Tamburlaine Must Die

As part of my relaxed cultural weekend, in addition to art and theatre (the "Bollywood" production of Twelfth Night, an excellent idea not as well executed or developed as it might have been but still well worth seeing), I read Louise Welsh's Tamburlaine Must Die, an imagining of Christopher Marlowe's explanation of his own fate at Deptford.

It's had mixed reviews, see a selection here. The language doesn't always seem appropriate, but the pace is brilliant and the mentality of late Elizabethan London seems to me just right: the amorality, the fatalism, and the fervent but unreliable passions. You might ask where I'm getting that sense from and I guess to a large extent Shakespeare: a nice little piece of consilience.