Harvard Pulitzer Winner Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe - Elizabethan Playwright & Spy

TheLearningCurve_StephenGreenblatt

Albert Cheng: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome to another brand new episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts, Albert Chang, and joining me is Alsiha Searcy. Alsiha, good to see you again.

Alisha Searcy: Hey Albert. Good to see you too. Hope all is well.

Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can’t complain. A lot going on, but can’t complain.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, agreed.

Albert Cheng: Um, we got a cool show today. We’re gonna have Steven Greenblatt to come talk to us about Christopher Marlowe. Now, maybe folks might be wondering who’s that? Well, he was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and so we’re gonna learn all about him and what his bearing on Shakespeare was. So I’m looking forward to the show.

I dunno about you, [00:01:00] Alsiha.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah, it’s gonna be cool.

Albert Cheng: Well, before we do that, let’s talk news. What caught your eye this week?

Alisha Searcy: Well, I’m gonna sound a little bit nostalgic.

Albert Cheng: Oh, okay.

Alisha Searcy: Came across an article in Chalkbeat. Will Bipartisan Education Reform Make a Comeback? Three Reasons It Could and Three Obstacles.

And it’s by Matt Barnum. So I say, I’m gonna sound a little bit nostalgic because I remember back in the day when I was. In the legislature, and I would say probably the majority of the Obama years, I think it’s kind of a coincidence, but also just that he was one of the presidents who was willing to work in a bipartisan way on education.

But I feel like during that time, Albert, there really was a such thing as bipartisanship. And although I had a number of disagreements with my counterparts on the other Sydor, the aisle, it felt like education brought us together. And so this article was really interesting to me because [00:02:00] the author is talking about, you know, whether or not this can happen again.

So the Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how influential these people are. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Um,

Alisha Searcy: But it sounds like it would’ve was a, a pretty cool group of people just talking about like what their ideas are on both sides in terms of education reform.

And so I think the most interesting pieces of this article for me were about, you know, certainly where Democrats are. He talks about in his article that for years, and I have been guilty of this, that we’ve been talking about how Democrats have lost footing on education. He argues that’s actually not true.

He talks about how both parties may have some political incentive for moving to the Center on Education. I hope that’s the case. And he talks about how presidents from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, I just mentioned Obama, all were interested in bipartisanship and I would argue did some pretty [00:03:00] significant things in terms of education.

But he also says that it might not happen because reformers in particular don’t have a clear bumper sticker. Hmm. And so he goes around the room and he asks the folks in there like, what’s your bumper sticker? You know, for the new ed reform phrase, and I’m paraphrasing, they said things like reimagine the high school years or required to transparent, consistent annual reporting.

Responsive systems and better information. None of that sounds exciting. Um, it doesn’t sound like you know, things that you can kind of bring together. And then he talked about how the right has quite a contrast on that, right? More choices, less wokeness. No US Department of Education. It sounds big and massive and transformative even if I don’t agree with those things.

The bottom line is I think having this discussion is important that what do we need to do so that we can bring parties together again on behalf of kids. [00:04:00] He argues, and certainly we would agree. When you look at test scores and sort of the trajectory of them over the last 10 years, we have a lot to be concerned about.

You know, I’m looking at the literacy crisis and I’m saying, why isn’t that the unifying thing that if we have in our state, 30% of our kids are reading proficiently well over 60 are not reading proficiently. That ought to make people galvanize and want to do something. Mm-hmm. I just appreciate. This idea that we do need to have these conversations.

One of the strongest arguments he does make, and this is the last thing that I’ll mention, is that it may require presidential leadership. And I would agree. ’cause again, going back to how we have had some of these major reforms, right? No Child left behind. You talk about during the Obama administration, you had these promised neighborhoods initiatives and race to the top.

And to me, things that were very exciting that really brought states together. Common Core I know is not as, didn’t turn out the way we expected, but there are a number of [00:05:00] things that there were attempts to bring people together and to really transform public education. I think he’s right that it’s gonna require presidential leadership, and I would argue in the work that I do at the state level in five different states, it’s gonna take gubernatorial leadership.

So I’m hoping that as there are elections across this country, that we will find gubernatorial candidates on both sides who are making education one of their top issues. Mm-hmm. We need that to be the case because we have to fix public education.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well thanks for sharing that and, and your reflection.

I mean, that article did catch my eye and I was, what are the three reasons that it could happen or couldn’t happen? But yeah, let’s hope for the best. And, you know, let’s give a shout out to you. You’re talking about GU leadership. I mean, some states are making this push. I mean, here in Arkansas we make a big push on a number of things here.

And so hopefully we could see more of that. Speaking of states doing things, you know, obviously there’s the Mississippi story. Um, my news article is about [00:06:00] Mississippi as well, but it’s about one of the law schools in that state. So Mississippi College School of Law, the headline goes, is. Among the first in the nation to require AI education.

So that caught my eye. And I guess this law school, you know, I mean, responding to some of the other stories that we’ve seen, I mean this, this article mentioned how a federal judge in Mississippi admitted his staff used AI to draft a court order. Then it had tons of mistakes in it. There’s stuff like that where, I don’t know, it sounds like this law school wants to get ahead of that and, and you know, we’ve talked about AI maybe off and on in the show and it’s here and you know, we’ve gotta figure out how to not let it master us.

And so it looks like this law school is maybe taking some steps to provide some training, some space for there. Aspiring lawyers to kinda reflect on how it ought to be used. So I don’t know, maybe there’s gonna be another model here coming outta [00:07:00] Mississippi for us to think about. But we’re on a new frontier and I don’t think any of us has this figured out.

So let’s keep at it. And, Hey, Alsiha, I don’t know about, you May, maybe this is a bipartisan thing we can do as well. You know, try to maybe to figure out ai.

Alisha Searcy: Right? I think it goes across party lines, doesn’t it?

Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah.

Alisha Searcy: And it’s funny you mentioned that we had a case here in Georgia at our Supreme Court.

Where someone in the district attorney’s office in one of the local counties, like an assistant da, cited a case that she got from chat GBT, and it wasn’t a real case.

Albert Cheng: Oh boy.

Alisha Searcy: So it’s a thing. I’m glad that this law school is, you know, getting ahead of it because as you said, we don’t have the answers to all of this, and I think everybody’s trying to figure out in whatever industry you’re in, how do you use AI in a way that aids your work?

You know, you can benefit from the technology, but it doesn’t take away your own critical thinking or ability to research legal cases.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. [00:08:00] Well, anyway, thanks for, uh, shooting the breeze with me about some of the news. We’re gonna have Stephen Greenblatt come on the show on the other Sydor, the Break to talk about Christopher Marlowe.

So stick around.

Stephen Greenblatt is Kogan University professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He has written extensively on English Renaissance literature and acts as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of 15 books, including most recently, dark Renaissance, the Dangerous Times, and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, the Swerve, how the World Became Modern Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Will in the World, how Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, A Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Tyrant Shakespeare on politics. [00:09:00] He attended Yale University graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English as Fulbright Scholar. He attended the University of Cambridge where he earned a further bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, and returned to Yale for his doctorate in English. Professor Greenblatt, welcome to the show.

Stephen Greenblatt: Thank you, Albert. It’s great for me to be here.

Albert Cheng: You’ve written one of the most celebrated books about Shakespeare and more recently Dark Renaissance, the Dangerous Times, and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival. Now, who is this rival? I think our listeners are, are keen to know, uh, it’s the great at Elizabeth and playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Could you start by just giving us a brief overview of who was Christopher Marlowe?

Stephen Greenblatt: Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare were just about exact contemporaries. Both born very close to one another in 1564, and actually from somewhat comparable backgrounds. Shakespeare came from a provincial family in Ry [00:10:00] upon Avon.

His father was a Glover. Marlowe came from Canterbury, the cathedral city, and his father was a cobbler. Actually, Shakespeare’s father did better than Marlowe. Shakespeare’s father, for a while at least, was reasonably successful, and even the mayor of Stratford, the equivalent of the Mayor Marlow’s father, was a rougher.

Anyway, they’re born the same year from backgrounds that in the context of their world, late 16th century, Elizabeth in England, they don’t count for anything because they’re not gentlemen, not nobles. They don’t come from fancy backgrounds with elite training. They’re just from a poor background, but, or modest, lower middle class background.

But Marlowe had an unusual. Run of it in a way that more remarkable in its way than, than this contemporary Shakespeare.

Albert Cheng: Well, let’s set the stage, pun intended a little bit more here. Um, I wanna hear a little bit more about the El Elizabeth and times [00:11:00] really. And so in the dust jacket of your book, dark Renaissance, it reads, quote, in repressive Elizabeth in England.

Artists are frightened into dull conventionality. Foreigners are suspects. Popular entertainment largely consists, of course, spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Now that’s quite the description, but tell us about Queen Elizabeth, the first and and the wider cultural landscape of her England.

Stephen Greenblatt: Albert, if you or any of the listeners have been.

Do anything like renaissance pleasure fairs where you dress up and drink ale, and imagine that all is well in the days of good Queen Bes Elizabeth, I, you have a, a sweet fantasy of what life was like, but it actually wasn’t like that. At least it wasn’t like that in the years that people like Marlowe and Shakespeare grew up because what had happened.

In the 16th century, starting with [00:12:00] the Queen’s father, Henry vii, was that the country managed to swing back and forth between Catholicism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Protestantism. And that actually variations on how, how hard the Protestantism was. And with each of these swings, there were a series of repressions executions.

And that on top of a society that actually was less like North Carolina and more like North Korea, where there were, there was actually almost no public sphere, no space for free speech and as a little space for free thinking as they could figure out how to make it. I mean, so it’s a very rough world and that produced, uh, an effect by the middle of the 16th century that people.

Figured out how they had to keep their head down if they wanted to keep their head on. And so there were some great artists at the beginning of the 16th century and very interesting [00:13:00] thinkers like Thomas Moore, who was executed by Henry Vi vii by the of Surrey, who was executed by Henry viii, learned the lesson, which was that they better stay very, very quiet.

And that’s the world that Shakespeare and Marlowe entered into. And that’s the world that Marlowe at least. So I argue in my book, that’s the world that Marlowe somehow managed to break through.

Albert Cheng: Let’s talk about his early years in this world. Yeah. Tell us about Marlowe’s family. His, I mean, you mentioned some details about his dad being a cobbler.

Tell us more about his family, his early life, I suppose he had an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. That’s also from your dust jacket, you know, what other formative educational or religious experiences did he have?

Stephen Greenblatt: Someone like Christopher Marlowe. Born to a shoemaker who was maybe marginally literate, but probably not able to read or write.

And certainly the mother wasn’t able to read or write and the siblings weren’t able to read or write. Someone like Marlowe would [00:14:00] normally not have had much in the way of an education except perhaps the crudest beginnings of one. And in the first years of. What we would now call elementary school, but something happened and we actually don’t understand at this point how it happened.

I have some speculations in my book. Marlowe comes from a. A rough family. The the father is brought to court because he draws blood from his apprentice. There’s endless lawsuits. The sisters attack people in the street. I mean, it’s a rough family. And yet what Marlowe managed when he was just at the cutoff age to get a scholarship to go to the best.

Secondary school, they would call it a grammar school in Canterbury. And that required a significant mastery of Latin. How on earth Marlowe got that mastery given the family is from, is not clear. I think the answer must lie [00:15:00] in the fact that, as I mentioned, he’s from Canterbury, a great cathedral city, and there were many priests associated with the.

Great Cathedral who must have somehow noticed that there was a fantastically bright little kid whom they took under their wing and they managed to teach him enough to get into this school. And not only did he get into this school, but then he did well enough so that he also won a full scholarship to go to.

One of the two great English universities to go to Cambridge University, so that’s again, just extraordinary. It wasn’t the case, Shakespeare didn’t go to university. This was the case of Marlowe, and that actually basically changed everything in his life. It was one of those moves as many of us have had in our lives, and I’m sure some of your listeners have, but it’s what we now call first gen.

University where, but that means that he in very deep way broke away from his origins because the schooling that he [00:16:00] had, both in the secondary school and at Cambridge, was virtually entirely in Latin. To put it mildly, his family couldn’t have understood a word that he was studying north, the friends that he must have grown up with when he was a little boy.

So he moves into a different world and that moving into a different world basically shapes everything that followed.

Albert Cheng: I’d like to hear maybe a bit more about this. You write in your book, quote, school boys who had endured the rigors of Latin grammar and had worked their way through Cicero and Caesar were rewarded with Virgil’s dark epic on the foundation of Rome and hefty dose of Ovid’s metamorphosis.

What I wanna ask is, how did this kind of education influence Marlowe’s intellectual life, and how did it exactly pave the way to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge?

Stephen Greenblatt: I think probably Albert, to be truthful, most students who went through the kind of education that Marlowe went through were born out of their gourd.

Uh, [00:17:00] the way in which Latin was generally taught in this time, in this period, Shakespeare and Marlo’s time was by beating children mercilessly when they made the mistakes that you in inevitably make when you try to learn a new language, especially a complicated new one. There was even an educator from the period who said that God had created the buttocks in order to enable children to learn Latin and the exception.

They were rare exceptions with someone like Marlowe who actually was liberated by what he read. And the reason for that is that there was an educational reform of the sort that’s known as humanism in the 16th century. And that educational reform was principally about the syllabus in the schools. And they decided to change the syllabus to emphasize less Christian theology by reading.

Medieval theologians and instead to read ancient classics, pagan classics. They did so because they thought correctly that the language, the Latin [00:18:00] language, was more beautiful, more polished in the ancient texts by poets like Virgil Anova than it was in theologians like Thomas Aquinas. But they didn’t entirely reckon with the fact that the pagan works that they were teaching were wildly at variance.

With the Sunday sermons, as it were, that everyone was required to listen to every week. That is to say these are works that are much, much, much more. They’re sexier, more transgressive, more freethinking than anything that the school masses would’ve wanted. And yet that’s what they would teaching. And every once in a while, and Marlow’s the extreme case, someone came along who was thrilled by what they were encountering.

Albert Cheng: Wow. I’m gonna ask you one more question about his educational background and then Alsiha’s gonna jump in and we’re gonna get into Marlowe’s Works. But there’s an interesting situation. In 1587, the university was [00:19:00] reluctant to award Marlowe his master’s degree because of a rumor that he intended to go to Northern France, presumably to become a Roman Catholic priest.

Tell us about this account and how did it all unfold?

Stephen Greenblatt: The education that Marla received, especially for. Kids like Marlowe was from a poor family. They were really about being trained to become an Anglican priest. That’s why the scholarships of the kind that he won were founded to identify bright kids, mostly from poor families Who would.

Enter the priesthood and work in a small parish somewhere and were expected to be learned. Be able to read Latin, be able to read Greek to be well educated people. That was the idea. That was the idea when Marlowe became, was an undergraduate and got his BA degree from Corpus Christi College in Cambridge and then he applied for and won a continuation of his scholarship to get an ma and that was a sure sign that he was going [00:20:00] on to the priesthood.

But when he applied for his degree at the end of his seventh year at Cambridge, his MA degree, the authorities in Cambridge said no for the reason that you mentioned Albert, which was that they suspected something dangerous and inappropriate criminal. In fact, which was the possibility that he was going over to France where there was, they were training dissident, young English Catholics.

And smuggling them back into the country, to minister to the Catholic faithful who were there secretly, and in many cases, to plot against the Protestant regime. England is Protestant at this point, so that’s a situation. The university’s authorities at Cambridge say, no MA degree, and then the most amazing thing happened.

Which was that a letter was sent, signed by the most important people in what was called the Privy Council. That’s the equivalent now of let’s say the president’s cabinet. [00:21:00] So every one of the leader, the leading people in the Elizabethan regime, writes a letter to the Cambridge authorities saying that we would be very reluctant.

The Queen would be very reluctant to have. Someone who has done the state such important services, Christopher Marlowe not receive his MA degree, give him his degree, and lo and behold, the Cambridge authorities gave him his degree. So the question is, what on earth are they talking about? What service, and then if you go back and look at the records they kept records at in the colleges in Cambridge of the food and the beer and sausages that the kids were eating because they were charged for it.

Marlowe had a scholarship, but they kept the record of it. So you can see whether they were there, they weren’t there in the college. And you see that in fact, Marlowe was missing for substantial periods of time during those years where he was supposed to get his MA degree. The only plausible explanation.

Is that he had been recruited for the Secret Service run [00:22:00] by a spy master named Francis Walsingham out of London, out of his house on a place called Seeding Lane. So as you may know, as your listeners may know, universities are prime recruiting grounds for spies. That’s always been the case. It continues to be the case into our own time.

And this was a period, the period that Marlowe was there in the 1580s. We’re talking about the years leading up also to the Spanish armada, the attempt to evade England and return it violently to the Catholic faith. These are years in which the authorities are completely obsessed, paranoid about the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, and they need buys.

And evidently, Marlowe was recruited to be one of them.

Albert Cheng: Fascinating. I mean, that’s a drama in and of itself.

Alisha Searcy: It really is. So, Steven Marlowe was, has often been described as a spy, and now we kind of understand why a brawler and a heretic as well as a magician, [00:23:00] a dualist tobacco user, counterfeiter, a reco, and an atheist.

Could you tell us about his complex personality, his character, and some of his personal experiences interwoven into his six dramas?

Stephen Greenblatt: It’s a good question, Alsiha. Of course, we’re talking about someone who lived centuries ago and who normally would’ve flown completely under the radar because he wasn’t from the right social class.

So ordinarily from someone of his background, we would know virtually nothing about him. But in the case of Marlowe, we know basically two kinds of things. We know the plays and poems that he wrote and their. Fascinating, rich and thrilling to read. And we know basically what was written up in police reports of one kind or another.

So unfortunately we don’t have other things that would be useful. Letters written back and forth, visits to his psychiatrist where you, you get [00:24:00] to read the record and so forth and so on or whatever. A diary or, no, nothing of the kind. But what we do have is still quite a lot about this person starting and maybe ending with the fact that he transformed, revolutionized the popular theater, and to some extent revolutionized poetry in the period as well, which is amazing for such a person, especially a person who does all of this basically in his late teens and twenties.

He came on the scene when he decided maybe he always knew he wasn’t gonna be an Anglican priest. He’s the least likely character to be a priest, I think anywhere. But he, instead of doing that, when he got his MA degree, he went to London and he entered into the theater world. And the first play that he wrote when he went to London, which was called Tamra Lane, the Great, completely exploded on the English stage.

And [00:25:00] it exploded for multiple reasons, partly because of the way it was written, but also because of what it was, which was a celebration, a kind of wild celebration of a, a strange character, Tim, the lane they, uh, from Central Asia who had basically come from nothing and conquered much of the known world.

It’s a historical character, and you would expect in such a play in the 16th century, and not only in the 16th century, that a character who comes from no nowhere, he is just a robber with a gang, and who conquers kings and princes will finally get his comeuppance. But in fact, in this extraordinary play that Marlowe wrote.

Far from getting his comeuppance. The play ends with his being triumphant and celebrating. So it had a kind of radical force, and virtually everything that Marla wrote afterwards had something [00:26:00] comparable. Not, they’re not the same. Each play is different, but there’s something wild and disturbing about each of the things that he.

Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. So I wanna ask one more question about Tamlin The Great, as you mentioned, its theme and you know, sort of a surprising ending, if you will. Why do you think that particular play remained such an enduringly important English play?

Stephen Greenblatt: Well, I actually saw a production of it not so long ago in New York that it still has a lot of life to it, though it isn’t done that often anymore, but it’s partly because it was written in an extraordinary way with a kind of power that the English theater had never had before the English Theater, before Marlowe came on the scene was written in verse.

I say most as Shakespeare’s plays are written, Marlowe plays are written. Most plays in the period are written in verse, and the reason for that, there’s almost no scenery. These are plays that are performed in daylight in the afternoon [00:27:00] on a pretty much a bare stage. So the equivalent in effect of scenery of what we would expect in the play is just a heightened language, intensified language.

So before Marla came in the scene, the plays were written principally in a form known as. Fourteeners because they had 14 syllables. And in my book I quote some particularly awkward fourteeners, but a little bit, I’m cheating cooking the books. ’cause you can write interesting things in Fourteeners. I’ll give you an example.

There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many, a poor girl and me. Oh, Lordy was one. Those are, that’s two, two lines of Fourteeners, so they can be pretty effective. But the quote that I just gave you, it doesn’t sound like the conversation that you and I are having.

It doesn’t sound like ordinary speech or ordinary speech even pumped up a notch. But Marlowe came on the scene and writes something like this nature that framed us of four elements [00:28:00] warring within our breasts for regiment that teach us all to have aspiring minds. Now you, you see that that is still tightened, but it sounds like, how should we say, ordinary English speech, ordinary English speech spoken by someone of extraordinary eloquence.

A picture of the best moments of Barack Obama, let’s put it that way, where you have someone who has an unusual command of rhetoric.

Alisha Searcy: Makes total sense. Marlowe’s tragedy. The tragic history of the life and death of Dr. Faustus 1592 is based on German stories about a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for magical power.

Could you give us a brief plot summary and explain Dr. Faustus wider dramatic influence?

Stephen Greenblatt: Well, the play came from, as you say, from a very crude source about a. Character who may actually have [00:29:00] existed in Germany, who was a magician, conjure, pawn, man, you name it, from a poor family who persuaded a lot of people that he had made a pact with the devil and could do extraordinary things.

And in the source that Marlo used, this magician who originated as a professor and then made this deal with the devil is finally torn apart. By the devils that he had made the pact with, and that was part of the deal. He was given a certain number of years, and at the end of those years, he would give his soul to the devil and he’d be torn apart.

And that’s what happens in the story. So it’s a fairly crude story about sin and its comeuppance and Marlowe. Fundamentally follows that pattern, but he follows the pattern typical for him in a way that you would never have imagined it could be done. It begins with an extraordinary scene of a scholar who has [00:30:00] reached the end of his.

Capacity to keep going and learning and learning and learning. Who feels it’s finally a waste? It’s been worthless. Even though he’s mastered the law, he’s mastered medicine. He’s master’s theology. He feels it doesn’t amount finally to anything, and in this kind of desperation, he turns to magic. Satisfy his profoundest longings, belonging to learn everything, to understand the nature of the universe, to intervene in human affairs, to save his country from its enemies and so forth and so on.

And that’s the design of the plane. He makes a deal with a devil, a devil named Melos, who becomes his companion, and the play follows the course of his life until. Lo and behold, he also was torn apart at the end and made beaches comeuppance. It’s a play in which Marlowe is able to [00:31:00] give voice to the profoundest doubts that must have been brooding just below the surface of the late, late 16th century.

I think hell’s a fable. I think hell’s a fable. I don’t believe any of this. It’s just meant to frighten us. We need to be able to follow our mind wherever it goes. We need to be able to learn. We have the right to understand the nature of the universe, to understand the structure of the cosmos, we need to answer our questions.

We need to call everything into question. All of this is voiced in the play.

Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. So I wanna talk about a poem for a second, Marlowe’s Pastoral poem. The passionate shepherd to his love in 1599 is composed in IIC to Tramor, and each stanza is composed of two rhyming couplets. Would you discuss his poetry and what we hope young people or college students might know and [00:32:00] appreciate about it?

Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, this was a poem that was just loved. In the period, we know that it was loved because people wrote answers to it. They made fun of it, they imitated it, they played with it. It’s a beautiful, seemingly very, very simple poem. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove that.

Just an invitation to a lover. To live with him and to enjoy life and to enjoy pleasures, the pleasures of life, and we know that this poem just reached a lot of people and excited them. What’s on about the poem, or from our perspective, very interesting about the poem, is that it is very unclear whether this is a poem written to a man or a woman who the lover actually is.

Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasure to prove that valleys, groves, hills, and fields, woods are steeping out and heels and we’ll [00:33:00] sit upon the rocks, seeing the shepherds feed their flocks and so forth and so on. It’s, it’s just itri. It’s beautiful and seemingly simple, but the more you look at it, the trickier it becomes because it’s not clear who was talking what the gender is.

Whether they’re actually real shepherds or just pretending to be shepherds because the speaker offers buckles of gold and amber studs as presents and so forth. It’s a, it’s a wonderful, charming, and secretly subversive poem.

Alisha Searcy: That’s fascinating. Who knew? My final question for you before I’m gonna ask for you to read as an excerpt is during their lifetimes, Christopher Marlowe was.

More famous and recognized as a superior playwright to William Shakespeare, and Marlowe was significant influence on Shakespeare acting as his key creative predecessor. Could you discuss these great rivals as well as Marlowe’s Mysterious Death and Enduring [00:34:00] Legacy?

Stephen Greenblatt: Sure. We know that Shakespeare and Marlowe had to have known each other, and they actually wrote together.

Now, scholars widely believe that several early plays of Shakespeare’s, the plays that we call Henry the sixth parts two and three were written together with Christopher Marlowe, though they clearly knew each other and they were exact contemporaries. If Shakespeare had died at the age that Marlowe died.

Which is 29. No one on this broadcast would’ve heard of, or almost no one on this broadcast would’ve heard of William Shakespeare. Maybe he would say, oh yeah, he wasn’t, he the guy who wrote that sort of, who wrote that kind of mediocre comedy called The Two Gentleman of Verona. Someone else would say, oh yeah, I think that’s the one who wrote the slasher play, Titus Andronicus.

Ooh, that’s a terrible thing. And that’s about it, as opposed to Marlowe. Who had written Dr. Faustus, the Jew of Malta, Tambala, the Great Edward ii, an extraordinary set of things. [00:35:00] So Shakespeare’s career blossoms basically in his thirties and forties after Marlow’s death. I could show you if we had time in a hundred different ways, how deeply Shakespeare was influenced by how carefully he watched.

Marlowe was doing, and because Shakespeare is an absolutely astonishing genius, he tended to do things even better than Christopher Marlowe could do them. But he starts with thinking, how did, how did he do that? And then figures out how to improve. Even among that Marlowe, we have no idea what would’ve happened.

Had Marlowe lived a longer life. Marla was walking on the edge of the ravine for his whole life. When he was 29, he was officially arrested because of several reports that had been filed. We’re not a hundred percent sure of the timeline here, but with the reports survived that say that he’s been saying horrible things that you’re, you absolutely couldn’t say If you want to live a long life in Elizabethan England.

Things [00:36:00] like, I think religion is a fraud, just designed to keep men in fear. I think that Jesus and St. John were lovers. I think that I have the right to counter to coins, to make coins as well as the queen does, and so forth and so on. I could go into all of those things. He is officially arrested, but he is not put in jail.

He’s told to stay within the orbit of the Queen, the Queen’s court, and wait for further instructions, and then May 30th in 1593, he apparently gets an invitation to go for a day’s. Outing to a town called Deford, now part of Greater London, but then was a separate port on the Thames. And he goes to Eleanor Bulls tavern, her house where he meets three friends.

And the three friends meet at 10 in the morning and then they stay around and they have lunch, and then they stay around the entire afternoon and then they have dinner and they talk quietly [00:37:00] among themselves. No one can hear what they’re saying. And then the people in the house here shouting after dinner and they go in and Marlowe is lying dead on the floor with a knife stuck through his eye into his brain.

There’s an inquest. The three men who are in the room all tell the same story, which was, there was an argument about the bill for the day’s meals and that Marlowe grabbed. One of the men’s knives we’re talking about people who carried their own knives a little bit like, you know, Abilene, Texas. In the 1890s, everyone is armed.

Marlowe grabs one of the men’s knives and hits him with a hilt over the head, and they point out that that one of them did, doesn’t indeed have some scratches on his head. And then in the, in the tussle, Marlowe gets killed. End of story. So possibly that’s the case. There was just an argument about the bill.

I’m not gonna pay anything like that, or whatever. Marlowe was [00:38:00] this person with a temper, but it was discovered, Alsiha, only in the 20th century. It was discovered by a clever literary sleuth who found the appropriate papers filed away, that the three men who were in the room with Marla that day were all associated.

The Secret Service in one way or another, and one in particular was a major operative in the Secret Service, so they could all have met together and had an argument about the bill, but I don’t believe it.

Alisha Searcy: Wow. Sounds like another play.

Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah. But one in which unfortunately, Marlowe gets cast in the role of Victim.

Victim,

Alisha Searcy: yes. Wow. What a story. Well, thank you for that. Would you like to close with an excerpt from your book?

Stephen Greenblatt: I’m happy to. I’m gonna read you something from pretty much near the end. Officially, the medieval worldview was still intact in England, even late in Elizabeth’s reign. [00:39:00] The earth was at the center of the universe, and the sun and the planet circled around it in their perfect crystalline spheres.

The structure of society was ordered in the way it was by God. As were gender roles and sexual positions, and it was f or worse to call the arrangements into question or to try to rise above one station or to long for what the church or state told you that you were not allowed to desire. Christianity was the only true religion and anyone outside the Christian community, whether Jew or Muslim or skeptic, was in the grip of the devil at the end of days.

Which could come at any moment, souls and bodies would be reunited and brought before God for the last judgment. He would consign the damned to an eternity of torment in hell. The saved to bliss in heaven. For the cultural life of England to move forward, [00:40:00] someone had to come along and break through the suffocating carpe of inherited dogma.

Cobbler’s son from Canterbury. Without any elite support or resources or sense of family entitlement seems an unlikely candidate for this role, and yet perhaps this very unlikelihood was part of what it took. Marlowe had no stake in the system to begin with, nothing to lose, except of course, his life. He was reckless, daring, unscrupulous, transgressive.

It is tantalizing to imagine what he might have written had he lived a long life or even survived as Shakespeare did into his fifties. But perhaps the wonder is that he existed at all and that he made it to the age of 29.

Alisha Searcy: Wow. Beautifully said. Thank you very much. And we’ve learned a whole lot today.

And who would’ve known if it wasn’t for Mr. Marlowe, we would not have had [00:41:00] Shakespeare?

Stephen Greenblatt: Well, I think that’s the case. And it’s been a pleasure to talk with you, Albert, and with you, Alsiha.

Albert Cheng: I dunno about you, Alsiha, but every time I listen to a podcast or a talk or somebody that talks about. Shakespeare and I guess in this case Christopher Marlowe and just all, you know, great literary works. I just mm-hmm. Get a little itch to maybe pick up and read it. You know, that itch usually dies out and I don’t get around to doing it, but I had that feeling today.

Alisha Searcy: I know, you know, I’m a former thespian, right? Instead. Oh, that’s

Albert Cheng: right. That’s right.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah. Shakespeare primarily in middle school, so it was really interesting to hear all of these accounts and kind of learn a little bit more. So I agree with you. It makes you wanna. Pull some books out and a few more plays and, you know, again, [00:42:00] identify some of the things that you missed back in the day.

Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for, uh, joining me on this episode.

Alisha Searcy: Always a good time.

Albert Cheng: All right. And for the rest of you, let me leave you with the tweet of the week as well, a teaser for next week. A tweet is a article from Education. Next quote, the movement of these teachers into the classical sector is sowing the seeds of pedagogical and cultural renewal.

Check up that article on Ed Next. Fascinating story on traditional public school teachers being a bit disappointed with the profession and the ability to. Teach as they, you know, may have thought teaching, could have been, and kind of found their way into classical education where they could really realize that aspiration.

So check that out. And then for next week, we’re gonna have Gerald early. He is the Merle Kling professor of Modern letters at Washington University of St. Louis, and he’s gonna come chat with us about his book Play Harder, the Triumph of Black Baseball [00:43:00] in America. So it should be another fascinating episode, but until then, be well and take care.

Alisha Searcy: Yes. Take care.