The reckoning

Description

In 1593 the brilliant and controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging-house. The circumstances were shady, the official account -- a violent quarrel over the bill, or "recknynge" -- Long regarded as dubious. 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. There is critical new evidence about his three companions on that last day in Deptford and about the sinister role of the informer, Richard Baines. More important, The Reckoning is an enthralling revelation of the extraordinary underworld of Elizabethan crime and espionage, a "secret theater" 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 reveal not only a complex and unsettling story of entrapment and betrayal, chimerical plot and sordid felonies, but also a fascinating vision of the underside of an entire culture. - Jacket flap.

First Sentence

THERE WERE OSIER-BEDS by Deptford Creek, and fishing boats drawn up along the gravelled beaches of the Thames, but already this seemed an image of Deptford's past, a memory of how it was.

Subjects

Genres

• Biography

Other Editions

• The reckoning: the murder of Christopher MarloweHardcoverHarcourt Brace1992-01-01
• The reckoningJ. Cape1992-01-01
• The ReckoningHarcourt1994-03-01
• The reckoningUniversity of Chicago Press1995-01-01