ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The new book "Dark Renaissance" is a true story of spies, counterfeiters, betrayal and murder. It's about the short life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's greatest rival. And the world of this book has some uncanny parallels with the present day. The author is Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stephen Greenblatt. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
STEPHEN GREENBLATT: Thank you, Ari.
SHAPIRO: You've been obsessed with Marlowe for decades. You tried to convince the people who wrote the movie "Shakespeare In Love" to make a film about Marlowe instead of about Shakespeare. Why does he fascinate you so much?
GREENBLATT: He had a strange, disturbing, powerful life, and he was a great creator. He actually paved the way for Shakespeare and for much that we actually care about in the culture of our language and our civilization. But he was a strange person and lost - a lost soul, died at the age of 29. So it's a fugitive life, a life hard to get one's hands on but full of mystery.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GREENBLATT: But also full of excitement.
SHAPIRO: The mysteries make this book so thrilling. But before we get to those, what do you mean when you say he paved the way not only for Shakespeare but for so much of what we value in our culture today?
GREENBLATT: Christopher Marlowe was born into a world that was heavily censored in terms of anything anyone could dare to say, let alone to write. If you mumbled unpleasant words about the ruler or about the policies of the state, you could get your ears cut off, you could get your nose sliced, or very likely you could get yourself killed. That kept people's heads down, as you can imagine.
SHAPIRO: And then comes along Marlowe, who, as you write, said out loud what no one who wanted to live a long life would even venture to whisper.
GREENBLATT: Absolutely. Marlowe took crazy risks. We don't fully understand those levels of risk now because we can say, basically, in our society, what we want about the people - at least for the moment - the people who are running our country. But that was not the case in Marlowe's world. And Marlowe, about the religious settlement in his country and about the political settlement, said things that you wouldn't say if you wanted to live a long, happy life.
SHAPIRO: Why? How? How did he get away with it? When the rule was don't speak out, how did he flourish and become such a huge success by violating that cardinal rule?
GREENBLATT: It's a good question, Ari. The first thing to say is he didn't flourish for very long.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GREENBLATT: He went to spend the day with - evidently, with some people he knew when he was 29-years-old, and he ended up dead. But before then, he broke through by exploiting in a absolutely brilliant way - the first great public entertainment industry in English culture, which was the theater. And in the theater, as opposed to outside, you could actually say - as Shakespeare followed Marlowe and understood, you could begin to say things that couldn't be said elsewhere. And Marlowe broke through with a play about a poor-born peasant, Tamburlaine, who conquered the whole world...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GREENBLATT: ...Who brought kings to their knees. And he excited thousands of people, ordinary people who went to the theater in the 1580s and saw this spectacle of a nobody who conquers the world.
SHAPIRO: Or there's a play like "Doctor Faustus," which, before Marlowe took it on, was a pretty straightforward morality tale of what not to do. And then Marlowe's version comes along, and it looks enticing and sexy and almost homoerotic, with all kinds of themes and nuances that were unheard of in this story that had existed for a very long time before his play.
GREENBLATT: You're absolutely right, Ari. He took a rather cheesy account of a German magician, and he turned it into a fable that has remained actually central in a way to us of what it means to make a deal with the devil in order to escape the little box that you were in. Marlowe ends the play by having Faustus, as in a good morality tale, dragged down to the devil - to Hell. But before that, he has the character, Dr. Faustus explore, the world - the world inside, the world outside and, as you've suggested, also the sexual world. This is a play insofar - we don't remember. Most of us won't have any idea about this play, except we might remember, was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers...
SHAPIRO: Of course.
GREENBLATT: ...About Helen of Troy. This is the kind of thing that Christopher Marlowe did, and as they say, transformed popular culture, English culture, our culture.
SHAPIRO: I went into reading this book thinking, how can there be anything new to say about somebody who lived in the 1500s? And your research blew my mind. For example, you make the case that he was a spy, recruited while studying for his master's degree, by looking at cafeteria records from 1584 to figure out when Marlowe was on campus and how much he was spending. Explain that for us.
GREENBLATT: Well, first, I should say - quickly say, Ari, that people have pored over those records now for several decades.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
GREENBLATT: They're extremely hard to read. But, yeah, the university kept track of the students' consumption of beer and food. And you can follow, actually, whether he was there in - at Cambridge when he was supposed to be. And in fact, that issue came up when he tried to get his degree because the university authorities said he wasn't there for long stretches of time, and they refused to give him his degree. And then a month later, a letter was sent, signed by the most important people in the kingdom, on behalf of a nobody - the son of a shoemaker from Canterbury - saying, her majesty would be unhappy that someone who's done the state such important service should not be given his degree. Give him his degree. And guess what? They gave him his degree.
And there's other evidence for this, as well, that he had been recruited, as, after all, there's a tradition of going to universities and recruiting people for the CIA or for MI6 in England for the spy service. And that's evidently what happened with Marlowe in a time in which this is - these are in the years leading up to the Spanish Armada, in which spying was a very both dangerous and highly important game.
SHAPIRO: I said that there are some uncanny parallels between Marlowe's time and ours. What do you think we can learn about the moment we live in now by studying the time that he lived in?
GREENBLATT: Well, we might learn that even when a culture looks like it's shut down, and we look around in our world at places in which there's ferocious repression for the freedom of expression, there will come along someone who will break through, someone brilliant enough, daring enough, crazy enough to speak out. Human beings can't actually, for long periods of time, be shut in the tight boxes of censorship. And Marlowe is the supreme example of the rule-breaker in every way - politically, religiously, sexually - who breaks through the enclosures that authoritarian regimes build around free expression.
SHAPIRO: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stephen Greenblatt. His latest book is "Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times And Fatal Genius Of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival." It's about the life of Christopher Marlowe. Professor Greenblatt, what a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.
GREENBLATT: Thank you, Ari.
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