A Dead Man in Deptford (25 page)

- It cannot be done, Warner said, it could not be published.

- Not in Antwerp, Basle, Geneva?

- Never Geneva.

- It is, I think, Harlot said, the divinity of Christ that must,
gently in your word, ever gently, be questioned. His blood may
stream in the firmament but it is the blood of a man. We are
always coming back to Bruno and his one great sun flaring in
that firmament.

- Denials of the divinity, Warner said, can be set forth and
then ineptly countered. That is one way of the gentle inserting of
the dagger. It has been done in the past. What was that book of
Queen Mary’s day? A Blast Against the Arians, some such thing.

- A Catholic book of course, Kit said, dark and depressed,
of which I have a copy. The Arian heresies are clearly set forth
only to be attacked. I studied it at Cambridge and have never
been sure of its true intent. I can bring it. I remember it said
something of the gospels showing Christ as a man subject to
hunger, thirst, weariness, fear and the like, and these words Now I must go. I settle to my trade, which is not dis-put-at-i-on.
I have a play to make.

And the play he was making lacked discretion totally. The
Duke of Guise that had driven the King from Paris had been on
the King’s orders, for now his gallic majesty was back, assassinated by thugs hired cheap. And the King had kicked the dead
head of Guise over and over, complaining then of blood on his
shoes. Here was Kit working on what he called The Massacre at
Paris, which, if presented, would have the French ambassador
raging at court and without doubt close the Rose for ever. But
here he was with

This was much like

The same Machiavellian boastfulness was there:

He was much possessed by hell, he noted, relighting his pipe.
When Jack Lyly and Tom Nashe came to call on him they waved
the smoke away like preachers denouncing heresy. Kit greeted
with:

- Lyly of the lilywhite boys. How go the squeaking thespians
of Blackfriars? Ah, that is not too bad a blank-verse line. Sit,
both. There is a kind of vinegar in that bottle. Find yourselves
mugs.

They were both thin men like blades with bladelike noses.
Nashe said:

- You have read the tracts?

- I read Have you any work for the cooper? I laughed. It was right for Bishop Cooper whose wife empties pisspots on him.
Married prelates are ridiculous. Celibacy is proper for priests.

- There is a smell of the old faith about your Faustus, Lyly
said. He looked with disdain on Kit’s poor lodgings, he that had
become secretary to the Earl of Oxford, no less. Which means
you must be against Martin Marprelate.

- I am against them all, bishops and black crows that
preach through their noses. The bishops make me puke but
Martin makes me laugh. Who is this Martin?

- A Brownist of course they think to be John Penry, Nashe
said. He has what is called the Pilgrim Press because it is ever
moving. Never in one place, and a heavy instrument to push
around. Yes, he has the comic gift which, alas, the bishops
have not. But there is episcopal money about. Did you see our
plays?

- Martin’s Month’s Mind was at the Theatre. It lacked poor
Dick Tarleton. That was of you both?

- Answer a fool with folly, Lyly said. A bishop’s commission. It is a strange new world we are in, bishops asking for
plays.

- And plays of some scurrility, Kit said. Martin poisoning
Divinity to make her vomit. I do not think it decent.

- This stink is not decent, Nashe waved as Kit relighted.
Call it the devil’s incest, pardon, incense.

- It is by way of being a fumigant. There is a lot tc
fumigate - bishops paying for low comedy, believers in God
being burnt. You prefer the stench of the burning of heretics?
Catch this Martin and he will be burnt and doubtless there will
be godly laughter.

- We come to you, Lyly said, with a view to collaboration.
There was good comedy in Faustus, the clown and God forgive
me he speaks Dutch fustian and the fireworks.

- The comedy was mostly Tom Watson’s. If you want from
me comedy about the Christian faith you will not get it. Faith
is a grave matter.

- Strange words from one reputed to be atheistical, Lyly
said primly.

- So Greene and his bravo are still at it? You believe
me to be that?

- You may be what you wish, Nashe said, unnasally, since his
handkerchief was at his hatchet nose. We are not here to exhort
you to orthodoxy. We are merely at work on commissions. Your
name would draw crowds and please their grades.

- Listen to me, Kit said, and he knew, saying it, that the
me to which he referred was one of a parcel of many within,
and he felt a manner of despair or at least desperateness in
not knowing well which was to speak. It is easier to believe
in this Church of King Henry’s founding than not to. I believe,
I believe, your worships, and the question of what is belief never
arises. So, with this thin surcoat of belief, we may do our work
and drink our drink and never be molested. To question faith
is a grave matter, and here you are bringing your clowns in.
An atheist at least has set working the engines of thought, and
it is no easy matter to throw God out of his heaven. The truth
is that there are no atheists, since who would be so witless as to
assert what he cannot prove? Simply and in all candour we must
shrug and say we know nothing. God’s book is man’s book, since
God handles no quill. These bishops with their termagant wives
throw the book at us and say believe because I demand belief
and by God I will burn or hang and quarter you if you do not.
By what authority is it affirmed that Martin and his Calvinists
are wrong? How has the Church that Peter founded in Rome
become so suddenly the Scarlet Woman?

- As I said, Lyly nodded, your Faustus is a work of the old
faith. And by atheist we may mean you reject the Church of the
Reform.

- Martin Marprelate is also a reformer, Kit said. Will not
the Reform go on for ever?

- Come, Nashe said not unkindly. Your boldness is well
taken. We did not visit you for all this. You are in a mood
of protesting and this is not the occasion. All we came for
was collaboration. To tell truth we are at our wit’s end for
new things the bishops will gladly pay for. If not comedy then
some thunderous Tamburlaine lines on behalf of the God of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then the trapdoor opens and Martin
is thrust into hell to scream his heart out. It would be in a manner
a fine fusion of your two plays. A few scenes only.

- Hell in the cellerage, aye. Dust and beetles and a few
squibs. Why this is hell nor am I out of it, that was the truth.

- You believe in hell? Lyly asked. Certainly you savour
the smoke of it.

- Belief is not to the point. There are men around who
do not believe in America nor in the existence of far constellations that reveal themselves through optic glasses. Hell may
be there whether we believe or not. We are scurrying emmets
or pismires with our sad little comedies. Religion is too great
a thing for either the hen-pecked episcopacy or the followers of
Robert Browne. Tell the Archbishop that. Belief makes nothing
and unbelief strikes nothing out. Let me go back to my Paris
massacre.

THAT was a summer in which Kit was hardly to be seen
in London. He took, he told me later, almost daily a boat from
London Bridge to Deptford, there to wander, drink, think not
solely on his play of the Paris massacre but of poems, Ovid translations, a sort of chronicle of an England that was at war indeed
for greed and conquest but not on behalf of a faith affirming that
God had a special love and care for a remote and misty island.
Also he saw, somewhat remotely and mistily, that his two plays
already seen and acclaimed yearned towards a third, for in the
first he had shown power through conquest, in the second power
through knowledge, in the third there would be power through
what? Money, he thought, though there could be no tragedy
in it, money was no tragic theme. Meantime he was soothed
by the noise of the waterside taverns, where there was much
hard drinking by joiners and caulkers and hemp-dressers, for
here were the navy yards where ships, merchantmen and men
of war, were built of English oak and Russian spruce. The smell of fresh-cut wood mingled with that of fish not so fresh, tarry
sailors, ale vomit. And Drake’s Golden Hind that had made the
three-year circumnavigation lay at anchor to be chipped in sacred
relics by those that came to admire. A mile downriver the Privy
Council would be meeting at Greenwich Palace, and Deptford
was by way of being a suburb of the court, with musicians that
made up the royal consort at their blasts and tunings, to which
the royal hounds in their kennels howled a forlorn faux-bourdon.

In the tavern where he sat on a day sailors let loose after a
long voyage regaled with stories not to be believed; it was the
scurvies that did for them, aye, and the eating of rats for there
was nought else but tallow and young blackamoors, and there
be men that have one foot only so great that it serves them for
shade in the heat, and there is fruit on the trees that does sing
a catch, aye. The standing shadow in the doorway resolved on
entrance into a known figure: a young man of grave face that
hauled behind him his baggage, just landed.

- Just landed on the Peppercorn, you will remember. The
name being Dick Baines. I will sit.

- And drink. English ale in a tankard of pewter.

- Talk not to me of pewter. The coining goes on but at last
I am sent home for different work. Did they find out that you
had not seen the butterman?

- No. But there was war just the same.

- Aye, and it goes on in the Low Countries. It was a great
victory and they are building ships here, I see, in great haste
for the Spaniards are not yet done with us. And what work are
you on?

- No longer in the Service. I make plays for the playhouse.

- No longer? You cannot speak so. Once in in always. I
must report to Mr Secretary who is very sick. There will be a
new master soon but who they know not yet. We hear much of
the Earl of Essex.

- Here too. Well, I have done with it.

- And what be these plays?

- Plays that bring in money but not enough. You see that great house there on the edge of the green? That is the Lord
Admiral’s. I write plays for his men.

- I do not see that clearly. Plays for sailors at sea?

- The companies of players must have a protector who
shields them for being rogues and vagabonds. There are others
than the Lord Admiral’s. There is even the Queen’s Men, but
that is the worst of them.

- In Flushing there were no plays but ones in Latin done at
the grammar school. But one that came visiting spoke of what
he called Timber Lane with much swearing and cursing of God.
Did you see that

- It is mine. The title you have is not quite right.

- Ah, you are still at your old business of God and Christ
and the beloved disciple?