To the Editor –

I always celebrate the confluences and serendipity of books and life.  I’ve been reading Anthony Burgess’ fictional biography of Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford, not an easy read as, ever the linguist, he writes in, I presume, a passable Elizabethan English.  He also does not sugarcoat what life was like then nor gloss over the intrigues of the Court (what we would call “politics” today) and the dangerous ground theater trod in its earliest days.

And so today we have a volatile mixture of politics and religion, the general populace walking around armed (with guns, not daggers and swords) for protection, and the recovery of the body of Richard II, written into history (by the victors, Shakespeare’s patrons) as villianous.  Isn’t it all somewhat wondrous.

– RP