The Late Mr Shakespeare (27 page)

I can never hear what they say but they haunt my mind’s eye.

Look, there, as in a dumb-show, there are four of them. Four men come to a reckoning in a little room. Over and over, they act out for your delight the terrible scene. You always want it to be different, but each time the end is the same. The dagger thrust in the eye, the skull hacked open. Blood on the walls and the ceiling, the poet lying dead in a pool of his own hot blood on the floor.

From the start, from the moment when they meet together, you can see that two of these four men are ruffians, and one is not. It is none of these three, however, that you can’t look away from. The fourth man, the victim, he is the natural magnet for your gaze. It is not just his sombre velvet doublet, his gold lace. It is not even that glittering ring hanging from his left ear, nor the gold buttons that seem far beyond his station. Neither is it, exactly, his sensual face, nor his dangerous smile. This is Christopher Marlowe, who is
more than the sum of his parts. You can’t take your eyes off a man like this.

The day has been hot. The place is a tavern in Deptford, three miles out of London, on the bank of the Thames. It’s a low inn, and dirty, the house of a widow called Bull. There’s a garden at the back of it, unkempt, full of thrusting May blossom, that runs down to the throbbing vein of the sunlit river.

These men met here this morning. All day they have been drinking and talking, and walking in the garden. They dined, too, at noon. Marlowe and the two ruffians have laughed a good deal – for the most part, you might think, at nothing. The third man, the gentleman, he does not laugh. His name is Robert Poley. He’s a government agent. He sits still in his cloak, hands folded, his face in the shadows, while the others fool about. You will have noticed that he drinks much less than they do. You may also have noticed that the ruffians provide Mr Marlowe with two drinks for every one of their own.

Now it is six o’clock, and the cool of the May evening has begun, and bats flap to the eaves, and all four men have come back into the tavern. Their glasses refilled, they retire to a little private room.

What causes their quarrel? We shall never know. Something that eyes cannot see, perhaps. Three of these men are liars, and the truth-teller soon lies dead.

Christopher Marlowe, poet and playwright, is stabbed through the right eye, quickly, by Ingram Frizer, in this small room in Deptford, after what seems to be a sudden quarrel over the bill or ‘reckoning’ presented for their food and drink. At the inquest, Frizer will claim Marlowe first attacked
him, for no reason that he could guess, and unprovoked. He pleads he only killed the poet in self-defence. His fellow ruffian, one Nicholas Skeres, supports this story. Frizer will be acquitted by royal pardon.

What part Poley played I can never determine. I know only that there were those in high places who wanted Marlowe dead, and if he really died by chance as the result of a blow struck in a tavern brawl over who should pay the bill then it was certainly convenient for the Privy Council, before whom he was due to appear to answer charges of atheism and blasphemy.

As Marlowe wrote himself:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
. Only it was not so much cut, my dears, as hacked to bits.

The son of a cobbler, he was just the two months older than William Shakespeare. His was a restless spirit, of an over-reaching ambition. Ben Jonson praised him for his ‘mighty line’. You can hear this at its mightiest in
Tamburlaine
, the play of his which had the most success. The Lord Admiral’s company first performed it in that same summer that Mr Shakespeare came to London, and I know that the newcomer stood three times among the groundlings to be intoxicated by its thundrous verbal music – he told me so himself. Marlowe fired both Will’s fancy and his ambition. He said that hearing Marlowe opened his ears. He said that Tamburlaine was like Herod of the Coventry play made intelligent. He said that Marlowe, single-handed, had dragged the verse of the play-makers out of antiquity, and matched it to the sound of the speaking human voice, and made it modern and alive along every line.

He got to know the man, too, and I believe they
were friends, despite deep differences of temper and of temperament. I believe that Marlowe may have helped Mr Shakespeare in the charting of the three
King Henry VI
plays, and that you can see some influence of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s
Richard III
.

That, though, is about the extent of it. There are those who suggest that if Marlowe had not been snuffed out in the blaze of his youth, then he would have gone on to be Shakespeare’s equal. I cannot agree. Marlowe is all fine lines that stop the play – which may be poetry, but it is not drama. Also, Marlowe’s scenes are brilliant, but they do not connect or cohere.

Michael Drayton once wrote of him:
His raptures were / All air and fire
. Which is true. But unlike Mr S he had not eaten of the earth and found it sweet. Nor had he any gift for comedy, in which Shakespeare is rich. Marlowe would have been incapable of creating a Falstaff. Look at the clown scenes in his
Faustus
; there’s not a real laugh to be had. Some say Marlowe didn’t write them, I know, that they were extemporised by the actors in the first place. If so, that’s because he dared not even try in such a vein.

I say that Shakespeare and Marlowe were very different as men, and so they were. The epithet most often applied to Mr Shakespeare by his friends was that he was ‘gentle’. No one would ever have dreamt of describing Marlowe thus. He was headlong, he was violent, he was like a little Lucifer. ‘Intemperate and of a cruel heart,’ said his friend and fellow lodger Thomas Kyd, but then poor Kyd was on the rack when he said that, as when he blurted out several of those ‘monstrous opinions’ which made Marlowe’s name so hated
by those in authority. There were supposed to be three sheets of paper which the cobbler’s son had written denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Saviour – though if anyone ever read them, then I never met him. Then there was that report that he called John the disciple ‘Christ’s Alexis’, meaning that Jesus had loved the man unnaturally just because he said of him that John was the disciple he loved best. In this, of course, Marlowe was simply attributing to Jesus his own predilections, as revealed on that other notorious occasion when he declared that ‘all that love not tobacco and boys are fools’. His principal heresies, assembled, seem to be these:

That all Protestants are hypocritical asses;

That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores, and that Christ had known them carnally;

That the archangel Gabriel, by his salutation to the Virgin Mary, was bawd to the Holy Ghost;

That all the Apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth, and that he could have written the Gospels better himself.

These are bold sayings. They are also rather silly. I think that Marlowe, had he lived, would have outgrown such schoolboy blasphemy. I think also that had Marlowe learnt to believe it might have provided him with some release from the bondage of his intellectual pride. However, someone, in some high place – (and not God, I think) – decreed Marlowe should not have the chance to grow or to learn at all. Hence that dagger-thrust which penetrated his skull, making a wound of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch, just above the right eye. He was twenty-nine years old when they cut him down.

They say, some say, that Marlowe died blaspheming. I
never heard him. When I watch that dumb show in the little theatre of my head I see nothing that makes me think that he dies blaspheming. Consider, it can only have been his murderers who ever claimed he did any such thing, and why should we believe them?

To be professed an atheist while bearing the name of Christopher must be an extraordinary burden.

Mr Shakespeare always spoke of Christopher Marlowe with tender affection. True, he was never like Ben Jonson, who put down his contemporaries. But Marlowe he went out of his way to praise. In his play of
As You Like It
he also pays his murdered friend the compliment of several backward glances, as when he had me (as Rosalind) mention how Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet ‘did what he could to die before’. (That was Marlowe to the life, as I have heard, a fire-eater who no one could ever have mistaken for a cud-chewer.) In the same play, Phoebe the shepherdess quotes directly from Marlowe’s poem
Hero and Leander
when she invokes the dead poet on Mr Shakespeare’s behalf:

And then Touchstone, to cap it all, recalls Marlowe’s death by Frizer’s dagger over the ‘reckoning’ in that Deptford tavern, when he says to Audrey: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood … it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.’ That last allusion is the one that always brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it. It is the more effective for being double: Mr Shakespeare means
us to remember not only Marlowe’s death, but one of his mightiest lines, from
The Jew of Malta
, where he speaks of ‘Infinite riches in a little room’.

I have often wished I had met Mr Christopher Marlowe. He was surely the best of those spirits they called the Bohemians, the play-makers who flourished between 1580 and 1590, the group which included George Peele and Thomas Nashe, and even (to be charitable) Robert Greene. Their plays were a great jumble of good and bad, a reflection in this of their own irregular lives. But at least they began that process which Shakespeare perfected. In their writing you see them start to take the ordinary common words and set them down in such a way that the verse sparkles and laughs at you, or then is sad and makes you want to cry. Before William Shakespeare, none of them did it better than Christopher Marlowe.

I wish I could hear what he says as he walks in the garden. I wish I could hear what he says when it comes to that reckoning.

These were William Shakespeare’s earliest plays, all written and performed between 1587 and that terrible year of ’93 when Marlowe was murdered and the plague caused the shutting of the playhouses:

It will be seen that his rate of production ran from the start at about two plays a year – which is something I know he counted professional, unlike on the one side the torrent of thin stuff that was pouring from such as the amiable Thomas Heywood, and on the other side the costiveness of Mr Ben Jonson who seemed able only to squeeze out his ‘humours’ at long intervals and after much grunting and straining.

However, in these first years of Mr Shakespeare’s industry there was more. Pardon me, gentles, I pun unpardonably. I mean that to this period we should also ascribe his original workings on that Hamlet play which haunted him a good half of his working life, growing longer and longer in the process, until some of our Company considered it unplayable; and also that other white elephant, the play they called
More
.

Before getting into that, though, a word about
WHITE
ELEPHANTS
. Here is an image Mr Shakespeare would not have known, but which I find useful. I have it from a translation of
Pinto’s Travels
published three years ago. It seems that the King of Siam makes a present of a white elephant to such of his courtiers as he wishes to ruin on account of their obnoxiousness. Your white elephant, you see, being a huge and a delicate creature, costs so much to keep that none but a king can afford it. Thus, by extension, a man might beggar himself by wasting all his fortune on some pet article. For example, a person moving is determined to keep a rich and expensive carpet, so hires too grand a house just to fit the carpet. There are, as I say, such
WHITE ELEPHANTS
to be found among the works of William Shakespeare.

The
More
play (since this morning I feel like mixing my metaphors to spice my gruel) could also be said to have been a
WHITE ELEPHANT
which turned into a
POISONED CHALICE
. Several playwrights had a hand in it. It was a waste of all their time.

The idea was Anthony Munday’s. He sketched out the plot. Henry Chettle then took over, taking out some of the religious polemic which had disfigured Munday’s draft. The play was to be called
More
(more or less), and it was to chronicle the main events in the life of Sir Thomas More,
King Henry VIII’s chancellor, from his rise to favour, through his friendship with Erasmus and opposition to the King, to his fall and his death on the scaffold.

Frankly, I could have told them that this would not do. An historical drama in praise of her father’s martyred arch-enemy was hardly likely to give much pleasure to Queen Elizabeth. As it turned out, the play was refused a licence to be performed. Most of it disappeared into the strongbox of Sir Edmund Tilney, censor and Master of the Revels, and was never seen again.

Here, in my own 64th little strongbox, I have William Shakespeare’s contribution to this
More
, the only example I know to survive of his work as a cobbler and patcher of other men’s plays. I am quite sure that the original idea could not have been his – religious and political controversy being a hurly (patience, madam!) which he always went out of his way to avoid. But at some point he was called in by old Mr Burbage to write the most difficult scene, in which More, as sheriff of London, uses his eloquence to quell the riot of the apprentices who wish to drive all foreigners out of the city.

The passage is passionate Shakespeare, a paean in praise of the necessity of respect for order and degree. It was a concept he worked out most completely in the great speech of Ulysses in
Troilus and Cressida
.
*
The scene as a whole has much in common with another he wrote later – that scene where Menenius Agrippa calms the plebs in Rome in
Coriolanus
. As there, you can see him shifting sympathy from the rioters to the man who masters them by dint of just and reasoned argument. Not only the style but some of the words of
Coriolanus
are prefigured. Without law, says More,
‘men, like ravenous fishes / Would feed on one another’. Coriolanus upholds the rule of the senate who ‘Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else / Would feed on one another’. The shouts of the rioters in
More
are identical with those later used in
Julius Caesar
, and Shakespeare begins More’s speech with what sounds to me like a clumsy throat-clearing rehearsal for Mark Antony’s
Friends, Romans, countrymen!
when he has the sheriff address the mob as
Friends, masters, fellow-citizens!

If you look closer at the vocabulary which Mr Shakespeare deploys in this lost scene of the suppressed play
More
then there is even (forgive me)
more
that rewards attention. Here are to be found such phrases as ‘in ruff of your opinion clothed’, and ‘stale custom’, and ‘unreverent knees’, as well as ‘self-right’ and ‘self-reason’ – all expressions dear to WS and which he alone employed. His use of the word
SHARK
as a verb (‘would shark on you’) is a peculiarity which I have encountered nowhere else save in his own
Hamlet
.

Another idiosyncratic thing of interest here is that in the
More
manuscript fragment the word
SILENCE
is spelt as
scilens
. The late Mr Shakespeare always spelt that word that way. It is the old-fashioned way. (You will find it thus in Caxton.) Usually the printer corrected these ancient spellings when it came to setting the plays in type, but not invariably. In the Quarto of
2 King Henry IV,
for example, you will find Justice Silence called Scilens not once or twice but eight times!

Is this too bibliotic? I apologise. But the world is a book, sir.

I am citing all this, besides, because otherwise such information might be lost for ever, along with the whole play of
More
. The other plays, early and late, you can read for
yourself in the Folio. Pickleherring seeks always to give you what you cannot get from any other source.

The lines being the draft of Mr Shakespeare’s contribution as it stood before the whole went to the copyist, they tell us even more about his methods. It is plain, for example, that he was a careless contributor to the work in hand – he shows no respect for the play as a whole, distributing his speeches among the rioters with such titles as
Other
, instead of the name of a character. In one passage, where his usual fluency dries up, he leaves two and a half lines so tangled and confused that the book-keeper (Mr Burbage?) has struck them out and substituted a half-line of his own.

I mean that passage where Shakespeare first writes:

Then (perhaps observing that he has used the word
WAR
in two successive lines) he strikes out the second ‘war’ and substitutes the word
HURLY
, a favourite synonym of his to cover all forms of contention, which he uses in at least three other plays.
*
The lines now read:

That seems perfectly put to your author, but still it did not satisfy Mr Shakespeare, because he then inserts after the word
RIOT
, the phrase ‘In, in to your obedience’, perhaps wanting More to be more vigorous and direct. However, it is obvious that this pleases him no better, for he did not relate it to what followed, but instead gives up, leaving the passage a jumble as it stands. It is this that Mr Burbage, unable to solve the difficulty, has drawn his pen through, for there in quite another hand we see the tame and unShakespearean:

Tell me but this.

Now because these manuscript pages reveal much of Mr Shakespeare’s method of composing, and the better to preserve them in context for a possible posterity, I intend to paste one of them into my book. Thus, if the two in the box are lost then this one may survive, and vice versa.

I will offer two general observations about them.

First, by their very carelessness (sometimes he even scribbles
Oth
and
O
to indicate successive speakers whose names he can’t be bothered with) they suggest that Shakespeare already at the time of their writing held such a high place among his fellows that they recognised his superior talent by indulging him. They may have been so grateful that he deigned to contribute to the
More
play that they did not even complain when he scrawled
Moo
as a cipher for Sir Thomas More.

Second, with the one exception examined above, there are few alterations. You can see where he sometimes struck out a word, or the start of a word, almost as soon as he had written it, following on at once with his second thought. All this is evidence of Mr Shakespeare’s quick hand and quicker brain, his fertility and his facility. You will see that sometimes
his hand stumbled, but less often his thought – as when he starts to write the word
NUMBER
with
mu
, and then writes
in
instead of
NO
. As to actual corrections, all of them involve the substitution of better words within the lines:
watery
is changed to
sorry, help
to
advantage, god
to
he, only
to
solely
.

All this evidence of speed and ease in composition bears out, of course, what Mr Heminges and Mr Condell said in their address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ in the Folio – that Mr Shakespeare’s mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with such easiness that ‘we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’ Pickleherring can confirm this. When my master’s mind was white-hot it was a wonder that the page did not catch fire beneath his hand, so fast his pen ran. He wrote the first two acts of
Macbeth
in a single day. (All the same, he went on writing
Hamlet
all his life.) Here, then, is the page from the
More
for you to see these things, dear reader, with your own eyes: