Marlowe and Spycraft

Marlowe and Spycraft

🗓️ Saturday 17 October |🕑 Duration: 1.5 hours |💷 £6 / £5 (Members' price)

Talk by Nadine Akkermann and Daniel Smith

Nadine Akkerman’s talk explores the slender threads connecting Christopher Marlowe and the dangerous trade that is espionage, drawing on fascinating insights from her latest book Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (co-authored with Pete Langman). She examines how spymasters such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Sir Francis Walsingham, together with their familiars—intelligencers, moles, and spies—wrote secret letters in code, cipher, and invisible inks to entrap enemies, prevent and plot assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth I. Akkerman also analyses the archival records that scholarship has used to suggest that Marlowe was an intelligencer, reassessing these texts by placing them into the context of 16th-century espionage. By placing Marlowe within this wider world of espionage, she offers a nuanced perspective on the relationship between tradecraft and literary culture in early modern England.

Following this talk, Daniel Smith will introduce demonstrate the historical technique of ‘letterlocking’, used widely before the invention of the modern envelope to keep messages secure. Although we do not have Marlowe’s own letters, he would have been familiar with these techniques—as were the intelligence communities keeping an eye on him.

Nadine Akkerman is the award-winning author of Invisible Agents, a history of women spies; her latest book is Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration, which she co-wrote with Dr Pete Langman.

Daniel Smith is co-author with Jana Dambrogio of Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter and was for ten years co-editor of the letterlocking YouTube channel of instructional videos.

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