First published in Great Britain in 1992, The Reckoning brilliantly re-creates the dark underworld of Elizabethan spies and conspiracies that enmeshed the 29-year-old poet/playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was stabbed through the eye allegedly as a result of in a brawl over his bill at Widow Bull's house in Deptford. Charles Nicholl is less interested in the poet's texts than in ``the reports of snoops and spies, in Privy Council papers and criminal charge-sheets.... This all happened a long time ago, but I believe it was a case of murder.... We can dig away some of the lies, and perhaps find beneath them a faint preserved outline where the truth once lay.'' Marlowe (1564-93) was killed after spending a day at Bull's with three nasty gents: Ingram Frizer, a crafty loan shark who did the actual stabbing and was acquitted for it; Frizer's dupe, Nicholas Skeres, who seems to have been a government intelligence agent in the pay of the Earl of Essex; and Robert Poley, a sinister, complex double-dealer, informer, agent provocateur and rumored poisoner, called by some ``the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld.'' Nicholl takes as a red herring an imputation by informer Richard Baines that Marlowe was gay, adding that we ``do not know what it meant to be gay in Elizabethan England.'' Baines also accused Marlowe of counterfeiting, of spreading heresies, atheism, and the slander that Christ was a sodomite with St. John, adding that Marlowe—a danger to Christianity—should have his mouth stopped. And Marlowe's dying of plague—another red herring? After carrying us through factions, fictions, and knaveries, Nicholl gives his vision of the murder. The vision is swathed in gauze and sultry with wine, but it sounds plausible and addresses the dark political context leading back to Her Majesty's Privy Council. A fine job of research that could quash forever the myth that Marlowe died in a ``tavern brawl.''
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-175981-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
Meet Norma Hazelton, connoisseur and collector of swizzle sticks. If you're not impressed by a plastic Jackie Gleason long since separated from its maraschino cherry, take a look at Robert Cade, inventor of Gatorade and a collector of Studebakers (re the carmaker's Dictator line of the 1930s, he says: ``Dictator was a good name until Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. They dropped the Dictator line in 1937 because of them''). Among the 20 collections that Tuchman and photographer Brenner cast their eyes on are caches of Civil War memorabilia (a banjo, a musket, a toothbrush); aquarium furniture (a lot of mermaids); and representations of the Last Supper (a clock, a saltshaker, a funeral-home fan). Tuchman's text, mostly a pastiche of comments from the collectors themselves, is informative—and just glib enough to keep the whole book from feeling like a spooky visit to your mad Aunt Mabel's attic.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0360-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
