Christopher Marlowe & the Vatican Codex
My mind is filled with matters Elizabethan. The Kansas City Renaissance Festival opens this coming weekend, and runs until October 17th, culminating about 5 months of rehersals and promotional appearances–for the next 7 weekends, I will be living as Sir Geoffrey Blake, the King’s Herald and Fellow of the Royal College of Arms.
Additionally, work proceeds on Gloriana, so my weekdays feature research and writing on such varied topics as 16th-century secret societies and the hidden occult significance within the design of Elizabethan theatres.
So, it should come as no surprise to me that all of this has started to leak into my dreams. Last week, I had a dream where I was looking at a hardcover edition of a novel that I had written…reading the sleeve notes, etc. When I woke up, I wrote down everything I could remember. The title of the dream-novel was Christopher Marlowe and the Vatican Codex, and I could recall pretty much all of the plot set-up synopsis from the sleeve.
I’ll probably go ahead and take a crack at writing this one. I did some quick research and found out that there actually is a Vatican Codex–the Codex Vaticanus is believed to be the oldest extant copy of the Bible, written in Greek and believed to be commissioned by Constantine sometime in the fourth century.
The Codex isn’t complete, though–during my research I discovered that a chunk of it, including the entire Book of Revelations, disappeared and was replaced in the 15th century. The section of the Bible dealing with the Apocalypse, mysteriously vanished about 100 years before the time of Marlowe.
This thing is starting to write itself.
Cool….but also freaks me out a little bit.