A lady-in-waiting becomes caught between the forbidden theater world of playwright Christopher Marlowe and the palace intrigue between Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots
Rating: Three Stars
HOLLYWOOD, CA: “The more I discovered about Marlowe’s life and death the stranger it seemed,” says All the Queen’s Players author Jane Feather. “I’d known very little before about either. Like most people, I believed that he had been killed at 29 in a drunken brawl in a tavern. I don’t believe that now.”
All the Queen’s Players is the story of Rosamund Walsingham, a junior lady of Queen Elizabeth’s bedchamber. Forced to secretly spy on the Queen, it’s falling in love and her inappropriate appreciation for the theater of Christopher Marlowe that get her into trouble with the Virgin Queen. Rosamund is dispatched to the castle of the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots.
Feather got the idea for All the Queen’s Players while watching a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C.
“I acquired every scholarly book I could find about Marlowe,” says Feather. “I was surprised how many there were, although they tended to cover much the same ground. I also read much of his work, plays and poetry, and researched a lot on the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign.”
Feather particularly researched the work of Francis Walsingham and the Babington conspiracy that engineered the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
“I really enjoy the editorial collaboration,” says Feather. “Because like most writers I work so much in isolation, it’s both necessary and a little nerve-racking to get an objective fresh eye on the manuscript. My editor for All The Queen’s Players was Maggie Crawford at Simon and Schuster. She has since left, and I’m now working with Kara Cesare.” Feather’s agent is Susan Ginsburg at Writers House.
Feather says she enjoys doing revisions. “It’s like putting a puzzle together and I find it much less draining than putting the first draft on paper.” Feather says she’s resisted creating a website but after writing All the Queen’s Players finally succumbed and acquired Jane-Feather.com.
All the Queen’s Players is an Elizabethan thriller and love story with a spy heroine who wants out and must somehow master the game of palace intrigue she can’t escape.
Jane Feather was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in England. She lives on Chesapeake Bay, just outside Annapolis. She’s begun writing the second book in a romance trilogy set in Georgian London in the mid-18th century.
All the Queen’s Players by Jane Feather. Trade paperback, $15, 400 pages, Publisher: Gallery, Original edition April 13, 2010, Language: English, ISBN: 978-1416525547
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