Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
The Marlowe Murder Case
By Michael Neill
The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
by Charles Nicholl
University of Chicago Press, 413 pp., $14.95 (paper)
A Dead Man in Deptford
by Anthony Burgess
Carroll and Graf, 272 pp., $21.00
Christopher Marlowe, the most prodigally gifted of Shakespeare's poetic contemporaries, was stabbed to death in an apparently casual brawl at the age of twenty-nine. This bloody mayhem was merely the latest in a succession of scandals that had darkened his career; but according to Charles Nicholl in The Reckoning the killing was deliberate and politically motivated. Nicholl is hardly the first to have made this suggestion, but he mounts much the most detailed case, and does so with a panache that helps to account for his book's remarkable popular success. In Britain The Reckoning has won several major nonfiction awards and attracted respectful notices in the press.
Review, 5023 words
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