The most riveting book I have read this year has been The Reckoning
by Charles Nicholl, about the circumstances surrounding the death,
at the age of 29, of Christopher Marlowe, the colourful
controversial Elizabethan dramatist who was second only to
Shakespeare. It is as gripping as any detective story. The
reckoning of the title is the dispute over a bill for a tavern
meal, between Marlowe and his friends, which was officially put out
as the cause of his fatal stabbing. Nicholl, however, has an
alternative explanation, and a fascinating one it is. He plunges us
into a world of Elizabethan intrigue, of crime and espionage, of
double-dealing and treble-dealing. The murky underside of the
English Renaissance is brilliantly exposed in this unputdownable
account of Marlowe's murder. Review by Keith Waterhouse (Kirkus UK)
The Reckoning is the first full-length investigation of the killing, tracing Marlowe's shadowy political dealings, his involvement in covert intelligence work, and the charges of heresy and homosexuality against him. Critical new evidence is uncovered about his three companions on that last day in Deptford, and about the sinister role of the informer Richard Baines. But more than that, The Reckoning is an enthralling revelation of the whole extraordinary underworld of Elizabethan crime and espionage, a 'secret theatre' in which nearly every historical figure familiar to us, from hack poet to queen's high minister, seems to have played a part.
Here, in a tour-de-force of precise scholarship and dazzling ingenuity, Charles Nicholl penetrates four centuries of obscurity to expose not only a complex and unsettling story of entrapment and betrayal, chimerical plots and sordid felonics, but also a fascinating vision of the underside of an entire culture.
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