In their enthralling debut historical novel Lightborne, Hesse Phillips brings to life the last dangerous days of famed Elizabethan playwright and poet, the outspoken and provocative Christopher Marlowe. In his time, and to this day, audiences and readers captivated by his spectacular plays and beloved poems found yet more fascinating material in Marlowe’s scandalous reputation, and in the vexed circumstances surrounding his mysterious murder.
Hesse Phillips’ vibrant reimagining of Marlowe steers readers straight into the forces closing in on him. But against that public backdrop of espionage, paranoia, and terrifying displays of state power, Phillips creates a private story of yearning and love, in which two men discover an intimacy so powerful, they imagine how they might escape and survive together, “Wild children, in a kingdom of two.”
I absolutely adored Lightborne’s haunting flashes of beauty that unfold within a darkly compelling world. Please read on for the fascinating conversation I had with Hesse Phillips, and pre-order Lightborne to get your hands on this fantastic book as soon as possible (October 22nd).
Jessica Bird: From the opening line of Lightborne, you immerse us in the dangers Marlowe faces – backstage, an actor costumed as Tamburlaine calls out, “Kit, are you alive?” Could you talk about beginning your story with a question about Marlowe’s survival?
Hesse Phillips: Well, the opening changed a lot over the years, and at one point, took place years later, in Deptford, right before Marlowe’s murder. So, I wanted to highlight that foreshadowing, because there is no sense in hiding how this is going to end: Marlowe is murdered under mysterious circumstances. And in fact, in subsequent pages, I go into an almost omniscient point of view, and I use that POV on other occasions – which I guess is a choice – I’m sticking by it!
Just as the wild success of his debut play Tamburlaine transforms Marlowe to a popular author, dark shadows from his past come knocking. Malevolent agent Richard Baines emerges from the audience to try and pull him back in – we have our stakes!
Thank you! I tried to get that rollercoaster happening early, and echo Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, in a way that Baines almost comes up out of the floor. So, Marlowe encounters this devil to whom he sold his soul. The history behind Marlowe and Baines is super fascinating. Biographers used to treat it as a footnote – Baines had some bone to pick with Marlowe, but we had no idea what it was. But Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines by Roy Kendall, despite controversy over how much leeway the author took with evidence, concluded Baines was something of a mentor for Marlowe in this world of espionage. Baines had guided impressionable young men into this underworld of heresy, treason, and anti-monarchist thinking – many of the things that he ended up accusing Marlowe of later.
Not long after, Baines is arrested in Deptford. Marlowe, onstage in London, “feels a clench behind the ribs, as if at the setting of a fateful clock. From this moment forward, Kit has less than five years to live. Even now, there are three men within the audience who will be with him when he dies, all of whom are still strangers to him.” Could you talk about composing this omniscient moment?
When I changed that early setting, from Marlowe’s last day in Deptford in 1593, to the London stage in in 1587, those people present later in Deptford were floating around my head. More than that, I had a theatrical vision of the opening chapter. The Elizabethan stage really had its mirror image in the audience, and I started seeing the audience as part of the performance. It made sense at this time, in this place, for all of the ghosts of the future and the past to come together.
You structure your book with an ongoing countdown to situate us in different time periods, and propel us on to Marlowe’s fate in Deptford. When did you decide to use that ticking clock?
That was totally Michelle Hoover! I have her to thank, because I was in the Novel Incubator while writing this. As the story progresses, it felt like readers might forget this event is coming. While I wanted to tease other potential outcomes, I also wanted to infuse scenes with tension about this big day approaching. So Michelle said, “Why don’t you just put a clock in it?” and I thought, wow, that’s genius!
You have great smaller clocks as well, like later in Deptford, when Marlowe and the other characters converge as an eclipse approaches.
There actually was an eclipse that took place right around that time. It’s all a great conjunction – which makes sense, because it’s an eclipse! It began with the inquest report about Marlowe’s death, because one of its most famous aspects is the supposed witnesses who saw what happened to Marlowe. But the report itself makes it pretty clear none of the so-called witnesses were in the room when it happened! So, what did they witness exactly? I started asking myself this question, and about the Latin word the inquest used, publicaverunt, meaning publicly. So, I applied that to the fight that day between Marlowe and Frizer, which happens in the garden. And why does it happen in the garden? Because there’s an eclipse! So, we have our witnesses, the entire neighborhood already outside, looking.
Speaking of looking, I loved your characters’ memorable physical characteristics. During my graduate studies, I never encountered mentions of Marlowe’s height. But reading your descriptions of how he towers over others, I wondered, damn, did I forget Marlowe was incredibly tall?
Many people who’ve read this book say, I had no idea Marlowe was so tall. And I say, well, neither did I! I came to see him as a person who literally doesn’t fit in the world. I might have also been influenced by my roommate at that time, who is 6 foot 7. Watching my poor friend trying to navigate the world, I thought, that’s what it’s like to be in Marlowe’s skin.
And I can’t forget his nemesis Baines’ creepy “half-empty mouth” – teeth on one side, void on the other – an actual two-faced character.
I love a Homeric motif! All the characters have one. It’s my shorthand way of sorting them all out in my head.
That’s very cool – and you draw our attention to their eerie similarities, too. In the past, Marlowe and Baines uncovered conspiracy accusations against Anthony Babington, and Robin Poley, a slippery agent who orchestrates the Deptford gathering, seduced Babington to secure evidence against him. Poley even obsesses over Marlowe’s resemblance to Babington: “the world has a way of making echoes.” Could you talk about those echoes?
Originally, I conceived of this book happening in three different timelines with three different sets of protagonists. It got very complicated – there was one timeline set in 1593, another set in 1607, and another in 2010 – and it did not work, at all! But the way I tried to make it work, was through this idea of parallels throughout history, and echoes that repeat across centuries. This version translated those timeline parallels into parallels between Marlowe and Ingram Frizer and Poley and Babington. A lot of the story’s background is fueled by Poley’s delusion – very similar to my delusion when I started the original version – that the past keeps repeating itself. It’s why Poley drives so much violence and strife and suffering – he’s trying to make the past repeat for real.
He really pits characters against each other to stage conflicts. All of the characters’ dramatic strategies remind me of your theatrical use of objects. Frizer’s knife, Marlowe’s leather bag full of his plays and manuscripts – almost like a Dungeons and Dragons bag –
It’s bigger on the inside!
Yes! I would love to hear about those significant objects.
Oh gosh, I think it’s that I tend to see the world in triptychs. We have Marlowe and Frizer and Poley, and each has their magical object. Marlowe has his bag, Frizer has his knife, Poley has a ring he wants to get back. The importance of props in Marlowe’s plays was always at the back of my head. His plays were incredible spectacles, and to capture aspects of that, I had to translate them into something within the bounds of reality – because Marlowe loved to go outside the bounds of reality every chance he got!
The Elizabethan period had so many violent spectacles: theatrical productions, bear baiting, public executions. And we witness two, almost three executions– from the past, Babington. In the present, heretic John Penry. And a potential future execution, Marlowe himself. Is that another triptych?
You know, that might be one of my unconscious triptychs! I’m fascinated by how the Elizabethan age gave us huge leaps in humanistic understanding, like with Shakespeare and Marlowe, who, especially towards the end of his career with Edward II, was starting to write more naturalistically. On the other hand, you have thousands of people filling arenas to watch dogs tear a bear to pieces. I actually wrote my dissertation on bear baiting and blood sports –
That’s amazing!
Amazing and harrowing, I’ve got to tell you.
Was it harrowing to write violent moments in the book?
Oh, absolutely. What interests me with public executions, bear baiting, blood sports, is how people in that time layered meaning onto these huge, public spectacles in a very private way. When I researched my dissertation, I read Thomas Dekker’s personal impression of bear baiting. That influenced how Frizer experiences it in Lightborne, seeing the bear as the soul and the dogs as devils. It’s like this entire period of time, you have people deeply traumatized by the horrors they’re witnessing, so they try to make sense of them, to survive in an insane world.
You mentioned earlier that ring Poley wants back, lost through his own experience of trauma. That desire gives him depth – he’s more than a villain pulling strings.
When I first conceived Robin Poley, he was very much this standard Marlovian villain – very big, very bombastic, very campy! By necessity he became more and more human with each new iteration of the story. You know, there’s always that character who is the author’s stand in. And weirdly enough, Robin Poley is almost my stand in. I’m not a psychopath or anything! But you know, you have to be a bit of a psychopath while you’re writing a novel, in order to get it done! But yeah, the entrance into Robin Poley’s humanity for me was he’s an unfinished person – the only way for him to fit and survive a vile world was to twist and distort himself.
Let’s turn back to Marlowe’s spectacles, and his words. Often, lines from his plays turn up in your novel because other characters relish repeating them.
Marlowe’s words were in my head through the whole experience of writing this book. It was Marlowe who I fell in love with first, and I fell in love with him through the plays. I started writing a book about Marlowe back when I was writing my undergrad thesis on Edward II, so that play in particular echoes throughout. Sometimes it was best to let Marlowe speak. And people in that period were more encyclopedic in their knowledge. They would have held entire monologues in their heads, like a library they could draw from, and recite verbatim. In fact, many plays were possibly written down that way, from someone in the audience, sort of like bootlegging a performance.
Another form of powerful words comes up in letters the characters send. I was captivated by how they sealed the pages with intricate paper bolts.
Yes! There are whole Instagram accounts devoted to letter locking. When I discovered that, I was like hell yeah, I’m doing that! So, these letters weren’t just stamped closed with the wax seals we might picture today, but closed with an origami type fastening. It was one of these lovely little bits of spycraft that I just had to put in the book.
On that topic of knowledge that’s locked away, Ingram Frizer turns up in historical records mainly as the person accused of Marlowe’s murder. In your author’s note, you say queer history is “the study of lost things.” How did you discover your version of Frizer, and develop his “lost” relationship with Marlowe?
Frizer had a very long evolution, because what we know about him is so vanishingly little. Biographers characterized him as a shady ne’er do well, one of Poley’s gross little associates. I couldn’t help but think, what if it was more than that? In the years following Marlowe’s death, competing accounts of what happened emerged. One accused Ingram Frizer of being – the language is difficult to work out – either Marlowe’s rival in love, or his jealous lover. So, that made a light bulb go off. Like a lot of people who came of age reading queer authors, I’ve always had that Oscar Wilde quote rattling around in the back of my head, that “each man kills the thing he loves” – which is actually a very Marlovian idea.
It made sense Frizer would serve this dual purpose: he would be Marlowe’s murderer, but before that, they would have this incredible connection. Yeah, we know Marlowe was murdered, but the real question is why. I didn’t want to default to the obvious scenario: shady characters wanted him dead. A far more interesting question is, why would someone kill the person they love? And will Frizer actually kill Marlowe, or will it end differently?
In Deptford, Marlowe looks for potential escapes, while Frizer worries others see him as simple, or cowardly. He thinks, “there’s no mystery, is there, in a frightened man?”
This story’s focus on masculinity centers around Frizer to a great extent, because Frizer has been told throughout his life he’s not enough, especially not enough of a man. Masculinity during this period was still bound up in chivalric age ideas of honor and courage, and permeated by misogyny. Women were emblems of powerlessness or duplicitousness, which is amazing, because here’s Queen Elizabeth ruling the country. It’s misogyny that has the characters up to their necks in self-hatred, and I wanted to capture it and see it through Frizer. If Frizer were alive in 2024, he might be genderqueer, but in this era, masculinity is his only option.
Both Marlowe and Frizer develop a heartbreaking skill – in traumatic situations, they can see themselves in two places at once. And that applies to the story as we approach the ending. There’s inevitability, but a parallel, persistent sense of how different it might have been.
It’s hard to resist the impulse to imagine other outcomes when you have something so set in stone as a historical event. For me, I wanted there to be an echo – you know, there’s that word again! – this idea maybe it could have gone another way. I tried multiple versions exploring potential futures. Ultimately, it ended up playing off the parallels between Poley and Frizer, and Marlowe and Babington, to bring us to a moment where all of that is in chorus.
Holding other endings in tension makes so much sense, because people who must keep secrets develop very complex selves. And throughout literature, queer and queer-coded characters like Marlowe are positioned to become spies, because they’re used to hiding.
The history of homosexual men participating in espionage is very long, so I wanted to situate Marlowe within that tradition. The film Another Country with Rupert Everett, also focuses on people leaving university and going into espionage, because they have no other option to live their lives the way they want. So, for Marlowe, and Poley, in his own twisted way – these are outsiders who work in espionage, because it feels like the best way to survive as themselves, and to take power for themselves.
Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about your wonderful debut novel, Lightborne.
It’s been really cool – thank you!
Hesse Phillips will appear at the Craft on Draft: Whose History? event on Tuesday, October 22nd at 7pm at Trident Books (338 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02115). They will also be in conversation with Michelle Hoover on Wednesday, October 23rd at 7pm at Porter Square Books (1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140).
Hesse Phillips was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022, and their winning novel Lightborne was selected as a Sunday Times Book of the Month following its UK release in May 2024. Their poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the époque press é-zine, Sage Cigarettes, Roi Fainéant Press, Pangyrus and others, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Hesse was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in Spain. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University and are a graduate of Grub Street Boston’s intensive Novel Incubator program. Lightborne will debut in the USA on October 22, 2024.
