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

An exploration of the crash-and-burn bard whose wayward life-style and bad-boy reputation led to his death at 29, stabbed through the eye in a tavern brawl in Deptford in 1593.

Born the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Marlowe went on to write "Tamburlaine", "The Jew of Malta" and "Doctor Faustus".

He was soon the leading literary light of his generation.

But he was also mixed up with political intrigue, spying, witchcraft, alchemy and the School of the Night, and was awaiting trial for atheism when he was killed.

The book investigates the conspiracy surrounding Marlowe's death, the subject of conjecture for over 400 years.

It proposes that Marlowe was a victim of a contract killing, a desperate measure to prevent him from revealing the names of other atheists including members of the Government and, perhaps, even Lord Burghley himself.

There were plenty of motives for Marlowe's death and, in the seething melting pot of Elizabethan England, plots, real and imagined, were everywhere.