Kit Marlowe Is Back!

 Well, sort of. Everyone gets fascinated by who was Shakespeare, and that was, in a way, my introduction to Marlowe back in 10th Grade. I take Shakespeare as Shakespeare. He is not as interesting as his work, whereas Marlowe may be more interesting than his work.

Yesterday, The New Yorker published Anthony Lane's Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble. There is a new book out about him.

Marlowe’s rackety reputation outlasted his death and then went quiet. Not until the twentieth century, and yet more so in our own time, did it become cacophonous again, amplified by claims that he spied for his country, and that he and his work exult in a flourish of gayness. (“Edward II” is dominated by the monarch’s obsession with his favorite courtier, Piers Gaveston.) There are mounds of commentary on Marlowe—historical, biographical, critical, and wildly fantastical—and all sorts of reasons to add to the heap. The latest addition is by Stephen Greenblatt, whose densely textured account of Shakespeare’s life, “Will in the World,” was published in 2004. Now he brings us “Dark Renaissance” (Norton). The title makes it sound like a low-rent knockoff of Assassin’s Creed, with hooded malefactors swarming over pixelated piazzas, and the subtitle, “The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” is equally brazen. Yet Greenblatt is right to sound the trumpet. If anyone’s story tugs and bullies us back into the past, it has to be Marlowe’s. Roll up and enjoy the show.

About the work, a slightly different viewpoint is in Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised  (Letters, The Guardian)

 And one last batch of quotes from Robert McCrum's review in The Independent, Inside the life of the perfect nobody who many say was better than Shakespeare

Dark Renaissance brings the wheel full circle. Greenblatt, having confessed his “fascination” with the author of Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta, captures the pivotal moment when Marlowe’s unforgettable, mighty lines (“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?”) wowed London audiences during the years before and after the Spanish Armada.

Here, once and for all, in a profound meditation on the well-springs of creativity, Greenblatt nails the playwright’s staggering originality: his fleeting role (six years at best) in the making of that glorious world-class dramatic phenomenon, Elizabethan theatre.

 I cannot say that Marlowe was better than Shakespeare. He never wrote an outright comedy, and his comedic characters are more things of farce. He has none of the counterpoint of plot and subplot as does Shakespeare - his music is rougher. The analogy that came to me is comparing The Sex Pistols to The Clash.

The thing to do is to read Marlowe. Out loud, and away from the academics who will strip the life out of him, as they have tried to do with Shakespeare,

sch 9/9