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Dark Renaissance

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius.

From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the cultural darkness and into the light.

In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – which to him is a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism.

What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of many others, including his youthful collaborator William Shakespeare. By the time of his murder in a Deptford tavern in 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe will be the most celebrated dramatist of his time.

Stephen Greenblatt grippingly reconstructs the involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his masterpieces about power and its costs. And he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

Dark Renaissance is a scintillating combination of narrative flair, historical insight and literary criticism about a writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of creativity.

’A rigorous and sparkling exploration of what makes an artist …. Essential and addictive reading’ MAGGIE O'FARRELL

© Stephen Greenblatt 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

What a magnificently thrilling read ... Dark Renaissance is a dazzling account of a dazzling life
Stephen Fry
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'Farrell
This 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
As 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 Gregory
A terrific read … as propulsive as that of any spy novel … A thrilling, twisty tale that brilliantly captures the horror and the possibilities of that lost, crepuscular world
New York Times
A great book ... Riveting and evocative
Daily Express
An unforgettable literary biographical tour de force. Almost single-handed, [Greenblatt] has curated a rehabilitation of Marlowe's reputation as the greatest rival, collaborator and exact contemporary of the glover's boy from Stratford ... Greenblatt nails the playwright's staggering originality ... [A] brilliant portrait of a strangely modern, tragic figure, who's 'fatal genius' became the catalyst for this earthquake in English literature and culture
Independent
In 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
Dazzling … vivid … Greenblatt provides a gripping narrative … which does indeed at times read like something out of Le Carré … impeccable
Observer
A brilliant and revelatory life of Christopher Marlowe. Dark Renaissance is a gripping, fascinating portrait, seasoned with Stephen Greenblatt’s superb scholarship. Unsurpassable
William Boyd
Author Stephen Greenblatt
Narrator Edoardo Ballerini
Duration 9 hours and 48 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529977677
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Biography: historical, political and military, European history: medieval period, middle ages, Social and cultural history
Availability AU, GB, IE

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