A Dead Man in Deptford (19 page)

For, though later than he had foretold, Henslowe was now
able to view with proprietorial pride the completed edifice of
the Rose that had supplanted the roses long planted on the site.
The Rose smelt of no roses, rather still of size and paint and the
armpits of the groundlings added. It lay between the bearpit
and the bullpit, which resounded with snarls and the tearing
of collops of flesh of the baiting dogs that yelped their descant.
Here blood spattered on to the dirty jerkins of them that paid
to behold the entertainment of biting and rending, but that was
a prized prize, see I have here and I will not wash it off blood
from the veins of Sackerson or Harry Hunks and the hounds that
have no name. And here too were Henslowe’s brothels, where no
blood was let save that of twelve-year-old virgins, very costly and
only for the better sort. The blood let on the stage of the Rose was in manner of a second letting, blood already let of pigs and
enclosed in bladders themselves enclosed in the garments of our
players who, in the comedy of killing, must gush out their lives
to the mob’s applause.

We who played there thought the Rose a fine structure.
Its plan was much the plan of the innyards wherein our trade
had its ignoble genesis. That is to say, there were upper and
lower galleries all around though with no bedchambers behind,
furnished with benches from which the shilling-payers could
look down on the penny-payers. And the stage itself had its
upper gallery, called the terrace or tarrass, and above that a
tower with a flag that flared in the wind during the two hours of
performance. The stage was a platform that thrust into the midst
of the standing auditors, pillared so that the roof or heavens,
zodiac-painted under, might be supported. There was a trapdoor
that opened on to the cellarage, which could be our Christian hell
or else a cooler pagan underworld. At the rear of the stage was the
space we termed the study, wherein players might be disclosed
at study, talk, or murder, for it was curtained or uncurtained
according to need, and the curtain was a fine embroidery of
roses stitched on by Henslowe’s whores in their not ample free
time. Exit and entrance were by left and right doorways. None
could ask better for our swift traffic of the afternoon: here were
all the possibilities of speed and change, here is Scythia, here is
Persia, or not, here is nowhere but the fire of words, and that
fire could rain down on the groundlings who gaped up or flare on
the highest payers, gentlemen of the Inns of Court, that had their
chairs as frame to the action. And beyond our noise was the noise
of dogs and bears and bulls and the imagined noise of them that
came to their blissful dying in the trugging houses of Henslowe.

Well, here we had Tamburlaine, that Kit had been working
on all that while while feigning his divinity studies or, not so
feigning, snouting out the dissidents on Mr Secretary’s instructions. It was a thunderstorm to our stage. Oh true, we had Tom
Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, that pleased ever, but little else save
ill-wrought clanking scrannelpipe confections, of which Tom
Kyd’s Hamlet Revenge was one. It could not hold, its mad prince was but Hieronimo writ small, its one memorable cry Blood is a
beggar was a poor pennyworth, and if the script was lost to the
future it would be no hardship. But with Tamburlaine, in which
I played the divine Zenocrate, there were voices that spoke to a
world greater than the playhouse, for they were voices that bade
us better comprehend the times and question old assumptions.
What was Tamburlaine? No more than a nothingness that rose
to universal power through a thrust from within, not a favour
bestowed from without. So here was Cosroe:

And here was Ortygius:

But there was iamburlaine:

I cite the text I have, having forgotten what I once knew by
heart. But in memory I hear still Ned Alleyn’s thunder or, to me asZ_enocrate, the honey of wooing, and, from backstage, see his
throat bared to the dust as to a dagger while he gulped what he
termed his lubricant ale. Then back onstage to conquer Persia,
Africa, Europe, Asia, India, ride in triumph through Persepolis,
slaughter the Turks, the Tartars, the Babylonians and even yearn
towards enchaining the meteors, the moon, Saturn, the sun. And
always this lust not easily slaked, except when he turned to me,
his divine Zenocrate, transformed to a manner of courtier no
court could have taught.

I say lust and lust again. It was all Kit lusting, a male body
augmented to a world his prey and no retribution. In a dream
of lust all is permitted, tear his throat out, madden him that he
batter his brains to a pulp, harness him like a horse, lay on the
whip. Some thought the beastliness went too far, when Tamburlaine offered captive Bajazeth meat on his sword-point with Here,
eat sir, take it or I’ll thrust the blade to thy heart, and Bajazeth
taking it only to stamp on it, and then Tamburlaine crying Take
it up villain and eat it, or I will make thee slice the brawns of thy
arms into carbonadoes and eat them. And Usumcasane mocked:
Nay, ‘twere better he killed his wife, and then she shall be sure
not to be starved, and he provided for a month’s victual before
hand. And then Tamburlaine: Here is my dagger, dispatch her
while she is fat, for if she live but a while longer she will fall into
a consumption with fretting, and then she will not be worth the
eating.

- A sniggering kind of brutality, Greene said in the Unicorn,
unworthy. The anthropophagous is no subject even for tragedy,
and here it is a kind of comedy.

- That, Kit said, was Tom Watson’s contribution. He is
always calling for the seasoning of laughter.

- It is the wrong laughter, it is the laughter of excess. All
that could happen in the most fevered of nightmares is made
to happen, and pathos is murdered by excess and the throat is
tickled against its will to laughter. Have you not seen men being
dragged to the scaffold laughing? Where there is laughter and no
simple causative that is harmless and wholesome, well then you
may suspect an excess of the brutal. It is unworthy.

Kit looked on Robert Greene. He had seen him at Cambridge
often enough, another profane one, drunken often, swearing
much, taking his mastership at Clare College in Kit’s own
fourth year at Corpus Christi. He would now be thirty and
looked more. His fiery beard was pointed like a steeple spire
in a lake’s reflection; his hair, uncut, stared to all the points of
a compass rose. His teeth showed their rotting waists, his nails,
much chewed by them, harboured the grease he scratched from
his lousiness. His stockings were silk but foully twisted and the
cloak tied at his breast but thrust over his shoulders was of the
pitiful green, much spotted, of a duck’s turd. He said:

- And I utter this condemnation if you will take it, as
you must, since you are my junior and backward in morality,
that here is the atheist Tamburlaine and no hint of his wrong,
no chorus warning of the downfall, no hovering Christian dove
bespeaking judgement - You follow me? It is as though we are
all to kneel before him and say yes yes, this is the crown of life
to which we would all aspire an we were let. It is an immoral
effusion.

- Are you so much for morality?

Greene looked suspiciously from his pig’s eyes that were
of a piss colour saying:

- I know what you think. Here is one living with a trull
whose brother is a cutpurse and who has begot a brat -

- I approve the name Fortunatus. It could also be Faustus.

- Whatever you approve, here it is. Now you must consider
that a man may embrace the divide between body and spirit.

- A divide is a nothing and cannot be embraced.

- Let that pass. I have done wrong, no man more, but I
recognise the heavenly light of goodness the better for splashing
in the mud. I call myself a moral man. Am I not a moral man?
he asked his companion, his minder and mistress’s bully, also
her brother.

- If you will it be so, Cutting Ball said, a reeking ruffian
in a black hat of exorbita-it but drooping brim.

- He is one of the innocent, Greene said to Kit, who have
never been oppressed with morality. He thinks a moral to be a mulberry. He would go as your Tamburlaine goes if he could,
he altogether approves of the whipping and the killing.

- You too. You are there many afternoons.

- I thought to enter the game myself. Pamphlets are well
enough but there is a pleasure in hearing one’s fine lines
mouthed.

- This you know without the testing?

- I have sung out some to the morning air. They promise
well. I have a ten-year advantage over you. I have read more.

- He is, Cutting Ball said, a magistrate arses.

- Magister artis, artium, fool. So is he here, but his ink
is hardly dry. I will out-Tamburlaine you, you will see else.

- I must go. And he went, somewhat flown, to dig pen
in (hardly dry was right. Learning stood out sophomorically)
and endite Tamburlaine the second part. Paul Ive’s The Treatise
of Fortification. Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The lore of
the physician:

This is Tamburlaine dying not because of assassin’s knife or
blow in battle but from nature which framed him of four
elements. And I died too, divine Zenocrate. But there was life
enough, with Ned Alleyn in coat with copper lace and crimson
velvet breeches drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon
and Soria with bits in their mouths, lashing them and crying: