Hesse Phillips is the author of the debut novel, “Lightborne,” about the final days of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Raised in Pennsylvania and now living in Spain, they have an undergraduate degree in theater history from Marlboro and a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts. Here, Phillips takes the Q&A and shares the origins of their novel.
Q. Please tell readers about your new novel, “Lightborne.”
“Lightborne” begins in the spring of 1593 when poet, playwright, and former spy Christopher Marlowe is arrested on charges of treason, heresy, and sodomy, all of which are punishable by death. He is then released on bail through the help of a man he presumes to be his friend, but who has in fact hired the infamous assassin Robin Poley to “take care” of Marlowe, out of fear that the charges might come back on him. Now, alone in London, and with Queen Elizabeth’s spies and the double-crossing Poley closing in, Marlowe first befriends and then finds himself falling in love with Ingram Frizer: a total stranger who is obsessed with Marlowe’s plays, and has some dark secrets of his own. Just ten days after they meet, Marlowe will be dead, and Frizer will be charged with his murder.
“Lightborne” contains a murder mystery, but because the story of Marlowe’s death is so well known, the defining question becomes not “whodunnit,” but “why?” There’s a story in here about espionage as well – really the beginnings of intelligence gathering as we know it today – and war, and the human consequences of unchecked tyranny. But at the heart of “Lightborne” is a love story, and a queer love story at that. The central characters of Marlowe, Frizer, and Poley are three queer men up against an age and a society that ruthlessly quashes difference, forcing them into decisions that are by turns selfless, heartbreaking, cowardly or cutthroat, all in the name of survival – survival for themselves, and for the ones they love.
Q. Can you talk a little about how you researched the novel?
By the time I arrived at college I was already interested in Marlowe – my parents are both voracious readers, and there had been a copy of his “Doctor Faustus” on the shelves back home – but as a theatre major, I ended up reading Marlowe’s explicitly queer play “Edward II,” which got me hooked. My undergrad thesis was an attempt to contextualize “Edward II” within the queer culture that existed during Marlowe’s lifetime, which entailed diving into court and criminal records, and scouring private letters, diaries, popular song lyrics, satirical and religious poems, and of course, plenty of plays and literature about the theatre.
Researching queer history often forces you to seek out negative images: places in the historical record where queerness is hinted at, mocked, suppressed, or punished. It’s often very hard to find instances of queer people writing about themselves as openly as Marlowe does in “Edward II,” or Shakespeare did in his sonnets written to men.
After that, I eventually started working on my PhD in Drama, where I kept my focus on the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Being in a doctoral program gave me access to materials which I ended up using not only in my dissertation, which was mostly about the horrendous animal bloodsports that were so popular in this era, but also in writing “Lightborne.” I spent a lot of time talking to archeologists who were excavating the remains of Elizabethan theatres around London, and learned a lot from them that helped me build “Lightborne”’s world – from the dirt up, literally.
Q. Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and said to be a spy. But is more known about him than Shakespeare?
The notion that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare has become a cultural shibboleth, but in fact, we know a great deal about him compared to many of his contemporaries, thanks to the fact that the Elizabethans were scrupulous record-keepers and extremely litigious people. We can reconstruct a great deal of Shakespeare’s life largely through various legal records, especially as his wealth and status increased and he grew ever more concerned with protecting them.
Much of what we know about Marlowe also comes from legal documents, although in his case he was more often on the wrong side of the law – but unlike Shakespeare, who was the middle-class son of a local politician and businessman, Marlowe began life in a shoemaker’s humble house, and despite attending university on scholarship, never found his fortunes much improved by either education or success in the theatre. Marlowe lived life “close to the knives,” I like to say, and very well may have taken work in Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network in order to make ends meet. But entering that world came at a cost. In fact, for the last several years of Marlowe’s life we can create a pretty accurate timeline of events just based on his various stints in court or prison, both in England and abroad.
Q. What are you reading now?
My friends are probably getting tired of my relentless evangelizing for Julia Armfield, whose first book, “Our Wives Under the Sea,” ruined all other books for me for a good long while. I recently finished her follow-up “Private Rites” and am now suffering from another book hangover that just won’t quit. Her prose is so weird, so unsettling, and yet so beautifully constructed. She’s a master at creating vast worlds within claustrophobic spaces, such as a submarine trapped in an abyss, or a city succumbing to rising sea-levels. Armfield is one of those writers who is not at all afraid to lean into her own strangeness, which is exactly what makes her so damn good.
Q. Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?
Because I write historical fiction, I naturally tend to read a lot of it. I can remember being in junior high school and staying up late with Mary Renault or Robert Graves – these whopping big tomes about monarchs, conquerors, emperors, usually male and always white. That all changed when I read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in high school, and discovered that historical fiction can be so much more than dead kings and queens, and can do so much more than simply novelize biographies of the “great and good.”
Nowadays, I prefer stories about people who existed in the margins of history in one way or another, and a book always gets bonus points from me for defying narrative or stylistic expectations. I adored Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life,” which is a tour de force in genre-bending, same with Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad,” and George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo.” Then you have books like Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” which is great first of all because it is not about Shakespeare; or Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” books, which are great first of all because Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, et. al. are secondary characters. Historical fiction has a reputation for being stuffy, but in fact it’s a genre where the possibilities are endless, because deep down it’s really all about time.
But back in those formative years, I was also reading a great deal of gothic horror, which is a genre I’d like to return to. I’ve never lost my taste for the creepy and unnerving, so I’m trying to reach now and then for books that make my hair stand on end. I love atmosphere, I love an unhinged protagonist, I love a house full of nasty surprises. Shirley Jackson is an old fave, and now Tananarive Due, not least of all because she combines horror and historical so seamlessly – but I know there’s a world out there to explore.
Q. Which books are you planning to read next?
As soon as I recover from my Julia Armfield hangover, I’d like to pick up Crystal King’s “In the Garden of Monsters,” a reimagining of the Persephone myth told through an Italian model who is brought to a mysterious 16th century garden by Salvador Dali. The old academic in me is also really excited to check out Darren Freebury-Jones’ “Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers,” which examines the ways in which Shakespeare was influenced by and worked closely alongside his contemporaries – Marlowe among them, of course!
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
As I mentioned above, my parents are both book addicts, so I grew up in a house full of overfull shelves that bowed in the middle, stacks of paperbacks in the corners, and at least one whole closet taken over by books no one could bear to get rid of. We lived in a rural area with spotty TV reception and no other kids around, so with nothing much to do, picking up a book just came naturally. My parents bought age-appropriate books for me, but the ones most readily at hand were often very much intended for adults. I remember reading Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” at nine or ten and getting traumatized by some of the more violent scenes; I also remember reading “Siddhartha” by my namesake Herman Hesse at around the same age, and being, well, confused by pretty much everything! So much went right over my head, but reading all these books did teach me early on to appreciate the beauty and rhythm of words, and gave me an appreciation for just how much life and humanity you can fit inside a novel. My parents were never troubled by my reading habits either, but always encouraged me to read whatever caught my interest. When I started trying to write novels of my own, as a teenager, they were my biggest source of encouragement.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
I often say that language is key for me, but that can mean a number of things: “voice,” however you define it; “style,” however you define that. Things like structure and form also come into play, obviously. I like a book that takes big risks, whether it fully pays off or not. I was blown away by Justin Torres’ “Blackouts,” for example, which is a mixed-media novel if I’ve ever seen one, combining poetry, images, and archival documents with a story so intimate it feels like memoir. On the other hand, a fairly straightforward novel, if beautifully written, can pull me back in again and again, like Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” which lives permanently on my bedside table just because the prose is so exquisite. I’m a maximalist at heart, so I love a good piece of Brontëesque purple prose, but I’m always impressed by writers who actually do manage to produce “clean as a bone” sentences. Colm Toíbín is wonderful at this, especially, I think, in his too often overlooked retelling of “The Oresteia,” “The House of Names.” Sometimes simplicity is a big swing too.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
“Lightborne” mostly came about in writing workshops and groups, so there’s actually very little about this book that no one knows. The problem with starting projects in your 20s that you don’t finish till your 40s is that they go through a lot of regrettable phases along the way. Some people out there might remember when I tried it as three different timelines with three different sets of protagonists, or when I tried doing the whole thing from the point-of-view of Marlowe’s ghost.
But the one thing that next to no one knows, because I’m ashamed to admit it, is that “Lightborne” was very briefly a play. There was a Greek chorus, a counter-tenor, some dancing, tableaux vivants – every bad idea imaginable all in one script. I have no idea where I put it, but wherever it is I hope it stays there. A big part of writing a novel, I’ve found, is simply teaching yourself what the story is and what it most definitely isn’t. I guess the play was a big lesson in what’s actually important about the story and characters – a lesson in ego-control, in other words!
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
I would ask that they try reading or listening to books out loud – at least in parts! There’s something about engaging with words physically, from the depths of your lungs to the tip of your tongue, that makes each one feel like its own urgent, living thing. I love hearing how words work in chorus together, when you suddenly recognize that there’s a rhythm at work, or a subtle rhyme you really have to feel in order to understand. Reading aloud will help you learn how to pay attention to language all around you, and see it as the joyful, vibrant, ever-changing thing it is, rather than just as a means to an end. I use it as a litmus-test sometimes when I’m choosing what to read next. When a writer loves words and loves the story they have to tell, you can just hear it, and feel it. That’s when I feel like I’m in good hands as a reader.
For more, go to the author’s website.
