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Kit Marlowe was the bad boy of Elizabethan drama, a schemer and player who inhabited a seamy underworld in which plots, real and imagined, proliferated. When he died, apparently in a tavern brawl, in Deptford in 1593, stabbed through the eye at the age of 29, it seemed he had only met the death that had been waiting for him. But is this the whole story? Or had Marlowe become embroiled in political intrigue, touched at its edges by the dangers of alchemy, atheism and homosexual love, which made him such a threat that he had to be expunged? This new investigation of Marlowe's death - and the life which provoked it - unravels the evidence to suggest a new answer to a murder which has puzzled us for over four centuries.
Born the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Marlowe studied theology at Cambridge before turning to playwriting and poetry. The author of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, he was soon the leading literary light of his generation. But while he excited admiration, he also made powerful enemies.
For, as leading crime writer M.J. Trow shows, Marlowe had also become involved in a world of spies and counter-spies, and developed perilous interests in alchemy and the School of Night. It is likely that Marlowe was employed by the Queen's duplicitous Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, for his 'secret service'. It was while awaiting trial for atheism that he was drawn to meet three companions, among them Ingram Frizer, the man who allegedly wielded the dagger at the Deptford victualling house.
After Marlowe's death a cover-up was engineered by four of the Tudor age's most influential men, members of the Queen's Privy Council. Previous writers have perceived Marlowe as the victim of an unpremeditated attack, or as a man caught up in a power-game between ministers of state. This new interpretation makes apparent, however, that it was Marlowe himself who was the target. He knew too much about those at the top and was openly defying them in his greatest plays -they became determined to remove him; it was the only way to ensure his silence. It was a conspiracy that killed Kit Marlowe.
A stylishly written and fast-paced narrative, illustrated with 8 pages of plates, this new book allows us to gain an insight into Marlowe's complex world, and to understand for the first time the web of political intrigue, paranoia and terror that surrounded him. The brutal murder of the young playwright at the peak of his powers has intrigued and captivated his publics for over 400 years. Now, this compelling journey through the evidence allows us to know who killed him.
book reviews
Martin Fido
'A fascinating historical page-turner . . . an intelligent and perceptive survey of all the existing explanations of that mysterious "great reckoning in a little room"... with a wholly new and surprising conclusion.'
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