Marlowe’s protagonists had been an infidel: an Atheist or a pagan, a Mohammedan or a Jew. We get the spies and Spy master, Sir Thomas Walsingham, the thugs Skeres, Fritzer and Poley Raleigh there are vital sketches of actors and playwrights like Nashe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Hemming,Condell and Alleyn. Written with extraordinary richness, and depth, pushing data into fictional form. Writing like thought is the dagger to the frontal lobes and scream, staying accurately close to the facts. The two grammar school boys met in this daring project. Burgess was to write the novel he’d been meaning to write on Marlowe (his last), prior to his own death. Shakespeare was to emerge from the shadow of Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’. Burgess is haunted by the ghost of Marlowe as was Shakespeare in 1593, when his work began to take off. Less than 2 weeks before his death, a warrant for his arrest on charges of blasphemy and atheism had been issued by the Privy Council. Marlowe’s stabbing during a Deptford tavern brawl of 1593 produced the most infamous murder in English literary history. Burgess had done his university thesis on Marlowe. Written on the quartercentenary of Marlowe’s death in 1993, having written Nothing Like the Sun on the quartercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth 1964.
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