← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
754 Christopher Marlowe (with Stephen Greenblatt) | My Last Book with Eric White
00:55:43
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:11]
Stephen Greenblatt
Get your mother loving ears on because your big time radio DJs got news. PayPal lets you choose how you want to pay for all the stuff. With PayPal, I can pay in store.
- [00:22]
Jack Wilson
Pay online, or pay over time.
- [00:24]
Stephen Greenblatt
What's that? You want this translated into song? I hope you're sitting down. You can pay your own way. You keep those ears on, you hear? Don't just pay, baby. PayPal.
- [00:37]
Jack Wilson
Learn more@paypal.com Black Friday Savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection. Right now, when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free. Click into one of our best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday Savings happening now at the Home Depot limit 1 per transaction exclusion supply full eligible tool list in store and online. Hello. Christopher Marlowe was born to a poor provincial cobbler and murdered at the age of 29. In between, he wrote seven plays and some extraordinary poems. He published nothing under his own name during his lifetime, but today we know him as a fascinating person, his life shrouded with secrets, his efforts as a writer accompanied by his forays into intrigue and spydom. He is central to the Elizabethan poets and playwrights traveling in their circles, innovating in ways they soon adopted. In the words of our guest today, Christopher Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance. Stephen Greenblatt joins us to talk about the man without whom Shakespeare as we know him would not be possible today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jack Wilson. Enjoying the holidays? We'll switch our interstitial music over to Gabriel's Holiday Treats, just for this month. And just for you. I'm glad you could join us today. We're all students. That's what we're here for, both in the podcast sense and also here on the planet sense. But you should treat everyone else as your teacher. I heard that the other day in a documentary. We're all students, but you should treat everyone else as your teacher. Everyone. Not just the geniuses like Christopher Marlowe, but the unassuming gardeners and grocers and greeters. If someone has a smile for you, they likely have a story to tell. Stay open to their wisdom and you too shall be wise. Here's a quick story for us before we get to our main topic. A 22 year old an Englishman who dabbled in poetry, who felt like he was all used up. I'm finishing a work of consequence, he says in a letter, but after that, I will bid farewell forever to writing. It is too stressful. I mean, to retire into obscure inactivity where my feelings may stagnate into peace. End quote. This guy was really struggling. He'd lost in love. He was waxing on again yet again about his dream of a utopian community to be founded across the Atlantic in rural Pennsylvania. And opium was probably dulling his drive. His friends intervened. Let's go to Bristol to cheer you up. You probably have already guessed who I'm talking about here. Within a year, the young man, whose name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had met another poet, William Wordsworth. And two years after that, the pair of them published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which changed the course of English literature. I usually start the Romantic era with Blake as a kind of pre Romantic, but if you're looking for a single work that kicked off the entire Romantic period, Lyrical Ballads would not be a bad choice. So there you go. Learn from everyone you can and don't give up. Your Wordsworth might be right around the corner waiting for you in Bristol or wherever, whatever unlikely place you'd like to choose. Okay, now, while we're learning from the grocers and the gardeners and all those other words that fortuitously start with G, grandfathers and go getters and garbage collectors could have mentioned them too. We can also learn from the more obvious sources, like Stephen Greenblatt. There's another G, the grocers, the Greeters, the Greenblatts, or here we go. More broadly, our guests. Stephen Greenblatt, our guest today is a wonderful writer, deservedly well known. His books are exceptionally learned and exceptionally readable. When he turns his attention to a topic, the rest of us literary fans can consider ourselves fortunate, as I considered myself when I got to talk to Steven about Christopher Marlowe, the subject of his latest book. Let's hear that discussion right now. Okay. Joining me now is Stephen Greenblatt, who is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, and how the World Became Modern, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He's here today to discuss his new book, Dark Renaissance, the Dangerous Times, and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest rival. Stephen Greenblatt. Welcome to the history of literature.
- [06:13]
Stephen Greenblatt
Thank you very much, Jack. Nice to be here.
- [06:15]
Jack Wilson
So I think there might be a tendency among casual readers and plague goers to think of the Elizabethan era as one where the men are all fops and dandies wearing tights and the women are attending church and dropping perfumed handkerchiefs. But your book opens with a bracing look at England in the late spring 16th century, which is a much rougher and more sordid place than we might associate with something as culturally revered as Elizabethan drama. Why don't we start with that? What was England like in the late 16th century? And why is that an important context for understanding Christopher Marlow?
- [06:54]
Stephen Greenblatt
Well, Jack, in the first place, there probably. There were plenty of men walking around in tights. Men love to show their legs in this period, and there were women who probably dropped perfume handkerchiefs. But it was also a world rather more like North Korea than North Carolina. It was a very dangerous world in which you could get in trouble quite easily. There's no free public space, no defense of freedom of thought or freedom of speech. And it is mistake to imagine that this was, how should we say, the Renaissance Fair. It is a world that had gone through a series of regime changes, each of which was accompanied by waves of persecution and execution. And that by the 1570s, which is when my book begins, that had basically caused a kind of cultural shutdown where anyone who had something powerful original to say had better decide to keep it to himself or herself.
- [08:04]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, and we saw that in the reign of Henry viii, with poets and scholars had run into those dangers.
- [08:13]
Stephen Greenblatt
There were great poets and scholars earlier at various points in the reign of Henry viii, but the best of them, Thomas Wyatt, the great poet who had an extremely interesting career but was in trouble, imprisoned twice and always having to look over his shoulder. And then the Earl of Surrey was executed. These were people, not to mention many, many others, who ran afoul of the authorities in time of Henry viii. That Henry VIII was an equal opportunity persecutor. He went there, both Catholics and Protestants, he didn't like at various moments. But it caused, as I say, a kind of atmosphere of fear, which was followed by a different kind of fear under his successor, Edward VI, and a different kind of fear under Edward VI's successor, Mary Bloody Mary. Then things got slightly better under Elizabeth, who came to the throne in 1559, but not hugely better. So all through the 1560s, 1570s, you had to keep your head down if you didn't want to be cut off.
- [09:22]
Jack Wilson
And you point out that in the first 20 years or so of Elizabeth's reign, we see a lot of artistic mediocrities, is how you put it.
- [09:31]
Stephen Greenblatt
When we conjure up the Renaissance, we conjure up a succession of very great writers, but. And thinkers. But when we actually imagine those early years of Queen Elizabeth trying to see who was doing things, there are people, you can read them still. They're. They're available if you can get to an extremely good library. But they're poets like Nicholas Grimald or William Warner who are, from our eyes, extremely mediocre.
- [10:04]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay. Well, that's a nice transition to Marlowe because he's not only is he not mediocre, he's also a risk taker who seemed to be willing to put himself out there even in the face of this potential danger. So who was he, where was he born and how did he grow up? What was his background?
- [10:23]
Stephen Greenblatt
Christopher Marlowe came from the city of Canterbury, which some of our listeners may know very well may have visited because of the very splendid medieval cathedral that is there. The greatest, one of the greatest cathedrals in England and indeed in the world. Canterbury had been the site of a famous shrine to Thomas a Becket that visited throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Early renaissance, by 100,000 pilgrims a year, which is an enormous number if you can imagine the size of the population in England, but had been shut down, smashed when the Reformation came. So Canterbury itself was a city of. In some disarray when Marlowe was born in 1564, two months before his distinguished contemporary William Shakespeare was born in another provincial city, Stratford upon Avon. Marlowe was from a even more implausible family to make a career than Shakespeare. Shakespeare was the son of a glover, but a glover who was rather important in the town. He became the equivalent of mayor of Stratford Pon Avon. Marlow was the only son, only surviving son of a poor shoemaker, cobbler, John Marlow in Canterbury. We don't know an enormous amount about the Marlows, except we can construct at least a certain from their will and the record of what they left when they died. And then a few other details we can conjure up a little bit about them. Christopher Marlowe's father, John, was cited for beating up his apprentice and drawing blood. Christopher Marlowe's mother, Catherine, was almost certainly illiterate. It's possible that the father was illiterate too, though he may have been able to read a little bit. Marlow had. Christopher Marlow had four sisters. The oldest of them married, married a taylor then There's Jane, who got pregnant at 13, got married to a shoemaker, then another sister who married another shoemaker, and then one who married an innkeeper, but an innkeeper who was charged with receiving stolen goods. So this is a family at a fairly low level, social level in Stratford. And the reason that it's important to think about this is that the chances of the son of such a family receiving a serious education were virtually nil in Canterbury of 1570s. Yet for reasons that are very, very difficult to explain or understand, Christopher Marlowe received a scholarship to the best school when he was 14 years old, received a scholarship to the best school in Stratford, the King School was called. We don't know how he got the amount of Latin that would have been required to get access to that school. Somehow he got it must have been from quite early on, perceived to be extremely clever and extremely ambitious. Yeah, get Latin just by walking in the right places and breathing. You have to work and you work at it. While the family was. The father was working, making shoes, the family was doing its thing. They would almost certainly never have sent their boy all the way through to a serious prep school, as it were, to get into the King School. But somehow he got it. Yeah.
- [14:03]
Jack Wilson
And from there he went on to higher education as well. But let's talk about the Latin because it seems extremely important to his education, not just as a stepping stone and kind of a gateway and his entry point into this life that gets him out of the neighborhood full of sewage and garbage and the blood and offal from the slaughterhouses that you vividly portray in Canterbury and the life of his barely literate parents. But it also opens up his mind to new ideas. So maybe we could talk a little bit about what those texts were that they were learning and how those might have, you know, these pre Christian texts might have played upon the mind of the teenage Christopher Marlowe.
- [14:56]
Stephen Greenblatt
Well, in an education in the 16th century, anyone who went beyond the very earliest levels, when you just learned how to read and write English, if you had such an education, which very few people did, but if you went beyond that, and it was only really boys who went beyond that, was closed to almost all the girls, you went through what someone has called a puberty. Right, the puberty rite of learning Latin. And I think, Jack, for most people, it would have been an unpleasant experience, hard and particularly gratifying. It's a language that wasn't spoken in the streets. It was language you needed if you were going to pursue a higher profession. But it didn't actually Speak. I think in all likelihood, it didn't speak to most people. But the interesting thing, fascinating thing about Marlo and about other figures as well in this period, a small number of others, if you got it, if you actually took in what you were reading, you could be sprung, as it were, in the most radical way from the world, the actual world in which you were living, the mental world, which was full of censorship and repression, restriction. But the Latin texts were from a completely different world, particularly the Latin texts that were taught to the children. They educators made an interesting decision, largely based on the quality of the Latin. They didn't give the children largely theological works, of which there were enormous numbers written in Latin that would have seemed to promote the correct views from an orthodox, conservative point of view. They gave them poems by Catullus and by Ovid. They gave Virgil's Great Nia. These are works filled with enormous imaginative power, but also with a certain kind of transgressive impulse, a breaking out, as it were.
- [17:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [17:00]
Stephen Greenblatt
From the rigid orthodoxies of the. Of the age. And preeminently, we know actually from. From what he did, that Christopher Marlowe, probably quite early, was alert to the subversive potential of the text that he was being given to translate in school.
- [17:27]
Jack Wilson
Right. And how was the theater viewed at the time in the university community, Cambridge and Oxford? Would Marlowe have been encouraged to write verse and participate in theatrical productions, or were these seen as beneath someone who was attending university?
- [17:46]
Stephen Greenblatt
The interesting thing about the theater, both in the grammar school that he went to, the King School before he went to university, and then, as you've already said, Jack, he won an impressive scholarship to go to university, to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge is. We have something like the same paradox of a quite conservative set of authorities who are fascinated by what looks to us like somewhat disturbing or subversive text. So there was lively theatrical life in a provincial town like Canterbury from traveling troops of actors, but also plays that the children themselves were made to perform. And then the same thing at Cambridge and at Oxford in this period. On the one, we're not talking about the public theater. We can come to that in a minute. From Starting in the 1570s, there were public theaters built in London. We can come to that in a second. But non public theaters, theatrical performances in the colleges or in schools. This was very popular in the 16th century. It was thought to be good for the kids, Latin. So these are performances that would be largely in Latin. And it was also a way of showing the sophistication and the beauty of these wonderful colleges. Visitors now to Cambridge and Oxford can see these astonishing buildings that come from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Beautiful halls and that's where the plays were often performed. And the colleges were very proud of these justly so and the students performed plays and people from other colleges were invited. So the school day was busy at Oxford and Cambridge. The the kids college students had an enormous amount to do, but they found time to perform in plays. And we can be sure that Marlowe participated in the theatrical activity of his time.
- [19:43]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll come back with more from Stephen Greenblatt.
- [19:48]
Stephen Greenblatt
Okay. J. Foreign.
- [20:05]
Jack Wilson
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- [23:18]
Stephen Greenblatt
Foreign.
- [23:22]
Jack Wilson
So Stephen Marlo, let's move him forward a little bit and take him out of the university and and heading toward London. He was known for his suddenness. What does that mean exactly?
- [23:36]
Stephen Greenblatt
We don't know entirely, Jack. We know that that's a word that was associated with him and we know it because his one time roommate, Thomas Kidd, who is himself a very interesting playwright. Thomas Kidd was arrested and in the course of the investigation. And we can go into the details of the investigation. When it was asked of Thomas Kidd, how is it that you associated with someone as wicked is Christopher Marlowe? It was making statements that you didn't make if you wanted to have a long life in the late 16th century. Kid said, well, it was because Marlowe was so sudden he would suddenly come out with these things, which was a convenient thing for a kid to say. But there is actually something surprising and sudden about Marlowe. If we can go back to for a second to his years in university at college. He was being trained to be an Anglican priest. That's why he got the scholarship. That's both at the King School and then subsequently at the university. Poor boys like Marlow come from the backgrounds that Marlowe had. If they were picked out at all and most of them weren't, if they were picked out for an education at all. They were picked out because they seemed like promising candidates for the priesthood. The Anglican, the Church of England needed, especially in small parishes, they needed young priests who would be willing to take on the work of the parish for virtually nothing. But they had to be well educated, because Protestantism insisted that people should be able to read and write sermons, so, not simply recite the words of the Mass. And Marlowe was clearly a candidate for that. But what happened was something unexpected, or at least unexpected by the authorities. We know from examining documents that survive at Cambridge that Marlow was absent for unusually long periods of time during his undergraduate and graduate years. After he got his ba, he went on to get an ma. That was a sure sign of heading for the priesthood. But he was absent. And when he went to get his MA degree, when he put in the the papers to receive his degree, the degree was denied him. And the authorities said it was because he hadn't fulfilled the residence requirement and because it was suspected that he had gone to Reims in France, where there was a. Something called the English College that was training renegade Catholics to be smuggled back into England and possibly as the State thought to kill Queen Elizabeth, overturn the regime and so forth, bring Catholicism, which was then illegal, back to England. So they didn't give him his degree. And a month passed. And then a letter was sent to the Cambridge authorities. And the letter was signed by all of the most important people in the intimate circle around Queen Elizabeth, the Privy Council around Queen Elizabeth. And the letter said, Her Majesty would be upset if someone who had done the State such important work should not be given his degree. Give him his degree. This letter was sent by the highest authorities in the land on behalf of a cobbler's son. Yeah, nobody. So that's the first and most startling sign that Marlowe had been recruited when he was a student at Cambridge, to work almost certainly for the spy service run by someone named Francis Walsingham in Queen Elizabeth's regime. Her secretary.
- [27:21]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [27:23]
Stephen Greenblatt
So we get this vision, and instead of going on to become a priest, as his education was preparing him, Marlow instead went off to London with his newly minted MA degree, which was not good for anything that he was pursuing, and he started to write plays and he lived the life he lived, whatever that was, for the few short years between London and the time he was murdered.
- [27:51]
Jack Wilson
Right. So I want to ask you about Tamburlaine in particular, but before we do that, maybe just one more question about his political activities or his spy activities. What motivated them? Did he have a religious or political agenda? Or was he doing this for money? Or was it just part of his restless personality? Or was someone pressuring him to do this? Do we have any idea of why he wanted to do the things that he did for the government?
- [28:20]
Stephen Greenblatt
It's a good question, Jack. There, of course, could have been many motives for someone who was recruited at that point. A little bit like the Cold war in the 1950s and 60s and CIA. England was, as it, I think, largely correctly thought of itself, in a kind of mortal struggle with its enemies. The enemies being the Catholic powers of the continent, and especially the Catholic Church in Rome, which hated the. The Protestant regime in England and wanted to topple it. So it could have been a kind of desire to defend that regime. It could have been money. When Marlow returned from those mysterious absences I talked about, there are records of food and drink purchased in the colleges because they kept track of what the students were eating and drinking. And Marlow seems to have had more money in his pocket than he did when he went away. There are other possibilities, and maybe the one that we could focus on is simply what was Marla going to do if he didn't want to be a priest? He's the least likely person to have a religious vocation from everything he wrote.
- [29:36]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [29:36]
Stephen Greenblatt
One of the things we. We know he was doing when he was at Cambridge was on his own translating Ovid's sexy poems called the Amores. They hadn't been translated into English, and for good reason, because they were actually indecent there, about adultery and abortion, cheating. And Marlowe chose to translate them. He translated them marvelously. But what kind of person does that if he's actually going to go on? He's playing the parish priest.
- [30:04]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [30:05]
Stephen Greenblatt
So this is very unlikely. But on the other hand, what was he going to do? There are almost no professions open to someone of his class and background, so that he is in a very peculiar position and at that point that the idea of being recruited to do something exciting, to go to the continent, to have some relation to the most powerful people in the country, that may have itself been an enormous inducement to take this step. We don't know what we do know to jump ahead and we can get back to Tamburlaine in a second. But we do know, Jack, is that subsequently, Marlowe wrote the greatest play in English ever written about what it means to make a deal with the devil. Yeah, Very hard for me, at least. And that is at the very center of my book. It's very hard for me to think that that play is not an exploration of what actually went on in Marle's own life.
- [31:06]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, okay, so let's get there, but let's do Tamburlaine first, because I didn't really realize until I read Your book, Just what it Meant for the Elizabethan Theater. And I think you point out that it's almost hard for us to see it now because it changed so much that we've sort of absorbed the changes. You know, it was so influential that we're now kind of familiar with what was so new about it. But why was it so new? What did it mean for the Elizabethan theater?
- [31:39]
Stephen Greenblatt
Marlowe came to London from Cambridge, still a very young man, 20s, and he probably brought with him at least part of a play that he had written, and the play Tamburlaine, about a Scythian conqueror from several centuries before who conquered much of the known world. That play was written in a way that hadn't. That plays hadn't been written before. Namely, it was written in blank verse, unrimed iambic pentameter. That doesn't to us ring necessarily. Maybe to some of your listeners it will ring a bell, but it was something new in England. And the significance of its newness was that it sounded at once like ordinary speech, the speech that we're having here, but turned up to a different level, energy and excitement. That's the. The wonder of blank verse. Blank verse sounds like ordinary conversational English, but conversational English on steroids, and that Marlow figured out how to do that. Blank verse had been experimented earlier in the century in a translation of Virgil by Henry Howard, the Earl of Sorry, but it hadn't taken off in the theater world. People went to the theater in the. In the public theater in the late 16th century, as they put it, to hear a play. What play are you going to hear tonight or this afternoon? They would have said, since these were performed in the afternoon. In other words, they weren't, we say, to see a play, but they said to hear a play. So they were very sensitive to what was being spoken and how it was being spoken. And Marlow basically created a way for it to be spoken with an enormous amount of energy. Yeah, there was someone. There were many people listening. After Marlow did this, a lot of people began to write in plays in black verse. But preeminently, the one who learned the most from Marlowe, namely, William Shakespeare.
- [33:48]
Jack Wilson
Right. What did Tamberlain then? I mean, it was a wild success. He wrote a sequel, and he was showing kind of how outrageous he could be with his plots and so on. But what did it mean for him? Did he become famous at this point? Did it. Did it mean he could make a living from what he could earn as a playwright or, you know, who did he become After Tamburlaine kind of took the world by storm, I think he.
- [34:19]
Stephen Greenblatt
Could keep going as a player. Playwrights were not well compensated, but they were compensated. You could eke out a living as a playwright in the late 16th century. Not a splendid living, but enough. The, the extent to all of this was precisely Shakespeare, but that's because Shakespeare not only made money from writing plays, but was a part owner of the theater in which he wrote. So he was able to actually get money from the. The audience who came to plays. Ordinary playwrights like Marlowe were simply paid for their texts. And if you wanted to live a very modest life, it was probably enough if you kept producing more and more and more plays. But it wouldn't make you famous. It wouldn't make you famous any more than for the most part, the people who write television shows become famous. We don't. We're interested in who the actors are in television shows generally, but we don't actually, for the most part, know who writes them. And that was true doubling true. In the late 16th century, theater people went to the theater. They were excited by plays. They saw a play like Tamburlaine that was an enormous hit. Actually. Some children were called Tamburlaine when they were christened in the. After the play. So it's a sign of the success of the play. But it was not published under Marlowe's name. It wasn't important enough to put Marlowe and most plays in the period were, if they were published at all, printed at all, weren't printed with the name of the person who wrote them. It would say as performed by the so and so Company.
- [35:55]
Jack Wilson
Right. And when we talk about Marlowe and say things like, you know, was he well paid? And so on, we should also note he died so young that we don't really know what his 30s and 40s would have been like. He may have, you know, developed into somebody who. Who had a. Who was a part owner as well.
- [36:17]
Stephen Greenblatt
Or not likely, I think, Jack, because I think that he. First of all, there's no sign that he had any interest in sort of stability.
- [36:29]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [36:30]
Stephen Greenblatt
Or in figuring out as really Shakespeare almost uniquely figured out how to actually make a quite a good living from the theater. But that was by virtue of being involved in all aspects of the playoffs, being part owner of the company itself, the theater company, being part owner of the theater, being the principal writer for the theater, acting for the theater, all of these things Shakespeare did. Marlowe wrote, period. He wrote play. But there's no evidence that he actually could have Figured out, would have figured out how to make a stable life that way, what Marlowe did. And that if we were actually to imagine the life he could have had if his life hadn't been snuffed out so early. What Marlowe did was evidently to cultivate relations with some of the most important people in England. So it's nobody. Cobbler's son from Canterbury declared at a certain point in his life that he was well known. Well known, he says, to several of the most important people in the realm. To the Lord Strange, he said, to The Earl of. 9th Earl of Northumberland. These are enormous magnates, fabulously wealthy, fabulously important. And that's the way in which probably not simply Marlowe's life, but other lives of people who weren't commercially successful in the way that Shakespeare was successful would likely have played out. It would be like saying, I'm well known to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
- [37:58]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [37:59]
Stephen Greenblatt
Whatever well known means here, be in orbit of, possibly receive gifts from. And that was the way in which actually much of literary life, not simply in Shakespeare's time, Marlowe's time, but actually for centuries afterwards. This was the world before the invention of copyright. This was a world before universities hired writers and gave them salaries. This was a world in which it was extremely difficult to get by if you didn't have a patron.
- [38:30]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Which he never had. And that's another potential difference with Shakespeare. And we do know that they knew each other. Right. And they collaborated. Do you view it as this is kind of a. A Lenin and McCartney connection where, you know, they each give each other certain things. Maybe Shakespeare gives him some. Some stability or some organization. Marlowe has some brilliance and. And quicksilver thinking and that kind of thing. Or do we not know enough about how they work together and. And you know, what they were like in order to do more than just kind of idly speculate?
- [39:09]
Stephen Greenblatt
I don't know if the speculation is idle exactly, but it's true. It's true. Don't have a very rich record. It's now thought, I think, and other scholars think that Shakespeare and Marlowe definitely work together on the second part and the third part of the plays known as the Henry VI plays that are attributed to Shakespeare principally. And they are principally attributed to Shakespeare. But Marlowe's hand is in both of those. The second and third parts. But we don't know where they sat down together, what the contract was, what their conversations were like. I speculate, I hope not entirely idly. I speculate as to what the conversation between Marlo and Shakespeare would have been. Yeah, almost by professional training. Very good at drawing out people's secrets. That's what it is. But Shakespeare was extremely good at keeping his views to himself. Shakespeare managed to stay out of jail, as far as we know, for his entire life. Not so Christopher Marlowe. Very short life. But I imagine them together having conversations. But we don't know what the conversations. Actually, no one was around recording what the conversations would have been.
- [40:24]
Jack Wilson
Right. So what did Dr. Faustus contribute? And. And what did that play mean for Shakespeare in particular?
- [40:33]
Stephen Greenblatt
Shakespeare couldn't have written. Shakespeare wound up writing some versions of many of the plays that Marlowe wrote. In effect, you can watch Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare in the sense that Marlowe wrote the Jew of Malta and Shakespeare wrote the Merchant of Venice. Marlowe wrote the second, Shakespeare wrote Richard ii. We can track the ways in which Shakespeare picks up and develops ideas that he gets from Marlowe. Techniques, thoughts, and so forth. Shakespeare, God help you if you're imitated by Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was really good at his contemporaries. Notice at the beginning the one, the resentful Robert Green, who said that he's an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers. Shakespeare was fantastically good at picking up skills from other people. But Shakespeare couldn't have written Dr. Fausus. And the reason he couldn't have written Dr. Faustus is Dr. Faustus is written by. Out of someone who has spent years at university, was an intellectual, a scholar. And that's how. How Dr. Fausis begins, of course, with Dr. Faustus, the scholar in his study, brooding about the things that he studied. Law, theology, feeling that he's come to the end, medicine, that he doesn't really want to go on with any of these studies. The closest that Shakespeare came, and it's interesting to think that even probably at the end of his career, Shakespeare was thinking about these things. The closest Shakespeare comes is in the Tempest, one of Shakespeare's late plays, in which he depicts a character. It was an intellectual, a bit like about. Like. Like Faustus.
- [42:19]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. We're jumping ahead a little bit because we have a hard stop here. But what do we know about the circumstances of Marlow's death? And maybe I should say, what don't we know? What are the key questions in your mind that we've never been able to answer, but you think would be most useful for us to have answered?
- [42:39]
Stephen Greenblatt
Well, it would be very nice to know exactly why he was killed. We have a official account of why he was Killed. He was killed, the report says, in an argument about what the report calls the reckoning, that's to say the bill. And so the actual. The circumstances, as far as we know of Maro's murder, was that he went on a particular day in 1593 to an inn in Deptford, which was then now part of London, but is then separate town south of London port. And he met three friends and at 10 o' clock in the morning, and they spent the day together. They had lunch together in Widow Bull's Tavern and then they walked around in the garden for several hours after lunch and then they went back in for dinner and then they talked very quietly. No one could hear what they were saying. And then after dinner, the bystanders heard shouting and they went in and Marlow was lying dead on the floor. And there was an inquiry, as there was when someone was murdered in this period, as in any period. And the inquiry concluded that it was an argument about the bill, the reckoning, and that Marlow had suddenly attacked one of the. The other people at the. At the dinner and in the scuffle. These are. This is where we're. We're talking about a world that's like Abilene, Texas, in the 1890s. Everyone is walking around armed. Elizabethans carried knives and there was a scuffle with knives. And at the end of it, Marlowe's knife, Maro's own knife was stuck through his eye into his brain. So that's the official account. And it would be good to know if that actually is true, that account is accurate.
- [44:32]
Jack Wilson
Because.
- [44:34]
Stephen Greenblatt
Only in the 20th century, interestingly enough, because the doc. The crucial documents had been misfiled. Only in the 20th century did an extremely clever researcher find the names of the people who were in the room with Marlow. And it turns out that all three men who were in the room with Marlow were also working in one form or other and connected in one form or other to the Secret service. That also, that could simply mean that these were the people that Marlow was hanging out with. But we can add to that that Marlow was under investigation at that point. He had been arrested a month before. He had been told, not been given the charges, but told to stay within a certain range of the Royal Court. And the court was the Privy Councilors were collecting information about Marlowe, about charges of atheism, charges of blasphemy, that he was saying very radical things, that he had the right to counterfeit coin, that Jesus and John were homosexual lovers, that Mary was a whore Things you didn't say if you wanted to live a long, happy life in the late 16th century, or probably any at any time. And we don't know if there's a relationship between these documents and what happened to Marla. But we know that the documents that list Marlowe's terrible ideas or the things he supposedly was saying were actually then given to the queen herself. And there's a marginal note on one of these documents that apparently that says, let this. Let this be attended to. Let this be taken care of. What does that mean? We don't know. But it seems to me personally, exceedingly unlikely that this was simply a squabble about the bill, who was going to pay what from the lunch and the dinner.
- [46:28]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, well, I'm afraid we're out of time. But I'll just wrap up here by saying that just like I wish we didn't have to stop talking, I didn't want to stop reading the book. And I was reading it last Saturday, and I only put it down because the lottery was up to $1.8 billion and I was heading out to buy a ticket before the deadline, and it kind of occurred to me that if the prize had been up to 500 million or so, I wouldn't have bothered leaving the house. So I guess I could say that the value to me of reading your book was worth more than several hundred million dollars.
- [47:05]
Stephen Greenblatt
Thank you, Jack. You must have won the lottery. Yes.
- [47:10]
Jack Wilson
Unfortunately, I think I. I think I struck out. So I probably would have been better off staying home and enriching my mind by finishing the rest of your book. But let's stop there. The book is called Dark the Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest rival, Stephen Greenblatt. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [47:29]
Stephen Greenblatt
Thank you so much, Jack. Pleasure. Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name.
- [47:55]
Jack Wilson
Jack. Jack and Coke.
- [47:57]
Stephen Greenblatt
Shot of Jack.
- [47:58]
Jack Wilson
Jack Daniels, please.
- [47:59]
Stephen Greenblatt
Right away. That's what makes Jack Jack. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery. Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [48:13]
Jack Wilson
Ford Blue Cruise Hands free. Highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in blue. Cruise enabled vehicles like the F1 150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace Safe driving see Ford.com BlueCruise for more details. Okay, that was Stephen Greenblatt. His book is a good one to put on your holiday list. Yes, we've had so many good books this year. I hope you've been keeping track of them to put on your shopping list or on your wish list so others can buy them for you. Just last week, Nilou Tabrizi's book, what a great book that is. That's one I enjoyed immensely. If you have a history of literature podcast fan in your life, or if you are one yourself, you might consider a Patreon membership for a holiday treat. We have a very popular membership level, five bucks a month to help us keep the lights on here at Holiday. You will receive a low ad version in the podcast as part of your membership and in 2026 you are going to be part of something special. We can't quite announce it yet. They have not yet arrived. I want to make sure I have them in my hands before I announce this. But we're launching something new in 2026, and Patreon members are going to be the first beneficiaries and you don't have to do anything at all other than be a member. And finally, if you're really looking to light up someone's holidays, you might consider giving them the gift of an unforgettable experience, the History of Literature Tour through Literary England, which we're doing in May of 2026. We'll be visiting sites in London and Oxford and Bath, and in each place we're planning to meet up with experts and guides. And some of your favorite guests are going to pop in as we learn all about the English Renaissance, the 18th century of Dr. Johnson and his circle, the 19th century of Charles Dickens, the Bloomsbury era and neighborhood and Virginia Woolf. Oh, and the Regency period and Jane Austen, the twentieth century with Tolkien and the other inklings, and on and on. And we're generally just hoping to have a good, enriching time. And we would love to have you and maybe a literature loving friend or family member join us. So find all that@patreon.com Literature for the Patreon membership. And the travel details for our trip through Literary England are at historyofliterature.com or at John Shores Travel. That's our partner travel company that's Shors with no E. Sorry, S H O R S with no E. John Shores Travel. Scroll down the page and look for the Jack Wilson Tour. Okay, finally today, Eric White was here in episode 739 after he and I discussed the manuscripts produced by Johannes Gutenberg. I asked Eric a special question. Okay. I'm joined now by Eric Marshall White, author of Johannes Gutenberg A Biography in Books. Eric, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [51:54]
Eric White
Yeah, I was thinking about that and you know, it's. It's a loaded question because if it's the last book I get to read, then I kind of want it to take a long time. Or if it's so great, why don't I want to read it now? Why am I saving it for?
- [52:10]
Jack Wilson
Right, yes, yes. A lot of people say what you first said, but not as many people pick up on the what you said second. And it kind of made me think, well, you know, as I've been thinking through this myself, shouldn't I read it right away? But on the other hand, is that tempting fate in a horrible way that.
- [52:28]
Eric White
I take this as the book that I'm guaranteed to read, start to finish the last book?
- [52:35]
Stephen Greenblatt
I hope it would be.
- [52:38]
Eric White
Yeah. It is a book that doesn't exist. And I've spent decades thinking about 15th century book production and struggled with the lack of sort of documentation or even more, you know, the personal insight. So I think the book I would really love to read is the unexpurgated diary of one Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz. And that kind of, you know, even if he passed over some essentials or even if he didn't get into his inner thoughts as he, as he worked, it would just give a lot of enjoyment to sort of relive the years of his struggle. His struggle is what the heck was he thinking? And then some insights into how it was done. So I don't think that book will ever exist, but it would be the one I wanted.
- [53:36]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now, I don't want to turn this into a Twilight Zone episode on you where the, you know, the famous Burgess Meredith one where he. All he wants to do is read books and he finally gets his. His wish after a nuclear holocaust or something, but his classes break. But I'm thinking, what if you're handed that unexpurgated diary of Johannes Gutenberg and you can't read his handwriting and you needed the movable type. I mean, you almost need him to have printed his own book. Right?
- [54:05]
Eric White
Yeah, I thought about that as I spoke.
- [54:07]
Jack Wilson
So you're right on.
- [54:08]
Eric White
You're right on. Two things about that, that are perfect. You're right on. I would continue to struggle as I do with, you know, reading, you know, 15th century handwriting. But, you know, I, I, I can kind of get in. I would have a prayer of doing it. So, yeah, chances are it would be difficult. But I have, I, I have friends in high places who read 15th century and we, we, we'd figure it out.
- [54:34]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And maybe what we're talking about is the diary has been discovered and some scholar has gone through all the trou publisher has brought it out in a very nice, handsome edition. And you're reading it with the benefit of type, much like Gutenberg put us on the path toward enjoying.
- [54:53]
Eric White
Yeah. So this is a fantasy. What would happen in the real world is that there could be some useful document that hasn't come to light, that will come to light every few decades or maybe even faster than that. We do get little snippets of information that are very helpful. Things are found in archives, sometimes just scraps tucked into a book unwittingly. So that really works for the metaphor. And you mentioned the Twilight Zone guy with the last book. And I suppose your viewers can look it up if they don't know the reference. Just a treat for your listeners if you can picture that guy with his little book and his little glasses. That's pretty much what I look like. So that's a lot of fun.
- [55:45]
Jack Wilson
Right? Okay, well, Eric White, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [55:50]
Eric White
Thanks so much.
- [55:56]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Eric White for that cameo and of course, to Stephen Greenblatt for that illuminating discussion on Christopher Marlowe. We'll be back soon with a deep dive into George Orwell's classic novel 1984. That's coming up soon. Maybe, maybe this week, maybe next week. And looking ahead a bit, we have stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Susan Glaspel, and, yes, Nathaniel Hawthorne again. And a special look at Gertrude Stein with a biographer who had access to some exciting new materials. We have the history of Aphorisms coming up and a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [57:01]
Stephen Greenblatt
Sa.
- [57:28]
Jack Wilson
Experience the sequel everyone's been waiting for. Follow Drayton and Dallas as they navigate the challenges of college life while trying to stay true to both themselves and each other. Sideline 2 intercepted, starring Noah Beck and Sienna Agudong, is streaming now for free only on Tub.