To Be a King

A biographical novel about Christopher Marlowe, who was born the same year as Shakespeare. They knew each other in London, but Marlowe was a famous playright at the age of twenty-two and Shakespeare was a late bloomer. Marlowe was brilliant but also notorious, an atheist and homosexual. A government spy and a rebel. His lover and patron was Thomas Walsingham, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state. Marlowe's reckless behavior eventually got him into fatal trouble. He was murdered in a tavern at the age of 29. "This book is filled with poetry and wit, excitement and suspense, beauty and ugliness." - George Oppenheimer, Newsday


Genre: Historical