This book’s approach to historical reconstruction is contemporary and wears a Renaissance register casually
Lightborne, a first novel by Hesse Phillips, is the latest in a long line of fictional treatments of the events that led to the killing of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe .
Marlowe’s biography exerts a powerful pull. Recruited as a spy while a scholarship boy at Cambridge, he went on to write dramas of unprecedented force, featuring protagonists who pursue their heart’s desire to the point of ruin.
The afterword to Lightborne claims Marlowe as a “queer ancestor” , and the novel offers a thoroughly contemporary take on his predicament. Phillips links not only Marlowe’s killing, but also the great conspiracy of his time, the Jesuit “Babington Plot” against Elizabeth I, to betrayed homosexual love.
Also contemporary is Lightborne’s approach to historical reconstruction. It wears a Renaissance register casually, like a hipster accessory. A fast-paced narrative chain of theatrical scenes breathes new life into familiar images of the period, though some clearer orientation may be needed for readers unacquainted with the context.
Far different from the “empty,” “hollow” torturers in the nascent, very nasty security state of which he too is a functionary, Lightborne’s Marlowe would never kill the thing he loved. By the end, Phillips has also given that Wildean motif an update.
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