I tried in earnest to read this - but while it had a great premise (Renaissance playwrights get ensnared in Faerie! Magic intersects with real life history! Christopher Marlowe with an eyepatch!) and strong characterization, the plot was too slow and dense to hold my interest. Might appeal to a Renaissance history buff, but it failed to capture me.

So I skipped ahead to the Renaissance playwright snogging scenes and then called it quits. I hardly ever skim when I read fiction, so I suppose it's a backhanded compliment to Elizabeth Bear that I bothered. ( )

Bear, Elizabeth. Ink and Steel. 2008. Gateway, 2019. Promethean Age, 2019.
The Promethean Age is a loosely connected series of fantasies in historical settings. Ink and Steel, the first of two books featuring Will Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, offers a sly romp through Elizabethan England with a side trip or two to visit the Faerie Queen. Elizabeth Bear has done her research and is honest with the liberties she takes with Early Modern English. She takes even more liberties with the many historical figures we meet along the way. The Earl of Oxford says he taught Marlowe all he knew about magic. Marlowe and Shakespeare have an off-again-on-again affair that is more than just a bromance. Marlowe, for example, is given several nicknames: Kit, Kitten, and Puss. Like a Shakespearean play, the tone swings from comic to tragic as the plot demands. Like Tom Stoppard in Shakespeare in Love (1998), Bear delights in the language: “Poetry,” she has Marlowe say, “was how we got here. Who would have thought poetry so dangerous?” Ink and Steel was clearly a labor of love, and I am glad it didn’t get lost. 4 stars. ( )

http://ninecats.org/margaret/blog/2014/05/28/ink-and-steel-elizabeth-bear ( )

Eh. I wanted to love this, but eh. It's a little overly stylized for my taste and took a while to get going; the last hundred pages are excellent. ( )

It isn't that Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water make more sense after reading Ink & Steel, because they didn't not make sense the first time; it's more that bits of them make a different kind of sense, knowing what you learn here about who some of these people are and where they might be coming from. Things echo. Oh, and now I'm going to have to spend the month waiting forHell and Earth reading the Complete Marlowe. And Shakespeare's sonnets, again. And probably As You Like It... ( )