Nicholas Skeres - Witness of Christopher Marlowe's Death

Witness of Christopher Marlowe's Death

In 1925, Leslie Hotson discovered details of the inquest on the death of the famous poet/dramatist, Christopher Marlowe, at which Nicholas Skeres was one of the three "gentlemen" also present. The report itself tells us that one of them, Ingram Frizer, having been attacked by Marlowe from behind because of a dispute over payment of the bill (the "reckoning"), killed him in self-defence by stabbing him over the right eye. Skeres and the other man, government agent Robert Poley—with whom Skeres had worked on exposing the Babington plot—testified that they were sitting on either side of Frizer in such a manner that he "in no wise could take flight" when Marlowe attacked him.

Although some biographers still accept the story told at the inquest as a true account, the majority nowadays find it hard to believe, and suggest that it was a deliberate murder, even though there is little agreement as to just who was behind it or their motive for such a course of action. The Marlovian theory even argues that the most logical reason for those people to have been there at that time was to fake Marlowe's death, allowing him to escape almost certain trial and execution for his seditious atheism.