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Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
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About This Book
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare's contemporary, inspiration, and rival. 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.
Reviews
"Greenblatt excels at immersing the reader in that time and place and has an ear for the delectable turn of phrase."
"There is, as you might guess, no real evidence that Strange and Marlowe even knew each other … Greenblatt's myth…betrays the principles of New Historicism ..."
"As a scholar, he earns our trust by backing up his bold accolades with the careful research and astute textual analyses for which he is justly celebrated."
"Greenblatt tells this murky but exhilarating tale with pace and gusto ..."
"An expert exploration of the tumultuous world of Elizabethan England, rendered with his signature literary elegance and scholarly depth."
"[A] masterful portrait of a man and an age."
"His generous insights on Marlowe and Shakespeare and their peers are antidotes to our festering obsessions with luxury, technology, and status."
"It evokes the fear and danger of late Elizabethan England ..."
"[A] narrative flair is beautifully showcased in Dark Renaissance."
"In Greenblatt's hands, literary scholarship...has taken a great leap forward."
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