The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe

by Charles Nicholl

Paperback

Published October 3, 2002

About the author

Charles Nicholl is an English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel. His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare. Besides his literary output, Nicholl has also presented documentary programs on television. In 1974 he was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer Award for his account of an LSD trip entitled 'The Ups and The Downs'.

Nicholl was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has lectured in Britain, Italy and the United States. He lives in Lucchesia in Italy with his wife and children. He also lectures on Martin Randall Travel tours.

Reviews

[Graham Pryor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Reckoning proved to be a very readable forensic examination of the motives, method, and environment (social, political and religious) surrounding the murder of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Charles Nicholl's considerable research reaches back in excess of 400 years and engages us in the difficult and dangerous milieu contemporaneous to Marlowe, producing an absorbing historical detective story. The main aim of the book is to challenge the official account of Marlowe's death, but after 400 pages that explain the key events of his life, his companions and acquaintances, his obligations and his beliefs, both real and assumed, we are told that despite the unearthing of myriad fragments of fact, and their gluing together with a liberal dose of supposition and conjecture, the 'final truth about Marlowe's death lies hidden'. It troubled me throughout the book that there was insufficient reason to embark on this quest of discovery. Marlowe was murdered in 1593; what does it matter now? Indeed, what does it matter to scholarship? Nicholl's own deduction is that Marlowe was killed out of political necessity, but this should come as no surprise, since it has long been known that he was deeply involved in matters of political intrigue both at home and abroad. Clearly, the subject of this book was a matter of the author's personal mission, in the manner of an academic thesis. We are lucky that it reads far better than a traditional scholarly text.