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 23, 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 SWERVE, a tendentious, much argued-over social history of the Epicurean effect on Modernity

THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

My Review: De rerum natura was a long narrative poem expounding Epicurean philosophy that was written in the first century before the common era. I am told by those possessed of sufficient Latin fluency to appreciate it that it is beautiful. I am not possessed of that level of fluency, and to me it seemed agonizingly impenetrable and obscurantist.

But author Greenblatt, in this fascinating Pulitzer Prize-winning history and analysis of the poem and its influence on the world, focuses not on the merits of the poem but on the genesis, development, survival, and influence of De rerum natura, arguably the foundation text for the mental construct that you and I share, and that diverges widely from the mental construct of earlier times.

Why is this so? Because we accept a material explanation of the existence of things as our prevailing orthodoxy, even in the face of religious challenges to the primacy of logic and evidence and just plain good sense. It's down to Lucretius's poem's astounding clarity of thought, persuasiveness of rhetoric, and miraculous survival and rebirth.

What Greenblatt did was to provide a brief history of Epicurus, his actual philosophy, and the cultural currents that distorted and misrepresented his philosophy, together with the whys and wherefores of that misrepresentation. Then Lucretius, a shadowy figure whose biography is unknown to modern readers except for a calumny heaped on his memory by a man who did not know him and in fact lived centuries after his death, wrote in poetry...a form of expression not to Epicurus's taste or, in his opinion, a good and useful tool of communication, he preferring plain and simple and direct prose...broke down the Epicurean vision of the world, and argued in support of it. Greenblatt then traces the survival of manuscripts from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the resurgent interest in their contents during the run-up to the Renaissance, and the incalculably valuable role of obsessive individuals in hunting down, copying, and disseminating the surviving antique texts to a world then, as now, hungry for more and better and different views and experiences and thoughts and ideas.

I give this book a five-star rating because it has solved a problem of identity for me: I am, as Thomas Jefferson said before me, an Epicurean. Not the debased view held of that noble philosophy thanks to “Saint” Jerome, who in the course of ramming his ignorance-celebrating religion down the throats of humanity, hit on the perfect misstatement of Epicurus's actual materialist philosophy: Hedonism! Hedonism and vice and licentiousness and gluttony! The pursuit of pleasure can only mean these things, shouted Jerome, and the chorus of baying dogs was off after the fox.

We all know how that ends.

Chapter eight of The Swerve, ”The Way Things Are,” breaks out the point-by-point reality of Epicureanism, and is the prime motivating factor for my five-star rating. (In fact, I dislike Poggio Bracciolini, the discoverer of De rerum natura, quite intensely, and suspect that had I met him in life, I would have been repulsed by him.) I list here the bullet points Greenblatt is at pains to provide with clear, concise, and satisfying explication:

➢Everything is made of invisible particles. This is called “atomism.”
➢The elementary particles of matter...are eternal.
➢The elementary particles are infinite in number, but limited in shape and size.
➢All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
➢The universe has no creator or designer.
➢Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. (Another word for this is collision.)
➢The swerve is the source of free will. If there is no preordained pattern, how can there be a preordained result?
➢Nature ceaselessly experiments. Evolution by natural selection, anyone?
➢The universe was not created for or about humans.
➢Humans are not unique. We are animals, literally not figuratively, like all the others.
➢Human society began, not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
➢The soul dies. There is no afterlife.
➢Death is nothing to us. It is merely a fact. There is no personal component to death.
➢All organized religions are superstitious delusions. Religions are, invariably, cruel.
➢There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
➢The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
➢The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain, it is delusion.
➢Understanding the true nature of things generates deep wonder.

I have never seen in print or heard with my ears a clearer, more concise, or more complete statement of my own personal worldview than this. It rang me like a bell. It sounds like Lucretius was sitting inside my head and copying down my responses to the world. Plenty, plenty disagreement with my agreement to the author's position exists. A lot of it is very well-founded, well-argued, and possibly correct; I will not chime in on those weighty matters because I possess no credentials and no desire to argue. If all the book is worth, in the end, is simply explaining me to myself, I will still give it five stars.

In the brief explications Greenblatt attaches to the bullet points, he makes it clear that these ideas, while they never wholly vanished from the world, were seen by the dominant world-view as a challenge to the idiotic legendary nonsense that had come to replace them, and were thus strongly condemned, to the point of burning people alive as a punishment and a warning to others inclined to think for themselves, to view the world as it is instead of through a warped fantasy construct that demonstrably causes harm and pain and facilitates much evil-doing.

So on that basis...five stars, and a ringing huzzah, to Gentile Signor Poggio Bracciolini; to Greenblatt for digging deeply enough in the humus of scholarly debate and historical records to make these connections for us, in a less scholarly age than the Renaissance, to find and use for ourselves as we see fit (ie, to exercise the free will we've got); and to WW Norton for publishing the resultant text as an under-$30 course in humanism. I am also grateful to the Pulitzer Prize board for awarding this book its non-fiction encomium, and to the Catholic News Agency for remaining consistently wrong by grousing about the book's anti-Catholicism and misinterpretation of the Church's anti-intellectualism. It's kind of hard to misinterpret burning people at the stake, guys. Own up: Your religion requires ignorance and prefers stupidity in its adherents.

(And, while it isn't in the text, I feel this is the place to put Epicurus's refutation of the Problem of Pain that Christians have never refuted:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Pace C.S. Lewis, his answers fail at every fence.)

Books such as this one do nothing to enhance religion's role in human affairs. It is best avoided by those of a conventional religious bent.