The Elizabethan era has everything : the inscrutable lost year of William Shakespeare , his playwright / spy contemporary , and multiple plots to destroy England , and we have n’t even fetch to the alternate history yet .
If you deal with the Elizabethan earned run average , you have to deal with Shakespeare plainly — Poul Anderson ’s A Midsummer Tempest mete out with an substitute account in which Shakespeare is reckon not as history ’s greatest playwright , but as its expectant historian . The events of all of his plays , even the ones with faeries , really happened . Shakespeare also appears in the Sidewise Award - gain short storey The Undiscovered by William Sanders . After being marooned in America , he attempts to stage a production of Hamlet with the Cherokee Indians .
There ’s also a whole host of fabricated whole shebang dedicated to what “ really ” happened to the lose works of Shakespeare . Love ’s Labours Won , the suffer subsequence to Love ’s Labours Lost , is the subject of the Doctor Who episode “ The Shakespeare Code ” — The Doctor aid Shakespeare conduct with some exotic witches , although the installment is technically more of a secret story than an alternate one . Another lost William Shakspere play , Cardenio , makes an appearance in the Torchwood ledger Trace Memory by David Llewellyn .
Love ’s Labour ’s Won is also mention in Harry Turtledove ’s Ruled Britannia . Britannia deal out with a universe where the Spanish Armada makes landfall in England and conquers the entire land . Shakespeare tries to spell a play to inspire the populace to rise up against the Spanish invaders and free Queen Elizabeth from the Tower of London .
The obsession on Shakespeare in Elizabethan alternate history is understandable , but — as a bit of a Shakespeare dweeb — I ’ve often found the struggle to shoehorn him into fable unusual give how little we know of his personal lifetime . Especially since we have a swell historical playwright with some really softheaded story sit there dismiss on the shelf .
MeetChristopher Marlowe , contemporary of Shakespeare , author of Faust , and double federal agent for England against the Catholic Church ( I am not have this up ) . In plus to that , Marlowe also died under mysterious circumstance in a prevention fight that may in fact have been a collision organize bySir Francis Walsingham , inventor of forward-looking spycraft . As a professional paranoiac , Walsingham may have decided that Marlowe was , instead of a dual agent for England , secretly a triple agent actually working for the Catholic church . Keep in mind that this patch is all taking place in 1593 .
Perhaps the job with Marlowe is that you do n’t really demand to fictionalize him when you ’ve already got history this crazy , but a few author ’s have at least sample to one - up history with some fictional versions of Marlowe ’s biography . He ’s a mo participant in Ruled Britannia but stop up playing a more major character in Howard Waldrop ’s Heart of Whitenesse in which he tracks a literal - living Dr. Faustus in a frozen 16th 100 England . Marlowe also protects England as a spy in a world where magic is real in Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett ’s The Armor of Light .
The most straightforward Marlowe alternating story is also the one with the least amount of spycraft . In Dave Hoing ’s The Onely Shake - Scene in a Countrey , Marlowe has to mistreat up and become history ’s expectant dramatist in a timeline where Shakespeare died vernal .
BooksDoctor WhoShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare
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