Prologue

Queen Elizabeth I herself was said to have pronounced Christopher Marlowe's death sentence ('prosecute it to the full') at court. A few days later, on 30 May 1593, Marlowe died from a puncture wound above the eye in the nearby home of a genteel widow. He was the greatest playwright that England had ever seen. The Queen's Coroner attributed the killing to a quarrel over 'the reckoning', a bill for food and drink, but many have long suspected that the murderer had ulterior motives. Was Marlowe dispatched in an act of sovereign power, or a tavern brawl? Was he guilty - and if so, of what - or innocent?

The author of a play produced eight years after the murder recalled a conflicted figure:

Marlowe was happy in his buskined muse,

Alas unhappy in his life and end.

Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell,

Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.

The anonymous playwright was among the few contemporaries to confront the discrepancy between Marlowe's artistic genius and his odious moral reputation. He decided that Christopher Marlowe was an enigma, a pitiful mixture of brilliance and vice. Other living witnesses lined up on either side of this divide. William Shakespeare, his only serious rival, hailed the erotic poet who penned the magical verse, 'Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?' Ben Jonson praised the inventor of 'Marlowe's mighty line'. The poet George Peele called the dead dramatist 'the Muses' darling, for thy verse'. Michael Drayton, another fellow poet, proclaimed that Marlowe 'Had in him those brave translunary things, / That the first Poets had.'

Marlowe's enemies were just as adamant about his vices. During the months leading up to Marlowe's death, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the 'famous gracer of tragedians' did not repent his blasphemies, God would soon strike him down. In the days before Marlowe was murdered, the spy Richard Baines informed Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council that the playwright was a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer of 'boys and tobacco'. Protestant ministers saw Marlowe's violent end at the age of twenty-nine as an act of divine vengeance. Marlowe 'denied God and his son Christ', declared Thomas Beard, 'But see what a hook the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dog.'

After Marlowe's reputation declined, it was of little public interest whether he was a genius or a sinner. But when Thomas Warton told readers of his History of English Poetry (1782) that Marlowe ranked alongside 'the most distinguished tragic poets of his age', the antiquary Joseph Ritson objected at once on moral grounds. 'I have a great respect for Marlowe as an ingenious poet,' he replied, 'but I have a much higher regard for truth and justice.' This opening salvo set the agenda for two centuries of scholarship and criticism. Marlowe belied the time-honoured opinion that 'it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man.' Could a bad man become a great writer?

The answer to this question had to be no. The first line of defence was denial. The Victorian Marlowe was an author and a gentleman. Marlowe's earliest biographer dubbed Baines a 'pitiful culprit who strove to avert punishment from himself by becoming the accuser of others'. Every contemporary of Marlowe's who questioned his morals received similar treatment. Greene's eerily accurate prediction that Marlowe would soon be dead became the 'crazy death bed wail of a weak and malignant spirit'. The testimony of Thomas Beard and other clerics went by the wayside because Protestant ministers disapproved of playwrights. Another accuser, Marlowe's roommate and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, was cast as a mean-spirited hack writer who betrayed his friend to save his own skin.

The second line of defence was displacement. While Victorian scholars denied that Marlowe was guilty as charged, Victorian critics invented a romantic Marlowe whose blasphemies stood for an impulse that was acceptable to modern readers - free thought, anti-philistinism, the quest for transcendence. Marlowe turned into a prototype of the romantic poet who lived for his art, suffered for his excesses, and died young. His immorality, like that of Byron and Shelley, was part of the artist's unrelenting search for truth.

Marlowe could not become a classic merely on the basis of his intellectual daring; Victorian educators expected great authors to affirm sound moral values. The proof of Marlowe's struggle to be good came in the form of Dr Faustus. Before the mid-nineteenth century, even his admirers found little to praise in this tragedy, apart from a few individual speeches. By the 1880s it had become one of the greatest plays in the English language. Marlowe's masterpiece not only had the satisfying contours of a moral tale; it also gave a conservative twist to the reports about his atheism. In telling the story of an educated unbeliever who sold his soul to the devil, Marlowe reconsidered his own excursion into free thought from a mature perspective. As an intellectual, Marlowe identified with his protagonist; as a Christian, he repudiated him. The precise balance of his sympathies remained an open question, and thus supplied a vast quantity of grist for the mills of interpretation. Like every great poet, Marlowe was ambivalent.

This gentrified free-thinker dominated biographies of Marlowe until well into the twentieth century, when he finally outlived his usefulness. New Historicists have recently shown that Marlowe's writing voiced the aspirations of blasphemers, sodomites, foreigners, unemployed scholars and the mutinous poor in Renaissance England. New archival work has revealed the depth of his father's poverty and the extent of his own criminal record. We now know that Marlowe was a counterfeiter and landmark figure in the history of atheism and sedition. The mass of evidence assembled in Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning makes it more likely than ever that the dissident playwright was murdered at the order of the higher-ups. The intriguing question of who Marlowe was remains to be answered.

The Victorian Marlowe was a romantic individualist who freely organized his own life and inscribed his beliefs in his writings. The Elizabethan Marlowe cannot enact this part, for the simple reason that he has left no first-person utterances behind for us to interpret (the sole exception being a cryptic Latin dedication published six months before his death). The facts of his adult life are few, scattered and of doubtful accuracy. Only one of his works was published during his lifetime, and his name appears nowhere on the text. Despite his lengthy criminal record, Marlowe never went to trial, apart from two brief hearings. He was never convicted of anything. All the evidence about his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice. It consists of reported speech transcribed by informants, observations by unfriendly witnesses, and passages drawn from his plays. Sceptics rightly insist that the atheist, sodomite, spy, and insurrectionist exists only in these documents. He is an irretrievably textual being.

Where does a biographer go from there? The familiar assertion that everyone who repeated the charges against Marlowe was an ignoramus or a charlatan begs the question of whether or not their testimony was well founded. Seven of Marlowe's contemporaries refer in writing to his blasphemies; the number increases to eleven if we include writers who refer to him by pseudonyms. This dossier is unprecedented in its intricacy and scope, its points of contact with literature and politics and its murderous outcome. Within the history of modern unbelief, Marlowe bestrides the moment when English atheism comes out of the closet and acquires a public face. In his Theatre of God's Judgements, Beard correctly nominated Marlowe as the first Englishman to rival the great blasphemers of antiquity: 'not inferior to any of the former in Atheism and impiety, and equal to all in manner of punishment'.

During the last seven years of his life, Marlowe was cited for defecting to the Roman Catholic seminary at Rheims, disturbing the peace, counterfeiting, suspicion of murder, felonious assault and public atheism. The constables in his neighbourhood sought protection from the local magistrate because they were afraid of him. One informant accused him of planning to join 'the enemy', Catholic Spain, four years after the coming of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Another linked him with a London gang leader who was involved in a plot to assassinate the queen.

If a biographer considers these facts piecemeal, on a case-by-case basis, he or she can usually contrive to extricate Marlowe from his underworld connections. Taken in its entirety, however, over the course of his brief lifetime, the evidence for Marlowe's involvement with espionage and crime is too substantial to be explained away. The challenge, then, is to make sense of it. The murder of a playwright and poet requires close scrutiny from those who care about his work.

The first question to ask about this evidence is not 'Did he or didn't he?' but rather 'Why Marlowe?'Why was he selected by history to fill this role? The answers to this question cannot lie in his conscious choices, about which there is little to know; they lie in the parts he was chosen to play. The strong-minded protagonist of traditional literary biography appears on a regular basis in the pages that follow, but always with reference to the world around him. In place of Marlowe's...