My Video Chat with the brilliant Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt about his new book on the Renaissance bad boy, Christopher Marlowe, without whom there might not have been a Shakespeare

Marlowe is one of literature’s most transgressive figures. In the words of Stephen Greenblatt, whose latest book, published today, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, Marlowe “broke open Elizabethan England.” Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenblatt calls him a “wild talent who risked everything and paid for it.” But before Marlowe was mysteriously murdered at the age of 29, this son of an illiterate cobbler roared across 16th-century England, translating Ovid’s poems in prose so scandalous that bishops burned his books, and inventing blank verse so revolutionary that Greenblatt compares it to the “arrival of talkies or technicolor in the movies.” Learn more from our fascinating chat!