"Poor poets borrow, great poets steal," as another of Brustein's characters, Christopher Marlowe, tells us in the prologue. Or rather it's the ghost of Marlowe, gory-eyed and bathed in red light, telling us that, shortly after he's demanded our attention by stealing a line from the ghost of Hamlet's father: "List, list! Oh, list!"
And list we do, for Brustein has a knack for weaving such appropriations into a generally amusing embroidery on a few Shakespearean incidents and themes. Sometimes, the contrast between the many lines lifted from Shakespeare and those crafted by Brustein himself, in an idiom somewhere between Elizabethan and modern English, only highlights the danger of following a master of blank verse. Even so, the heirs of Brustein's invention are rich enough to convey a diverting tale.
Set in 1593, "The English Channel" takes place in a room at the Mermaid Tavern, where, Brustein's Marlowe tells us, young Will is holed up writing sonnets while the theaters are closed by plague. We're soon embroiled in Will's entanglements with Henry "Hal" Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, frequently identified as the mysterious Fair Youth of Shakespeare's sonnets; with Emilia Lanier, a court musician and poet whom Brustein - following A.L. Rowse and other scholars - nominates for the role of the Dark Lady; and Marlowe himself, here seen as Shakespeare's rival for Southampton's patronage, go-between with the lovely Lanier, and anti-Catholic spy.
Readers who found their minds wandering through the thicket of references in that last paragraph would probably feel equally lost in "The English Channel." For those to whom the Authorship Question and the Essex Plot are familiar and beloved ground, however, Brustein has crafted an academic divertissement that, at its best moments, is also something more: a reflection on the interplay between art and life, and a glimpse into the mysterious process of turning people into characters - and vice versa.
