Marlowe has always somehow been more interesting than Shakespeare. The Bard is established canon, taught in schools, safe and accepted and familiar. Marlowe is more secret and dangerous and obscure by comparison. Atheist, homosexual, spy, who wrote the ultimate play of damnation for knowledge, he lurks in the shadows of Elizabethan England, his death a mystery never to be solved. Burgess sheds a little light on the shadows, but it's a fictional light, for what that's worth, itself a kind of shadow, and the whole novel is a kind of play, constructed with Elizabethan language to create the set and the sights and the sounds, full of word-play and poetry and clashing ideas, rationality wrestling with religion, and danger everywhere, every thought and deed a step to the Tower or the noose, conspiracy, real and fraudulent, and plays of power and brutal clashes of doctrine. Once grown accustomed to the language, the book comes to life and follows Kit Marlowe's life to that fateful reckoning in Deptford.