A Dead Man in Deptford (41 page)

- Listen, Skeres said, and he looked to Poley for approval.
Poley nodded. You are in the situation of one that is no proper
criminal, unmeet for trial or hanging. Of one, rather, that had
best be voided. We heard your threefold no, we speak not of
treachery but of its possibility. There is one reason for your
being voided. There are two others, and you will never know
whether it is a knight or an earl who wishes the voiding. The
wise man takes his money where he can, like the judge that
takes bribes from both sides. One deletes you from life’s book
as a warning to others, or because he fears your tongue, or for
dislike and no more, or as payment for insolence. The other is
afraid of a speaking out under duress that will light the powder
of his own ruin. Whatever it is, you had best go, though not
out of that door. This is by no means an execution. We three
here seek only to defend ourselves against a wild man. For you
are wild to leave, are you not?

Skeres took out a dagger and slid it across the table so that
it lay under Kit’s hand. Kit hesitated and then grasped it. He
was permitted to rise.

- Go on, strike, you passionate shepherd.

Kit struck at Frizer’s head but grazed his brow. Frizer
spoke foully. He reached over for Kit’s striking hand but the
reach was too far. It was Poley that seized the right hand while
Frizer seized the left. Poley wrested out the weapon and threw
it to Skeres. Skeres, on his feet, came round. He said:

- I will hold. Thou, dear Ingram, shalt have the privilege of the strike. You have been broody long and may now lay the
egg. The eye will serve, the right one.

He was round to take Kit’s left arm from Frizer. Frizer and
Poley wheeled Kit so that he faced the light from the garden.
Frizer stood before him with the dagger.

- It is, Skeres said, a target permitted in fencing, though
the sword’s length doth not always allow the accurate thrust.
Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer.

- There is nothing in truth, Poley said. The blowing out
of a candle. They tell me he was a good poet.

Kit’s mind rose above all, observing, noting. The fear belonged
all to his body. The dagger-point was too close to his eye for his
eye to see it. Frizer spoke very foully:

- Filthy sodomite. Filthy buggering seducer of men and
boys. Nasty Godless sneering fleering bastard. Aye, I will lay
the egg.

So he thrust. The eye’s smoothness deflected the blade to
what lay above under the bone. Kit felt at first nothing. Then
dissolution, the swooning of the brain, great agony. He heard
the scream in his throat and saw with his left eye Poley, recoiling
from him, making the signum crucis. Dying, he knew the scream
would not die with him, not yet. It lived for a time its own life.
He even knew, marvelling, looking down on it, that his body
had fallen, thudding. Then he knew nothing more.

So I suppose it happened, but I suppose only. The finding
of the coroner, endited in good black lasting ink, was that on
Wednesday the thirtieth of May in the year of our Lord 1593
Messrs Marlowe, Poley, Frizer, Skeres (now come his words)
about the tenth hour before noon met together in a room in the
house of a certain Eleanor Bull, widow, and there passed the
time together and then dined and after dinner were in quiet sort
together there and walked in the garden until the sixth hour after
noon and then together and in company supped; and after supper Ingram Frizer and Christopher Marlowe uttered one to the other
divers malicious words for the reason that they could not agree
about the payment of the sum of pence, that is le recknynge, there.
Christopher Marlowe then lying upon a bed in the room where
they supped and moved with anger against Ingram Frizer and
Ingram, sitting with his back towards the bed where Christopher
Marlowe was lying and with the front part of his body towards
the table and with Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley sitting on
either side of him so that he could in no wise take flight, it so
befell that Christopher Marlowe on a sudden and of his malice
against Ingram maliciously drew the dagger of the said Ingram,
which was at his back, and with the same dagger gave him two
wounds on his head; whereupon Ingram, in fear of being slain
and sitting between Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley so that
he could not in any wise get away, in his own defence and for
the saving of his life then and there struggled with Christopher
Marlowe to get away from his dagger, in which affray Ingram
could not get away from Marlowe; and it so befell that in that
affray Ingram in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid
to the value of 12d, gave Christopher a mortal wound over his
right eye of which wound Christopher Marlowe then and there
instantly died.

And so the jurors say upon their oath that the said Ingram
Frizer killed and slew Christopher Marlowe aforesaid on the
thirtieth day of May in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth at Deptford Strand within the verge
in the room aforesaid, in the manner and form aforesaid, in the
defence and saving of his own life. In witness of which thing the
Coroner as well as the Jurors have interchangeably set their seals.

Le recknynge? What Frenchified madness is this? It is a lie of
language, unpurposed maybe, that is a badge or brooch of the
lie of the whole. Even the covering of the body with its ravaged
eyesocket, that the delicate stomachs of the jurors might not
be turned, this too was a kind of lie. And there is the lie of
anonymity, since, as the plague growled still, that body was,
straight after the lying verdict, interred in a grave unmarked
in the churchyard of St Nicholas in Deptford.

I have lived long. I have seen both the Earl of Essex and
Sir Walter Raleigh, in that order, go to the block on Tower
Hill: treason, like loyalty, is a wide word; at length the two
concepts become one. I saw Thomas Walsingham knighted and
married to a wife who grew much in favour with the Queen of
the Scotch slobberer that was less of a man than the irritable
harridan he replaced. I even, as a player with the King’s Men
at Valladolid, saw the sealing of perpetual peace between Spain
and the new Britain that contained England as one of its provinces. Most names in this brief chronicle faded from sight, so
we may envisage their owners dying in peaceful beds perfumed
with lavender. My own name you will find, if you care to look,
in the folio of Black Will’s plays, put out by his friends Fleming
and Condell in 1623. In the comedy of Much Ado About Nothing,
by some inadvertency, I enter with Leonato and others under my
own identity and not, as it should be, the guise of Balthasar to
sing to ladies that they sigh no more. So a useless truth obtrudes
on to a most ravishing lie. I would say finally that, as the earth
turns and the truth of summer and the lie of winter interchange
(interchangeably set their seals), so the bulky ball of history
revolves, and what a man dies for may become the thing that
dies for him. The England that killed Kit Marlowe or Marley
or Merlin will define itself in one of its facets by what he wrote
before he died swearing. And there, you see, we have another
lie. Let me lie down and, fair or foul reader, say farewell.

Not quite. Your true author speaks now, I that die these
deaths, that feed this flame. I put off the illmade disguise
and, four hundred years after that death at Deptford, mourn as
if it all happened yesterday. The disguise is i11-made not out of
incompetence but of necessity, since the earnestness of the past
becomes the joke of the present, a once living language is turned
into the stiff archaism of puppets. Only the continuity of a name
rides above a grumbling compromise. But, as the dagger pierces
the optic nerve, blinding light is seen not to be the monopoly of
the sun. That dagger continues to pierce, and it will never be
blunted.

N 1940, months before the Battle of Britain began,
the Luftwaffe trundled over Moss Side, Manchester,
on its way to the attempted destruction of Trafford
Park. In Moss Side, in the small hours, I sat, my induction
into the British Army deferred, typing my university thesis on
Christopher Marlowe. The visions of hell in Dr Faustus seemed
not too irrelevant. “I’ll burn my books - ah, Mephistophilis.”
The Luftwaffe was to burn my books and even my thesis.
Mephistophilis, as Thomas Mann was to show in his own
Doktor Faustus, was no mere playhouse bogeyman.

I determined some day to write a novel on Marlowe. The
year 1964, which was his natal quatercentenary, was also that
of William Shakespeare, and the lesser had to yield to the
greater. In that year I published the novel Nothing Like the Sun,
a fantastic speculation on Shakespeare’s love-life. Now, with the
commemoration of Marlowe’s murder in 1593, I am able to pay
such homage as is possible to an ageing writer.

I make a certain claim here to secondary scholarship. All
the historical facts are verifiable. One of the known Elizabethan
thugs was named George Orwell, which is embarrassing, but
truth must not yield too much to discretion or delicacy: after
all, that expungeable bravo had a better claim to the name
than Eric Blair. I acknowledge the help I have received from
the major biographies by John Bakeless and F.S. Boas as well
as the extremely useful “informal” life by H.R. Williamson.
The most recent study of Marlowe as a spy is The Reckoning
by Charles Nicholl. The scholarly delving will go on, and other
novels will be written, but the true truth - the verita verissima
of the Neapolitans - can never be known. The virtue of a historical novel is its vice - the flatfooted affirmation of
possibility as fact. As for the man Marlowe, he smiles, somewhat
ironically, and is still, not exactly out-topping knowledge but
continuing to disturb and, sometimes, exalt. Ben Jonson knew
what he was talking about when he referred to the mighty line.
Shakespeare may have outshone him but he did not contain or
supersede him. That inimitable voice sings on.

A.B.