Kit, his face strangely taut, turned to Annie and clapped her on the arm. “Only a woman would think to stall God to her convenience. Well‑reasoned, chop logic.”
She nearly smiled, and touched Kit on the shoulder lightly. And Will almost imagined he heard, nearby, the flicker and settle of massive wings.
Author’s Note
First and foremost, I would like to thank Mr. Tony Toller, trustee of the Rose Theatre Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the remains of Bankside’s first theatre, the Rose. It was through the kindness of Mr. Toller that I was able to visit the site of that theatre, and stand – quite literally– where Ned Alleyn, Philip Henslow, and Christopher Marlowe stood, although the Rose was not then an archaeological site housed in the damp, breathing darkness under a modern skyscraper.
Plans are afoot to preserve the site and continue excavations and research, and as of this writing, fundraising for these projects is under way. If you are interested in learning more about this important historical and archaeological work – or in supporting it –details may be found at www.rosetheatre. org.uk.
This pair of novels has been a labor of years, and over the course of that time a lot of people have offered comment or listened to me whine. I also wish to thank first readers, bent ears, inspirational forces, and others both on and off the Online Writing Workshop (and the denizens of its invaluable writers’ chat) and various other online communities: Kit Kindred, Matt Bowes, Lis Riba, Sarah Monette, Kat Allen, Stella Evans, Chelsea Polk, Dena Landon, Brian and Wendy Froud, Liz Williams, Treize Armistedian, Rhonda Garcia, Leah Bobet, Chris Coen, Ruth Nestvold, Marna Nightingale, Hannah Wolf Bowen, Amanda Downum, Rachele Colantuono, John Tremlett, Gene Spears, Mel Melcer, Larry West, Jaime Voss, Walter Williams, Kelly Morisseau, Andrew Ahn, and Eric Bresin. I would also like to thank Ellen Rawson and Ian Walden, who graciously opened their home in England to me when I visited on a research trip in 2006. I’d also like to thank my editor, Jessica Wade, and my agent, Jennifer Jackson. Most sincere gratitude to my copy editor, Andrew Phillips, who is not only something of an Elizabethan historian in his own right, but also meticulous and intelligent. And I’m sure I’ve forgotten several people who deserve to be here, but as I’ve been writing this book since Christmas of 2002, I hope they will forgive me.
The present work would have been impossible to complete without the recent outpouring of popular scholarship concerning the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and in particular Mssrs. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. In addition, I consulted the work of multifarious authors, dabblers, artists, and historians. I have never met Park Honan, Anthony Burgess, Stephen Booth, Peter Ackroyd, Charles Nicholl, Michael Wood, Liza Picard, Stephen Greenblatt, David Riggs, David Crystal, Constance Brown Kuriyama, Peter Farey, Jennifer Westwood, Antonia Frazier, Alan H. Nelson, C. Northcote Parkinson, Elaine Pagels, Jaroslav Pelikan, Lawrence Stone, Gustav Davidson, Richard Hosley, Alan Bray, Michael B. Young, Peter W. M.. Blayney, Katharine M. Briggs, or any of the other wonderfully obsessed individuals whose work I consulted in preparing this glorious disservice to history. However, I owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude, and I spent immeasurable pleasant hours in their company while in the process of writing this book.
A couple of historical and linguistic quirks for the reader’s interest: the Elizabethan year began on Lady Day, in late March, rather than January 1. In result, Christofer Marley was, to his contemporaries, born at the end of 1563 and William Shakespeare at the beginning of 1564. To a modern eye, their birth‑dates would be in February and April, both of 1564.
I have chosen to preserve this quirk of the times, along with a characteristic bit of English in transition: at the time to which the writing refers, the familiar form of the English second‑person pronoun (thee) was beginning to drift out of use, but had not yet lost the war, and the plural pronoun (you) had–under French influence–come to be used as a singular pronoun in more formal relationships, but was not exclusive. As a result, conversation between familiar friends showed a good deal of fluidity, even switching forms within a single sentence, depending on the emotion and affection of the moment.
I have not availed myself of such transitional forms of address for nobility as were in use at the time, under the belief that it would cause more confusion than it would be worth; instead, I’ve tried to limit courtesy titles to one per customer, for clarity. Also, I have discarded the Elizabethan habit of referring to oneself in the formal third person (“Here sitteth –”), with the exception of sparing use in correspondence, etc. As well, during the time period in question, that same older third‑person verb conjugation ‑eth (She desireth, he loveth, she hath, etc.) was being replaced by the modern ‑s or ‑es, so that in some cases words were written with the older idiom and pronounced in the modern one. In the interests of transparency–this is a work of fiction, intended to entertain, after all – sincere attempts have been made to preserve the music of Early Modern English while making its vocabulary transparent to the modern eye and ear, but what is rendered in this book is, at best, nature‑identical Elizabethan flavoring rather than any near approximation of the genuine animal.
I recommend David Crystal’s excellent books Pronouncing Shakespeareand Shakespeare’s Wordsfor an accurate picture of the speech of the times.
I was unable or unwilling to avoid the use of some words that have a well‑defined meaning in Modern English, but are slipperier in EME, and to which our own cultural assumptions do not apply. Those who were spoken of as Atheists did not necessarily deny the existence of a God, though they denied God’s goodness and agency in intervening in mortal lives, for example. Likewise, the word “sodomy” covered a lot of ground, and it was legally punishable in proportion to witchcraft and treason… but the practice of male same‑sex eroticism seems to have been largely winked at, or at worst satirized. You can explore two conflicting takes on the homoeroticism of the day in Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance Englandand Michael B. Young’s King James and the History of Homosexuality;feel free to draw your own conclusions, as I have. At the very least, the modern ideas of homosexuality or heterosexualiry as the foundation of one’s persona did not have much currency to the Renaissance mindset; however, we can be fairly certain that, the social demands of reproduction aside, the desires of men (and the less‑well‑documented desires of women) no doubt inhabited the usual sliding scale of preferences.
Of course, even Platonic Elizabethan same‑sex friendships
could be very intense, passionate in modern terms, and one can find examples in Shakespeare and other chroniclers of the times of the vocabulary of love used casually between friends and nothing thought of it. However, some squeamish criticism to the contrary, it is this reader’s opinion that the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets is homoerotic rather than homosocial, and I have chosen to run with that reading. It also seems to me that, while those poems were at first only privately circulated, he does not seem to have believed his friends would be too shocked. Of course, this leaves open the question of whether any biographical analysis of those selfsame sonnets can be considered reasonable; they may very well have been an interesting work of fiction.
Much as this.
Back to cultural drift. On the family front, a cousin was not the child of an aunt or uncle, but merely any relative close enough to be considered kin, but not a member of the immediate family – a niece or a third cousin twice removed as easily as what we might consider a “cousin.”