‘I have four candles and one evening to write this account…’

It is 1593. Marlowe – playwright, heretic, bisexual, spy – is summoned before the Privy Council. Someone calling himself Tamburlaine has been posting poetic libels threatening the immigrant community in London. Marlowe, author of the play ‘Tamburlaine’, ‘an heretical tract’, is suspected of being the libeller. He also stands accused of blasphemy and atheism, courtesy of his friend Thomas Kyd, who claims to have heard him accuse Christ and all the apostles of sharing his own vices. Marlowe listens, does not hear the cock crow, and denies the friendship. He defends himself by insisting that the poetry of the libels is so poor that he could not possibly have written it. For unknown reasons, (Marlowe never does quite get to grips with what is going on around him), the Council lets him go, although he remains a suspect under supervision. He realises that his only chance of survival is to discover the identity of the man who calls himself Tamburlaine.

The shameless oppression by the state, its tortures and coercion, is a dark thread which runs through this novella. The shadowy rulers ‘committed men they knew well and men they had met only once to torture and death’. In this they are most ably assisted by their victims, who will betray anyone for money or to save their own skins, or for even baser motives, such as the jealousy Marlowe attributes to Kyd. The falseness of friendship, the dagger hidden in the smile, is the other dark thread woven through the tale.

One of the pleasures of the book is the sights and sounds Marlowe encounters as he searches London for clues to Tamburlaine’s identity. He moves from the bookstalls of St. Paul’s churchyard, to Blind Grizzle’s hovel, to the inn to meet with the Newgate turnkey, to Mortlake to meet with wise Dr. Dee, and along the way encounters a range of strikingly low characters. The best advice the turnkey can give to Marlowe, for example, is to choose a victim to be Tamburlaine: ‘a man like you can always think of someone….put his head in the rope instead of your own.’

Welsh achieves real lyricism in her descriptive passages. London street scenes are powerfully evoked in several places. A high point is a woodland scene where Marlowe reflects on what he sees there. In describing the violets and the trees, she shows something of Marlowe’s vanity, his lightness of mind, and the danger he is in, as well as a lush and attractive place. Another such high point is when Marlowe remembers a sexual encounter with his patron Walsingham. Since he now suspects Walsingham of being an enemy, his fantasy of Walsingham having congress with his own corpse is a horror of Jacobean dimensions.

The book is crammed with such vivid writing, but there is a problem with this. These and other scenes like them are the most powerfully written parts of the book, and by their number and power overshadow the plot. They are strung out one after the other, high point to high point, while the plot sags below them. There is a sense that they are somehow ‘stuck on’ to provide a thrill or a shudder to pad a plot that is essentially weak. For example, Marlowe is bisexual, and so we have a ‘facefucking interlude’ with Walsingham, later an encounter with a female prostitute, immediately followed by another encounter with a male friend. As background to a seamy life, they are well written, but seem to have the sole function of enlivening Marlowe’s repetitive wanderings where the same scenarios of betrayal is played out over and over.

While time and space is lavished on these scenes, plot devices are barely touched on. Marlowe is the recipient of mysterious scraps of cloth, a direct reference to his fictional Tamburlaine, but this clue is so lightly touched on, it becomes almost an irrelevance. The dramatic potential of Marlowe’s Faustian pact with Raleigh and Dee – literary immortality in exchange for his silence over Raleigh’s heresies – is lost through overcompression. In fact a good deal of dramatic potential is lost. Too much is narrated to or by Marlowe instead of being experienced by him (and the reader). In a sense, some of the best parts of the story have been omitted: Blaize’s accidental killing of the lady in the audience; the ambiguous relationship between Blaize and Marlowe; the mutual betrayal by Baynes and Marlowe to make sense of what happens between them in the book; the mysterious meetings at Raleigh’s home.

‘Tamburlaine Must Die’ is a good, pacy novella, but I can’t help but feel that it would have made a first rate novel.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.