Dark Renaissance

The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival

Voorzijde
35,95
Leverbaar vanaf 9 september
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Bestel
ISBN: 9780393882278
Uitgever: Norton & Company
Verschijningsvorm: Hardcover
Auteur: Stephen Greenblatt
Pagina's: 416
Taal: Engels
Verschijningsjaar: 2025
NUR: Geschiedenis algemeen

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler's son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry-a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen's spy service that shaped Marlowe's brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus-dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world-involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.