Anthony Burgess A Dead Man in Deptford.
Carroll & Graf, 272 pages, $21
Novelizing the lives of famous artists is probably not a good idea. For every Hermann Broch, this genre throws up a thousand Irving Stones. The late Anthony Burgess was fond of the enterprise, doing the life of Shakespeare (Nothing Like the Sun), of, in light disguise, Somerset Maugham (Earthly Powers), and in this, his final novel, of Christopher Marlowe. Burgess may have thought he was bringing a Joycean richness to a pop genre, but he was really just Irving Stone with airs.
The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Kit Marlowe (1564–1593) went to Cambridge but headed for London in 1587 to scribble for the theater. We pick him up there; the story is told (when Burgess remembers) by an anonymous young actor in Burbage’s troupe who acts in the old-fashioned melos of Kyd and in the new-fangled melos of Kit and is the occasional object of Kit’s lust. Kit has a dicey rep about town—his plays are scandalous enough but he gets drunk in the Unicorn and spouts shocking atheism and buggery. Kit was “known about the town, pointed at as one that would raise the devil [cf. Doctor Faustus] with Latin, and with Greek call back Helen of Troy from the dead [ditto].”
But what gives Kit even more best-seller cachet than diabolism or buggery is espionage. Yes, reader, he was a spy. And so, relying heavily