Yesterday I read Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh, her imagined last lamentings of Christopher Marlowe in the seventy-two hours before his death.  The truth behind Marlowe’s demise has never been discovered.  As spy, poet, playwright, atheist, bisexual lover, and party boy reveler, any number of scenarios could be imagined and the one that Welsh comes up with, while believable in terms of plot, tries too hard to combine all the bits and pieces of Marlowe’s personality, life, and times into the final explanation of his death.

The novel is jam-packed with melodramatic declarations from Marlowe (nothing like his actual — and beautiful — prose)  about religion, death, love, and nature; rowdy bouts of whoring and manloving are meant to titillate, while the occasional interlude of secret meetings in dark alleyways, details of torture and execution, and a mutilated bookseller are thrown in for atmosphere.  Adding in the tidbits about Marlowe’s atheism, his associations with Sir Walter Raleigh, and the book stalls and stores abundant in the corners of sixteenth century London are not enough to bring this novel out of the gutter and into the realm of intellectual interest make it an interesting or entertaining read.  Thumbs down:Tamburlaine Must Die, unread.