Reviews

Controversy has surrounded Marlowe in death as well as in life. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe is remembered primarily as an English poet and author of Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta , plays still performed today. This book plunges readers into the 16th-century world of spies, conspiracy, and political intrigue, as Nicholl, a British author of travel books, investigates the conditions and reasons for Marlowe's death by stabbing at age 23, challenging the commonly held ``tavern brawl'' theory over the ``recknynge'' of the bill. Nicholl reveals new evidence that points to a smear campaign and frame-up, resulting in murder sanctioned by those high up in the government. A remarkable piece of scholarship, this work carefully reconstructs the events leading up to the murder with all the excitement and suspense of a modern mystery novel; at the same time it vividly conveys the energy and color of Elizabethan England. Recommended for scholars and informed readers.-- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Elizabethan playwright-poet Marlowe was stabbed to death in 1593 at the age of 28, supposedly in a dispute over a tavern bill or ``reckoning.'' In a painstaking piece of scholarship that reads like an intricate detective thriller, British author Nicholl argues that Marlowe was murderd by a court cabal orchestrated by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who viewed dramatist-spy Marlowe as an obstacle to his political ambitions. One of the three men with Marlowe the day he died, Nicholas Skeres, was a servant of Devereux; another, Robert Poley, was a government agent who earlier had played a major role in a covert operation to entrap and eliminate the imprisoned Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. The third, a shady entrepreneur named Ingram Frizer, was the hit man. Nicholl, who goes much further than previous biographers in exploring Marlowe's connections to espionage, concludes that he was a government spy, recruited while a Cambridge student, who informed on subversive Catholic loyalists. Winner of both the British James Tait Black Prize for biography and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award, this highly speculative study provides an extraordinary glimpse of the seamy Elizabethan underworld of espionage replete with double agents, disinformation, torture and murder. Illustrated. (Mar.)