The Adventures of Master William Shakespeare in the Land of the Fae

[bibliogramma]

Elizabeth Bear:
Ink and Steel
Heaven and Earth

Elves in the Elizabethan era. With Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson and Will Shakespeare and Francis Walsingham and the Queen of the Elves and a most strangely imprisoned angel and Lucifer himself.

In the second duology of her Promethean Age series, Bear continues to explore themes of how the creation of narratives influences reality, and issues of servitude and freedom, sacrifice and the desire for redemption.

A more focused story (the title of the duology is The Stratford Man, and Shakespeare is the central figure, although it is Marlowe’s actions – beginning with the historical circumstances of his death, often speculated to have been at the hands of an assassin – that drive much of the plot) it is stronger and more thematically coherent than her previous Promethean Age novels, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. The Stratford Man duology also focuses more specifically on religion as a source and instrument of oppression/bondage.

While Bear has received criticism for her handling of racial tropes in Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, I’ve always appreciated her treatment of queer characters and situations. And in the character of Chris Marlowe, Bear continues her solid and, in my opinion, very welcome tradition of sympathetic representation of queer characters.

I could barely put the books down to sleep and eat and work until I finished them.