SETTLING THE SCORE

Had he not died before his rival, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe would now be feted as the greater playwright, contends a thrilling new biography

- Robert McCrum

According to the jacket copy for Dark Renaissance, Professor Stephen Greenblatt has been “studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature his entire working life”.

Lurking behind this rather bold claim, there’s a more fascinating disclosure that holds the key to every page within: the scholarly refutation of a literary myth - Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan spy-playwright murdered in a tavern brawl.

Shakespeare scholars sometimes concede, anecdotally, that if Shakespeare had died before Marlowe, we should now regard Marlowe as the greater writer.

In this book, Greenblatt has translated a donnish provocation into the sinews of an unforgettable literary biographical tour de force. Almost single-handed, he has curated a rehabilitation of Marlowe's reputation as the greatest rival, collaborator and exact contemporary of the glover's boy from Stratford.

Today, in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe was an impecunious scholar from 1580 to 1585, the famous portrait - believed to show the poet at 21 years old - has been moved from an obscure corner of the college dining hall to a place of honour in the Fellows' inner sanctum, where it now hangs, radiating dark mystery like an icon.

Not only has Greenblatt achieved this profoundly influential reappraisal in books such as Will in the World, his bestselling life of Shakespeare, but in popular culture, he has also championed the immense significance of Marlowe the poet and playwright in the late flowering of Elizabethan arts and letters.

In a tantalising aside at the end of this enthralling analysis, Greenblatt describes how, when asked about his ideas for a Shakespeare biopic, he advised Tom Stoppard's co-writer “to forget Shakespeare” and write a movie about Marlowe. No surprise, then, that some of the wittiest and most brilliant lines in the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love are actually about Kit Marlowe, played by Rupert Everett.