Christopher Marlowe

Thomas Kyd may have delighted Elizabethan audiences, but he still wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare

14 December 2024 9:00 am

Brian Vickers aims to ‘restore’ Kyd to greatness – but claiming too much on too little evidence does the playwright no favours

Shakespeare sceptics are the new literary heroes

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Determined sceptics will always find reasons to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship, but who cares in the end, Emma Smith wonders

The first Cambridge spy: A Fine Madness, by Alan Judd, reviewed

15 May 2021 9:00 am

For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…

In 1600 Muhammad al-Annuri arrived in England, as the Moroccan ambassador, to propose an Anglo-Moroccan alliance. Shakespeare probably started writing Othello six months later

Gloriana and the Sultan — England’s unlikely alliance

2 April 2016 9:00 am

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton,…