A Dead Man in Deptford (35 page)

Some said rats, others said foreigners that had brought it in
on their ships. I was playing at the Theatre in Have At You Pretty
Rogue, a comedy that did not please knocked swiftly together by
Nashe, Dekker and Munday, when the apprentices rioted. They
heard what they thought was Dutch or Flemish spoken by a hugebellied man who laughed aloud and drank pottle ale, this was
during the prayer for the Queen after the jig, and they set upon
him. He was in fact from the north of the kingdom on a London
visit and his speech sounded outlandish. Outside the playhouse
they had stripped him bare and were like to hang him from a
sycamore until they saw on the street the man’s wife who cried
out that he was English enough and desisted, having also seen
a known Flemish master weaver slinking by, and him they got.
Then three mounted troopers of the Lord Mayor rode into this
territory rightly beyond the City’s jurisdiction and hit out with
staves, though one with a sword that sliced through the belly of
an apprentice who screeched in great pain till he died. Then there
was fighting without cause for fighting’s own dear sake until a cart
loaded with five or six corpses came by, a bellman tolling in front,
and there was running away in horror, though where to run, since
the plague was within and everywhere, and the time had come for
our players to run to the country and perform in air uninfected.
Criers at all corners read what the magistracy put out: A strong
and substantial watch sufficient to suppress any tumult is to be
kept. Moreover for the avoiding of unlawful assemblies no plays
may be used at the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose or other usual
places until the Feast of St Michael.

Will of Warwickshire would stay. He sat calmly at his work
while I put my garments together in a basket and a leathern bag.

- Well, I said, peering, the empty eagle, not a good phrase, is pecking all around, you had best keep yourself aloof.

- One cannot be aloof of an eagle. The Muse will look after
her own. And he looked on me with a kind of smug fatness as
I prepared to flee with the others. Then he quoted something
not his: Croyden doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn, The
want of term is town and city’s harm. What does Nashe mean
by that?

- Best ask him. For I was in haste.

In truth it was only in late summer that he met Tom Nashe,
leaner than ever but untouched by contagion as was he himself,
in the beer garden of the Dansker, where a sweet breeze sighed
from the south and the plague howled some way off. Nashe said:

- You know Robin Greene is dead? No, not of the plague
neither. A cracked heart and a burst liver, somewhat like poor
Tarleton. Indeed, this pestilential Harvey, Gabriel not the
other, has said something of the king of the paper stage playing
his last part and is gone to Tarleton, a filthy man. I blame
myself a little. I fed him on pickled herrings and Rhenish,
he drank thirstily and gorged greedily, then he collapsed
in the street and was taken in by a kind cordwainer. His
wife crowned him with bays or perhaps parsley, he rambled
much about his greatness while dying. Well, he spits venom
as well as that boast from the grave. You have seen the
book?

Will took and opened it, having first wiped its cover on
the grass. He read: For there is an upstarte Crowe beautified
with oure feathers that with his Tygers harte wrapt in a player’s
hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse
as the beste of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum
is in his own conceite the onlie Shakescene in a countrie. He
said:

- Spite. And he thinks that line to be mine.

- He gets at Kit another way. Read back and aloud.

- Wonder notte, thou famous gracer of tragedians that
Greene, who hath saide with thee like the fool in his
hearte There is no God should nowe give glorie to his
greatnesse; for penetrating is His powre, His hande lyes heavie upon me, He hath spoken unto me with a voyce
of thunder - There is danger there, I would say, an
imputation of atheism in print. For me, nothing. For
him -

- He will ride over it, safe with Tom Walsingham in leafy
Kent. He rides over much, there is protection there. Have you
noted that the whole town is suffused with poetry? Lord have
mercy on us makes a good last line. It is everywhere, but now
it is my own. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, I am sick I must
die, Lord have mercy on us.

- The present number?

- Something over fifteen thousand, they say. The whole
city a charnel-house.

NAY, for the end of that year we have an exact figure
of sixteen thousand five hundred and three. And it was a
warm Christmas, very green, and the deep pits were dug
and the carts trundled. The Queen, safe as she believed from
contagion at Greenwich, had her plays of the grim festal season
performed, and it was a mingling of all the companies that had
returned to town that gathered in her great hall to enact Kit’s
Rich Yew of Malta. She was not against the Jews as so many
were and I, who took the part of Pilia-Borza, observed her so
closely that I near missed a cue, noting that she laughed little
though munched much from a silver dish of candied figs. It
was not, to speak the truth, an audience all that easy to
please, no groundlings here content with a cracked sconce
and pig’s blood and leering quips, all ladies and gentlemen
finely dressed though many discreetly drunk, Essex stroking
the Queen’s hand but often thrust irritably away, candles candles
and again candles, and at one point a damask curtain enflared
but swiftly doused out. It seemed to me that the epilogue that
Alleyn, great nose plucked off, spoke to the court sneered at
absent Kit:

- My princely patience, she cried out while Alleyn was bowing
low, is not over-wronged. But do not put blame on your betters,
who make what you oft mar. In the beginning was the word.

This seemed to be a kind of blasphemy, but none of the
black bishops there that had fidgeted during the play were like
to arraign her with it. She spoke, like poor dead Greene, for the
makers not the puppets. Then she left, bowed and curtsied at,
with a great rustling of skirts and clink of necklaces and winking
of jewels. As she left to resume, for all I knew, crafty statecraft
and raving and striking at ministers, there was a sigh of relief like
a gale and they that had been covertly drunk were more openly
so. There was a gap among the Queen’s simpering and tittering
Glories and no silver armour flashed at the head of the Queen’s
Guard. We players were given by disdainful footmen but scant
fodder as befitted our beastly status - spiced ale let cool and tarts
of mince rank and salty - but chewing Alleyn was high with his
performance and in exultation said:

- Tomorrow we see Henslowe. He may open up the Rose.

- Without permission?

- This was a manner of permission. The Queen desired a
play and by God she has had it, her subjects may too, the law
is for all.

But it was not until January 26 of 1593 (I must from
now till the end be most exact of dating) that Henslowe dared
frowns and the frost to blare the trumpet for the play of Guise
and the Paris massacre. At last Kit, plump from a Scadbury
Christmas, had the triumph of witnessing a work long boxed
and locked, and the afternoon’s gather was £3 14s, but 3s 4d
lower than Harry Sixt, which was in the nature of a whisper as
to the future rule of the stage. And to Kit’s joy and that of many others Sir Walter signalled his new freedom by showing himself
to the lower world, gorgeous in his raiment, striding alone into
the Rose, planting himself very visibly on a stage stool, and most
vigorously making some of the players cough with draughts and
puffings of ample tobacco. And after he was glad to take drink
with the players before a fire in the tiring room.

- And your admirable lady?

- Out, thin, defiant, eating hearty at Durham House.
You must not think I am just come from the Tower. I was
sent under guard to Dartmouth to quiet rioting and ravaging
sailors who were not pleased at Sir Wat’s incarceration. The
Queen cannot have it all her own way. The sailors were busy
looting the Madre de Dios, my take, my prize. Mace, nutmegs,
satin, amber, ebony, pearls, gold. The Queen’s officers could
not control them, but I did. Fourscore thousand pound for her
ungracious majesty and for me nothing but what is my right as a
man. Free, at least. And if I cannot speak freely at court without
termagant rebukes, then I shall speak freely in parliament as one
of the people’s tribunes.

- Speak freely on what?

- I will find something.

Parliament opened on February 19, with the knights and
burgesses coming up but timidly from their country estates, for
they rightly feared contagion. The Queen feared nothing, and
glared from her throne in the Upper House while she exhorted
all not to lose good hours in idle speeches full of verbosity and
vain ostentation. She said bluntly that she required the voting
of money to meet the imminent invasion of the Spanish from
the north and the passing of laws to put down Catholic and
puritan alike with brisk severity. There was also the matter of
the stranger in our midst, it was in the nature of this realm and
its tolerance to welcome all such as were sorely misgoverned in
their own lands, and such as, preferring life in a free country,
frisked up trade and helped goods to flow, whatever that
meant. Still, the bill that was presented was against Alien
Strangers selling by Retail any Foreign Commodities, but it
was meant for a stuffed figure to be pierced or burnt by the speeches of the liberally given. But Sir Walter was loud in its
defence:

- You argue that it is against Charity, against Honour and
against Profit to expel these Strangers. In my opinion it is not true
Charity to relieve them for those who flee hither have forsaken
their own king, and religion is only a pretext for them. As for
Honour, it is indeed honourable to use Strangers as we are used
among Strangers, but it is baseness in a nation to give liberty to
another nation which they refuse to grant to us. In Antwerp we
are not allowed to have a single tailor or shoemaker living there;
at Milan we cannot have so much as a barber. And as for Profit,
they are discharged of subsidies, they pay nothing, yet they eat
our profits and supplant our own nation.

Some disagreed, many did not and, when the speech
leaked out to the lowlier world, it was seen as an incitement on a high level to the continuance of rioting against
the outlander. But on February 2, the feast of Candlemas or
the Virgin Mother’s churching, the playhouse that had against
the law opened was by the law shut, and there were few places
for apprentices to gather with clubs and daggers and shards of
broken glass.

- We have had all this afore, said the squire Sir Richard
Bradbrooke in parliament. My father did speak much of the
day he was not speedily to forget, videlicet May Day of
1517, when there was great apprentice rioting against insolent
foreigners. It cannot be put down, as it is the people’s voice,
though in the tongue of the young. The Sheriff of London of
those days, who was Sir Thomas More, he could not well do
it.

- He, said one with no pertinence, was a Catholic traitor.

- They were all Catholics then and he had not betrayed
at that time. What I say is let them do what they will, it
is sport that breaks but few pates, and it showeth to these
overbearing Dutch and Flemings and French that flaunt their
money that they be but guests of the commonweal and no
more.

- It is known, cried a voice, that you are indebted to a
Fleming I will not out of decency name, and here is a fine
way of cancelling an obligation, kill all Flemings and while
your hand is in all other outlanders.

- I protest. This is monstrous slander, I will not have
it, I will have his words put to the arbitrament of steel.

- Order order.

It may be that this mention of Sir Thomas More, whom as
a Catholic martyr Lord Strange was known privily to admire,
put into the heads of some, perhaps his lordship himself as
protector of his players, the notion of a play on the man that
some thought blessed and others cursed, and it is certain that
Sir Thomas Tilney, that was Master of the Revels, received
such a play for his approval and he rejected it instanter as
foully seditious, though not returning the fee of seven shillings
that had accompanied the submission. It was known that Tom
Kyd had the chief hand in writing it, and this was to do him
little good.