This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe

Potted bio of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler.  He impressed someone and became a scholarship student first at the cathedral school and then at Cambridge, where he stayed until receiving his MA.  At the university he was almost certainly recruited into Her Majesty’s Secret Service which at that point did not involve fighting SMERSH but rather infiltrating and betraying secret English Catholics, some in the pay of the Spanish who were, in fact, planning to invade England.  After Cambridge, he wrote a handful of plays that introduced numerous innovations into the new English theater, hung out with a number of young noblemen, and appeared in a number of legal records, many of them in pretty odd circumstances, until the final one, the inquest of his murder, when, in the company of some truly suspicious characters, he was stabbed in the eye with his own knife.

Stephen Greenblatt’s new 285-page biography of Christopher Marlowe has a gimmicky title – Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival – and an ugly cover, but is otherwise quite good.  I read lots of biographies of artists, but in magazine article, not book, form, so I doubt I would have read this one if I were not reading Marlowe’s plays right now.  But Greenblatt has been thinking about Marlowe for over forty years, from his earliest research.  I should see what his Marlowe looks like.

Greenblatt’s Marlowe looks like a collection of texts.  A founder of New Historicism, Greenblatt has a more expansive idea of which texts are useful than the older New Critics, but he is still a literary critic whose main tool is close reading.  He, and other scholars, are just applying the technique to court documents and the Cambridge buttery book as well as plays and poems.

And are there ever some strange texts.

Much of what we know about his life and opinions comes from the reports of spies and informants or from testimony extracted by torture.  (7)

Greenblatt is on page 7, warning me that the evidence about major aspects of Marlowe’s life is quite poor, full of gaps and riddles and unreliable narrators.

Poor Thomas Kyd.  Greenblatt begins with Kyd’s 1593 arrest and torture, which perhaps killed him within a year, essentially because he and Marlowe had been roommates (living quarters, or maybe an office?) a couple of years earlier.  Once released, he write “two desperate letters” (18-9) to one of the investigators begging him to intercede with Kyd’s patron, the powerful Lord Strange.  These letters are the most direct evidence of Marlowe’s ideas, including his blasphemous atheism and his homosexuality.  They may by accurate; they may be self-preserving slander.  Who knows?  Greenblatt does not pretend to know.

The records of the investigation into Marlowe’s death, discovered only in 1923, have the same problems.  We have the scene in great detail, but all from the testimony of Marlowe’s killers.  They said it was self-defense.  What else would they say.  Greenblatt presents a number of different scenarios proposed by different scholars and ends with the one “[c]loser to my view” (280), as strong as his language gets.

Greenblatt is not really making any kind of case about what happened to Marlowe or what he was doing in many of the strange incidents in which he was involved.  He presents the work of other scholars and when necessary casts his vote.  Not only is this intellectually honest, but it means he tells me not one story about Marlowe but all of the stories.

With so little evidence, Greenblatt organizes Marlowe’s life around subjects where he, due to the work of other scholars, knows something.  For example, Marlowe was involved with Sir Walter Raleigh and his circle, so that is a chapter, Raleigh and friends.  An enormous amount of research has been done on Elizabethan espionage, with some remarkable surviving archival material, none of which mentions Marlowe specifically.  The amount of research on Elizabethan education, hoping to somehow explain Shakespeare, is extraordinary, and pulled together smartly by Greenblatt.

The headmaster of Marlowe’s Canterbury school had one of the largest private, non-aristocratic, libraries in England.  An inventory of his library has, amazingly, survived.  It is full of books that Marlowe read somewhere.

Students in the school are unlikely to have ordinarily been granted access to it.  Marlowe’s biographers  are united in doubting that their subject, only recently admitted to the school, got anywhere close.  (48)

This is one of the few places where Greenblatt argues a point.  The Harvard professor thinks: of course the headmaster let his most brilliant student read, or even borrow, some of his books.  “But from time to time he almost certainly encountered students who made the whole enterprise seem worthwhile” (49).  Some of Greenblatt’s evidence here is asking what he would do.   “This may all be a fantasy.”  But the rest of the evidence is in the poems and plays.  Marlowe gets so much done so quickly.  He entered the school late, so he is fifteen here.  Fourteen years later, he is dead.

Greenblatt expresses his frustration most directly in a chapter in a sense about Marlowe’s contribution to the Henry VI plays, but really about his relationship with William Shakespeare.  Since we know nothing, Greenblatt turns to fiction.  “Then – to continue this imaginary conversation – Marlowe might have looked quizzically at Shakespeare and ventured on the subject of love” (144-5).  I am sure there are some cases where Greenblatt reaches past the evidence without knowing it, but I thought he was always telling me what he was doing clearly enough.

Highly recommended to anyone sympathetic to a historicized approach to literature.