The gaol

"For over eight hundred years, Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This was where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went. the gaol endured as London's unofficial stage. From the Peasants' Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures, as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history."--BOOK JACKET.