This book came to me courtesy of the inestimable Delia Sherman, along with several other works. I am most grateful to her.

It’s interesting to me that this project has, more than anything else I’ve ever done — including college and grad school — liberated me of the notion that I need to read a book cover-to-cover. I mainly read two chapters out of this one, those being the chapters that focused most generally on the relationship between Elizabeth and her courtiers. The rest of the book is broadly both chronological and focused on particular courtiers in particular scenarios; there’s a chapter, for example, on Norfolk’s downfall. Since a lot of that stuff predates the period in which I’m writing, and I’m running out of time for research, I decided to bypass it. Looks good, though.

Not much else to say on this one, I think. But look out for more posts later today, probably, as I knock off reports on a few other books I’ve read lately.

This may possibly take the cake for Most Arcane Research Question I’ve Ever Asked Because Of Writing.

Is anybody out there familiar enough with Terrestrial Dynamic Time to tell me what if any conversions I need to make for a timestamp from 1547? As in, was 12:54 TD roughly noonish back then? The Wikipedia article on Terrestrial Time leaves me entirely unclear as to how closely that timestamp matches normal person time.

Edited to add: astroaztec has been kind enough to verify my math for me. It turns out the difference is truly negligible, so I needn’t worry.

This book wins, hands down, the prize for Coolest Piece of Random Trivia Discovered While Researching This Novel. (The downside is that the trivia in question appears a few pages in, and seems to have dominated the author’s thinking for the remainder of the text.)

The trivia is this. Elizabeth loved to nickname the people around her; Walsingham, for example, was her “Moor,” while Burghley was “Sir Spirit.” Three men in her reign got nicknamed “Eyes.” The first was Leicester, who signed his letters with a little glyph: two circles with dots inside, representing (of course) eyes. The second was Hatton, who ended up being called “Lids” to distinguish him from Leicester; he signed his letters with dotted triangles instead.

The third was John Dee. His special sign for his nickname was two circles guarded by a mark Deacon describes as “what might have been a square root sign or an elongated seven.”

The book then obligingly shows you a picture of the mark, and yes: it looks like “007.”

I have no idea if Ian Fleming knew this, but Deacon doesn’t miss the chance to draw the connection for his readers. And this sets the tone of the book; while the last bio of Dee I read emphasized his scientific and magical work, this one runs with the idea that Dee was an intelligence agent in service to the royal government.

I’m not entirely certain what to do with Deacon’s claims. He’s not as good as he might be about telling you the basis for his conclusions about Dee’s activities, so I can’t be sure when the missions he outlines are things we definitely know happened, and when they’re educated speculation. That Dee occasionally passed information along to Walsingham and/or Burghley and/or Leicester, I can believe with no problem, but Deacon’s biography more or less positions that as the overarching purpose of his life. Dee, according to him, refused jobs he might have taken because they would have limited his ability to engage in intelligence work. His trips overseas were as much for spying as for anything else. And the angelic conversations . . . in Deacon’s view, Dee’s work with Kelley is most easily explained by assuming that much of it was used as a cover, a ciphered means of passing information to those who could act on it. Who would look for intelligence reports in the middle of one of those?

Um. I’m not sure what to do with this. Certainly there seems to have been at least one occasion that an angel informed Dee of something in cryptic terms, Dee passed the report along to the authorities, and they subsequently discovered Spanish agents attempting to burn down the forest which supplied timber to the royal navy, under conditions which matched the cryptic message of the angel. I’m not sure I buy into the thesis that spying was such a major focus of Dee’s work, though.

I’d have to read more about Dee to say for sure. But the nice thing about this research is, I’m doing it for a novel, not a dissertation. Which means I can appreciate Deacon for the details he gives, and discard his overall point if it doesn’t suit my purpose.

Edited to add: Hah. A footnote from Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus:

“Richard Deacon’s book, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London, 1968) does regrettably little to establish Dee’s true importance. In a rather sensational way, Deacon portrays Dee as ‘a roving James Bond of Tudor times’ [not, so far as I’m aware, an actual quote from that book — me], the master of a massive espionage system. He considers the ‘Spiritual Diaries’ a form of enciphering used for spying purposes. Deacon’s argument is tenuous at best, and his book is riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

I guess I’m glad I only read selections from it. But it’s good to hear someone else evaluate that thesis and find it to be kind of bunk.

As the presence of the word “Aquarian” in the title might suggest, this book ranges from fuzzy-headed neopagan pablum, to fairly well-researched archaeological and folkloric history, to a random dissection of a William Blake poem, depending on which article you’re reading.

The middle category is, of course, the one that was the most useful to me. There isn’t a terrible amount in here that was utterly new, but it helped reinforce some stuff I already knew, and offered a vareity of tidbits (like the London Stone, or the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, or a reminder of the existence of Walbrook) that I’m smuggling into the novel where I can. I wish the article on “London Leys and Lines” had been more useful to me, though. Alas, it failed to present me with the kind of sacred/mystical geography I was hoping for.

The other thing of use in here is the bibliographies attached to (most of) the articles. If I ever write that London novel that’s in my head (which, given the research it would require, I don’t even want to think about right now), I’ll have some good leads on books to pick up.

I feel bad for having not read this entire book, but it’s no reflection on the quality; I just conceded defeat on getting through the entire thing in one day, and quit once I’d passed into the stuff that will be happening after Midnight Never Come is over.

The moronic thing is, I had to read this book to find out whether I needed to read this book. Less cryptically, I was trying to decide once and for all whether or not Kit Marlowe is going to be a character in MNC. There are vague reasons to put him in, and vague reasons not to, so I decided I’d read a biography of him and see if any historical felicities offered themselves for use. (A rather large amount of this novel is built on such foundations.) As it turns out, no such felicities were to be found, at least not ones that are compelling enough to shoehorn themselves into MNC. Marlowe was mostly involved with Burghley, not Walsingham, and his involvement with the other Walsingham (i.e. Sir Thomas, not Sir Francis) mostly grew up after the point at which I’m writing.

So Kit is likely to be Sir Gay-Atheist-Spy Not Appearing In This Book. Having said that, I do quite like Riggs’ work, and if I don’t end up reading the remainder, it’ll be because I’m getting bloody sick of the sixteenth century, not because I didn’t like the biography.

The big selling point of this book, to me, is that it grounds itself thoroughly in the historical and cultural context of the period. Which is making a virtue of necessity: Riggs points out in the prologue that we know precious few facts about Marlowe’s adult life, and the documents relating to him are either written by him in the voice of another (i.e. plays and poems and translations), or else written about him by other people; he left behind precisely one “first-person utterance” (as Riggs terms it). You can’t get at Marlowe directly; you have to reconstruct him from oblique evidence. To quote Riggs again, “All the evidence about his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice [. . .] He is an irretrievably textual being.”

Which means this book approaches the “gay atheist spy” trifecta by contextualizing the indirect evidence in more concrete facts about the period. Take the notion of Marlowe as a homosexual: Riggs denies that the term as we understand it today would fit Marlowe, since “homosexuality” as such did not exist in the Elizabethan mind. Sodomy was a behavior, not an identity, and was linked with other behaviors like heresy and treason. But given the social context in which Marlowe lived during a goodly chunk of his life; the way that his education promoted homosocial behavior, intimate male bonding, and sharing a bed with other men; and the kinds of classical texts to which he was exposed during that education, there are basically two options for his sexual behavior: either he was celibate, or he was a sodomite. There simply weren’t any women in his vicinity for him to do anything with. And sodomy certainly did happen.

As far as atheism goes, I was floored by the detailed discussion of Elizabethan higher education. Its purpose was to turn out good little leaders of the Church of England, but its design . . . well, let’s just say I’m surprised more of the men who went through it didn’t end up Catholics, Puritans, or atheists. Teaching young men to defend and attack arguments as a logical exercise, without any particular concern for the truth of the argument, nor any particular intent to arrive at a conclusion, seems a pretty good way to guarantee they end up casting a cynical eye on the things you then tell them to believe.

This book deserved better attention than I was able to give it, but I was conducting a high-speed reading with a specific purpose. In particular, I would like to come back to it some day when I’m more familiar with Marlowe’s writings: I started really skimming a ways into the detailed discussion of Tamburlaine, even though it was less a lit-crit analysis of the text and more a survey of how it fit into the political and theatrical scene of the 1580s. Then I read the Faustus chapter, skipped ahead to his death, and quit.

I don’t think Kit will be in this novel, except very, very peripherally. Which is a pity. But I’m not going to cram him in just for the sake of the Marlowe fangirls, even if I am one myself.