Posthumous Gentleman

Michael Dobson

• The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs
  Faber, 411 pp, £25.00, May 2004, ISBN 0 571 22159 9
• Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground by Roy Kendall
  Fairleigh Dickinson, 453 pp, US $75.00, January 2004, ISBN 0 8386 3974 7
• Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
  Canongate, 149 pp, £9.99, July 2004, ISBN 1 84195 532 9
• History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt
  HarperCollins, 388 pp, £17.99, July 2004, ISBN 0 00 712123 7

They were both eight-year-old grammar-school boys when news began to reach England of the bloody events of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (news which bolstered moves towards Protestant reform in each of their provincial towns), and they remained sufficiently interested in French politics to write in a surprisingly well-informed fashion about the subject twenty years later. The dispute between Henri of Navarre and his estranged Catholic wife, Marguerite de Valois, over control of Aquitaine; the wider dynastic and religious feuding among the Valois and the Bourbons that culminated in the assassinations of the Duc de Guise and Henri III; the Earl of Essex’s subsequent mission to reinforce Henri of Navarre and his associates the Maréchal de Biron and the Duc de Longueville: both writers would refract this material into some of the most distinctive drama of the age. In the early 1590s each produced a play about recent French affairs that suggestively combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life.