“Dark Renaissance” is a biography of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who burned so brightly in a brief and astonishing life that his contemporary, William Shakespeare, stood in his considerable shadow. The biographer is Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, who in addition to a gilded academic career struck bestseller gold and snagged a Pulitzer for “The Swerve.” That account of an ancient Latin poem has been optioned by Hollywood.

Paging Paramount, because Marlowe’s life, which was as explosive as the stage dramas that made his name, seems scripted for the silver screen. The son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler, Marlowe secured a scholarship to grammar school and then a place at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. At some point during his time as an undergraduate Marlowe seems to have joined the web of spies plying espionage in service to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. 

Mr. Greenblatt paints the Elizabethan era in dark tones. This was an era of strife. Henry VIII’s break with Rome launched a period of see-sawing religious regimes, with Catholics and Protestants taking turns at persecution, murder, and surveillance. Catholics were a potential fifth column that could be useful to England’s arch-enemy, Spain. Only marginally less menacing were the Puritans, who saw the Church of England as camouflaged popery.

Mr. Greenblatt describes Elizabeth as a monarch with “face painted white tinged with pink, her hair dyed bright red, and her teeth turning black, she was periodically paraded, like a weird religious icon covered with precious jewels … her interlocutors felt they were entering into an unsettling, fantastical, world.” A backwards one, too. The English language was hardly known across the Channel, and the humanism that flowered in Italy was unknown in England.

That all changed, in Mr. Greenblatt’s telling, when Marlowe moved to London. Mr. Greenblatt writes that “it is difficult for us to register the shock waves produced by Marlowe’s blank verse; we no longer have the ear for it … it was a bit like the arrival of talkies in cinemas.” Mr. Greenblatt likens Marlowe’s writing to “a verbal music” and the “cylinder of an internal combustion engine.” The playwright Ben Jonson called it “Marlowe’s mighty line.”

Mr. Greenblatt reckons that “everything in the Elizabethan theater is pre and post-‘Tamburlaine.’” The plot of the play would not be out of place in a modern action movie, as the play’s protagonist rises from obscurity to unleash a wave of slaughter and conquest that brings the mighty kings of the East to bend the knee — when they are not corpses ground to dust. Tamburlaine becomes lord of everything “from the bonds of Afric to the banks/of Ganges.”

Mr. Greenblatt’s argument will be a startling one to readers with fuzzy memories of Marlowe as a kind of B-league Shakespeare. The book credits Marlowe with breaking “open the rigid carapace that had enslaved the English spirit” and with having “awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.” These are the kind of bold claims to which academics are usually allergic. There is no hedge in Mr. Greenblatt, though. Marlowe midwifed modernity.

The thesis is a peculiar turn for Mr. Greenblatt, who is seen as the godfather of an approach to studying literature that prioritizes impersonal historical forces over the agency of individual genius. Mr. Greenblatt’s facility with archives pays off here in the form of a biography that reads like a novel. Shakespeare, upon whom Mr. Greenblatt has built a career, is in this book an elusive and elliptical operator, not yet the Bard but already on the way up.

Marlowe, unlike Shakespeare, lived and wrote dangerously. Mr. Greenblatt argues convincingly that Marlowe was a homosexual and a free-thinker, if not an outright atheist. He was also wildly original. If not for his dark-magic epic, “Doctor Faustus,” there likely would have been none of the abyss-like interiorities that mark “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.” Shakespeare, though, was a survivor — he lived long enough to retire as a rich man to his ancestral home.

Marlowe, whom Mr. Greenblatt calls “a genius but a profoundly disturbing one,” was murdered, in shadowy circumstances, by a knife that plunged above his eyeball into his brain in a shabby tavern. He was only 29 but had already, Mr. Greenblatt contends, “made it possible to write in a new way … he offered poetic liberation: Thanks to his astonishing style, the expressive power of the English language took a great leap forward.” 

Shakespeare knew it, and referenced Marlowe in his comedy “As You Like It.” The jester Touchstone reasons that “when a man’s verses cannot be understood / it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” The allusion is to the murder scene — no one was ever punished for the crime — at the Deptford Inn, where Marlowe breathed his last. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a row over a “reckoning”: a supper bill. 

Mr. Greenblatt reckons that Shakespeare’s “engagements with Marlowe’s achievements are brilliant, broodingly complex, and radical … they never once signal trust.” Marlowe’s work in the world of Elizabethan espionage would not be out of place in a novel by John le Carré. Those secret missions would have underscored the life and death stakes of trust. The man who wrote, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” still has his hidden.