Ros Barber’s first novel, The Marlowe Papers, was a miraculous oddity – a 400-page blank-verse sequence that built artfully into an elaborate conspiracy narrative. Purporting to reveal the long-suppressed truth about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (the faked death of Christopher Marlowe; a life spent in secret but prolific exile; the sly assumption of another man’s name), its numerous pleasures lay as much in the mischievous ingenuity of its plotting as in the flamboyance of its form. A marriage of scholarly wit and technical expertise, it also, unexpectedly, proved to be thoroughly compelling. On its publication, I wrote in these pages, with a slightly clumsy enthusiasm,

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