The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (36 page)

‘Some of them, yes, I fear that’s how it will be.’

‘Fie, misanthrope. Or are you just indulging my mood? I have wine here, but I would prefer to have it all for myself.’

‘I would prefer that too. Madame Berger, it turns out we have a common acquaintance – Mistress Field, who used to be Madame Vautrollier.’

‘Dear Jacqueline, she’s a wonder, isn’t she?’ She doesn’t say what kind of wonder. She goes over to the cage: the bird, blissfully for Will, freezes into stillness as she looks in. ‘So, you will have been asking about me. Furnishing yourself with knowledge.’

‘No. Why should you think that?’ He should never have come, the woman is intolerable, and so he may as well deal in her own hostility before he goes.

‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes mist: he wonders if she is drunk – now, habitually. Yet her movements are so contained. ‘Perhaps because I’m not accustomed to people being kind to me.’

‘It’s a bitter shame that you cannot walk the streets without—’

‘Oh, I don’t mean that. Naught to do with being a foreigner. Or an alien, as they say, which is a better word, I think, don’t you? You have to make a grimace to say it. Well.’ She sits down at the table abruptly, stretches out her feet, and gives a little pleasurable yawn, like a bite from a cake. ‘We don’t have to keep playing, do we? I dare say we both have things to do.’ The bird resumes its clockwork hops as absently, with faint weariness, she begins unlacing her bodice. ‘Naturally you want the reward of your gallantry.’

‘You have the art of the insult,’ he says, as temperately as he can, and gets out of there, thanking God, as he fumbles and stumbles down the stairs, or the lucky stars he doesn’t deserve, that this was revealed to him so immediately; that something has ended and not begun.

*   *   *

But in those jammed hot streets what began with muttering and gathering is suddenly transformed. Suddenly hate speaks in the most exciting language of all: the language of the theatre.

It appears overnight, like a late frost or a crop of fungus. Pasted to the wall of the Dutch church in Broad-street, where the foreigners go to worship. Another of those inflammatory libels – but what an example. It’s like a great speech from a play. In thirty lines of heroic measure it exhorts the suffering true-born Englishmen – read apprentices – of London to rise up against the alien presences who are draining their lifeblood. Rise up and strike, burn, kill. Allusions to Marlowe’s work sow its fierce length; and it is signed
TAMBURLAINE
.

‘Not a bad piece of work,’ says Nashe judiciously. ‘Lacks something in finish, no doubt, but then it was written to order, as ’twere, and there one always finds faults.’

‘But it can’t have been Marlowe,’ says Will. Cold sweats have been sweeping over him ever since he heard. He keeps imagining not
Tamburlaine
at the foot of it but his own name.

‘Oh to be sure. Still, it does a good job of evoking him, I think, which I dare say it’s meant to do.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows, when it comes to that? I don’t understand half his dealings with the great. They say he’s intimate with Raleigh now, and Raleigh is at odds with my lord Essex. Interpose in a Cornish-wrestle of giants, and you’re like to get crushed even as you squeak to them for peace. Then there’s this school-of-night name attaching to Raleigh’s circle—’

Will can’t help his bleak laughter. ‘What do they do? Hold black masses?’

‘Philosophy, I think. Than which there is nothing more dangerous, you will allow. God and not-God.’

‘Where is Marlowe, do you know?’

‘Staying with the Walsinghams is what I hear. I don’t enter his confidence much lately.’

‘He’ll be safe then, surely, from any association with this.’

‘You would think so. Yet somehow I can’t put the word
safe
together with Kit. Like mingling Greek and Latin.’

The libel is torn down, but not before its phrases have established themselves on the lips of the angry delighted – the manipulated? Who knows, and who knows who is manipulating them? The streets seethe anew. Calling at Blackfriars, Will finds new bars on the door. A friend of Jacqueline’s was set upon in the dark, beaten – but it might have been normal London malice, not something special. Will sees the lustre of brown eyes in powdery shadow, the little covered yawn of scorn. Tastes something, like some forgotten treat of childhood, piercingly sweet.

The Privy Council stirs. Doubtless it would close the theatres if plague hadn’t done so. The Dutch Church Libel, as it is soon called, manhandled the names of great lords in its muscular blank verse, suggesting in fact that they are in the foreigners’ pockets or vice versa; only the Queen is innocent, really. A blow must fall, somewhere: the lifted arm of the state is too heavy.

‘Kyd? Why arrest Kyd?’

‘Ah, perhaps that’s the idea. So we ask ourselves, why him, why not me, who next?’ Nashe is enjoying himself.

Sedition: Kyd. Was he capable of that? Whenever Will saw him, which was seldom – he seemed to have left the theatre – he had the same pained detachment, as if trying to refine himself away: as if he wanted to change form altogether, as dragonflies did, leaving the nymph carapace, flying jewelled. Perhaps that was what being close to Marlowe did for you.

‘Of course, everyone connected to the theatre must be careful,’ says Richard Field. ‘But your patron sits well at court, they say, and has my lord Burghley’s interest, so that’s a useful connection. And then as to seditious views…’

‘Is there anyone less likely than me?’ says Will, half laughing. But what’s in the other half? A long corridor of darkness. A good place to hide, perhaps. Safe, safe. He avoids St Martin-le-grand. He imagines himself in Stratford and feels the tick of his children’s eyelashes against his cheek.

Burbage brings Will the news.

‘Kyd’s out. They let him go on Wednesday, I think. Henslowe saw him. Well, Kyd went to him to beg a loan, to pay his doctor’s fees. Henslowe actually gave him the money, can you believe that? But apparently he looked so fearful it even shook old Brass-sides.’ Burbage lowers his voice. ‘He’d been before Star Chamber. Apparently they racked him. Racked him after he had talked, which seems a peculiar refinement of torture. Dear God. Let them take their eyes off the theatre, please, or just go back to calling us whoresbirds and vagabonds. Mind, you’ve half left us anyhow, haven’t you? Sir Proper Poet. No, I jest, I understand. Needs must.’

Needs must, you do what you have to do. You survive. Do you survive at any cost? Questions in the tainted spring, warm as a haybox, as airless. Nashe finds out where Kyd is lodging. They go to see him, to see if – well, what? If he has said something about them, perhaps? And Will’s quiet inner voice, Keep away, don’t touch. Don’t touch Will, keep him clean.
Noli me tangere.
Jacqueline makes way; Isabelle looks him up and down.

Kyd keeps his room dark. Still, you can see what’s been done to him. The best torture is supposed to leave no marks, but you can’t alter that twisted mouth: those eyes.

‘They searched my papers. They found things, writings. Things that weren’t mine. They were interleaved.’ He makes it sound like an obscenity, a perversion. ‘Dangerous sentiments. Atheistical sentiments. Well, in the name of dear Heaven,’ a moment’s trembling appeal, ‘you know me.’ An admission in Kyd’s lowered face that he has preferred not to be known. ‘It was him. It was all Marlowe’s writing. As I told them, we used to share chambers, and there was but one writing-desk, and so our papers were mixed up. He used to talk that kind of thing, you know, and I tried to stop him – though after a while it was best not to, because it would only make him go further. Merely for shock, I thought. The only true profane love was buggery and Our Lord Jesus Christ knew it and knew his disciple John in that way…’ Kyd utters a hoarse laugh of outrage, at hearing himself say it, perhaps. ‘Such things he would say, there were more of them, and so I told them. You see, don’t you? I had to tell them. Any seditious writings, any trouble in the state, I fear you’ll find Kit Marlowe behind them. It grieves me to say it but I’m thankful too. Thankful I’m free from his unholy spell, aye, I thank the God in whom I verily believe and who has preserved me—’

‘But you don’t believe Marlowe wrote the Dutch Church Libel,’ says Will.

‘Why should I not?’ Kyd says, wiping and wiping his brow.

‘Because – because it’s not well writ enough. It’s done by someone who wants to make you think broadly of Marlowe. As art—’

‘It isn’t a matter of art,’ Kyd says helplessly.

‘No. No, I know.’ Oh, but it is. Everything is. Kyd weeps. Nashe sends out for a bottle. Will thinks of high green meadows, the fetching intricacy of woods.

*   *   *

They arrest Marlowe next, once they can find him. He is indeed staying with his patron Walsingham, the late tremendous Sir Francis’s cousin. Not a bad connection, when you have to go before the Privy Council. Kit will land on his feet, Nashe says. Will digs away at his new poem,
Lucrece.
Sir Proper Poet. Whether it’s the dark subject of his work, or the heat, he sleeps badly, interrupted by dreams that can’t quite be called nightmares – full of horrible images, but a glass between him and them: can’t touch.

*   *   *

At the Mermaid Will talks to Ben Jonson about it: seeking, perhaps, a sort of detachment. Compulsive follower of the theatre though he is, still he is a bricklayer, belonging to the other world, a daylight world. But if Will is hoping for comfort, he doesn’t get it.

‘Difficult for Kyd. Also for Marlowe. Difficult all round,’ Jonson says briskly. ‘So, the question is, what would you do in such a situation?’

Will takes a long drink: to think. ‘I would never put myself in that situation in the first place.’

Jonson laughs and drinks in turn. ‘You said that as if you meant it.’

‘Did I? That’s a habit I must rid myself of.’

Of course, as Jonson’s bright, sceptical look says, it was no answer at all.

*   *   *

Marlowe: he bursts upon Will in Bishopsgate, as suddenly as if he has come up from a trapdoor. Clamps a hand on his neck.

‘What, Will? Don’t want to be seen with me, the infamous blasphemer? Never fear, you’re safe.’ He steps away, grinning. ‘Arm’s length, Will, arm’s length where you like to be.’

It’s the smell that makes Will recoil. What must he have been drinking, to turn his breath like that?

‘You’re free? What happened?’

‘Free, we’re all free if we only hack the shackles from the mind. I like your
Venus.
I’ve been writing in that vein myself, on Hero and Leander. You must look it over and give me your opinion some time.’ The thought hits Will like a low branch in the face: Yes, outdoing me, I’ll wager. ‘Oh, I’m freed for now, but I have to present myself daily to the Privy Council. Show Mamma thy clean hands. Such shite and cockcheese, of course, that I would write those contemptible bills. Oh, mark you, I’m all for a massacre here and there – we weed fields, why not people? – but in truth the foreigners are hated because they are cleverer than poor English Toby Trot. And name me an emotion stronger than envy, hey?’

‘Jealousy.’

‘Say why.’

‘Jealousy has fear in it. Envy, compared, is just a kind of bunching of the muscles.’

‘Oh, well. It’s obvious you know whereof you speak.’ Marlowe stops to peer inquisitively, smile in dazzling, alarming place, into the faces of several passers-by. ‘God’s blood, the dead dull nullity of this town lately. Never mind the plague, you’d need the frogs and the locusts before this set would even begin to know they were alive. Look you, as I must make daily attendance on their lordships or worships or whoreships, I shall seize the opportunity to lay our case before them: when in pity’s name are they going to allow the playhouses open again? It’s a murderous intermission of the mind’s life. Scarce anyone’s heard my
Faustus.
’

‘I have.’

‘And what did you think?’ For a moment Marlowe looks almost unsure, uncomfortable.

‘What everyone must think. It’s the most powerful thing yet written.’

‘Ah, everyone
should
think it, but only you and I know it.’ The detaining hand is back. ‘Now, if you had a bargain with the devil, Will, what would be your wish? Long life, perhaps? Solid prosperity for you and yours, or a woman or a man of such surpassing quality you forget everything—’

‘We’re back here, are we? Trying to get your fingers into my head.’

‘Where else?’ Marlowe says, with his peculiar two-voiced laugh.

‘Besides, how do you know I haven’t made a devil’s bargain already?’

‘How do I know?’ Marlowe releases him with a parting blast of that corrosive breath. ‘Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?’

*   *   *

Afterwards you feel something must have been forming in that fetid London air, that some inevitable result lay at the end, purposed, perhaps, like the shape of the fresh-coming play, as he turns over the pages of a stale and shapeless tale. Yet at the time it is life, middling mid-stream. The disturbances remain just that, in spite of the authorities’ alarm: no full-fledged riot bursts out from the apprentice musterings, no slaughter of the aliens, blood running in the streets. Another time, possibly. Plague lingers on; the pits fill. Any remaining libels are plucked down, shredded, burned. Kyd goes to ground, plainly just wanting to keep the eyes of the courts off him, the instruments off his limbs. The theatres stay closed, and with them the bear-baiting yards, so word goes round of private baitings laid on in closes and cellars illegally: folk will always find a way to be entertained. Actors go on tour where they can. Grass sprouts in the ground of the Theatre, where Will walks with Burbage, talking of and trying to conjure up the future: this is where he is when the news comes.

‘Well, the experiment of joining up the companies may after all be a prophecy,’ Burbage says, listlessly gnawing an apple. He is always trying to lose flesh. ‘Once the plague is over, we can’t scatter ourselves so wide again. Not that there will be enough of us left for that, I fancy. We can come out of it stronger, though. A good close company of sharers, all seasoned actors, all committed to the hilt…’