...and cheshyre, you owe me some sort of read-that-one-so-you-didn't-have-to consolation prize.

Book #53: Chris Hunt, Mignon

ellen_kushner presented me with this book at Readercon, as a sort of joke. For those of you joining us in progress, I've been reviewing (and occasionally sporking) Marlowe and Shakespeare and Jonson fiction and biography in my blog for the past three years or so. I think she wanted to test me.

Well, I showed her.

I read it.

Oh, dear. This is a sort of category romance with a good deal of sodomy in it, as queer not-terribly-erotica goes an honest enough example of its type, I suppose. But the protagonist is a thoroughly unlikable chap who spends paragraphs musing on the plumpness of his thighs, the other characters are more or less faceless, and while the plot might reveal itself upon inspection with more sophisticated tools than I had at hand, I was unable to discern it.

Although, in its defense, the sex scenes are less winceable--though much vaguer--than the ones in either Tamburlaine Must Die or Young Will. So at least that's something.

I am not, in short, the target audience for this one.

Okay. Several people who shall remain un-named (*cough* skeetermonkey, stillsostrange *cough*) challenged me to back up my assertion that the sex scene in Young Will was really as bad as all that.

I'm going to do them one better. A Real People Slash Trifecta! I'm going to throw in some smut from Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford and--to prove that I won't expose anybody else to ridicule I'm not willing to face myself--an equally out-of-context chunk of my own The Stratford Man. WHICH I will put after the Burgess passage, so you can get the full effect of how much he kicks my ass.

(Although no, you can't have the Tom Walsingham/Ben Jonson/William Shakespeare threesome, and I'll tell you right now that any smut involving Edward De Vere takes place safely offstage. Because even I can't stomach that....)

Because Bruce and Anthony are dead, and can't defend themselves.....

1) Bruce Cook, Young Will: The Very Long Title pp 175-177 (quoted under fair use, etc etc)

Now, because I am lazy, please note that I am not actually starting this scene where I should for its full facepalm value, in the Elizabethan molly-bar. (cheshyre and angevin2 just has twin myocardial infarctions, and truepenny and skeetermonkey are bringing up the train with a burst blood vessel and a fit of the vapors, respectively. But what's two hundred years of queer history between friends?)

For context, also, it's important to note that this is supposed to be a first encounter between two people who have just more or less fallen in love across a crowded room, a read that's enforced by the first-person narrator (Shakespeare) quoting a rather infamous line of verse of Master Marlowe's, which Shakespeare later used--attributed, directly ["dead shepherd, now I find your saw of might--"] in As You Like It.

literary victims: Will Shakespeare (POV) and Kit Marlowe

( Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? )

*pauses to gulp scotch and regroup* (arcaedia, mcurry, I couldn't have done this without the Bunnicula.)

*rummages through the Burgess for a suitably smutty passage*

1) Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford pp 49-50 (quoted under fair use, etc etc)

literary victims: Kit Marlowe and Tom Walsingham, who have just met in Paris, having been on different ends of a mission for Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to the queen. (POV is first person omniscient. Yeah, I know. Ye gods and little fishies, I love this book)

Nonstandard dialogue punctuation sic. Kit speaks first.

( I'll frame me wings of wax, like Icarus )

Damn, I wish I could write like that.

What's striking to me is that the situations here are exactly equivalent. We have two young men who have met and ostensibly fallen in love, and one of them is going to eventually, inevitably destroy the other. One of these writers knows what he is doing. The other... can't even quite keep his line of direction straight.

...bad choice of word. Sorry.

Okay, I haven't got an equivalent scene in The Stratford Man. Sorry. What I can give you is this: a scene in which Master Marlowe, recently murdered, finds himself in Faerie, at the tender mercies of a mother and son team who will be troubling him for quite some time to come. I can't give you the sex scene that will inevitably lead to Master Marlowe's death, because TSM starts on May 30th, 1593. But I can get you the first one after he dies. *g*

Mine has het in it. Oh Noes!

( And burnt the topless towers of Ilium )

ETA: Additional commentary on Tamburlaine Must Die and Mignon. Because I care.

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