[the witnesses] say upon their oath that [Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, Robin Poley and Christopher Marlowe] met together in a room of the house of one Eleanor Bull, widow… and after lunch kept company quietly and walked in the garden… and after dinner the aforesaid Ingram and the said Christopher… publicly exchanged diverse malicious words because they could not agree on the payment of the sum of pence, that is to say, le Reckoninge…
Christopher Morley then lying on a bed in the room where they dined and moved by ire… suddenly and of malice aforethought… unsheathed the dagger of the aforesaid Ingram which was visible at his back…
… thus because the aforesaid Ingram killed & slew the aforesaid Christopher… in defence and salvation of his life… We therefore, moved by pity, pardon the same Ingram Frizer… for the death above mentioned & grant him our firm peace…
WITNESSED BY THE QUEEN AT KEW [RICHMOND], 28 JUNE 1593
The mystery of Marlowe’s death… is now cleared up for good and all on the authority of public records of complete authenticity and gratifying fullness.
G. L. KITTERIDGE, INTRODUCTION TO THE DEATH OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1925
Most of the grounds for suspicion about Marlowe’s death seem baseless on dispassionate examination… The claim that Marlowe and Frizer began quarrelling over the bill is perfectly consistent with what we know about Marlowe, particularly during the last year and a half of his life.
CONSTANCE BROWN KURIYAMA, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: A RENAISSANCE LIFE, 2002
[However]… there is something queer about the whole episode…
JOHN BAKELESS, THE TRAGICALL HISTORY OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1942
Arguably, the trouble is that the legal details [of Marlowe’s death] tell the whole story about as well as a sieve holds molasses.
PARK HONAN, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: POET & SPY, 2005
The fact that the official account trivializes the killing should provoke scepticism, not acquiescence.
DAVID RIGGS, THE WORLD OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 2004
Was this, after all, an unplanned brawl, a bar-fight, an accident, of a sort that can happen in a city any week? It can seem so, except that ‘accidents’ with Poley… were not normally allowed to happen, unless [he] wanted them to.
PARK HONAN, 2005
I believe on present evidence that if Marlowe had not died on the day he did… he could very well have been dead before the month of June was out. Despite the fog of obfuscation, what is undeniably clear is that Marlowe was in grave danger.
ROY KENDALL, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND RICHARD BAINES, 2003
We will never know for certain exactly what happened in that room in Deptford in 1593. An event like this, which echoes on through the centuries, takes just a few seconds to happen. Once it has happened, it is gone.
CHARLES NICHOLL, THE RECKONING: THE MURDER OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1992
Whether [Marlowe’s] soul went to hell, heaven, or oblivion… his plays and poems were safely launched on a career of immortality.
LISA HOPKINS, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: A LITERARY LIFE, 2000
But it is a strange immortality, continually shifting with time and with the perceiver… One suspects that Marlowe would barely recognize many of the images that scholars and admirers have imposed upon him in kaleidoscopic succession.
CONSTANCE BROWN KURIYAMA, 2002
Atheist, intelligencer, heretic, spy, overreacher, tobacco-loving sodomite, intellectual queen, radical tragedian, who held monstrous opinions…
EMILY C. BARTELS & EMMA SMITH, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE IN CONTEXT, 2013
His spirit seems to me to have dwelt in the innermost motions of men’s hearts… The darkness of Fate overshadowing human life, & the fearful energies of wickedness in men’s hearts, strongly possess his imagination…
ALEXANDER BLAIR, PERSONAL LETTER TO JOHN WILSON, 29 APRIL 1819
He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth… His tongue and his invention were foreborn; what they thought, they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed… His life he contemned with the liberty of speech.
THOMAS NASHE, THE UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER, 1594
On the whole, Marlowe’s inspiration appears to be of a dark kind; he is one of those whom Cicero feared would be made dangerous by eloquence. One may wonder, in fact, if Marlowe is not Plato’s first kind of madman, whose genius arises not from divinity, but from alcohol, lechery, or mental disturbance.
CLARK HULSE, METAMORPHIC VERSE, 1981
Marlowe was happy in his buskine muse,
Alas unhappy in his life and end,
Pitty it is, that wit so ill should dwell
Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.
ANONYMOUS, THE RETURN FROM PARNASSUS, 1601
Dying in odd circumstances, which we will perhaps never fully understand, he was buried hugger-mugger in a location we can no longer precisely identify. With him died attitudes towards religion, sexuality and society which we are unlikely to ever be able to reconstruct in their original complexity, and he went to the grave leaving his greatest works in a hopeless textual muddle…
LISA HOPKINS, 2000
The intriguing question of who Marlowe was remains to be answered… The facts of his adult life are few, scattered and of doubtful accuracy… All the evidence of his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice… He is an irretrievably textual being.
Where does a biographer go from there?
DAVID RIGGS, 2004
I know not, but of this I am assured:
That death ends all, and I can die but once.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, EDWARD II, C. 1593