Robert Nye

Infinite Riches in a Little Room

The World of Christopher Marlowe

By

Faber & Faber 400pp £25 order from our bookshop

ON 30 MAY 1593, at ten o’clock in the morning, the poet Christopher Marlowe was at Deptford, drinking in the ‘house of a certain Eleanor Bull, widow’. He had three companions, all of them intimately connected with Thomas Walsingham, cousin of the head of Queen Elizabeth 1’s espionage service. The men spent the day drinking and talking, and walking in the garden on the bank of the Thames. When the time came to settle the bill with Widow Bull, some kind of tavern brawl seems to have developed. At the end of it, Marlowe lay dead in a pool of his own blood, stabbed through the right eye by the lowest of his three companions, one Ingram Frizer.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    • Thirty-two years ago this month, we published Muriel Spark's short story, 'A Playhouse Called Remarkable' Read it… ,
    • Time travel, bicycles and white horses populate @WomackPhilip's roundup of children's books by @marcussedgwick,… ,
    • RT : Joanna Kavenna’s ‘Cooking with Trotsky’s Frying Pan’ in June’s is the most well written and interesting… ,
    Follow Us