John Marlowe, a shoemaker from Canterbury, died in 1605. His son Christopher had failed to follow him into the trade, choosing the more unreliable life of playwright, poet and jobbing spy. It had been 12 years since Christopher’s death in a notorious Deptford stabbing, so John left all his possessions to his wife, Christopher’s mother, Katherine. Itemised, they included only a single book: the Bible. Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan age’s most learned playwright and most notorious atheist, had grown up in a house with no other text.
John Marlowe’s probate inventory is one of few items of hard evidence we encounter in Dark Renaissance, a wilfully imaginative new biography of Christopher Marlowe, author of Doctor Faustus. Many of us hoped for more. Even a popular biography from Stephen Greenblatt, one of the most influential living scholars of early modern literature, is a literary event.
As a founder of the new historicist movement, Greenblatt taught generations of students to move away from the close readings of the new criticism and to situate literary texts in the context of historical evidence for their authors’ lives. After Greenblatt—his breakthrough Renaissance Self-Fashioning came out in 1980—we read Marlowe and Shakespeare through legal debris such as family wills, as well as records such as the wardrobe inventories for public entertainments, which tell us about the visual displays that made up their cultural life.
Choose a subject surrounded by plenty of archival material, and the new historicist is onto a winner. Stumble onto more barren territory, and—as Greenblatt’s critics have long complained—this genre quickly becomes literary history by anecdote. (In a manifesto advertised as “jargon-free”, Greenblatt and his colleague Catherine Gallagher once defended his reliance on anecdote as offering “representational plenitude”.)
The life of William Shakespeare, born just weeks later, is better documented than Marlowe’s. Yet that still didn’t stop Greenblatt making some bold assertions in his 2004 biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World—notably, he imagined an encounter between Shakespeare and the dangerous Catholic martyr Edmund Campion.
In the even greater absence of records, Greenblatt bases his life of Marlowe not only on minor anecdotes, but also on imaginative leaps which can become flights of outrageous speculation. A college contemporary, John Greenwood, “may have” introduced Marlowe to two friends, executed several years later for heresy. “It is remotely possible” that Shakespeare described Marlowe in his sonnets; Marlowe “might have hinted” to Shakespeare that he held Catholic sympathies or a taste for men, to see how Shakespeare responded.
“Perhaps, just perhaps” the teenage Marlowe may have traded sexual favours with his headmaster for access to a private library. Greenblatt likes to frame scholarship as a chance to “speak with the dead”, but here he outright slanders them. Marlowe’s headmaster, a blameless bibliophile named John Gresshop, left no record whatsoever that he was a paedophile; the only shred of evidence offered by Greenblatt is that Marlowe later wrote a passage in a play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which the boy Ganymede wins a jewel (not a book) from his lover Jupiter (not a schoolteacher).
Marlowe’s story is interesting enough without such exaggeration. The characters he created were provocative and grandiose, and so was he—at least according to his enemies, who accused him of everything from pederasty to murder. He began as a scholarship boy, winning one golden ticket to King’s College, Canterbury, then another to Cambridge. His repeated absences without leave almost cost him his degree—until, in 1587, a mysterious letter arrived at Cambridge from no less a body than the Privy Council.
Despite the university’s suspicions that Marlowe had been making trips overseas to Rheims, where the Catholic church trained Englishmen abroad to return as undercover priests, the queen’s senior ministers vouched for his loyalty. They could not disclose the truth of where his absences had taken him, but “he had done her Majesty good service… in matters touching the benefit of his country”.
Under sufferance, Cambridge awarded its truant his degree, which allowed Marlowe to arrive in London in the style of a gentleman. As a graduate, he now outranked Shakespeare, likewise born in 1564 to a provincial tradesman. But he had also picked up the dark connections and taste for danger that would take him to the grave 23 years before his Stratford contemporary.
We can glimpse Marlowe, as Greenblatt perceptively demonstrates, in his most famous work. Like Doctor Faustus, Marlowe shone first as a scholar, before finding his true motivating principle: “liberated from all theology-based moral constraints, the pursuit of knowledge is about the pursuit not of virtue but of power.” Book-learning was Marlowe’s route out of his father’s house, but not his ultimate goal.
Greenblatt argues that Marlowe learnt this at the feet of his patrons in London, a circle of aristocratic occultists led by Walter Raleigh and Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (“the wizard earl”). He creates a version of Raleigh in the image of Faustus, then—with circular logic—uses this to argue that Raleigh inspired Faustus: “Raleigh was the demonic magician, or close enough to make the magician seem real.” But his reading of Faustus is, for the most part, careful and convincing, a welcome reminder of how Greenblatt built his own Marlovian reputation for brilliance.
Marlowe sold his soul—but to whom, we will never know
Faustus sells his soul to the devil, and Marlowe sold his too—but to whom, we will never know. Like many biographers, Greenblatt finds it too convenient that he was killed just a few days after being released on parole for atheism and sedition, by a drinking companion who claimed self-defence and received no punishment. He had clearly been a state operative—if not at Rheims, then at the English garrison at Flushing, where his activities were disrupted by an accusation of counterfeiting coin by a rival spy, his roommate Richard Baines. But this was an era when purveyors of intelligence sold to many masters at once.
Baines was an unreliable witness, who had been exposed by Catholic agents during his own attempt to go undercover at Rheims years earlier. When, in 1593, Marlowe found himself under renewed suspicion—his latest roommate, the playwright Thomas Kyd, broke under torture and denounced Marlowe—Baines popped up again to accuse him of a string of blasphemies, including denying the divinity of Christ. What might come out at trial about all these double-dealers? Far better to resolve the matter quietly, Greenblatt suggests, in a house of questionable hospitality in Deptford. What made Marlowe an embarrassment to the government, he argues, was not his attraction to men, nor any treacherous loyalties, but his persistent atheism.
Marlowe’s atheism preoccupies Greenblatt to the near exclusion of other questions—including Marlowe’s place in sexual history. Greenblatt recognises that Marlowe’s very public interest in male-male desire was part of what made him so outrageous to his peers. “There is no more explicit representation of a gay encounter in English Renaissance literature,” he writes, than Neptune’s advances to Leander in Hero and Leander, while Marlowe’s play Edward II, depicting the king’s relationship with Piers Gaveston, forced audiences to confront “what happens when the open secret is no longer a secret at all”. But there is little broader assessment of the norms of same-sex desire in early modern England—and how far Marlowe deviated.
For Greenblatt, Marlowe’s real place in history is as the man who brought the Renaissance to England. To make this case, he relies on a string of clichés about England as “cultural backwater”—from Greenblatt’s opening chapters, you’d almost believe that no Englishman opened a book until Marlowe came along. (Counter-Reformation Italy, by contrast, is portrayed as a bastion of liberal cosmopolitanism.) “Through the fissures Marlowe had made, light began to flow,” writes Greenblatt, as if Marlowe were a character in Philip Pullman’s fantasy fiction, bringing “Dust” into new worlds.
Where Greenblatt does succeed is in showing us just how far this scrappy scholarship boy travelled from his roots. He writes beautifully about Marlowe’s adventures, and heartbreakingly about the “unbridgeable distance” from his origins. Shortly after her husband, Katherine Marlowe also died, probably illiterate. By this time, several of her son’s works were available in print. They appear to have passed her by. “The detailed list of her possessions mentions no scrap of writing, in print or in manuscript, by the genius she had brought into the world.”
