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 ShapiroAs evocative as any novel, Stephen Greenblatt takes the reader into the biting cold and dark of the little ice age of Elizabethan England and explores the network of spies, patrons, poets and fraudsters who copied, exploited and trapped Christopher Marlowe. A triumphant piece of story-telling – Philippa GregoryIn his riveting new biography, Dark Renaissance, Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores Marlowe’s short, subversive life and argues that it was he, even more than Shakespeare, who ‘awakened the genius of the English Renaissance’ … Dazzling * Daily Mail *A brilliant and revelatory life of Christopher Marlowe. Dark Renaissance is a gripping, fascinating portrait, seasoned with Stephen Greenblatt’s superb scholarship. Unsurpassable – William BoydThis is such a gleeful piece of writing. Greenblatt writes with his customary exuberance - which, of course, perfectly suits his principal subject, the life and work of Christopher Marlowe – Simon Russell BealeA 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 HytnerIn previous books, including Will in the World, his best-selling biography of Shakespeare, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Swerve, Greenblatt emphasised the importance of cultural context in understanding literature, the so-called new historicism. In Dark Renaissance, he does so with dazzling effects, evoking England circa 1580 as an almost dystopian backwater * Associated Press *

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.