Customer Reviews

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Contrary to what one reviewer (if we can use that word, since he or she obviously didn't read the book) says, the mystery of Marlowe's death has not ceased to be fascinating. There are several reasons for this, as Nicholl makes abundantly clear: first, the debt owed to any human being whose death has not been clarified; second, the light this murder throws on the workings of the Elizabethan espionage system, and Marlowe's relation to it; third, the fact that he wasn't just anyone - he was a gifted writer, and we all lost something by his dying so young.

Nicholl's work leaves nothing to be desired: it is at the same time scholarly and awfully entertaining. The man obviously knows his subject. The Marlowe that emerges is not the brilliant if somewhat rebellious youth that we used to think of, but a less likeable, more unsavoury character. But, as Nicholl says somewhere in the book, can we really burden him with the weight of our own expectations? He was a man of his time, and, although we might regret having to put the spy side by side with the playwright, he may not have seen it that way: it was a question of going or not going hungry. I would say that I altogether prefer the fuller picture, even if it's not the most pleasant one.

"The Reckoning" is abundantly researched and very well written, and is one of the few books I have lately read, which I did not want to finish.

The death (possible murder) of Christopher Marlowe is one of the most fascinating of all true crimes. Set in Elizabethan London with a cast of characters that include William Shakespeare, "The Reckoning" provides a intriguing explantion for the events of that strange day when after hours of drink and talk, Kit Marlowe ended up dead, stabbed through the eye. The official story: a quarrel over the bill or reckoning. But mix in politics, espionage (Marlowe was a spy), homosexuality and literary genuis and the official story gets shaken to its tidy core. This is a very fine work, thoughtful, well-researched and crisp, capturing the time and place effectively and believably, and providing a rational context for the known events. Apart from the loss of Marlowe's death at the height of his genius, the story provides a compelling view of the murkier side of life among the young bloods of the aging Elizabeth's world. Not only a class A unsolved mystery, "The Reckoning" is also important resource for serious readers of late 16th c. poetry and drama. NB: Marlowe is the only playwrite Shakespeare quoted in one of his own works -- a sign of respectful rivalry.

I love history and all the details. I also love riddles and mysteries. So, when someone combines both into a tale, as Charles Nicholl did, it's bound to please me. This book is the Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography and the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Awards for non-fiction thriller - both well earned!!

Marlowe was a very controversial poet and playwright. In 1593, he was stabbed to death in a lodging house in Deptford. To say the least, the manner and circumstances of death was up to question. There was a violent quarrel concerning Marlowe's bill and the official finding has been called dubious at best.

Nicholl brings to life this historical riddle with style and ingenuity weaving facts, supposition and fiction into one wonderful mix. He presents a very complex study of Marlowe's death, but it is also a marvellous study of the seedier side of Elizabethan society.

Nicholl walks the masterful tightrope between historical study on Marlowe's murder, a well-written 'who dun it' and portrays with rich detail the period that leaves one wondering if he is not reincarnated!!

So buy it for the history, writers need to read it if they write about the period for it is also a scholarly work, but most of all sit back and enjoy a real British Who do it.

This was one of the hardest books to put down that i have ever come across. Not only does it offer a credible theory of Marlowe's death, but also an insight into the duplicity and danger of life in sixteenth century London. Of course as a Brit who has been to and experienced the ever present feeling of history and precariousness of the city many many times, it may not have the same effect on a stranger to the city.
Intriguing, fascinating, necessary.

These three terms could refer either to this book or its primary subject, Christopher Marlowe. Surely one of the most riveting pieces of historical detection ever undertaken, Nicholl's work weaves together an intricate tapestry of documentation, imputation, and speculation to create what is, in many ways, the most convincing explanation for the murder of Marlowe ever given in print. "New" documents shed much additional light on previously obscured links and connections, and Nicholl himself brings a fresh manner of thinking to the table in order to make clear sense out of even long-discussed pieces of "evidence" such as Dr. Gabriel Harvey's so-called goggle-eyed sonnet. The main portion of the book is concerned with painting the historical background of the murder itself. Nicholl illuminates individuals, giving us portraits of single participants in the overall scheme of the Elizabethan secret service and its related criminal underworld and Catholic conspiracies, not to mention the court rivalry Nicholl believes is the immediate catalyst for Marlowe's death. Again, as with the murder itself, Nicholl is plausible and original in his theories. My one quarrel with the work is that frequently it is based upon speculation -- intelligent, well-grounded speculation, but guesswork none the less. However, the paucity of documentary evidence from the time and the frequent statements by Nicholl in the narrative that he knows he is not proving each theory makes this more palatable. On the whole, a spellbinding and astonishing piece of work.

There are only three reasons to read this prize-winning reconstruction of the events surrounding the death of Elizabethan playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe: (1) if you have some particular previous interest in Marlowe; (2) if you have a particular interest in Elizabethan politics, international relations, and espionage circa 1580-1600; (3) if you are interested in the use of archival materials to tell a story. I came to this book for none of these reasons, and so found it sporadically interesting, but overall rather tedious and agonizing to read. Nicholl's strategy is to examine the biographies of the other people in Marlowe's life (including those present at his killing/murder), and to try and connect them to the larger political context. It was a time of deep intrigue, with Elizabeth's court deeply concerned about a Franco-Spanish Catholic invasion and a Catholic fifth column inside England. Plots abounded and there was a correspondingly extensive murky world of informants, semi-official spies, dirty tricks, and many agents provocateur.

Nicholl attempts to position Marlowe within this world as a sometime government spy on the Catholics, and tries to demonstrate how many writers turned to such intelligence work in order to make a more comfortable living. As educated men with skills in foreign languages, writers were often forced to supplement their meager writing income by whatever means they could, and spycraft offered a fairly lucrative, if somewhat dangerous option. The problem was that it was all to easy to get caught up in some complex double- or triple-cross, and secure patronage was very hard to maintain. Nicholl provides examples of various agents who were arrested based on flimsy denunciations and paid for it with their lives. His ultimate, unprovable hypothesis is that Marlowe was a small fish who got in the way of court jockeying for position in relation to all this, and that the Earl of Essex ordered that he be dealt with. The book is full of speculation and leaps of conjecture that will have history buffs gnashing their teeth in annoyance, but he does establish some things rather persuasively. If nothing else, it should put to bed the notion that Marlowe died in some brawl over a tavern bar tab. The setting was actually the home of a respectable widow with high court connections, it was a private meeting between Marlowe and three others which started in the morning and lasted all day, and the three other men involved were all part of the demimonde of Elizabethan espionage.

While I admire Nicholl's extensive archival work in piecing together events from some 400 years ago from so many different obscure sources, the prose is so laden with extraneous details and tangents that it's hard to keep track of what is truly relevant. No figure is too trivial to merit inclusion -- for example, consider that a quick survey of the index shows some 364 different names listed, which works out to the reader having to absorb slightly more than one new person per page. This is especially irksome given that a little more than half of these individuals appear only once in the narrative! Moreover, spot checking ten pages turned up another seven names not in the index-so perhaps the book has a cast of some 500 people! A good example of how this plays out of the prose can be found on page 179: "Like Ingram Frizer at Deptford, Watson and Marlowe stood their ground. They were arrested by the constable of the precinct, Stephen Wyld, a tailor, and marched off to the nearest Justice. This was Sir Owen Hopton, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, whose home was at Norton Folgate. Later that day they were led to Newgate prison..." If one rewrote the above omitting the extraneous detail, it would read as follows: "Watson and Marlowe stood their ground and were arrested and taken to Newgate prison." This is just one example of how Nicholl's account would have benefited from a tighter focus and control over the material, as he appears overeager to share every last archival finding with the reader, at the expense of lucid prose. Ultimately, it's a book whose value depends largely on the reader's interest in the three areas mentioned above.

Many of the other reviews have nailed it. Nicholl has done an extraordinary job of gathering the available evidence to present a seemingly strong case for Marlowe's espionage work and murder. What he hasn't really done is write a gripping story about Christopher Marlowe. The Marlowe chapters are good, and there are several other chapters that aren't about Marlowe but are still good, though I wonder what they're doing in here. It's like he didn't have quite enough material for a book-length manuscript on Marlowe's murder, so he threw in lots of other (admittedly very interesting) stuff. For instance, there's a lot about the Babington conspiracy, which does give one a good insight into the intelligence world of the times, but oops, sorry, has nothing to do with Marlowe per se. Still, I'm glad Nicholl got it published as a book rather than a scholarly article (which is more what it reads like), since this way there's a much greater chance more people will find it and read it.

An investigation into the circumstances of Marlowe's death,
this book delves deeply into Marlowe's background and to
the realities of the Elizabethan underworld with its spies and
cutthroats. A fascinating study not only of Marlowe but of his
contemporaries, including fellow writers and Sir Frances
Walsingham's secret service. Diligently researched, the
book also contains numerous invaluable illustrations. One
of the most 'readable' books I have read in a while!

Fascinating book. Charles Nicholl is excellent at detailing the machinations and dirty tricks of the Protestant police state that was Elizabethan England. Unfortunately he isn't quite as good at explaining why poet and spy Christopher Marlowe was executed by that state.

It's not Nicholl's fault of course - the problem is the lack of hard evidence. All we can conclude after wading through 500+ pages of Nicholl's labyrinthine research are some vague hunches - that chief minister Robert Cecil wanted to nail Sir Walter Ralegh, that young Marlowe was a member of Ralegh's circle, and that executioner Poley was Cecil's man. As with the Gunpowder Plot twelve years later, it seems Robert Cecil was probably the chief villain. But who knows?

Readers should be prepared to like Marlowe rather less after reading the book. Making his living as a government spy during very violent times, Marlowe was certainly no innocent victim of circumstances.

For assiduous research into Marlowe's life and times, THE RECKONING deserves five stars. For pure entertainment value, I would give it only three. So I've split the difference.

It's impossible to deny the hard work and exhaustive research that went into this densely argued book. Nicholl discovered previously unknown tidbits of fact about Marlowe and other Elizabethan figures (and he is not shy about announcing his role in these discoveries). Unfortunately, the sheer number of digressions into the minutiae of Elizabethan spycraft began to wear on me after a while. At one point Nicholl himself admits that a certain story he is recounting is "wearyingly familiar," as indeed it is - we've read it all before, again and again, in the lives of various minor poets and sometime spies reconstructed throughout the book. Some of these folks are directly connected with Marlowe, some have only the most tangential relationship, and others are dragged in just for atmosphere. An examination of the events in Deptford that left Marlowe dead occupies the first and last sections of THE RECKONING, but the long middle portion is devoted to establishing the background of the killing - a background that seemingly incorporates every single fact Nicholl was able to dig up during months or years of poring through archival documents. It can be "wearying" indeed, not to mention mind-numbing. Still, there is important information here for those interested in the period. Just don't expect a quick or easy read.