The Playmakers
Authors: Graeme Johnstone
Tags: #love, #murder, #passion, #shakespeare, #deceit, #torture, #marlowe, #plays, #authorship, #dupe
Shakespeare and Marlowe – murder
and deceit
Graeme Johnstone
A novel based on a story as told,
and a concept devised by, Kevin Heeney
The Playmakers
Shakespeare and Marlowe – murder and
deceit
Copyright © 2005, 2015 by Graeme Johnstone
G. & E. Johnstone
978-0-9925059-3-6
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
The information, views, opinions and visuals
expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do
not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any
liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel
or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of
this publication.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity
between the characters and situations within its pages and places
or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
1st Edition (2005)
BeWrite Books UK
ISBN 978-1-9052020-8-9
Dedicated to all those in the world who recognize
that not everything is what it seems.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND
THE PLAYMAKERS
1589
Execution was not their usual job. The two
men were normally messengers, occasionally spies, and, more often
than not, musclemen proficient at persuading a wavering soul to
support the Protestant ethic of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
Now, here they were, on a chilly April
evening - in front of a large, noisy mob of traders, smiths, wives,
layabouts, drunkards, thieves, rowdy low-lifers, and the Norwich
village comedian - struggling to set fire to a man chained to a
stake.
“Come on, get it going, we’re freezing over
here!” came a voice from the onlookers, inspiring a burst of
laughter.
One of the two appointed agents of the Court
of the Star Chamber, a bearded, beefy man with short bowlegs,
struggled up from the lifeless fire, intent on chastising the
unsighted heckler. His senior partner, taller, thinner and
clean-shaven, summoned him back to the task, throwing him a neatly
tied bundle of sticks.
“Just get these faggots in place,” the boss
hissed. “Strike the flint and let’s get it over and done with.”
“These faggots is green,” his deputy sullenly
replied, examining the bundle. He was right. Some of the twigs had
only recently been cut from the oak trees of the nearby forests in
Norfolk.
“Oh, I see, you’re going to let him freeze to
death, instead!” came the voice again.
Cavernous mouths containing blackened and
missing teeth opened in unison, and more laughter echoed through
the town square. The frivolity encouraged more observers to come
out of the shops to witness the burning of Francis Kett at the
stake.
The junior of the two executioners, his round
face flushed with anger, wiped his hands on a battered leather
waistcoat, which barely touched each side of his belly, and rose
again to snare the invisible miscreant. “Listen,” he shouted, “if I
catch whoever is saying that, he’ll be going up in flames along
with this bleedin’ atheist, all right?”
“At least I’d have a warm arse,” came the
mystery voice.
The crowd laughed again. But it was suddenly
stilled, not only by the executioner’s malevolent glare as he
waddled over to the faces in the front row, but a defiant burst of
sound from the person chained to the single wooden upright.
“I am not an atheist,” came the cry. “I am
not an atheist.”
It was the same phrase that Francis Kett,
poet, writer, visionary and Free Thinker, had shouted at the Star
Chamber hearing earlier in the day. He had screamed it in
frustration after hours of vainly presenting logical, intellectual
argument that his views on the earth, life, and the after-life were
not heretical. The bishops, sitting behind a high wooden table at
the end of the dimly lit room in Norwich Castle, had been
unmoved.
They did not brook thoughts that ran contrary
to the views of the Church of England. Thoughts that besmirched the
name of God. Thoughts that ran against all proper-thinking
Christian doctrine. Thoughts that could threaten their control
…
The guilty verdict had been a formality.
Francis Kett had repeated his protest as a
dozen hooded men had slowly marched him across the drawbridge out
of the castle where forty years before, another Kett, the wealthy
landowner Robert, had been beheaded for leading a rebellion against
social and religious change.
“I am not an atheist,” he had declared again,
as they passed through the unruly, jeering crowd and down the muddy
road to the centre of the east England village.
“What’s an atheist?” a poorly-clad pig
farmer, wiping his nose with the back of a grubby hand, had said to
a man standing next to him as the entourage walked by.
“An atheist? You don’t know what an atheist
is?” his friend said. “You’ve been spending too much time on them
pigs of yours.”
“Just tell me.”
“It means that he don’t believe in what you
and I believe in.”
“And what’s that, then?”
“You know, all things right and proper.”
“Right and proper, hey? That could mean
anything.”
“Exactly. It can, and does, mean anything
…”
And now, the crowd stood silent as the words
rang through the square.
“I am not an atheist!” Kett cried, his beard
wet with spittle, his dark hair matted, his once-sparkling brown
eyes dimming with resignation.
A cheery, well-rounded woman, her bonnet tied
tightly around puffy red cheeks, nudged a tall, skinny, redheaded
fellow next to her. “Go on, George, give them another!”
The tall man looked down, his blue eyes
sparkling from under a battered leather hat. He nodded, stroked his
ginger goatee for a second, cleared this throat and shouted, “Well,
mate, you may not be an atheist now, but you won’t be anything once
Gog and Magog can get this bleedin’ fire going!”
But on this occasion, the timing was wrong
and the joke fell flat.
Amid the awkward silence, the two bemused
executioners grabbed some drier wood, got down on their knees in
the stinking mud, and huffed and puffed the twigs into life. They
had chosen the method favoured by the Spanish and perfected through
the Inquisition – arranging the faggots so that they just reached
the victim’s waist. This gave the leering witnesses a clear view of
the offender writhing in agony, rather than dying behind a barrier
of flame from wood stacked too high.
The flames first danced around Kett’s legs,
setting fire to his breeches and singeing the skin, giving him a
terrible preview of what was to come. As they roared into life,
under stimulation from a small pair of bellows borrowed from a
nearby blacksmith, only Kett’s strong will and defiant intellect
enabled him to block out the excruciating pain and hold back from
screaming – the very response the crowd had come along to hear.
Nevertheless, the mob roared in glee as the
flames finally start to lick around his upper body, setting fire to
his shirt, forcing him to throw his head from side to side in
anguish.
Their joy was not shared by two men standing
at the back, their clothes and demeanour setting them apart from
the crowd.
On one, an undernourished, wispy fuzz
purporting to be a beard clung tenuously to the outer edges of an
almost perfectly oval face. A similarly reedy moustache battled for
credence against the authority of two handsome eyebrows and a
wonderful shock of brown hair drawn back from an expansive
forehead. The symmetrical curve of the sallow face was complemented
by two almond-shape brown eyes. Sharp eyes. Quick eyes. The eyes of
an observer.
On the other, the hazel eyes had an edge
about them, an element of alarm, an indication that the owner was
not comfortable yet with his life and his role. He was slightly
shorter than his companion, clean-shaven, with sandy hair and paler
skin.
Amid the crowd wearing crudely-cut leather
trousers and rough shirts, the pair stood out with their tailored
breeches, calf-high leather boots, capes, rakish hats with
feathers, and colourful doublets over spotless silk shirts.
The shorter of the two men, Thomas Kyd, spoke
first. “Why are we here? There is no comfort to be had watching a
friend burn at the stake.”
The man with the oval face, Christopher
Marlowe, replied, “But there may be some small comfort for him to
know that there are people here who believe in what he said.”
It was not uncommon for the well-educated
pair of young men to talk about death. They were both writers, with
Kyd working on a play,
The Spanish
Tragedy
, in which practically every character meets his
demise. An intense young man, Kyd saw this work-in-progress as his
big opportunity to break from the humdrum of academia and teaching,
and establish himself as a writer.
Cambridge-educated Marlowe, on the other
hand, had stolen a march on his friend, and was already becoming
the darling of the theatre set. His first play had been performed,
a masterpiece about the doomed Dr Faustus, and he was riding high
on the triumph.
But the deadly scene before them was no
fiction scrawled in longhand on a piece of scrappy parchment. This
was the real thing.
The pair fell silent again, watching as the
cruel flames began to sear Francis Kett’s flesh so badly it was
beginning to melt. Eventually he could hold out no longer and let
out an agonized bray. Such was its loudness, so sorrowful did it
sound, that it momentarily stilled the bubbling noise of the
crowd.
There was an eerie fragment of silence, and
then they burst into more shouts of glee.
“My God,” whispered Kyd, as tears welled,
“these animals think it’s fun.”
“Did you say God? Is there a God?” answered
Marlowe, as the eyes of their friend began to bulge from their
sockets and the flesh of his face drained into the flames. “How
could you even remotely consider there is a God, a God who would
allow such a monstrous thing to happen? Is death a deserved
punishment for letting the mind wander into fresh fields of thought
that others are so ignorant or so scared to even consider
entering?”
“Especially death like this,” said Kyd
angrily, “when the men who organise such a disgrace say they are of
the cloth and …”
Kyd stopped mid-sentence as he felt the force
of Marlowe’s right elbow into his left ribcage. He was about to
protest at the rough handling when he saw Marlowe cock his head to
a point in space behind Kyd’s right shoulder. “Shhh …”
Standing behind them and to the right was a
man looking fixedly at the grotesque scene, apparently oblivious of
their discussion. Marlowe had seen this face before. And he knew
this man was straining to hear every scrap of their talk over the
roar of the crowd.
Richard Baines was not the sort of person you
would want gleaning the slightest syllable of your conversation.
His weasel face and whippet-like frame matched his role in life as
an informer, the ultimate ferret of information for the Court of
the Star Chamber – some of it true, most of it not. He thrived in
these times of deep suspicion and organised spying, often being
seen in dark recesses of the Court, relaying in his familiar hoarse
whisper venomous reportage of yet another alleged indiscretion.