Before we return to his audacity, I thought I had understood every manner of torture and punishment, and yet I would continually turn the page, and you're revealing yet another means by which people were just basically dismantled on public corners.

Yes, it was a world without...

Let's start with saying it's a world without...

Our penitentiary system in which we lock away gigantic numbers of people, alas, it doesn't exist in the 16th century.

There are prisons, but there are prisons in which you generally don't spend very long.

But you do have a world in which the discipline, if that's the way to put it, is established by torture, tearing people apart, cutting off their ears, nailing them to death.

sticks to hanging them on trees.

But at the same time, the Queen seems to like it while never attending in person, it seems.

Yeah

...

in our lives.

Uh, and I imagine someone incredibly intelligent, imaginative woman and a, at, around a campfire coming up with this, uh, story, but the story that then becomes the truth for millions of people even now, however unbelievable it is, with a, a garden with magical trees, and a talking snake, and all, uh, and so forth.

I mean, it's obviously marked out as fiction in its origins, and yet it becomes true.

Anyway, I was obsessed with that story and with how it happens that, that such a obviously fictive story becomes the truth for millions of very intelligent people, Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, the smartest people in the world.

Anyway, because I have a friend at Harvard who runs a research station in western Uganda, works on chimpanzees, I went and observed the chimpanzees, thanks to his invitation, and lo and behold, you know, the alpha male of the chimpanzees is exactly the figure you describe.

May- maybe talk to me real fast, what is the swerve as you define it? I've tried, I, I read the book and I was like, "Oh, I get it," and then every time I've tried to be like, "So I read this book, The Swerve, and here's what the swerve is," they're like, "What are you talking about?" [laughs]

But for those who say there's a bit of hyperbole there, can you justify for me how important Tamburlaine was in Elizabethan theatre?

One curious fact that marks at least a little bit of the impact that the play must have had is that a few children in Tudor England after this play was performed in London, a few parents gave their children, rather oddly, the name Tamburlaine.

So that must mean something.

And there's other evidence having to do with For example, Robert Greene's attack on the play.

But for me, most of all, the impact that the play has to do, and we know that the play was successful, and that there was a, as happens on our, obviously, in our own entertainment industry, when something is successful, they call for an immediate follow-up, second season, as it were.

And Marlowe was called upon, clearly, to write Tamblyn Part 2, because Tamblyn Part 1 was a success.

But for me, most of all, The key to the impact of the play was Marlowe's, in effect, creation of blank verse, of unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Why do you think that is?

It feels clumsy, doesn't it? [laughs]

Yeah, very clumsy.

Trying to implicate somehow Marlowe in all of this.

The authorities go and search.

The Privy Council issues a, a very handsome reward for anyone who can identify the author of this menacing poem.

They go, uh, I think in search of Marlowe.

They can't find Marlowe, but they find his former roommate, Thomas Kyd, the playwright who was the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and they look around in Kyd's room to see if there's any evidence, the authorship of this anti-immigrant placard.

He obviously leaves such wealth behind him, and I wanted to get your take, Stephen, as we begin to wrap up this episode, with your understanding or your characterization of Marlowe's legacy.