DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, I'm picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry—a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus—dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world—involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Swerve was a life-defining read for me in 2012. In it, Author Greenblatt took a horrendously complicated, unpleasantly difficult classical Latin poem about atomism and made it into a living document that gave form to a way of thinking that defines modernity in the 21st century.

If anyone can make a sea of "maybe"s and "perhaps"es into a life story, it is him. And he does.

Kit Marlowe is of enduring interest to many of us for lots of 21st-century reasons, including his apparent sexual interest in other men, his apparent involvement in anti-catholic espionage, and his very obvious murder in what we think was a tavern brawl before he turned thirty; but there's enough uncertainty about all of it that one can't pin him down. His plays survive him; Tamburlaine the Great and The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus shocked then, shock now four hundred years later, and likely delight in their transgressiveness to the same degree though for very different reasons in both ages. Marlowe knew how to use the prejudices of the world he wrote to entertain to deliver pointed messages well beyond the obvious scope of his story.

A provocateur's work is never done. He can still raise a rage-filled shout.

I think that would delight Kit Marlowe. I know he's not as revered as Shakespeare, his contemporary; but that's down to chance, the unpredictable lightning of luck (and probably Shakespeare's longer life thus larger surviving body of work). It could also be that Marlowe's authorship of The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, making the homoerotic subtext of male loving friendship that was so celebrated in Elizabethan times into blaring text, had a little something to do with it. Homophobia is an evergreen form of hate, powerfully corrosive to even the most wonder-inspiring talents' gifts. If the ewww-ick response is your default response to gay sex, why are you thinking about it?

Imponderables like this float through my mind as I read this fantabulous work of stitchery that sews a bit here, a scrap there, none of them large, into a very interesting if unclear portrait of a man whose unapologetic purpose was to confront and discomfit the world he so obviously saw in perfect clarity, then whipped out his microscope to look more closely at its flaws.

Dark Renaissance is well titled...the renaissance of a dark figure, the Renaissance's dark side considered then and now, the renaissance of darkness in Marlowe's lifetime and his life and times...layers, layers like an onion, gleaming, and making one tear up as the essential oils of a man's very skin hit your eyes.

THE GHOST THEATRE, power to the alt-Elizabethan London lovers!

THE GHOST THEATRE
MAT OSMAN
The Overlook Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wild and hallucinatory reimagining of Elizabethan London, with its bird worshippers, famed child actors, and the Queen herself; a dazzling historical novel about theatre, magic, and the dangers of all-consuming love

London, 1601—a golden city soon to erupt in flames. Shay is a messenger-girl, falconer, and fortune teller who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city’s fabled Blackfriars Theatre, where a cast of press-ganged boys perform for London’s gentry. When the pair meet, Shay falls in love with the performances—and with Nonesuch himself. As their bond deepens, they create the Ghost Theatre, an underground troupe that performs fantastical plays in the city’s hidden corners. As their fame grows the troupe fans the flames of rebellion among the city’s outcasts, and the lovers are drawn into the dark web of the Elizabethan court. Embattled, with the plague on the rise throughout the country, the Queen seeks a reading from Shay, a moment which unleashes chaos not only in Shay’s life, but across the whole of England too.

A fever-dream full of prophecy and anarchy, gutter rats and bird gods, Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is a wild ride from the rooftops of Elizabethan London to its dark underbelly, and a luminous meditation on double lives and fluid identities and the bewitching, transformative nature of art and power, with a bittersweet love affair at its heart. Set amid the vividly rendered England of Osman’s imagination and written in rich, seductive prose, The Ghost Theatre will have readers under its spell from the very first page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mat Osman, brother of Richard, tries his hand at fantasy noveling...outta the park, buddy, what a genre debut! Co-founder of Suede, a quintessential 90s Brit-emo-boy band, decides to write something not centered in the music culture. Great decision! Tackling the end of Elizabethan London, adding a layer of fantastical performance art to it, made this a book I approached with some trepidation. His earlier novel, The Ruins, was a powerful read set in a modern world heightened but still mudane. It was imperfect in its characters' grapplings with desire, the desire to be one's self, the desire to be valued and still free, but it was a fine read.

Here we get the thing I missed in The Ruins. Shay is a cross-dressing woman (it's safer in this world to present as a man) who falls in with young actor Nonesuch (recalling as you do that female roles in Elizabethan theaters were played by crossdressing boys) after her bird-worshipping cult is disrupted by violence. Violence, societal down to interpersonal, is the refrain of this operatic tale of escape, concealment, and ultimately discovery. Violence rules this novel. Shay, rescued from violence, and Nonesuch, accustomed to its sexual expression, decide to become performers of stories that aren't about the great and good. They tell stories like the one they've just shared in which they stave off rage and hate, but pay a price in the process. They know not to try to compete for center stage with those stories of the great and good. They take to the corners, they lurk in the shadows among those like themselves who, stunned, see themselves in the stories the Ghost Theatre duo are telling.

The power of seeing yourself in a story is hard to overstate.

Soon the pair, intimately connecting to the hoi polloi of their class, are attracting crowds. That means they're also attracting notice. The great and good, the primacy, inescapability, of whose stories drove the pair to rebel, are suddenly attentive and making them very much in fashion. They're getting noticed by the elite who never knew they were alive before.

Ask a gay person outed in heteroland, a Black person in whiteworld, a trans person anywhere, how that feels.

Passionately pursuing Truth is, I think, only safe for the young and powerless. They have little to lose. They have no kind of perspective, but this irresistible draw to honesty and truth and self-realization is the road traveled to acquire a lifetime's supply of that missing perspective. This is a subtractive, even divisive process. Shay and Nonesuch ignite passion and create magic with their Ghost Theatre. Fire metaphors for growing up, for attaining wisdom, are apt: annealed in flames of their own ignition, the entire troupe burn in the brightness of fame's flames.

When the bill comes due, the prices (plural) are high; the perspective, one is left to hope in the ending that gives no closure, they've earned will keep them safer than they are during the story.

I can't get to a fifth star because the way we move, bob, and weave in this narrative is sufficiently non-linear as to make the journey circular in affect. Has anything fundamental, or even just more than cosmetic, changed?

I'm not sure; I'm only sure I love the Aviscultans, and the Ghost Theatre, and the honest portrayal of the power of Love among the powerlessness of Others to make a life of struggle feel as though it's a Quest, a magical, important affirmation of Life.

Sadly it never really is, or not for long. That knowlege, though, is mine, not the characters'. Beautiful-sounding, complicated, and still the story's in the end slighter than it feels while you are within it.

THIS MARLOWE, an historical novel of espionage, treason, suborned honor, and gay love

THIS MARLOWE
MICHELLE BUTLER HALLETT
Goose Lane Editions
$22.95 paperback edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1593. Queen Elizabeth reigns from the throne while two rival spymasters Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex plot from the shadows. Their goal? To control succession upon the aged queen's death. The man on which their schemes depend? Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler's son from Canterbury who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright. Now that the plague has closed theatres, Marlowe must resume the work for which he was originally recruited: intelligence and espionage.

Fighting to stay one step ahead in a dizzying game that threatens the lives of those he holds most dear, Marlowe comes to question his allegiances and nearly everything he once believed. As tensions mount, he is tossed into an impossible bind. He must choose between paths that lead either to wretched guilt and miserable death or to love and honour.

An historical novel with a contemporary edge, This Marlowe measures the weight of the body politic, the torment of the flesh, and the state of the soul.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kit, as the narrator of this delight of a tale thinks of himself, is (all unknowing, as are we all) approaching the end of his life. We know this so we're listening on on his thoughts, viewing his activities, with an odd finality that lends them extra poignance: seeing a man's ego up close is often off-putting, but seeing it knowing the trap it's led him into, knowing it's not in him to see the trap and escape it...very intense, and in Author Hallett's capable hands, deeply moving.

This Marlowe is fleshing out the sketchy official record of Kit's entanglement in Elizabeth Tudor's complex web of overlapping espionage networks domestic and foreign. Stories are always built on some rock of reality or another, they can't nucleate otherwise (all y'all blocked novelists make a note of that). Choosing Marlowe's fairly scanty official records as a launching point for the fleshed-out myth of the playwright's life was savvy. Author Hallett succeeds in stitching the myth, the records, and the ideas that bridge them into a tapestry. It would be easy to make an attractive quilt for any author of sensitivity. Author Hallett unpicks each existing strand of story-stuff, then reweaves them into a satisfying whole with an almost Biblical sweep.

That whole is not a sweetness-and-light New Testament scene, but a sturm-und-drang Old Testament screamfest. There is intensity in any Tudor era story, it was a paranoid police state doing its awful worst to scare people into surface conformity via constant surveillance and disproportionate punishment for disobedience. Their external enemies were determinedly sabotaging the regime's efforts to establish a new normal, to refashion the rituals of daily life to reflect a manufactured consensus that was different from the old one (therefore better, obviously). Kit's incredible rise depended on that new consensus succeding. His loyalty was assumed to be absolute.

Many of y'all have heard of Marlowe solely in relation to Shakespeare...lots of you are now picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love when thinking of Kit Marlowe. *swoon* so pretty *ahem* So Mrlowe was Shakespeare's role model in the sense that he was more successful as a playwright when Shakespeare was a tyro. Marlowe began life as a cobbler's son, somehow becoming a university graduate in a time when not even that many noblemen's sons could claim a degree. Then as now, there are those whose innate gifts gain them access to education and the rewards thereof...and the notice from the Powers That Be. Marlowe's life was charmed, as Author Hallett's storytelling shows us, and wasn't he just the smartest manipulator of the system! Didn't he just make it his business to know and be known to the greatest and goodest he could reach! If they needed an intelligent pair of eyes to suss out the secrets, the plans, the sort of things a man would say to a pretty, talented, intelligent, pliant catamite...well, Kit lived to serve.

Never for a moment believing that service would not buy loyalty and protection.

It's a story that never stops being relevant, isn't it...and one we would all do well to heed in parlous times.