The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe.

By Charles Nicholl (Hardcourt, Brace, 413 pp., $24.95)

ON MAY 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe was killed in the port town of Deptford, a few miles downriver of London. He was stabbed through the eye by a certain Ingram Frizer in a dispute (so said Frizer and the two other men present, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres) over "the reckoning"--the bill for the day's entertainment. Frizer was eventually acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

The case caused an enormous stir --even though sudden death was scarcely rare in London that plague year--because of the dead man's high stature and dubious character. At the age of 29, he had already been a wildly popular playwright for six years. (From our vantage point four hundred years later, we can say that, while he can't be compared to his co-eval, Shakespeare, for dramatic texture or subtlety of characterization, he wrote lines, speeches, whole pages of poetry that are imperishable.) He also lived dangerously: he was a member of Sir Walter Ralegh's circle, which had the reputation of skepticism and outright atheism; and he was quoted as saying things like, "All they who love not tobacco and boys are fools." Whether he said this, and, if so, whether because he believed it or merely to shock, are questions that Charles Nicholl meticulously probes in this book; but the point, in terms of Marlowe's reputation, is that people believed he did. The parallels between his unhappy end and those of some of his characters (". . . swollen with cunning of a self-conceit, / His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And melting heavens conspired his overthrow") were pointed to, sadly or triumphantly, by many of the surviving literati.

Still and all, why, now, a four-hundred-page book about the death of Christopher Marlowe? As Mr. Nicholl puts it, "It all happened a long time ago, but I believe it was a case of murder, and an unsolved murder never really ages."

Mr. Nicholl is not the first person to find that the account given at the inquest raises more questions than it answers. Forty years ago the Canadian scholar Calvin Hoffman came up with the ingenious thesis that Marlowe was not killed at all. The Hoffman theory is that dangers were closing in on him, and so, with the help of three friends, he staged the murder, fled to the Continent, and continued to write plays--the plays put out under the name of William Shakespeare. (This, I can attest, is a theory that appeals to romantic 15-year-olds. Taking another angle, Hugh Ross Williamson concluded that Marlowe was killed because of his involvement in the Elizabethan spy trade--in which we know that he at least dabbled, and in which Robert Poley, one of the other men present that day in Deptford, spent his life.

Mr. Nicholl also looks for clues in the spy trade, but finds unsatisfactory the simple answer that Marlowe was killed because, as the saying goes, he knew too much. Events in the weeks preceding Marlowe's death suggest that it may have been part of a much larger power struggle.

In building toward his conclusion (which I will not reveal, since, as in a mystery novel, the answer makes sense only when the reader is in possession of all the facts), Mr. Nicholl traces the intrigues of the previous ten years and sets them against the struggles between Catholics and Puritans in England, and between Catholics and Protestants on the Continent (as in France, for instance, whose St. Bartholomew Massacre is the subject of one of Marlowe's plays). Nicholl demonstrates convincingly that Poley was not merely a spy but an agent provocateur; indeed, he makes a good case that the Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and install Mary Queen of Scots in her place was instigated by Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham (with Poley as one of his primary agents), in order to draw a group of Catholics into the open and prosecute them for treason. This material is powerful and brilliantly presented.

The rivalries for the aging Queen's affections are also well presented, and mostly from an unusual angle: neither directly, nor from below stairs, but as seen from the far reaches of the table, well below the salt. The motto inscribed on the portrait believed to be Marlowe's, "Quod me nutrit me destruit" (That which nourishes me destroys me), has a clear application to Queen Elizabeth as well. The independence she achieved by not marrying--and therefore not allying herself permanently with one faction or another --allowed her to manipulate the balance of power among her courtiers, but also forced her to manipulate that balance; intrigue was the prevailing atmosphere in late Elizabethan England. If Mr. Nicholl is right, Marlowe died because he got caught up in one of these intrigues.

As Nicholl freely acknowledges, there is a great deal of uncertainty here. Apart from Marlowe's own works (about six hundred medium-sized pages in the Oxford edition) there are only a few dozen contemporary documents relating to him, and most of those date from the last year of his life and the first year after his death. The thing that amazes non-historians such as this reviewer is that, four hundred years later, new documents can still surface--in some cases, because scholars have only recently been allowed into some private library; in other cases, because in the vastness of London's Public Record Office there is a large element of chance in whether a document will be found by the particular person who knows enough of the story to make sense of it--as when, in 1925, the Harvard-based scholar Leslie Hotson chanced upon a reference to Ingram Frizer that led him to the original inquest on Marlowe's death, which had lain in obscurity for 332 years. For anyone who has not read anything published about Marlowe in the last twenty years, there have been several new discoveries--some of them by Mr. Nicholl himself.

After a leisurely 260 pages in which the backgrounds of all the players are filled in as far as the evidence will allow, the last 60 text pages are as exciting as a thriller. The facts we have met before are turned round and seen in a new light (one of the newly discovered documents plays a role here). We learn of a definite motive for Richard Cholmeley to have not merely spread stories about Marlowe, but actually invented them; we see how Marlowe fits into the intrigues of one would--be court favorite against another.

Is Mr. Nicholl right? We will probably never know, so much having been lost (or, prudently, never written down). And one doesn't have to accept as gospel truth a rollicking account such as Alfred Noyes's unjustly forgotten Tales of the Mermaid Tavern to feel that The Reckoning dwells too exclusively on the dark side of Elizabethan life." But his conjectures are plausible--and suggest that whatever double-dealing Marlowe may have engaged in while in Walsingham's employ, at the end he kept faith with his friends, unto death.

Miss Bridges is NR's managing editor and co-author of The Art Persuasion (National Review Books).