All Program Dates
November 18, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
November 25, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
December 2, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
December 9, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $240. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Thursday, August 27, for Rosenbach members on Thursday, September 3, and for the general public on Thursday, September 10.
Description
Christopher Marlowe has long exerted a kind of charged power over his audiences. Far more than merely the second-best playwright of the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare’s great competitor was a master of iambic pentameter, a salacious poet, and an arresting, profane, and scandalous writer (and person). Much remains uncertain about Marlowe, from how much he actually embraced the heretical beliefs ascribed to him to the details concerning the circumstances of his untimely murder in a London tavern in 1593. In Marlowe’s writing, all certainties are questioned, faith can be treated scurrilously, and the Devil is always just a contract away. Join Ed Simon, lecturer in English at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, named one of the “Best Books of 2024” by The New Yorker, as he explores the writing and the world of Renaissance England’s most scandalous of writers.
About the Instructor
Ed Simon, PhD is the Public Humanities Lecturer in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University where he is the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. A widely published author, he is a monthly columnist for Literary Hub, and he regularly contributes to sites including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and dozens of others. Author of over a dozen books, including Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain and Printed in Utopia: The Radicalism of the Renaissance, he is an expert on Renaissance English literature and religion.