It is no surprise that Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Christopher Marlowe is a shadowy portrait of a genius rogue playwright. Born in Canterbury in 1564, the son of a cobbler, Kit Marlowe was clever enough to pass, at 15, the requirements for admission at King’s College and then secure a scholarship to study the priesthood at Cambridge where he was surrounded by sons of titled aristocrats.
At Cambridge he was so advanced that he gained access to the private libraries of the most revered dons. Though he was expected to become a priestly teacher, the only position a man of his class could hope for, Marlowe was already on his own path as a poet and playwright. It was there that Kit renamed himself Christopher and plotted his own destiny.
Even though Elizabeth I allowed theatrical troupes to perform, the public theater was a tough life for actors, playwrights and theater people were routinely treated like vagabonds, tricksters, and low lives– but not if they had titled patrons who indulged the arts. Marlowe evidently was among the lucky ones who benefited, on and off, from this dicey system.
And even though performances could be shut down or censored at any time on one pretext or another by local authorities, shows were permitted to go on. They were as a distraction from the realities of British life for the average citizen trying to make a living, survive poverty, not to mention contend with bubonic plague outbreaks. In the midst of all of this, for a few pennies one could escape the horrors of daily life in open air stages to hear poets, musicians, acrobats, actors and plays.
Performers like everyone else had to be wary of offending the crown, lest they be suspected of seditious behavior, or even the mere perception thereof. Punishments could include being broken on the rack, or hung, or set afire or drawn and quartered while still alive, atrocities that were public events as commonplace as the rats in the Tower of London and in the halls of the palace. If that wasn’t hellish enough an existence, bubonic plague was rampant across the Britian. It was indeed a dark ‘Renaissance’ as Greenblatt details.
Fueling the suspicious atmosphere and rumors were the endless plots between the Crown’s Church of English (established by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII) and the Catholic Church hoping to install Mary Queen of Scots to the throne.
Meanwhile, amid all this intrigue, Marlowe was creating what would be a new era for British theater and dramatic literature. He wrote seven plays – Tamburlaine the Great 1 &2, Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, Edward II and The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage– none of his plays were published under his name during his lifetime.
Marlowe introduced blank verse in his poetry that was more accessible to audiences of all classes and more anchored, psychologically to real life. There are allusions to Marlowe’s work in Shakespeare his contemporary (also born in 1564) who was aesthetically influenced by Marlowe’s writing style. His play “Tamburlaine 1” was so popular he wrote an equally successful sequel.
Marlowe followed it up with “The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus,” which was teeming with narrative daring, dramatizations of censorious subjects. Greenblatt’s lengthy examination of Marlowe’s incendiary stage adaptation of the German book “The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus.’ Realizing that the themes of Faustus’ summoning the devil and bargaining his soul for limitless knowledge, fortune, fame, power, occultism, magic and sadistic pursuits carnal and otherwise.
The play could be read as roman a clef that would bring to mind the political rumors, plots and characters of aristocrats including Sir Walter Raliegh, Ferdinando Stanley (Lord Strange) Henry Percy and other courtiers for their subversive schemes they had the wealth and power to indulge in, pursuits that in fact ended up turning them into suspects accused of plots against the crown. Marlowe was socially connected and possibly further involved with their intrigues.
There is not much information in the book about the circumstances of Marlowe’s creative process or the preparation for the performance runs of his plays. Marlowe had influential friends in his college years and beyond, and was likely engaged as a secret agent in service to operatives at Elizabeth I court.
At pivotal moments of Marlowe’s life, there are no diaries, journals notes, a few insinuated court correspondence that links Marlowe to royals. Meanwhile, Shakespeare maintained a public life, acted in his own plays and even though there are many versions of his actual lived experience, it is a trove compared to what is verifiable facts about Marlowe. But little is known about Marlowe’s daily activities and otherwise furtive life and none of his plays were printed under his name during his life.
As Greenblatt suggests, it is probable that Thomas Kyd, a fellow playwright (author of The Spanish Tragedy) ended up being interrogated on the rack and was forced to give evidence against Marlowe.
Marlowe was repeatedly in harm’s way by design, he was charged with assault several times. Accused of atheism and Machiavellian conceits, even posting protest documents on trees and baiting colleagues into political and religious debates, but he was also invested in skullduggery that festered from all sectors of Elizabeth’s monarchy, fair and foul.
Sorting it all out turns into a spy vs. spy political maze, everyone covering their tracks, or being exposed, or confessing to crimes just to escape the rack. Dr. Faustus also may have been Marlowe expressing his own precarious status for his bargaining with royals at a personal price. He was murdered while being detained on his own recognizance at the pleasure of the crown.
Marlowe incinerated the literary closet for all ages with his homoerotic tales of the Greek gods in his poem Jove and Ganymede a same – sex love and later the hot and heavy royal love affair between Edward II and Galveston. When Marlowe was murdered at age 29, Edward II had yet to be staged or his scripts published under his name until after his death.
There are in depth profiles of Marlowe’s friends and enemies, each adding an extra pieces to the Marlowe puzzle, some of it can be heavy going, though on balance, Greenblatt drives the slippery plots narratively forward.
Even as Marlowe lurks in the shadows in his own biography, his plays, scandals and conspiratorial mysteries, remain center-stage. And Greenblatt’s portrait of this once-in-a-century playwright who kicked theater into a new era of literary agency continues to fascinate, however elusive the clever rogue remains.
