Who Killed Kit Marlowe?: A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England

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.