Ari Shapiro (2:48)

The mysteries make this book so thrilling. But before we get to those, what do you mean when you say he paved the way not only for Shakespeare, but for so much of what we value in our culture today?

Stephen Greenblatt (2:58)

Christopher Marlowe was born into a world that was heavily censored in terms of anything anyone could dare to say, let alone to write. If you mumbled unpleasant words about the ruler or about the policies of the state, you could get your ears cut off, you could get your nose sliced, or very likely, you could get yourself killed. That kept people's heads down, as you can imagine.

Ari Shapiro (3:23)

And then comes along Marlow, who, as you write, said out loud what no one who wanted to live a long life would even venture to whisper.

Stephen Greenblatt (3:30)

Absolutely. Marlow took crazy risks. We don't fully understand those levels of risk now because we can say basically in our society what we want about the people, at least for the moment, the people who are running our country. But that was not the case in Marlowe's world.

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Stephen Greenblatt (3:49)

And Marlowe, about the religious settlement in his country and about the political settlement, said things that you wouldn't say if you wanted to live a long, happy life.

Ari Shapiro (4:00)

Why? How. How did he get away with it when the rule was don't speak out. How did he flourish and become such a huge success by violating that cardinal rule?

Stephen Greenblatt (4:09)

It's a good question, Ari. The first thing to say is he didn't flourish for very long. He went to spend the day with, evidently with some people he knew when he was 29 years old, and he ended up dead. But before then, he broke through by exploiting, in an absolutely brilliant way, the first great public entertainment industry in English culture, which was the theater. And in the theater, as opposed to outside, you could actually say, as Shakespeare followed Marlowe and understood, you could begin to say things that couldn't be said elsewhere. And Marlowe broke through with a play about a poor born peasant, Tamburlaine, who conquered the whole world, who brought kings to their knees. And he excited thousands of people, ordinary people, who went to the theater in the 1580s and saw this spectacle of. Of a nobody who conquers the world.

Ari Shapiro (5:13)

Or there's a play like Dr. Faustus, which, before Marlowe took it on, was a pretty straightforward morality tale of what not to do. And then Marlowe's version comes along, and it looks enticing and sexy and almost homoerotic, with all kinds of themes and nuances that were unheard of in this story that had existed for a very long time before his play.

Stephen Greenblatt (5:37)

You're Absolutely right, Ari. He took a rather cheesy account of a German magician and he turned it into a fable that has remained actually central, in a way to us of what it means to make a deal with the devil in order to escape the little box that you were in. Marlow ends the play by having Faustus, as in a good morality tale, dragged down to the devil, to hell. But before that, he has the character Dr. Faustus explore the world, the world inside, the world outside, and as you've suggested, also the sexual world. This is a play insofar as we don't remember. Most of us won't have any idea about this play, except we might remember. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers? Of course, about Helen of Troy. This is the kind of thing that Christopher Marlowe did and as they say, transformed popular culture, English culture, our culture.

Ari Shapiro (6:37)

I went into reading this book thinking, how can there be anything new to say about somebody who lived in the 1500s? And your research blew my mind. For example, you make the case that he was a spy recruited while studying for his master's degree by looking at Cafeteria records from 1584 to figure out when Marlow was on campus and. And how much he was spending. Explain that for us.

Stephen Greenblatt (7:01)

Well, first, I should say quickly say, Ari, that people have pored over those records now for several decades. They're extremely hard to read. But yeah, the university kept track of the students consumption of beer and food. And you can follow actually whether he was there at Cambridge when he was supposed to be. And in fact, that issue came up when he tried to get his degree because the university authority said he wasn't there for long stretches of time and they refused to give him his degree. And then a month later, a letter was sent signed by the most important people in the kingdom on behalf of a nobody, the son of a shoemaker from Canterbury, saying Her Majesty would be unhappy that someone who's done the state such important service should not be given his degree. Give him his degree. And guess what? They gave him his degree. And there's other evidence for this as well, that he had been recruited as. After all, there's a tradition of going to universities and recruiting people for the CIA or for MI6 in England for the spy service. And that's evidently what happened with Marlowe in the time in which these are. In the years leading up to the Spanish Armada, in which spying was a very. Both dangerous and highly important game.

Ari Shapiro (8:25)

I said that there are some uncanny parallels between Marlow's time and ours. What do you think we can learn about the moment we live in now by studying the time that he lived in?

Stephen Greenblatt (8:39)

Well, we might learn that even when a culture looks like it's shut down and we look around in our world at places in which there's ferocious repression for the freedom of expression, there will come along someone who will break through, someone brilliant enough, daring enough, crazy enough to speak out. Human beings can't actually, for long periods of time, be shut in the tight boxes of censorship. And Marlowe is the supreme example of the rule breaker in every way, politically, religiously, sexually, who breaks through the enclosures that authoritarian regimes build around free expression.

Ari Shapiro (9:32)

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Stephen Greenblatt. His latest book is Dark the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Arrival. It's about the life of Christopher Marlow. Professor Greenblatt, what a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Stephen Greenblatt (9:47)

Thank you, Ari.

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