In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England artists had been frightened into dull
conventionality foreigners were suspect popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse
spectacles animal fights and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler's son
with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry-a torment for most schoolboys yet for a few a secret
portal to beauty visionary imagination transgressive desire and dangerous skepticism. What
Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door and what he did with it brought
about a spectacular explosion of English literature language and culture enabling the
success of his collaborator and rival William Shakespeare. With propulsive narrative flair
and brilliant literary criticism Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with
the queen's spy service that shaped Marlowe's brief troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine
and Faustus -dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight
Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew and the transformations they wrought birthed
the economic scientific and cultural power of the modern world-involving Faustian bargains
with which we reckon still.
