Marry in Haste

The dodecal of the day is Marry In Haste.

Christopher Marlowe

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl.

After reading Will in the World, I was feeling curious about Marlowe, the popular young playwright who died violently just before Shakespeare's first play was performed. This was the first book I got from the library - a book not about his life, but about his death. Not written by a historian, but by a journalist, and hence, written with style. It has one of the most interestingly artistic book jackets I have seen, designed by Peter Dyer - the face of Marlowe, hidden, peeking out mysteriously from behind a screen.

It was a fascinating look at Elizabethan espionage and Elizabethan life.

( Christopher Marlowe was born... )

Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life by Constance Brown Kuriyama. This is a scholarly biography of
Marlowe, not nearly as much fun to read as the more informal style of Nicholl, but it has its virtues. One is that the last fifty pages or so of the book reproduce in print form the various documents relating to Marlowe's life - precious few though they are. This includes his christening, wills he witnessed, his various encounters with the law, and the testimony against him by Richard Baines -both originals and translations of the Latin. She quotes an interesting piece of anonymous poetry about Marlowe from 1601 (four years after his death):

Pitty it is, that wit so ill should dwell
Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.

( After reading Nicholl... )

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I can't think why I was so tired today. It was a nice day, a low-key day, and I fell asleep over the book I was studying while the budgies chirped loudly and happily beside me. Made Lamb Souffle from the Laura Secord cookbook for supper - it's been years since I've made that, and it was as good as ever. Watched Lost again, because masseru hadn't seen it last week. Enjoyed it at least as much as ever.

But so tired, and my hand hurts from typing. I think it's the humidity.