If you close your eyes and picture an artistic genius, chances are that the portrait will be framed by a Romantic ideal that took shape 200 years ago: an artist dedicated solely to his (almost always his) muse and transgressive appetites, breaking his era’s rules both moral and artistic, remaking society with his art. But this vision of genius is a poor fit for many great artists, and it tends to obscure what makes them and their work special. Take William Shakespeare, who is often portrayed as a carouser, downing pints while exchanging barbs with his fellow writers, cheating on his wife with both men and women, passionately engaging his quill to reimagine the very nature of the human being.

The little we know of Shakespeare’s life calls most of this into question. The man wrote two plays a year for much of his career, worked as an actor, and probably helped manage the theater company in which he was a major shareholder. His work was more conservative when it came to violence and sex than that of his peers. He did not invent any of the major components of his dramaturgy, and he almost always adapted existing source material. He invested wisely, worked hard to attain the rank of gentleman, and retired in his beloved hometown. If Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson wrote, the “soul of the age,” that may be in part because his life was nearly as conventional as any actor’s or writer’s in his time.

Shakespeare was shaped as much by that time as he was a shaper of it, and despite being the English language’s greatest writer, he defies the common vision of a genius at the cultural vanguard. Luckily, another brilliant Elizabethan playwright better suits the Romantic model: Christopher Marlowe.

As Stephen Greenblatt relates thrillingly in his new biography, Dark Renaissance, Marlowe led a brief and stormy life that deeply transformed the theater. He likely pioneered both the soliloquy and iambic pentameter on the English stage.