The True Crime genre. Stories of actual murders and other crimes that have been fictionalized

is not a new phenomenon. More than four centuries ago, a series of plays based on real-life

murder cases appeared on the London stage.

It was a short-lived craze generated by the insatiable early modern appetite for the

three M's, as my guest today has put it, melodrama, moralising and misogyny, and the craze

influenced Shakespeare. So it's very strange that we've all forgotten about it. All that

is except today's guest. Charles Nichol is a historian, a biographer and a travel writer.

He's written about 16th century alchemy, the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nash and

the poet Arthur Rambo. He's the author of The Reckoning, the murder of Christopher Marlow,

and the lodger Shakespeare on Silver Street. But he's also written a life of Leonardo da Vinci.

In other words, he's rather extraordinary. And he's just written this piece about Elizabethan

True Crime for the London Review of Books, and I thought as a result I just had to invite

him on to not just the tutors.

How did you discover that this True Crime genre was around in the Elizabethan and Jacobian

period? I mean, I wondered if it had come out of your research in Tomalos death.

Well, it didn't come out of my research to Marlow's death because in fact that connection

occurred to me while I was doing this research on the True Crime. One of the plays, Arden

of Favisham, is a well-known play, although anonymous, but it's partly well-known because

it has been claimed quite vociferously to be partly written by Shakespeare. Up and coming

Shakespeare's, the date would be quite early on in his career, what I hadn't been aware

of and found out increasingly as I started to look into it, was the extent of this genre

of what we would now call True Crime. Following on to Arden, Arden's the first one we actually

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