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. 'A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist
.... Essential and addictive reading' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 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 contemporary and 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 helped fashion 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 combination of narrative flair historical insight and literary criticism about a
writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of
creativity.
