It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries — Story, Setting & Ideas

Voice and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Link

The novel's most distinctive feature is its use of paired epigraphs. Each chapter opens with a line from Marlowe and one from Shakespeare, implying continuity. For instance, the preface quotes Tamburlaine and King John side by side. This technique extends into the narrative, where characters occasionally speak in blank verse or echo the playwrights' phrasing. Zeigler's own prose, however, is straightforward and descriptive, rarely rising to the poetic heights it invokes. The effect is a deliberate contrast: the lofty epigraphs set a tone that the text itself does not always sustain, creating a tension between the author's ambition and his execution.

Pacing and the Mechanics of Secrecy

The story's pace shifts markedly between its two main threads: Marlowe's hidden life and the legal pursuit of his supposed killer. Early chapters, such as 'The Meeting in Finbury Fields,' unfold slowly, with careful attention to setting and dialogue. Later chapters, like 'The Ride to Tyburn,' accelerate into action. A key scene in 'Where Lamentation Prevailed' shows constable Gyves following a plague cart through London streets; the prose here becomes almost cinematic, tracking his movements with precise detail. This shift from deliberation to urgency mirrors Marlowe's own predicament—the need to remain invisible while the world closes in.

Setting and the Texture of Elizabethan London

Zeigler grounds his speculative plot in concrete physical details. The novel describes a 'mediæval portable wardrobe' with a hidden shaft, 'gloomy looking buildings' at street corners, and 'rows of small, miserable cottages' with wooden fronts and reed roofs. These details are not merely decorative; they serve the plot, as when Tamworth uses a dumb waiter to signal for food. The plague adds a layer of urgency: bodies are carted away, and characters fear contagion. This attention to the material world—the mud, the narrow lanes, the fear of disease—gives the historical setting a palpable weight, even as the central premise remains fantastical.

Readers should note that Zeigler's novel is a work of fiction, not a scholarly argument. The appendix mentioned in the table of contents is not included in this digital edition, so the author's full case for the Marlowe theory remains incomplete. Approach the book as a period piece—a late-Victorian attempt to solve a literary mystery through imagination rather than evidence. The pacing rewards patience: the early chapters build a world, while the later ones deliver the chase.

There’s something about Zeigler’s Marlowe, that quiet spectacle of a life lived twice, which leaves me thinking of the sea-soaked perils in The Middy and the Moors: An Algerine Story — A Closer Reading. Both feel like secret histories, where the real adventure isn’t the chase itself, but the lingering shadow of who we might have been, had fate blown differently.