The Fascinatingly Interesting Short Life of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a Cobbler, Scholar, Spy, and Shakespeare’s Greatest Contemporary

I recently finished reading Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival (2025) by Stephan Greenblatt. Greenblatt is a professor of Renaissance Studies at Harvard and is the best-selling author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (2004). He is one of the best practitioners of new historicism, and as a literature student, you can’t walk 10 feet without hearing Greenblatt’s name. His historic research sheds light on the interesting and powerful life of Christopher Marlowe: poet, playwright, and translator. In Professor Greenblatt’s latest book, he immerses the reader in the late 16th century Elizabethan England–a world where what you said or wrote could get you jailed, tortured, or killed. The 16th century was a time when Catholicism and Protestantism were striving to be the supreme religion. Public executions and bear-baiting (a blood sport where dogs and bears fought each other) were the norm, and England was largely a place where what you said could get you killed. 

Greenblatt puts Marlowe in his historical circumstances where readers learn how his early upbringing in Canterbury, England led him to Cambridge University. Marlowe, the son of a cobbler, managed to earn a scholarship to attend Cambridge, where he received his BA and MA. At Cambridge, Marlowe mastered Latin and was rumored to have been recruited as a spy by her majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. This practice echoes techniques used by the CIA and MI6 today, recruiting the brightest thinkers at prestigious universities. Greenblatt takes us through England, where Marlowe’s genius led him to write influential works that inspired Shakespeare and others of the day.

Marlowe took great risks in his work, and it’s hard for us to imagine what kind of risks Marlowe took because today we have more artistic liberty. This was not the case in Marlowe’s Elizabethan world. This was a world where if you said an unpleasant word in a tavern about the ruler or the policies of the ruler, you could get arrested, have your ears or nose cut off, or even be killed. In the 16th century, there were spies everywhere listening to common people–not so much unlike how Siri and Alexa listen to our every word. 

You can imagine people of this time kept their heads down and their thoughts to themselves. However, within the book, readers learn that Marlowe managed to display his thoughts about religion, sexuality, and politics on the stage–a place where normally taboo topics were able to be explored. Marlowe pushed the boundaries of what could be said, whereas his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare, were not nearly as bold (which may explain why Shakespeare lived much longer). Marlowe said and depicted things that one wouldn’t normally say or display if they wanted to live a long, happy life. And well, Marlowe didn’t live very long; he was killed at the age of 29. Greenblatt’s book feeds on the speculation that Marlowe was most likely assassinated.

Greenblatt writes about Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine the Great (1587-88), written about one man’s meteoric rise to conquer the known world and crush the opposition. This was a play that the audience adored; they loved the idea that someone of low birth could conquer the known world. His other plays, such as Dr. Faustus (1592) and The Jew of Malta (1589-90), were also exceptionally popular. Marlowe was a pioneer on the stage; he wrote about corrupted power, the Devil, and of homoerotic lust. He proved to be a trailblazer, one who arguably set a path for Shakespeare to thrive.

Though Marlowe lived a short, but fascinating and interesting life, Greenblatt’s new book has shed a great light on the great Christopher Marlowe and the influences he’s had on literature and on our society today. When a culture looks to bring down and repress freedom of artistic expression, it takes a genius to break through the barriers of censorship. Marlowe is a worthy example of someone who breaks rules religiously, politically, and sexually. The human experience can’t be censored forever, and Marlowe was a brilliant and daring figure that was crazy enough to speak out and set English literature on a great path.