Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both born in 1564, rising from working-class origins and finding success in the new world of the theater. But before Shakespeare transformed English drama, Marlowe had already done so—with Tamburlaine the Great which introduced blank verse to the English stage.

As Stephen Greenblatt argues in his new biography, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, virtually everything in Elizabethan theater can be seen as “pre- and post-Tamburlaine.” Shakespeare learned from Marlowe, borrowed from him, and even tried to outdo him. Beyond his theatrical innovation, Marlowe was a poet, provocateur, and likely spy whose turbulent life was cut tragically short.

In this episode, Greenblatt explores Marlowe’s audacious works, his entanglements with espionage and power, and his lasting influence on Shakespeare and the stage.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 23, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Swerve, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Will in the World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both born in 1564 into working class families. They both made their way to London and found success writing for a new and exciting form of entertainment: the theater.

Marlowe’s first big success came with his play Tamburlaine the Great, about an emperor whose desire for conquest can never be satisfied.

But it was Tamburlaine’s poetry that staked Marlowe’s claim to immortality.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

This was the first time anyone spoke in blank verse on the English stage.

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in Dark Renaissance, his new biography of Marlowe, “virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”

Greenblatt compares the introduction of blank verse to the invention of recorded dialogue in movies. There would be no going back.

Shakespeare was certainly paying close attention to Marlowe’s innovations. The two playwrights may have worked together at one point—some believe that they co-wrote the Henry VI plays, along with another unknown writer.

Did Shakespeare view Marlowe as a rival? You can read The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, and Richard II as attempts to beat Marlowe at his own game.

But Greenblatt makes an argument for Marlowe’s importance on his own terms, not just as a foil for Shakespeare. Add to that a life story full of intrigue, espionage, and murder, and you have the makings of a gripping biography.

Here’s Stephen Greenblatt, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

———–

BARBARA BOGAEV: Steven Greenblatt, welcome back. You have really got to stop writing books so fast. I barely have time to interview anyone. [Both laugh.]

STEPHEN GREENBLATT: You are very kind. You know, Ben Johnson said— to compare myself to Shakespeare, which I don’t normally do that—“That man had to be stopped some time.” So, you’re just invoking.

BOGAEV: I’m sure your family feels that way. So, I was thinking you’ve been teaching and thinking and writing about Shakespeare for, is it 50 years now?

GREENBLATT: Oh, at least.

BOGAEV: At least, right? So, was it inevitable that you’d eventually also write about Shakespeare’s rival?

GREENBLATT: Probably. But I also had already written about Marlowe very, very early in my long run. I wrote a chapter on Marlowe in a book called Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which came out 45 years ago. So, I’ve been thinking about Marlowe on and off for a very long time. He’s hard not to think about, partly because his life was so astonishing but also because his work is so amazing.

BOGAEV: Yeah, so dramatic. Didn’t the screenwriter for a certain Shakespeare movie come to you early on asking for input?

GREENBLATT: This is true. I was teaching at Berkeley at the time. Someone came up, a screenwriter I’d never heard of who identified himself as having written the screenplay for Car 54, Where Are You? and a series of movies I had never heard of.

BOGAEV: Right. I think his name is Marc Norman.

GREENBLATT: He was indeed. He came to see me in Berkeley, took me out to lunch at a lovely restaurant, and said he wanted to write the screenplay for a movie: a biopic about Shakespeare roughly based on Amadeus about Mozart. I immediately said, “Forget it.” Shakespeare is not an interesting subject for a movie. You’ll never do a good movie about that. But Marlowe was the great subject for a movie.

He said, “No, it probably had to be Shakespeare.” And then he came back a second time. Actually, I had thought about it more and I said, “Well, if you have to have it be about Shakespeare, have Shakespeare have an affair with Marlowe. Then you can get it onto Marlowe. He had an amazing life.”

BOGAEV: You just would not get off of Marlowe.

GREENBLATT: I wouldn’t get off! He laughed at me and said he was hoping to get funds from the Disney company. They’re not going to have a gay romance between Shakespeare and Marlowe.

He then managed to hook up with Tom Stoppard and write the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which was I think a marvelous movie. If you are very, very quick at the end of the movie and arrest the image when there’s a long list of names you’ll see my name. So, I was acknowledged at least in a modest way for having had these two very pleasant meals with Marc Norman and trying to get him to make a movie about Marlowe.

BOGAEV: He is such drama. I am still waiting for the Marlowe movie. But there’s so much we don’t know for sure about him. So, I thought we might start with some truth-digging and jump around a little bit. And I’m starting with a very practical question which is, he was a shoemaker’s son so how did he get so well educated in poetry that he could do this?

GREENBLATT: With Marlowe, as with Shakespeare, as it was with most lives that weren’t the lives of the very greatest aristocrats in this period, we have only scanty, irregular, inadequate evidence for how anything happens. The challenge of my book, Dark Renaissance, as was the challenge of Will in the World, my earlier book on Shakespeare, but of anyone’s work on these figures, is simply to figure out on the basis of a very tiny body of hard evidence what to make of the life and the work that was produced.

So, to go back to your question, how did Marlowe, the son of a perhaps semi-literate shoemaker and almost certainly illiterate mother and family, how did he get there? The answer is, we haven’t a clue. What we know is—

BOGAEV: Well, we know he got scholarships to good schools.

GREENBLATT: We know he got scholarships but that’s already the first mystery. How did he get enough Latin to pass the entrance exam which was a difficult entrance exam to the King’s School, which was the great grammar school in Canterbury, where he is from?

BOGAEV: Where they spoke Latin all day.

GREENBLATT: Where they spoke Latin. Where you had to take an exam in Latin to get into the school. The simple answer is we don’t know.

In my book, I speculate that it certainly wasn’t his local parish priest, because we know that the local parish priest was cited for being incapable of writing a sermon. So, he was very unlikely to have been the figure who would’ve led. But on the other hand, Marlowe’s living in Canterbury, an easy walk to the great cathedral where there were very many priests. My guess is that someone picked up that this is a remarkably intelligent, quick boy who might be interested in pursuing knowledge, the kind of knowledge that led normally to grammar school, going to university, and eventually becoming an Anglican priest.

BOGAEV: Then he went on to get a scholarship to Cambridge. And Cambridge was this hotbed of scholarship and the classics but also you write “the radical new ideas at this time” and you point out right at the beginning of your book in really dramatic fashion that England in the late 16th century was a “cultural and intellectual dystopian backwater” compared to the rest of Europe.

GREENBLATT: I mean, I don’t want to push it too hard, but up to about 1580, those middle decades of the 16th century were a dead zone in England. After the execution of the Earl of Surrey and the early death of Thomas Wyatt, the poet, basically creativity, literary creativity, in England goes dormant. I think there are very obvious reasons for that because there was a succession, as you know, of regime changes. Every one of them, between Catholic and Protestant, Catholic and Protestant, every one of them was accompanied by persecutions and executions.

BOGAEV: Right, it was just too dangerous and chaotic.

GREENBLATT: Wildly dangerous. The best thing in those situations is just to keep your head down because you know that otherwise you might get your head cut off.

BOGAEV: But that was changing by the time Marlowe got to college, right?

GREENBLATT: Changing a little, not much, changing maybe a tiny bit because Elizabeth, at least nominally, and officially, and to some extent, truthfully, didn’t want to keep up the, should we say, the intense regime of killing people for not believing exactly what you’re supposed to believe that had been in place.

Nonetheless, it’s dangerous. What’s happening is that there is pressure building up. Building up from Protestants who want the Reformation to go much further than the English Protestant church had taken it. Then pressure from Catholics. The country must at that point have been still—despite the fact that Catholicism was technically illegal—there must have been probably more Catholic believers then not wanting to go back to the practices that people had had for so many generations. The government is anxious about it. But Cambridge and Oxford, the way universities usually are, Cambridge and Oxford are the places in which these pressures are building up at their most intense.

BOGAEV: Right? And the students are soaking in new ideas about science and theology and philosophy and politics. So, all of these ideas are swirling, and also the university is somewhat of a safe space for men and same-sex relationships—that’s my next myth-busting question I want to get to. Was Marlowe gay? How would we know, given that it was illegal and there wasn’t even this concept for it in the period?

GREENBLATT: Well, we have significant evidence in this case that Marlowe was, at the very least, tremendously interested in what we now think of as homosexual relations, same-sex relations, I could rehearse that evidence. The most startling and shocking being the reports, multiple reports from different people, that Marlowe toward the end of his life was saying something that you really shouldn’t have said in the late 16th century if you wanted to have a long life, namely that Jesus and John were lovers.

BOGAEV: He didn’t say it in that language but yeah—

GREENBLATT: He said, “Jesus used John after the manner of Sodom.” That’s about as explicit as you can get, and that is something as they say, that provocation, let’s put it that way, that you wouldn’t have made if you wanted to live a secure life.

On top of that, Marlowe wrote what is the great play in the period about same-sex desire, namely Edward II, about a king who was in love with a man and then he also wrote an extraordinary part of his long epyllion, his long epic, about Hero and Leander in which Neptune comes on to the male hero. So, he’s clearly interested in this, and almost certainly, this is his principal form of desire.

BOGAEV: Right, he’s just soaking in it, I mean, and you point out in college he translated all of Ovid’s Amores.

GREENBLATT: Yes, though Ovid’s Amores are actually heterosexual so, we could say he, perhaps at a certain point, was interested in both.

What I do say in my book, and I think it’s worth thinking about, is that there was something that looks from this distance like a perennial bed shortage in the 16th century. That is to say, people slept with each other all through school and university.

BOGAEV: Yeah. Everybody’s bunking up.

GREENBLATT: Absolutely. So, I think we can reasonably assume that some form of same-sex arousal was an almost universal experience in the 16th century but then you have this very peculiar arrangement where it can’t be spoken of.

BOGAEV: Right, the don’t ask, don’t tell.

GREENBLATT: Absolutely don’t ask, don’t tell. Marlowe makes the kind of daring decision to tell.

BOGAEV: Okay, so I think we can put that one to rest. On to our next question. Okay, was Christopher Marlowe indeed a spy for Queen Elizabeth? How do we know this?

GREENBLATT: Well, again, this is one of the delicious, tantalizing pieces of evidence that survives but like everything else, it’s wonderfully ambiguous.

Marlowe went to Cambridge to get a BA degree, and he had a wonderful scholarship. At the end of his BA studies, he applied for and received a further scholarship to get an MA degree. At the end of his MA studies, he submitted the forms to get his degree.

What does survive, first of all, is a refusal on the part of the Cambridge administration to give him his degree on the grounds, two grounds: one, that he had been absent for mysterious periods, he had not fulfilled the resident’s requirement in that period. That can be confirmed by—they used to keep something called the buttery books in which they registered everyone’s, students’ purchases of beer and food in the college—and we know that Marlowe was absent for a long, really remarkably long, months at a time, in the buttery books.

BOGAEV: Suspicious.

GREENBLATT: Suspicious. Then secondly, even more suspicious, the University authority said that it is thought that he had gone to Rheims, the cathedral city in France. And in that city was the English college to train young, dissident, Catholic gentlemen to become priests and be smuggled back into England running the risk of their lives in order to minister to the faithful and perhaps also to plot to kill Queen Elizabeth and return England to the Catholic Church. These are the years building up toward the Spanish Armada in 1588. This is not a mere paranoid thought on the part of the authorities.

BOGAEV: So, if someone were a spy, it would be a good place to be a spy.

GREENBLATT: Yeah, universities are great places to recruit spies, they always have been and this was particularly so in the late 16th century in England at Oxford and Cambridge.

So, we have those two pieces of evidence for the refusal of the degree. Then a month passes, and a letter is sent to the Cambridge administration, the Cambridge authorities. It’s signed by basically every one of the leading figures in the government: the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Chancellor, and so forth. Crucial figures in the government saying that Her Majesty would be unhappy if someone who had done the State such useful service as Christopher Marlowe were not to receive his degree.

BOGAEV: Wow. He had such powerful people in his pocket.

GREENBLATT: And you have to think about this. This is a nobody—no one cares about this class of people in the period—and this is someone for whom the leading figures in the government are saying, “Give him his degree.” Put these things together, and you don’t have to make a huge leap, to say that Marlowe had been recruited for Francis Walsingham’s spy service and is working for them in some capacity. But what capacity?

BOGAEV: That’s Elizabeth’s Secretary and spy master.

GREENBLATT: Exactly.

BOGAEV: Why, if Marlowe’s a spy—and you make such a strong case—why was he a spy? Was it just for money? Because at this time if you got a university degree, you were a gentleman and you weren’t supposed to do menial labor like Shakespeare was doing, you know, being an actor and trying to hustle people into seats in the theater. You were a gentleman. You weren’t supposed to. I mean, it was hard to make a living at this time, right? It was that transition to a middle class that was just beginning.

GREENBLATT: It is true that getting a degree from Oxford or Cambridge gave you, even if you weren’t born into the upper classes, gave you the right to call yourself a gentleman. But it didn’t give you anything else.

You have this peculiar situation in the late 16th century that is a fascinating one, and how shall we say, unfortunately, an uncomfortable one for us now in the 21st century, which is that a significant number of young people from relatively modest backgrounds are admitted to university where they can explore all kinds of ideas, they can think about various possibilities in life, they can imagine futures for themselves, so forth and then they face a real world, as it were, where there’s absolutely no room for them.

BOGAEV: Right. They’re unemployable, really.

GREENBLATT: There’s basically nothing they can do except one route which is to become a parish priest in a small village somewhere. That could have been Marlowe’s fate. That was the fate actually of many of his poorer classmates who also had the kind of scholarship that he had.

What we know is that peculiar piece of evidence that Marlowe might have been at what, almost certainly, was recruited at that point. And then what we know is that after he graduated from Cambridge he went to London and started to write plays, a very dangerous, economically, extremely implausible thing to do.

BOGAEV: Right, you don’t make that much money for writing for theater. That’s why Shakespeare got into the business of theater.

GREENBLATT: I mean, you can make a, you know, Barbara, you can make a certain amount. They paid you know what were reasonable sums by their standards for plays. They paid more for a good costume than for a good play. But still they paid for plays. But you’d have to write a lot of them to keep going. You had to keep writing them in order to make ends meet. In fact, he does actually write a remarkable amount.

So, he writes the two parts of Tamburlaine. He writes The Jew of Malta. He writes Edward II. He writes, of course, spectacularly Dr. Faustus and more. That doesn’t exhaust his writing. So, he’s working tremendously fast and hard in just a few years after he went to London.

BOGAEV: And I want to talk about some of those plays but first I just have to take a little tangent because you’re talking about Marlowe moving to London. You describe how he lived in this neighborhood, Norton Folgate, it’s very mixed and it’s full of these hilariously named, dubious characters: the Priggers of Prancers, the Cony-Catchers, Counterfeit Cranks, Anglers and Abraham Men, Bawdy Baskets.

GREENBLATT: Yeah, he moves to the equivalent of Brooklyn, let’s say, and he lives an exciting life as far as we can reconstruct it. But exciting may not be the right, quite the right word for it, because he actually is involved in a murder. He’s living in this very peculiar mix of risk-taking and also excitement, intellectual excitement.

He gets to know in the person of Sir Walter Ralegh [editor’s note: Ralegh was Sir Walter’s preferred spelling rather than Raleigh; scholars and historians today use Ralegh to reflect that preference], in the 9th Earl of Northumberland, two of the most astonishing intellectuals, public figures, and also dangerous thinkers of the entire period. The 9th Earl of Northumberland was known as the Wizard Earl, interested in scientific experiments. Sir Walter Ralegh, we know from a hundred different ways, is at the very front edge of what’s most exciting really in late 16^th-century England. We know from here, we do have some surviving records, that suggest that Marlowe actually knew these people and not only knew them but knew them well.

BOGAEV: You say in fact that Sir Walter Ralegh might have inspired the character of Doctor Faustus?

GREENBLATT: Well—

BOGAEV: Or maybe he’s part of the composite character?

GREENBLATT: Exactly. I mean, both Ralegh and the 9th Earl, the Wizard Earl, I think are floating behind—if you try to think of “where does this astonishing character that Marlowe creates come from”—he obviously partly comes from the little book about Georg Faust, the magician in Germany, but as Marlowe takes this rather thin figure and blows him up into this astonishing creation, he’s drawing upon everything—as Shakespeare drew upon everything—that he’s encountering in his world. And in this case, he’s encountering two of the most daring, magician-like figures in his world.

BOGAEV: And you see Faustus as the character that most resembles Marlowe or that he most imbued with himself than any of his other characters.

GREENBLATT: I think this is something that in different ways Shakespeare and Marlowe both thought about. Here are two people who come from modest provincial backgrounds—as Marlowe’s character Faust comes from what’s called “parents base of stock,” lower class parents—who through learning, through education, and through creativity, moves into a zone in the society that they’re not meant to be in, that they’re meant to be excluded from by virtue of their low birth.

So, there’s a tremendous excitement, thrill of leaping beyond your boundaries. But then there’s the sense of, “Well, who are you finally? What are you doing with your skills?”

BOGAEV: Your gifts.

GREENBLAT: “Your astonishing gift.”

So, Shakespeare thinks about this, as you know, throughout his career. Finds different ways of imagining himself, who he is. And Marlowe thinks about his own choices. I think, not only in Faust, but in lots of his work.

Sometimes in the kind of fantasy life, as in Tamburlaine. “The king of the world. I’ll conquer everybody.” That kind of fantasy. Or the sly plotter as in Barabas in The Jew of Malta.

But then in Faustus, thinking about what it is to have made a deal with the devil. To know that you have a very limited number of years. That you can’t get out of this thing that you’ve got into. But that you have to figure out how to use what you can of your time.

BARBARA: You mentioned The Jew of Malta. And I think it is safe to say that most people haven’t seen it or read it. What’s it about?

GREENBLATT: In some way, The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s, as a piece of art, Marlowe’s most perfectly structured play, most beautiful play.

I mean, it’s a hideous thing. It’s virulently anti-Semitic. It’s virulently anti-Muslim. It’s virulently anti-Christian. It has a kind of equal opportunity despising of everything.

Its dominant figure is Machiavelli. Machevill or “Make Evil,” maybe, they said at the time. Who was actually a character brought on at the very beginning of the play in the prologue.

It’s a play about someone, in this case, a Jew, wealthy Jew, on the island of Malta named Barabas, whose wealth is seized by the Christian authorities in order to provide money for fighting against the Muslim invaders, the Turks. Who has an enormous rage at how he’s been treated.

Tries to figure out and does figure out successfully how, through a set of cunning and betrayal, to achieve what he wants. Which is not only the recovery of his money, but also, he’s offered the position of the ruler of Malta.

BOGAEV: Right? You say, “This is how Marlowe delivers Machiavelli to England.” And it enables him to say these seditious and dangerous things on a public stage because he’s shielded. He’s hiding behind that.

One of the things that “Make Evil” or Machevill says right in the prologue of the play, “I count religion, but a childish toy. And hold, there is no sin but ignorance.”

GREENBLATT: “But ignorance,” exactly.

BOGAEV: Blasphemy.

GREENBLATT: It is blasphemy. I mean, Shakespeare and Marlowe both figured out preeminently in this period how to do this. How to… they live in a world without anything like protection for speech, anything like a public sphere in our sense. They have to figure out how to say what they want to say.

Shakespeare has a character say, “It’s a heretic that makes the fire, not she that burns in it.” If you said that in the local pub in the late 16th century, you’d have your ears cut off or your nose slit.

Marlowe figures out how to say the most radical things that can be said. But you do it on the stage before several thousand people and you get away with it. You get away with it because you structure the play in such a way as to get away with it.

The interesting thing to me is that there are all kinds of transgressive thoughts that are constantly being aired and played with, especially in art. That’s why, after all, we watch Breaking Bad or the tens of thousands of other things that we watch. We play with the most transgressive thoughts that we have in our world.

Marlowe was an extraordinary genius at exploiting that impulse. The impulse that goes along with our dreams and our fantasies.

BOGAEV: Right. And there’s a murderer in all of us somewhere. That impulse, at least.

GREENBLATT: Unfortunately, Marlowe got too close to it.

BOGAEV: Well, yeah. Now we’re at Marlowe’s murder. So, how did Marlowe die? What do we know for sure?

GREENBLATT: What we know for sure—what they knew for sure, collectively, in the late 16th century were a set of rumors and wild accounts of what happened. There are lots of stories that circulate in the wake of Marlowe’s murder in 1593. No one really has a very full account.

It was not until the 1920s when a gifted, young scholar named Leslie Hotson was working in the archive in London. And through a set of clever presumptions and calculations—he was a great literary detective—found the missing autopsy report on Marlowe.

Now we have, suddenly only from the 1920s, an official account which had been misfiled of what actually happened. The account goes that Marlowe went at 10 in the morning to the Widow Bulls in Deford. Just a little south of the city of London.

He went and met three of his pals. They hung out together. They had lunch together. They spent the afternoon together walking in the garden. They went back and had dinner together. So, this was a whole day.

BOGAEV: Of speaking quietly.

GREENBLATT: Speaking quietly. The witnesses have nothing to report about what they were doing, what they were talking about.

Then, after dinner they were in the room together, these four men. The witnesses, they heard voices raised and they came in and they saw someone dead on the floor, namely Christopher Marlowe.

They asked the three men, “What happened?” And the three men said that three of them were sitting on the bench. Marlowe was behind them, lying on the bed, and they began to argue about the reckoning. That is to say the bill for the day’s entertainment.

Marlowe grew increasingly angry. Marlowe took his knife and he hit—probably, with a hilt of the knife—he hit one of the people sitting on the bench, a man named Ingram Frizer in the head.

There was a scuffle. In the course of the scuffle, Marlowe got his own knife stuck through his eye. And that is the official account. It was only—

BOGAEV: You don’t believe that’s what happened?

GREENBLATT: Well, I mean, something happened. Marlowe was dead, that’s for sure.

It was only when the autopsy record was recovered and the names of the men were listed—Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer—that people began to do the work and found that all three men were associated, connected in one form or another, to the secret police. To the Secret Service.

Robert Poley is the scariest figure practically in the 16th century. A terrifying character working for Walsingham. Ingham Frizer and Skeres were also scoundrels who had connections to the, on and off, to the secret police.

Your guess is as good as mine Maybe it was an argument about, “Really, that dinner cost so much?” But the fact that there were four men who spent the entire day from ten in the morning all the way through to after dinner, and then had an argument on the bill. That doesn’t—to me, that doesn’t, add up.

BOGAEV: No. So, what do you think it was about? And you do lean towards one particular theory?

GREENBLATT: I do. Well, what happened is that Marlowe wasn’t just passing through town. At that point, Marlowe was there because he’d been arrested. He had been arrested only a few weeks before.

He wasn’t told necessarily why he was arrested. He was just arrested and told that he had to remain, what they said—they called in the day, “Within the verge.” That is to say within a certain distance from where Queen Elizabeth was. Because at some point, he was going to be questioned. But there were no charges yet leveled against him, and he was not put in jail.

But we happen to know much more about this because the state was collecting evidence against Marlowe. They were collecting evidence in the wake of an anti-immigrant placard that was nailed to the wall of the church where immigrants in London were praying.

The placard was a poem. A very bad crude poem that basically said, “You immigrants, you’ve caused our rents to rise. Our food is more expensive because of you. You’re taking our jobs. We hate you. Get out of the country or we’re going to cut your throats.” And it, it signed, “Tamburlaine.” The name of Marlowe’s most, at that point, probably the most famous play.

The Privy Council, the Queen’s authorities, they don’t like popular threats that cut people’s throats. They don’t feel all that sentimental about the immigrants, but they don’t like the idea that there’ll be popular descent of this kind.

So, they issue a proclamation with a big reward for anyone who can tell who wrote this thing. And they send agents of the Privy Council out. And they said the agents have the right to arrest anyone they want and actually to put them to the torture to get the information.

The agents in this case go to the house of someone named Kyd. Thomas Kyd, who was a playwright himself. They’re looking for evidence that Kidd might have written this placard. Or they, more interestingly, they may have known that Thomas Kyd and Marlowe had been roommates in the recent past.

Kyd says he doesn’t know who wrote the placard. He certainly didn’t write it. And they go through his papers, and they don’t find anything related to this anti-immigrant placard. But they find a document that seems to be denying the divinity of Jesus, which is totally illegal in this period.

So not on the basis of the, at this point of the placard, but of the so-called atheism of this document. They take Kyd off and torture him. Kyd says, “I have no idea where this came from. This is not mine. You can see it’s not my handwriting.”

So, to give Kyd credit, he didn’t say anything at the beginning about who this document. It was only when he was being tortured that he remembers that, “Oh, that document must have been Marlowe’s,” from the time that they were living together.

Then the state begins to gear up to go after Marlowe. They begin to assemble reports about Marlowe. Marlowe persuaded people not to believe in this and that. Marlowe declared that anyone who didn’t like tobacco and boys was a fool. Marlowe said, “I have as much a right to counterfeit to make money as the Queen of England.” Things that you absolutely couldn’t say.

Christopher Marlowe himself never gets the chance as far as we know to answer any of these charges. But we do know that one of the documents that listed all the terrible things that Marlowe was saying was actually copied and given to the Queen herself.

So it’s taken super seriously. And there is a note on the document, presumably comes from the Queen that says, “Let this be attended to.”

So, it’s impossible to figure out the actual time scheme here: the dates. When was the document that we’re talking about written? When was it shown to the Queen, before or after? And so forth and so on.

But I think that there is—and I’m not alone. David Riggs, who has written a wonderful biography of Marlowe as well, thinks that this is clearly connected to the murder of Marlowe. And I think so too.

BOGAEV: There’s so much digging and detective work in your book. By the end, I was thinking, “Wow, I wonder if Stephen Greenblatt ever wanted to be a detective?”

GREENBLATT: No. I only wanted to understand Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and the works of art that most matter to me.

BOGAEV: Well, that leads me to my really, the big question, which is by the time I did get to the end of the book, I felt like, “Wait a second. Maybe Marlowe changed everything for England and helped usher it into the early modern period, not Shakespeare.”

GREENBLATT: That is what I want to claim, Barbara. I want to claim that… of course, one can always and one is always exaggerating that these things happen for ten thousand reasons, not for one reason. But that Marlowe was a crucial figure. Actually, much more crucial figure in this period than Shakespeare.

If Shakespeare had been murdered—thank god he wasn’t—in 1593. He’s exactly the same age as Marlowe. They were both born in 1564. If Shakespeare had been murdered at that point, we wouldn’t actually be thinking very much about Shakespeare. He would be the author of the Henry VI plays and of Titus Andronicus. So, basta finito.

But Marlowe had broken through the wall that had been built. The wall of fear, the wall of repression and censorship that had been built around creative writing in the 16th century.

Marlowe was not alone in this. But it was Marlowe, certainly in the public sphere, in the sphere of the theater, in the world of love poetry, who had cracked this wall.

Then Shakespeare, as it were, walks through the crack over Marlowe’s dead body into a much more remarkable, much freer, and much more creative world.

BOGAEV: But carried so much of Marlowe with him, right?

GREENBLATT: Yeah, I think Shakespeare thought about Marlowe a lot. They knew—certainly knew each other. And they almost certainly both worked together to write Henry VI Part Two and Three. But this is…Shakespeare and Marlowe were working side by side.

Shakespeare has an incredibly good eye for what is going on in Marlowe. It was a terrible experience—as Robert Green who called Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow,” in this period understood. It was a terrible thing to be copied by Shakespeare because Shakespeare would always do the copy better than you.

But Marlowe writes Tamburlaine. Shakespeare writes the Henry II plays. Maybe that’s not particularly better, in fact, not better at all. Marlowe writes Jew of Malta. Shakespeare writes Merchant of Venice. Marlowe writes Edward II Shakespeare writes, Richard II. Marlowe writes Hero and Leander. Shakespeare writes Venus in Adonis.

And you could tease out the fact that Shakespeare is looking, watching, working with what Marlowe has done. And in many ways, doing it better. Not in every way, but in many ways, figuring out from what Marlowe has done, what he can do with this extraordinary inventiveness of his doomed contemporary.

And Shakespeare was extraordinarily daring in his way. But also, figured out how to avoid the form of daring that led Marlowe to that inn at Deford, and to his fatal dinner.

BOGAEV: That’s a thin line to walk. Okay. What are we going to talk about next? Or who? What is left, Steven? You’ve already written about Sir Walter Raleigh.

GREENBLATT: Everything is left. Come on. All of these things are left. No, it’s so much fun to think about this. These are inexhaustible works.

Now you began by teasing me about my long career. And what seems to me, amazing. Not about my career, but about the materials about which I’ve been thinking, is that they’re inexhaustible. That they keep rewarding you. They keep their freshness decade after decade, generation after generation.

So that, I never feel what poor Dr. Faustus feels at the beginning of his play, that I’ve reached the end. I feel I’m just at the beginning.

BOGAEV: Well, I’m so glad because then I can look forward to talking to you again. Thank you so much.

GREENBLATT: Thank you very much. Nice to talk to you.

———–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Stephen Greenblatt, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is out now from Norton.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Paige Sutherland in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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