Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Myth of Literary Genius - The Atlantic

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If you close your eyes and picture an artistic genius, chances are that the portrait will be framed by a Romantic ideal that took shape 200 years ago: an artist dedicated solely to his (almost always his) muse and transgressive appetites, breaking his era’s rules both moral and artistic, remaking society with his art. But this vision of genius is a poor fit for many great artists, and it tends to obscure what makes them and their work special. Take William Shakespeare, who is often portrayed as a carouser, downing pints while exchanging barbs with his fellow writers, cheating on his wife with both men and women, passionately engaging his quill to reimagine the very nature of the human being.<br>The little we know of Shakespeare’s life calls most of this into question. The man wrote two plays a year for much of his career, worked as an actor, and probably helped manage the theater company in which he was a major shareholder. His work was more conservative when it came to violence and sex than that of his peers. He did not invent any of the major components of his dramaturgy, and he almost always adapted existing source material. He invested wisely, worked hard to attain the rank of gentleman, and retired in his beloved hometown. If Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson wrote, the “soul of the age,” that may be in part because his life was nearly as conventional as any actor’s or writer’s in his time.<br>Shakespeare was shaped as much by that time as he was a shaper of it, and despite being the English language’s greatest writer, he defies the common vision of a genius at the cultural vanguard. Luckily, another brilliant Elizabethan playwright better suits the Romantic model: Christopher Marlowe.<br>As Stephen Greenblatt relates thrillingly in his new biography, Dark Renaissance, Marlowe led a brief and stormy life that deeply transformed the  theater. He likely pioneered both the soliloquy and iambic pentameter on the English stage. He was never regularly employed, and he was completely disinterested in business. His plays gleefully plumb the wickedest aspects of the human psyche, delivering tales of relentless conquest, Jewish perfidy, deals with the devil, and gay love. The most famous of these works, Doctor Faustus, is about the glories and perils of eccentric genius. Marlowe’s life story is also filled with near escapes, nefarious friends, bizarre escapades. He was almost prosecuted for counterfeiting. Multiple people accused him of outspoken atheism, a transgression then punishable by death. He was probably gay, possibly a spy, often in trouble with the law, and even died in a fight over a bar tab—stabbed through the eye with a knife.<br>Dark Renaissance - The Dangerous Times And Fatal Genius Of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival<br>By Stephen Greenblatt

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Greenblatt, a scholar and critic both highly acclaimed and somewhat controversial, is clearly drawn to Marlowe because he’s such a deliciously Romantic figure. Greenblatt argues that Marlowe “awakened the genius of the English Renaissance,” and that this was possible only because his life on the edge provided the materials necessary for his plays. Dark Renaissance is beautifully written and frequently perceptive about Marlowe’s work and times, but Greenblatt’s investment in making myth over documenting history becomes more of a problem as the book progresses. His imaginative storytelling techniques, well known to readers of his previous books Will in the World and The Swerve, often threaten to push him into the realm of historical fiction. Dark Renaissance will teach you a great deal about Marlowe’s brilliance and the Elizabethan era—its theater, the aristocracy, the spy craft, and the finer points of drawing and quartering religious dissidents. But much of what it has to say about Marlowe’s life story is pure supposition.<br>Read: Shakespeare in love, or in context<br>At the beginning of his career, Greenblatt helped usher in the New Historicist movement in early modern scholarship, championing the idea that English departments should ditch both the postmodern treatment of the author as dead and New Criticism, with its fetish for close reading, and instead place works within their historical and social contexts. For example, if you know about the succession crisis that gripped the English court toward the end of Queen Elizabeth’s life, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and several other plays gain new resonance. New Historicism was a much-needed corrective—my own Shakespeare podcast, Lend Me Your Ears, could not have existed without it—but its limits often arise, ironically, regarding the very era that Greenblatt specializes in. We know so little for sure about the lives of the great poets of the 16th and early 17th centuries that we have no choice but to speculate. Shakespeare didn’t keep a diary; when we say that Julius Caesar encodes English subjects’ fears that their world was about...