A vibrant, modern biography of the writer, and suspected spy, Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s bolder, raunchier and more radical brother in arms, pen and ink.

LONDON, LATE 16^TH CENTURY. Townhouses quickly give way to overcrowded tenements and hovels; cobblestone lanes are filled with excrement and offal; bodies hang from gallows and severed heads are impaled on spikes for all to see. It’s a place of repression, suspicion, censorship, and violence – for London to become the scene of astonishing creativity and intellectual daring someone truly revolutionary had to break through the status quo.

ENTER CHRISTOPHER ‘KIT’ MARLOWE. A cobbler’s son from Canterbury with no connections, no resources, and no social standing, he’s an unlikely candidate for this role. But, having scrambled his way out of poverty and through a Cambridge education, he also enters London with nothing to lose. From inner city taverns to royal courts, Marlowe becomes a catalyst for change in the cultural landscape and a shadowy actor in the political one. By the time of his murder in 1593, the 29-year-old is the greatest and most revered playwright, poet, and rule-breaker of his time.

In Dark Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt uncovers the real Christopher Marlowe: his artistic ingenuity, riotous politics, and transgressive, ultimately doomed life. In so doing, he shows Marlowe to be not only the most genius of writers, to whom Shakespeare owes an enormous debt, but the mastermind who carried Elizabethan England out of the dark ages and into the light.