American History Tellers - Billy the Kid

The true-crime genre - stories of actual murders and other crimes that are then fictionalised - is not a new phenomenon. More than four centuries ago, a series of plays based on real life cases appeared on the London stage. It was a short-lived craze generated by the insatiable early modern appetite for the "three Ms" - melodrama, moralizing and misogyny. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to author Charles Nicholl about the little known phenomenon of Elizabethan true crime, which even influenced the works of William Shakespeare.

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