The Marlen of Prague: Christopher Marlowe and the City of Gold by Angeli Primlani

(Guardbridge Books, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

The Armada is sailing towards England. Playwright, spy, and mage Christopher Marlowe is pulled by his sister Ann from dalliance with his lover Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy) to take part in a rite that will turn back the invasion. They save the country and are back in time for supper and that—apart from Marlowe’s attempts to bury the memories of the Spell in poetry and smoking—is that. Until five years later, when Kyd (who in the new reality which comes to pass never wrote The Spanish Tragedy but is still in possession of incriminating writings left by Marlowe in his rooms) is arrested and Marlowe himself is told that he is going to have to “die” and be sent undercover to bring arch-magician John Dee back from Prague.

The life of the historical Christopher Marlowe, whose recorded stabbing to death in an argument over a bar-bill in Deptford really has spawned rumours that his murder was faked so that he could work for Elizabeth I’s secret service (and, to boot, write most of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare) is fascinating enough. Add that Marlowe is one of the Gifted, who can see into the spirit world, and The Marlen of Prague becomes a story of magical intrigue which takes some time to unfold its convoluted tangle of twists and turns but becomes increasingly rewarding. Marlowe’s early conversations with Will Shakespeare—himself Gifted but preferring to “pay my own way” than be at the mercy of powerful men, and who has no memory of The Spanish Tragedy despite having acted in it—set up his own discontent with having changed reality once. But after he is recruited unwillingly to the Order of Merlin, a spy network devoted to the English Crown and sent to Prague with his minder Edwin Mooney, he discovers that the uneasy balance which Emperor Rudolf II holds between Protestant sects and fanatical Catholicism requires another act of world-changing.

Primlani’s portrayal of Marlowe amid a network of shifting alliances and allegiances, religious, political, and sexual, is that of a man who almost but significantly not quite knows what is going on. Among the characters we meet are Edward Kelley, the charlatan who convinced Dee that he could communicate with angels and the Emperor Rudolf that he could transmute base metal into gold, and who was eventually imprisoned by Rudolf for failing in the latter. We also meet Kelley’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Weston, one of the most interesting characters of the period—“our” Weston, some years after the events of this story, published well-received volumes of Latin verse and she is portrayed here as a scholar, like Marlowe one of the “Merchants of Light”. The astronomer Johannes Kepler plays a small part in events (his observations upon the supernova of 1604 seem to underlie much of the tensions within the story). Also featured is the spirit Madimi, one of the apparitions encountered by Dee and Kelley during their scrying sessions.

Primlani, a playwright, theatre director, and actor, has obviously delved deeply into Byzantine networks of research and come up with a story which repays her work. There are a few infelicities: alternative-reality or not, American-English or not, I cannot accept that the author of Tamburlane could ever write “I caressed his ass.” The echoes of as-yet-unwritten plays in Shakespeare’s conversations, while effective in context, are nevertheless somewhat obvious to anyone who has watched the tv sitcom Upstart Crow. Yet at the same time, the complicated relationship between Marlowe and Edwin, the shifting and amorphous levels of identity with which Marlowe must both deal with and construct, and his own guilt about the previous reality-shift he has been responsible for, make The Marlen of Prague a page-turner right to its ambiguous and poignant conclusion.

Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.