marlowe only by finding out about someone else. He stays a shadow.

Dark Renaissance
Stephen Greenblatt
Bodley Head, 352pp, £25

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