Title:  THE STRATFORD MAN  (INK AND STEEL / HELL AND EARTH)
Author: Elizabeth Bear
Year: 2008
Publisher: Roc
Reviewer: Kevin Riggle

Elizabeth Bear's THE STRATFORD MAN is one story contained in two volumes, 
respectively titled INK AND STEEL and HELL AND EARTH, set in Elizabethan 
England.  It is part of her Promethean Age series concerning the battle of the 
human Prometheus Club against the forces of Faerie, and the prequel to her 
modern BLOOD AND IRON / WHISKEY AND WATER duology.  I really quite enjoyed it, 
though it took me a couple months to read, mostly because of the distraction of 
school, so I did have to spend some time refreshing my memory which titles 
(Earl Foo, Duke Bar) went to which characters whenever I picked the books up 
after a week or two's hiatus, and the bulk of the reading happened over 
Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations.  Thankfully Bear has, as she says in her 
afterword, "tried to limit courtesy titles to one per customer, for clarity," 
so I actually stood a chance of regaining the thread of the plot with 
relatively little re-reading.  That said, I advise blocking out some time in 
which to read these, because they're books like a good meal, and reward the 
time spent to savor them.

But I get ahead of myself.  The books concern the adventures of one Christopher
Marlowe, playmaker and spy for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, saved from death 
at the hands of some rather disreputable associates by the Fae for their own 
purposes, and his replacement in our iron world, one William Shakespeare, who
finds himself quickly sucked into the machinations, mundane and other-worldly,
surrrounding keeping (or not-keeping) Queen Elizabeth on the throne.  The focus
of the books is not on the magic involved ("All stories," Bear tells us, "are
true," but beyond that the details of how magic works in her world are not ever
really specified), but instead on the relationships between the characters and
how their efforts, magical and otherwise, to support the Queen's rule affect 
their lives and interactions.  Ultimately Marlowe discovers that he has been 
made the linch-pin in his enemies' plot to destroy the English monarchy (which 
sustains and is sustained by the Faerie Queen's rule), and he must decide how
much he is willing to sacrifice to his Queens' cause.

Marlowe is an interesting character, with many lovers and many scrapes, and his 
emotional journey is the core of the story.  (Bear continues to write the only
sympathetic bisexual male characters I'm aware of in dead-tree fiction 
(excluding for a moment TORCHWOOD novelizations, none of which I've read), and 
she writes them very well.)  Shakespeare is no less well-developed a character,
though, and his friendship with Marlowe and his relationship with his wife Anne
are rich and detailed.  Bear has a knack for the telling detail, and I found 
myself rereading whole pages a couple times to make sure I caught everything.
Oftentimes her characters expose their feelings through subtle gestures, nods
and half-smiles and almost-unconscious flinches, which she manages to capture 
without bogging the story down, showing rather than telling, and this gives 
her worlds and characters a sense of living, breathing reality that I really
enjoy.  Often the characters' subtle behaviors will foreshadow by many chapters 
their admittance of and in some cases their recognition of their feelings, if 
they are explicitly revealed at all, or some mythical reference is made early 
in the book which becomes important late in the book, and for me part of the 
"game" of Bear's books is catching those cues, making the symbolic connections,
and watching them develop over the course of the story.  And though I focus on
the character development, there's no shortage of sword-fighting, romance, 
intrigue, and derring-do in the books to keep the plot ticking alone.

Elizabethan England feels (to this reader) faithfully rendered without 
obscuring the story in a cloud of perfectly accurate "prithee's" and 
"Godswot's".  (Bear in her afterword calls this "nature-identical Elizabethan
flavoring," and it serves her purpose to evoke the era.)  She does preserve a
couple linguistic oddities of the era, primarily the breaking-down of the 
distinction between the formal "you" and the informal "thou", to interesting 
and character-building effect.  It's clearly a well-researched book, but it 
doesn't assault the reader with the results of that research -- I found it in
fact whetted my appetite for more historical understanding of the period and 
experience of the plays referenced.

I really highly enjoyed THE STRATFORD MAN, and I recommend it if you are at all
interested in Elizabethan England, historical fantasy, secret history, or well-
built worlds and well-characterized people.