Review: Elizabethan drama (and fiction)

Christopher Marlowe was one of the pre-eminent playwrights of the Elizabethan era. He also lived a life of controversy and scandal marked by accusations of covert Catholicism, atheism, espionage, libel and homosexuality. He was killed at age 29 by Ingram Frizer, a man employed by Marlowe’s patron, Thomas Walsingham. Frizer claimed the killing was in self-defense and was instigated by an argument over a dinner bill, but Frizer’s potential ulterior motives have been the source of significant debate in the past four centuries. 

In her debut novel Lightborne, Hesse Phillips portrays Frizer as Marlowe’s lover, caught up in a world of intrigues he does not fully understand. 

The book opens with Marlowe playing the eponymous title character in “Tamburlaine,” his most famous play. Marlowe is more than a playwright and actor: He is also a spy, part of the elaborate network that answered to the Privy Council and Queen Elizabeth’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. Their goal is to ferret out information concerning enemies of the state—primarily Catholics trying to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne.

But Marlowe has a problem: He, too, might be an enemy of the state. This is an era where church and state were tightly intertwined, and to be insufficiently Anglican was both a sin and a crime. He was also repeatedly suspected of sodomy. This comes forth in his writing. Marlowe’s play “Edward II” offers a dramatization of the life of the 14th-century English king, who was suspected to have had a male lover. Edward was allegedly killed with a hot poker because of this, and Marlowe invents a murderer, Lightborn, whose name is an Anglicization of the Latin Lucifer. 

The book follows Marlowe, Frizer and others, like fellow spies Thomas Walsingham and Robin Poley, as Marlowe is brought before the Privy Council to explain his alleged manifold crimes. He runs from inn to safe house to inn and ponders a way to get to the European continent. Along the way, we learn the drama of his life, the men he has loved, the plays he has written and his anger, knowing there will ultimately be no escape.

I was initially worried about this book: Kit Marlowe gets killed by his gay lover? How far is this novel departing from fact? This anxiety was heightened when I acquired a copy and saw it described on the cover as “edgy.” But I shouldn’t have worried. There is sex and violence and torture, but none of it is presented in a shlocky, slasher-film kind of way. The sex scenes are also not pornographic. Frizer’s imagined backstory is the closest the book gets to feeling “edgy,” and that part is somewhat overwrought, but even that is not presented as shock for the sake of it.

Lightborne feels sensitive toward the fact that it is about real people, and it is well researched. The author, who has a doctorate in drama from Tufts University, spent over a decade writing the novel, and it shows. The chapters often begin with real quotes from the 16th century—a reminder that this is based on a true story. This adds something to the book: It is not some spy-novel invention. The characters are often in pubs whispering about the latest political and social developments. The world of people in service to queen and country who are running tricks and schemes feels very romantic, until the next mention of missing teeth and fingers from torture. We are reminded that being a spy is all a fun game right up until the moment it isn’t. 

Heavy on dialogue, the novel offers just enough physical description of London at the time to give a mental image of the city without being overburdened by it. While the author mostly hews to modern English in the dialogue, there is a hint of an earlier vernacular, which is occasionally aggravating. Direct quotes from 16th-century documents retain the original spellings. 

Overall, this is not only a story about a very specific historical moment but also a story about love, fear and trying to find one’s place in a complicated world. I do not have a background in either theater or British history, but I enjoyed the book despite being unfamiliar with much of the narrative context. 

It is not a didactic novel, which is refreshing in an era of the Y.A.-ification of adult literature. The characters are real people—so some are terrible. Dick Topcliffe, the government torturer, is presented as affable in a slick, used-car salesman way, a reminder of the banality of evil. Marlowe, the ostensible hero, is also an aggressive alcoholic, who has sold out others just as he is now being sold out. 

Most of the characters are gay or bisexual men. Some cheat on their wives and abuse and betray their lovers. Yet there is no attempt to make a statement about what it means to be a queer Catholic or Anglican. A man telling another man, “Farewell sweet Robyn, if as I take thee, true to me. If not adieu, omnius bipedum nequissimus” (“the most wicked of all bipeds”) in the letter he writes before he is to be executed, not knowing if his Anglican lover is the one who has revealed his Catholic plotting, is statement enough. 

This is also not a religious novel, but it is a novel about religion. It is a reminder that today’s Church of England was once an active promoter of violence in the name of enforcement of the faith. Many of the Jesuit martyrs in England met their end at the hands of Dick Topcliffe. In Lightborne, the archbishop of Canterbury has his own militia. One of the others before the Privy Council at the same time as Marlowe is John Penry, the Separatist preacher who was executed in 1593. To be insufficiently supportive of the Reformation was a problem; but so was being too in favor of it. To disagree with the church was to disagree with the state, and treason was a capital crime. 

The historical specifics of Marlowe’s life and death may have been lost to time, but it seems undoubtedly true that they would have been different if disagreements in matters of religion had not been viewed as sedition. 

Ultimately, Lightborne is an engaging novel that tries to offer an explanation to one of the mysteries of English literary history. Phillips weaves together real history with fiction in a way that reads like something that could have happened and creates a charming, if irascible, Christopher Marlowe. 

This article appears in January 2026.