Dark Renaissance

A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist, Dark Renaissance conjures the Elizabethan age as a place of instability, succession anxiety, and burgeoning theatrical genius. Essential and addictive reading: Greenblatt’s Kit Marlowe leaps from the page with all the élan and immediacy of his plays – Maggie O’FarrellThis brilliant and riveting book brings Christopher Marlowe out of the shadows, capturing the remarkable and sudden life (and the no less sudden and violent death) of this extraordinary Elizabethan poet and playwright. No critic has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to illuminate Marlowe’s world and work. Dark Renaissance is a worthy successor and companion to Will in the World * James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare *A thrilling portrait of the English theatre’s great transgressor. Stephen Greenblatt gives brilliant life to Marlowe’s vaunting intellect, his reckless sexuality, his double-dealing with the security services and above all his theatrical imagination, which exploded out of nowhere to transform the Elizabethan stage * Nicholas Hytner *

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.