5. The Coroner's statement that Frizer, while sitting in a chair and wrestling with a man in bed behind him, inflicted "a mortal wound over his [assailant's] right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch" is so improbable as to throw doubt on the whole of his account of the matter.
6. Neither Skeres nor Poley made the slightest attempt to interfere with or to part the combatants. There is no indication that they attempted to summon help.
7. The Coroner apparently made no attempt to find any other persons who ate or drank at Eleanor Bull's that day and who might have testified to the behavior of this remarkable quartet. How was it that none of the habitués of the place, a cheap tavern frequented mainly by sailors, were called upon to say what they knew or saw? The Coroner's strange silence suggests that Frizer, Skeres, and Poley probably managed to keep Marlowe most of the day in a private room and out of view of any of Eleanor's patrons. We must not overlook the significance of the fact that the Coroner reports that Marlowe and his associates "met together in a room in the house ... & there passed the time together & dined" and that, after walking about in the garden belonging to the house, they "returned ... to the room aforesaid & there together and in company supped."
8. The Coroner's failure to get Eleanor Bull's testimony is a highly suspicious feature, especially in view of the fact that the law required him to question the neighbors and any other persons who might throw any light on the homicide. It would surely have been of the utmost importance to know whether there were any evidences of a struggle, e.g., overturned chairs, broken dishes, the position of Marlowe's body, etc. As matters stand, we do not even know for certain whether the dead Marlowe was discovered in bed or on the floor, whether there were bloodstains in the bed, whether the Coroner found the dagger in the wound and in the clutch of the deceased—surely very material facts in an inquiry regarding a possible murder. And yet Eleanor Bull did not testify. The only likely explanation for this fact is that the assassin or assassins kept Marlowe in a private room in a remote part of the house until they were ready to dispatch him. Having got him sufficiently drunk, one of them thrust a dagger into the sleeping Marlowe's brain just above his right eye.
9. That the Coroner's inquest was a perfunctory matter and that his story cannot be accepted as a faithful account of what actually transpired is sufficiently evident from the facts that he made no inquiry into how much liquor Marlowe had imbibed and that he was willing to believe that a two-inch wound above the eye would result in instant death. One who knows the anatomy and pathology of the human brain knows that it is almost impossible for death to follow immediately upon the infliction of such a wound.[32] That Marlowe's brain—"the abode of the poet's vaulting imagination," as Hotson poetically calls it—was not examined is, therefore, certain, and yet the Coroner says that the wound was two inches deep and one inch wide. Such a wound, if made horizontally, traversing the eye socket, would not have involved the brain for more than half an inch, and would not have affected any vital area; if the wound was made vertically, the injury would have been in the frontal lobe of the brain and would not have proved fatal, certainly not immediately. To have caused instant death the assassin would have had to thrust his dagger horizontally into Marlowe's brain to a depth of six or seven inches—and that could not have happened if Frizer and Marlowe had been wrestling as the witnesses described. Portions of the frontal lobe have been shot away without fatal consequences. Bullets have been known to enter the brain through one temple and to come out through the other without causing death. The Coroner's "grim tale" of Marlowe's violent and untimely end is, therefore, not a true account of what happened.
Taking all the known facts into consideration, we must, it seems to me, conclude (1) that Marlowe was assassinated while he was asleep, probably in a drunken stupor; (2) that while he was in this condition, Ingram Frizer thrust his twelve-penny dagger, which he had brought with him for the purpose, deeply into Marlowe's brain; and (3) that the Coroner was influenced by certain powers not to inquire too curiously into the violent death of an "outcast Ismael".[33]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Harl. MS. 7368, at the British Museum.
[2] That the sixth man, hitherto known as "D", was not Shakspere, I have tried to show in my books, Problems in Shakspere's Penmanship and The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. The latter of these presents my case for the dating of this play (the spring of 1593) as well as for the identification of Heywood, Chettle, and Kyd.