Tuesday, January 24, 2017

2017/03: History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe -- Rodney Bolt

‘The question confronting a young man in [Elizabethan times] was not, am I heterosexual or am I homosexual, but where do my greater loyalties lie, with other men or with women.’ The answer for Kit was ‘with both’.
Reread, for a paper on Christopher Marlowe in Historical Fiction that I was unable to give (due to ill health) at the Historical Fiction Research Network conference. My earlier review is here.

I still think it's a delightful bit of historical play: I suspect I caught some more in-jokes this time around: and I found myself more intrigued than before by the ways in which 'Shakespeare's' sonnets, read in particular sequence, can be made to tell a story. (It's like tarot cards: put 'em down in any order and construct your narrative.)

Reading on Kindle made it easier to search and match up different threads, characters, themes: however, it also made the footnotes harder to follow (impossible, in fact, on my old Kindle 3, as the footnote refs didn't seem to work as links: I ended up having footnotes open on my phone's Kindle app, and reading the main narrative on the Kindle itself.)

Plenty of sound scholarship on the known events of Marlowe's life, and the lives of those associated with him: plenty of playful invention regarding a life in exile. Still highly recommended.

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