Product Description

Kit Marlowe was the bad boy of the Elizabethan drama, a schemer and player who inhabited a seamy underworld in which plots proliferated. When he died, stabbed through the eye at 29, it seemed he had met with the death that had been coming to him. But is this the whole story? Or did he know too much about those in power and so had to be expunged? This 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 over four centuries. Author of 'Tambourlaine', 'The Jew of Malta', and 'Doctor Faustus', Marlowe was the leading literary light of his generation. But while he excited admiration, he also made powerful enemies. For Marlowe had also become involved in a world of spies and counter-spies, and developed perilous interests in alchemy, witchcraft and the School of the Night. This work gives an insight into Marlowe's complex world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1106247 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Looks good? Never trust appearances!
M. J. Trow sets out to establish who murdered the Elizabethan playwright,Christopher Marlowe, and ends up presenting the reader with a weak hypothesis based upon unsubstantiated evidence manipulated to fit the situation of the time. The majority of the book is devoted to reanimating the historical Marlowe, his character, employment, and outlook on life but the factual evidence to support this is less than well documented and in the end the reader is left feeling that we do not and will never know who or what Marlowe really was (and it will take you 150 pages to establish this!) By the end of the book you will be left with little interest or sympathy for the case put forward by Trow. The 300 page book would have been better served in 100. As an avid reader myself I found this book immediately appealing but it left me feeling very disappointed. Sorry.

Quite an interesting book
On May 30, 1593, the acclaimed playwright Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (b.1564) died in the home of Eleanor Bull, having attacked another man over who would pay for the day's drinking. At least that's what the coroner ruled. The authors of this book believe that Marlowe earned an important someone's ire, and was murdered.

The book follows Marlowe's life, as he lived in the turbulent Elizabethan England. In an often-rambling narrative, the authors meander from topic to topic, giving the reader a fascinating look into the seamy underside of this "Golden Age." In the final chapters, the authors examine competing theories concerning Marlowe's murder, and then present their own explanation.

This is quite an interesting book. The authors reveal a great deal of information on Elizabethan England, the sort of information that you will not find in most history books. My one complaint is that the wandering narrative sometimes proves disturbing, making one wonder where the authors are going. But, that said, I did enjoy this book, and am glad that I read it.

Badly written, implausible and dull
To make either the life or death of Christopher Marlowe dull is quite an achievement in itself but I'm afraid that's the best I can say about this book. The author, who is neither a historian nor a literary scholar, approaches this from the outside, and is happy to ignore the huge body of work that exists on Marlowe. That isn't, of course, a literary crime in itself, but here it is replaced by the frankly imaginary, pulled together inefficiently, and written in a rough and uncouth manner (one chapter, for example, has a paragraph writing off a theory as 'complete claptrap'). For an excellent, speculative account of Marlowe's death which delves deeply into the Elizabethan world of players and spies, forget this and try The Reckoning by Charles Nicholls instead.