CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S MYSTERIOUS story has intrigued me for a long time. What would have happened to theatrical literature and the history of the Elizabethan stage if this young genius had not died at twenty-nine? Could Shakespeare have found an audience if the stage had not been prepared by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the first grandly staged historical piece of theatre? My dormant fascination was piqued first by seeing productions of Tamburlaine and Edward II, and then by reading Charles Nicholl’s wonderful historical investigation of Marlowe’s death, The Reckoning. The book reads like a work of detective fiction but is in fact a meticulously researched nonfiction account of an historical mystery. I followed that with Anthony Burgess’s novel A Dead Man in Deptford, a deliciously vivid, bawdy depiction of Marlowe’s England, again interlaced with carefully researched historical detail, and I was hooked.
I have another fascination—spies, the underworld of secret intelligence, and the reasons why people become entangled in that world. Francis Walsingham was the first known spymaster. The Spanish Inquisition had its own networks, of course, but Walsingham’s privately funded network was the first historically accepted state secret service. When I realized how Marlowe could have been involved in that world, I had all the springboard I needed for All the Queen’s Players. Copious research has been done on the link between Marlowe and Walsingham’s secret service, and the more I read the more convincing it seemed. Nothing can be certain at such a vast historical distance, but enough scholars have linked enough known facts to make it safe to assume that Marlowe served Walsingham in some capacity while at Cambridge and writing his plays. The Bond of Association is a historical fact, as are the Babington Plot and the beer-keg post, which gave Walsingham all he needed to bring down the Scots queen and rid the realm of the Catholic threat at home and abroad.
Christopher Marlowe’s homosexuality is a matter of speculation, based on his plays and poetry as much as anything. It’s not a matter of fact. Anthony Burgess, in A Dead Man in Deptford, depicts Marlowe and Thomas Watson as a couple, but it has also been postulated that Kit and Thomas Walsingham had a sexual relationship. Marlowe was staying at Walsingham’s house at the time of his murder, and Walsingham was his chief patron. It suited my purposes to create a fictional Walsingham, Rosamund, to give the entrée into Sir Francis’s secret world. Will Creighton is a fiction, Ingram Frizer is not. The coroner’s report states that Ingram Frizer killed Christopher Marlowe. Robin Poley is not fiction, and he too, according to the coroner, was present at Kit Marlowe’s death.
How could one resist such a springboard for a tale of historical intrigue and romance?