Book Review: Renaissance scholar illuminates brief, transgressive life of poet Christopher Marlowe

The English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the same year as his frenemy William Shakespeare. Yet unless you majored in English in college, it is quite possible you never heard of him. Except you have.

Marlowe was the guy who wrote about Helen of Troy: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships” (“Doctor Faustus”). Who penned the much-imitated line “Come live with me and be my love” (“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”). Who virtually invented Elizabethan theater by writing his first play for the London stage, “Tamburlaine,” in unrhymed blank verse.

In his riveting new biography, “Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores Marlowe’s short, subversive life and argue