What is it​ we still want from Christopher Marlowe? To judge from their recent reception, it’s not his plays. Apart from Steven Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus in 2004 and Michael Boyd’s condensed Tamburlaine in 2014, there have been few outstanding Marlowe revivals in the 21st century, and his plays have been put on only in small venues. The second half of Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus led its audience through the centre of Chichester, where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of Samuel West’s Faustus was staged at the high altar. But since the first half of the play was staged in the Minerva Theatre, it still only played to a maximum of three hundred spectators per performance. Boyd’s Tamburlaine was mounted by the Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Centre in Brooklyn, which also has a capacity of three hundred. The Royal Shakespeare Company has staged a string of Marlowe productions over the last decade – Justin Audibert’s Jew of Malta (2015), Maria Aberg’s Dr Faustus (2016), Kimberley Sykes’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (2017), Daniel Raggett’s Edward II (2025) – but all were put on in an auditorium less than half the size of the main house, the adjoining Swan. As if further to underline the extent to which present-day theatrical taste is wary of Marlowe’s amphitheatre-filling mighty lines, even in the Swan, which has an audience capacity of around 450, the cast of Edward II was miked up.

That isn’t to say that Marlowe isn’t good box office any more: it’s just that the RSC finds it easier to sell seats for plays about Marlowe than plays by Marlowe. Soon after he had finished playing the title role in Edward II at the Swan, Daniel Evans directed a revival of Liz Duffy Adams’s Born with Teeth at Wyndham’s in the West End, with Ncuti Gatwa as Marlowe. First produced in Houston in 2022, Born with Teeth positions its Marlowe as the bad angel to a less worldly Shakespeare. Like other recent fictionalised Marlowes, this one, though proud of his humble origins, displays an aristocratic contempt for the credulous and the uncreative, with an admixture of Joe Orton and a dash of espionage. In Adams’s script the two playwrights complicate the mutual attraction developed while co-writing Henry VI by flirting with the possibility of betraying and/or killing each other, for reasons never satisfactorily explained by some clunky passages of political exposition. While their imagined relationship owes something to that between Mephistopheles and Faustus, the play’s intimate prose could hardly be further from Marlowe’s hyperbolic flash and thunder.

Marlowe has the odd distinction of being an acknowledged major playwright whose work disappeared for centuries, relegated from the mid-17th century until the 20th to the domains of antiquarian reprints and scholarly footnotes. His modern literary influence, such as it is, has been largely transmitted via his impact on Milton and Shakespeare: in 1896 George Bernard Shaw could still suggest that the only reason for reading Marlowe (whom he dismissed as ‘the true Elizabethan blank verse beast … wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion’) was in order better to understand Shakespeare’s lack of originality. Even Marlowe’s spectacular debut, Tamburlaine (c.1587), a play that every writer for the stage, including Marlowe himself, was trying to imitate for at least the next five years, was practically unknown by the time of the Civil War. It is true that Tamburlaine-like barbarian conquerors, and even versions of Tamburlaine himself, did return to the stage after the playhouses reopened in 1660, but the protagonists of Restoration heroic tragedy tend to speak in rhyming couplets rather than blank verse, and instead of relentlessly pursuing an amoral monomania they pause to debate conflicts between love and honour with a level of hair-splitting nuance that would do credit to Henry James. Meanwhile, Marlowe’s breakthrough blockbuster and its author were forgotten, as Charles Saunders’s indignant claim for the originality of his own play Tamerlane the Great (1681) makes clear:

I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock-Pit Play, going under the name of the Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, which how good it is, any one may Iudge by its obscurity, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly, cou’d call to Remembrance, so far, that I believe that whoever was the Author, he might e’en keep it to himself secure from invasion, or Plagiary.

Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane, Bevil Higgons’s The Generous Conqueror (both 1701) and Handel’s opera Tamerlano (1724) are all equally ignorant of Marlowe’s work on the same subject.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was not staged professionally again until Tyrone Guthrie’s production at the Old Vic in 1951; The Jew of Malta similarly vanished (save for one experimental revival by Edmund Kean, a star Shylock, in 1818) until Clifford Williams’s RSC production of 1964. Doctor Faustus survived in the popular consciousness for longer, though with its author’s name usually absent, dwindling in one cultural direction into lowbrow puppet and harlequinade adaptations, and in the other helping, uncredited, to inspire Goethe’s vast and high-minded dramatic poem Faust and its operatic derivatives, in favour of which it was ignored for most of the 19th century. There have in effect been only two periods when Marlowe’s plays have regularly been seen in large playhouses, both of about the same duration: the age of the original Tamburlaine, Edward Alleyn, from the 1580s until the 1620s, and the age of latter-day heroic actors – Orson Welles, Donald Wolfit, Richard Burton and Albert Finney – from the 1930s until the 1970s.

What mainly kept Marlowe himself alive in the popular imagination was the resonance between his sole English chronicle play, Edward II, with its explicit presentation of a sexual relationship between the king and his favourite, Piers Gaveston, and the rumours about Marlowe’s own sexuality put about by a renegade Catholic priest in the weeks leading up to Marlowe’s death in 1593. According to BL Harley MS.6848 ff.185-6 (known as the ‘Baines note’ and headed ‘A note Containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly Concerning his Damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of gods word’), Marlowe had stated on at least one occasion ‘That all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles.’

There is a whole study to be written about when and for whom this attributed viewpoint came to count in Marlowe’s favour rather than against him, and how his widespread image in popular culture as an excitingly shady gay martyr came to replace the 17th century’s sporadic treatments of his short life as the cautionary tale of a blasphemer justly punished. Thomas Dabbs made a good start in Reforming Marlowe (1991) by looking at the way the Victorians and the Decadents rediscovered Marlowe as an aesthete and a deviant (Havelock Ellis, for instance, identified Marlowe as a ‘psychosexual hermaphrodite’ in Sexual Inversion, published in 1897). One key turning point came in the late 1960s, when Toby Robertson revived Edward II for the Prospect Theatre Company. The production, starring Ian McKellen and James Laurenson, was broadcast by the BBC in 1970 and featured the first gay kiss ever shown on British TV. The play had visited New York the previous year, only a few months after the Stonewall riots, where it had immediately been recognised as powerfully topical: a rather guarded review in Time described Edward II as ‘a play by a homosexual about a king who was a homosexual’ and praised it as ‘a better play about that too-fashionable subject than anything overt or covert recently on or off Broadway … sensuous, unpleasant, funny, guilt-obsessed and intensely masculine’. Even the fact that the play helped to inspire the establishment of the debauched Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford in 1977 has failed to dim its reputation.

Disappointingly,​ Stephen Greenblatt’s new study leaves the question of why and how Edward II still matters well alone, and his treatment of Marlowe’s sexuality is surprisingly under-informed by recent scholarship on queer identities in early modern culture. Then again, Greenblatt’s scattergun subtitle – ‘The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe’ – leaves it unclear whether this is a biography at all, or whether Dark Renaissance wishes to content itself with offering an account of Marlowe’s historical context and an appreciation of his literary talent. It’s a real difficulty for Greenblatt that there is already a highly readable and scrupulously accurate account of Marlowe’s life in its historical context, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), which no new archival discoveries have rendered obsolete.* It is an even bigger difficulty that there is a similarly unsuperseded historically contextualised introduction to Marlowe’s literary achievements, even more readable and still in print, and that it was written by Greenblatt himself. The thirty pages of ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’, the fifth chapter of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), remain the best modern starting point for an understanding of Marlowe’s canon and its place in the world that produced it. Shrewdly detailed, sharing in the wit of Marlowe’s onstage cruelties even while it demonstrates the way they both partook of and implicitly criticised the religious and colonial cruelties of his society, this chapter is many people’s favourite part of a book that has been on every serious reading list in Renaissance studies for almost half a century. Summing up, Greenblatt admires above all ‘how recklessly courageous Marlowe must have been: to write as if the admonitory purpose of literature were a lie, to invent fictions only to create, and not to serve God or the state; to fashion lines that echo in the void, that echo more powerfully because there is nothing but a void’.

On the plays and poems, Greenblatt’s new book has little of substance to add to this, save various attempts to tie some of Marlowe’s characters to figures he may have known. But it doesn’t enhance The Jew of Malta to think of it as a (very) oblique warning to Sir Walter Raleigh, or to find in Doctor Faustus an occasional glimpse of Simon Forman or John Dee or Henry Percy (the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland). Given the ‘desire to speak with the dead’ to which Greenblatt hubristically admitted at the start of his follow-up to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), it’s a shame that while writing Dark Renaissance he didn’t recognise more of himself in Faustus instead of pursuing these minor historical parallels. Faustus, after all, was an academic who set out subversively to stretch the boundaries of human knowledge, but wound up squandering his talents and his allotted time performing feats of necromancy in order to divert successive potentates even wealthier than the families of Greenblatt’s cohorts of Harvard students.

Having published his brilliant and enthusiastic chapter about Marlowe’s thrillingly, defiantly nihilistic plays, Greenblatt is left in Dark Renaissance with the much less attractive task of describing what we know about Marlowe’s life. He does what he can to nerve himself for the work by making some even larger opening claims for Marlowe’s significance – ‘In the course of his restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and his stupendous achievements, Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance’ – even though it was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, not Marlowe, who pioneered English blank verse as a medium for drama, two decades before Tamburlaine (in Gorboduc, first performed in 1561), and even though most recent cultural historians have suggested that the English literary Renaissance began before Marlowe was born, during the reign of Mary I, with the publication in 1557 of the poetry anthology Tottel’s Miscellany.

Greenblatt alleges nonetheless that before Marlowe little entertainment worthy of the name was available to the English except the public burning of heretics, variegated with an afternoon spent bull-baiting, and that suddenly with the advent of Marlovian drama new creative possibilities opened for scepticism, dissent and sheer dash. Whether this convinces or not, Greenblatt is soon bogged down in the squalor of what little we know about a playwright who appears to have been recruited by the intelligence services as a student at Cambridge and who, for all his conspicuous success as a scriptwriter, never seems to have succeeded in coming in from the cold before his services were permanently dispensed with at the point of a dagger in Deptford on 30 May 1593.

Unhelpfully,​ Greenblatt works not from the cradle to the grave but from the weeks immediately preceding Marlowe’s death, back to the cradle, then on through Marlowe’s education and literary career, and only then, eventually, back to the circumstances leading up to his stabbing. He starts with the murky business of the Dutch Church Libel. This doggerel attack on immigrant workers, pinned to the wall of a London cemetery on 5 May 1593, which is laced with allusions to Marlowe’s works and signed ‘per Tamburlaine’, is so badly written that it isn’t obvious whether it was intended as a genuine piece of xenophobic abuse, a simulated piece of xenophobic abuse designed to implicate Marlowe as a xenophobic abuser, or a satire on Marlowe and on xenophobic abuse. Greenblatt insisted on its inclusion in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and he does what he can here to explain why it might have been a factor in the warrant issued for Marlowe’s arrest shortly after the libel appeared.

The trouble with this ploy is that it means we meet Marlowe the questionable intelligence asset and his even dodgier associates long before we meet Marlowe the poet, and have already become mired in speculation over whose unreliable accusation and/or confession can be trusted before we have really been shown why we might care either way. The back cover of Dark Renaissance advertises the book by hailing Marlowe not only as a ‘poor boy’, a ‘dark star’, a ‘transgressor’ and a ‘genius’ but also as a ‘spy’, but the sad fact is that the word that should be used is not ‘spy’ but ‘informer.’ Greenblatt takes a disdainful line with Marlowe’s colleagues in this sphere, referring at one point to a ‘reptile named David Jones, who was trolling for information about priests in London prisons’ and soon afterwards to the ‘dubious characters who trolled many of the streets of London’.

But the man who probably supplemented his meagre scholarship at Cambridge by making friends with closet Catholic fellow students and then betraying them to the authorities, who helped another writer-cum-nark, Thomas Watson, to kill the innkeeper William Bradley in September 1589, who at one time shared rooms with the Catholic priest turned Protestant source Richard Baines, and who was shopped by Baines on two occasions (once, in Holland in 1592, for counterfeiting coins, and back in London for holding the damnable opinions set out in the Baines note), does not emerge from this book as much less reptilian or dubious.

As in the case of John le Carré né David Cornwell, it may be a good selling point for a writer to have it known that he was once a professional spy, but, if revealed, the actual details of his work may give readers pause. In his novels, the mature le Carré personified the agonised liberal conscience of his country, horrified at the successive betrayals forced on even those with its best interests and noblest aspirations at heart, but that doesn’t make us feel any less queasy when we learn that the young Cornwell’s earliest intelligence assignment was to join left-wing student societies at Oxford in order to provide information to MI5 about his fellow members.

Marlowe, similarly, may have been able to stand above worldly and spiritual power alike as a writer, loftily playing off rival religions and empires as so many interchangeable masks for human megalomania and appetite, but what in the works of Marlowe the dramatist can be celebrated as free-thinking irony could in the life of Marlowe the informer find expression only as sordid equivocation. We may like to enjoy imagining a Marlowe who was briefly able to live out a daring radicalism, a secret agent for all the freedoms we now most wish to cherish, someone who spoke his desires too authentically for the establishment not to have him silenced, but that fantasy is a wishful back-formation from the ‘high astounding terms’ (to quote the prologue to Tamburlaine) of the plays themselves. As Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically dismal life of the man who wrote them.