by Glenn Cooper
Marlowe had taken to London like a witch to a cauldron. By night he frequented the riotous Nag’s Head in Cheapside, the dark brothels of Norton Folgate where he could try to hide the truth of his anatomy under his drawn-up breeches, and the feverish salons of Whitehall where – among Cecil, Walsingham and his kind – he had no need to hide. And by day, when his head had cleared from the previous night’s excesses, he sat in his rooms and put quill to parchment until his hand ached.
He found his theatrical home among the Admiral’s Men, a troupe of players under the patronage of Charles Howard, Elizabeth’s Lord Admiral. The Admiral had lured the leading actor in England, Edward Alleyn, to his company and when Alleyn, an imposing man with a baritone voice like a fine brass horn, first read Tamburlaine the Great it was the beginning of an intense artistic partnership. Alleyn could scarcely believe that a masterpiece like Tamburlaine was penned by a 22-year-old. Nor could the audiences, and the play about a simple shepherd who rose to be the murderously blaspheming ruler of Persia became the talk of London and a commercial sensation.
The Theatre was London’s first purpose-built playhouse and Marlowe still felt a shiver of excitement every time he entered. It was a great timbered polygon, built partly by Burbage’s own hand, he a master carpenter by trade. There were three galleries surrounding a cobblestoned yard fronting a raised stage. For a penny a few hundred could stand on the stones pressed hard against one another. For another penny, a few hundred more could ascend the galleries and for yet another penny they could rent a stool. A half a dozen Lord’s Rooms were fashioned into the galleries, private cozies for the wealthy.
Outside the Theatre Marlowe had to fight his way, unrecognized, through an unruly smelly crush of patrons, prostitutes, procurers and pickpockets. He arrived at the turnstile whisking at his doublet with the back of his hand in case something nasty had stuck to it.
‘Kit! Over here!’ Thomas Kyd was waving at him from the other side.
‘Tom!’
The gatekeepers let him pass and Tom closed the distance with a few loping steps. He was much taller, as fair as Marlowe was dark. ‘I thought you’d be late for your own opening.’
Marlowe beamed. ‘They hardly need me any longer. The words, after all, have long been writ.’
Kyd clapped him on the shoulders. ‘Such is our lot in life, my friend. But without our small contribution, the actors would have naught to do but fart and stammer.’
Marlowe had met Kyd shortly after leaving Cambridge. Kyd was a fixture of the Mermaid, one of the young lions of the theatre. His The Spanish Tragedy had been one of the most successful productions in recent memory. He was six years older than Marlowe, like him of rather humble origins, and was further disadvantaged by having never attended university. He had triumphed solely on the basis of his creative talent and a winning personality. Marlowe took to him instantly and vice versa but the younger man resisted for the longest time his entreaties to become his paramour.
Finally, after one particularly ale-filled night, they found themselves in the same bed. Marlowe pulled away from Kyd’s ardent kisses and said hoarsely, ‘I have a certain feature.’
‘Really? How intriguing. Is it very large, very small or very crooked?’ Kyd asked, propping himself on one elbow.
‘Do you swear never to tell anyone?’
‘I do so swear,’ Kyd replied melodramatically.
Marlowe got off the bed, stood, turned his back and lowered his breeches.
Kyd screamed in delight. ‘I always knew you were a devil! How marvelous! May I touch it?’
‘You may,’ Marlowe said. ‘It can take rough treatment.’
Kyd stroked the tail in fascination. ‘Does this peculiarity run within the bloodlines of your family?’
‘No,’ Marlowe lied. ‘I am the only one. Perhaps the only one in the world.’
‘This will be our special secret, then,’ Kyd said. ‘Come back into my bed as quick as you can.’
The two men pushed their way through the crush to the stage. In the wings Edward Alleyn, England’s leading actor, in the full academic robes and hat of Doctor Faustus, was warming up his vocal chords with a harmonic exercise.
‘Kit!’ he exclaimed. ‘And Tom! How’s the house looking?’
‘Oversold, judging by the crowds,’ Kyd said. ‘You’re looking the part.’
‘I look it well enough but will I remember it? I’ve done three new plays in the past week.’
‘Do not, good sir, forget my lines,’ Marlowe scolded. ‘Remember, the other plays were mere meat pies. This one is a top cut of beefsteak.’
‘I shall do my very best, of that you may be assured.’
James Burbage sidled over and escorted Marlowe and Kyd up a narrow staircase to one of the Lord’s Rooms where they surveyed the crowd.
‘Look at them all!’ Burbage exclaimed. ‘I hear there’s a mob at the gates, all clamoring for tickets. I’ll have to dispatch armed horsemen to keep order! Word of mouth is a powerful ally, is it not?’
‘Well, the play has it all!’ Kyd said. ‘Kit’s notions – summoning Mephistophilis with magic, selling one’s soul to the Devil in exchange for the secrets of the universe – these are heady themes.’
There was a flask of wine on the table. Burbage poured out three glasses. ‘Here’s to heady themes and frothy success, gentlemen.’
The stage manager called for quiet and announced the players to the audience. At the mention of Edward Alleyn there were rousing cheers. The Chorus marched onto the stage and the play began.
When the Chorus set the scene and exited, Alleyn, as Doctor Faustus, entered and at the mere sight of the great man the house erupted in cheers. He managed to stay in character as the robed Faustus while pausing smugly to let the audience exercise their lungs. Soon he was standing in an elaborately drawn magic circle of astrological signs, done precisely to Marlowe’s specifications. His voice boomed:
Now that the gloomy shadow of the Earth,
Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look,
Leaps from th’ antarctic world unto the sky,
And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,
Faustus, begin thine incantations,
And try if devils will obey thy hest,
Seeing thou hast pray’d and sacrific’d to them.
Within this circle is Jehovah’s name,
Forward and backward anagrammatiz’d,
Th’ abbreviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and erring stars,
By which the spirits are enforc’d to rise:
Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,
And try the uttermost magic can perform.
The audience gasped collectively as Mephistophilis appeared in a flash of phosphorus, green-suited, complete with horns and wings.
Kyd whispered into Marlowe’s ear. ‘Marvelous!’
And Marlowe smiled back at him, well satisfied.
The stagecraft intensified as Faustus, having made a pact with Lucifer to trade his soul for twenty-four years on Earth with Mephistophilis as his personal messenger, embarked on his journey of worldly exploration.
Alleyn’s soaring elocution, combined with fireworks and flames, enthralled the audience. When it was time for Lucifer to claim his bounty a terrible dragon of a creature rose out of the smoke, breathing fire. Overhead, shaggy-haired devils swung across the stage on wires with sparklers in their mouths. Drummers made thunder and stagehands made lightning.
And near the end, before being carried off to Hell, Faustus was granted his final wish – to see with his own eyes the fair Helen of Troy. Alleyn, his voice soaring, moved the house to tears.
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium!
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
By the time the applause had faded and the audience had largely dispersed, evening had come and with it a coolin
g mist. In an alleyway behind the Theatre, Kyd and Marlowe shared a moment.
‘Why must you go?’ Kyd pouted. ‘Come with me to the Mermaid. You’re triumphant, Kit. Celebrate among friends.’
‘I’ve men I must see,’ Marlowe said. ‘I’ll be there later. Wait for me, will you?’
‘I will, if you’ll come closer.’ Kyd kissed him, slid a hand down the back of his breeches and sensually stroked his tail.
In the shadows a lone man watched them for a while, then crept off silently into the haze.
*
At the Palace of Whitehall, within his privy chamber, Francis Walsingham poured Marlowe and Robert Cecil glasses of good French brandy. Robert Poley was there too, sitting by the fire, nursing a tankard, gloomy and taciturn.
There was a knock on the door and Walsingham’s private secretary announced, ‘He is here.’
Marlowe wasn’t expecting another party. With curiosity he watched as a small man, no taller than an adolescent boy, entered. He wore an academician’s black robe that scraped the floor. His face was wizened with age and he possessed the most remarkable beard that Marlowe had ever seen, white as a snow goose, bushy enough to hide a bird’s nest and as long as his head. The man was clutching a polished, inlaid box the size of a Bible.
Walsingham went to him, obsequiously kissed his bony hand and asked, ‘Is that it?’
The man handed him the box and said, ‘It is.’
Walsingham placed it carefully on his desk, pointed toward Marlowe and said, ‘This is the man I wanted you to meet. Christopher Marlowe, I give you Doctor John Dee.’
The bearded man seemed to glide to him. ‘The young playwright and poet. I am most pleased to know you, sir.’
Marlowe felt the excitement of the occasion wash over him. The great Lemures astrologer! The Queen’s astrologer! ‘No, sir,’ he said, bowing deeply. ‘It is I who am humbled and immeasurably favored to meet you.’
Walsingham filled a glass for Dee while Poley remained mutely by the fire, uninvited into the circle.
‘So, your new play opened this afternoon, I hear,’ Dee said.
‘Indeed it did,’ Marlowe said.
‘And how was it received?’ Walsingham asked.
‘The audience seemed to take to it,’ Marlowe said modestly.
‘Perhaps we should assume disguises and see it for ourselves,’ Cecil said to his host.
‘I do not frequent plays unless the Queen insists,’ Walsingham said. ‘Perhaps, Master Marlowe, you’d be so good as to inform Doctor Dee how this new production serves our larger purposes.’
Marlowe nodded. ‘Certainly: nothing is more important than our mission and my small play is merely meant to sow sweet seeds of confusion and hatred.’
‘How so?’ Dee asked.
‘Well, for one, it is about good and evil and I am happy to report that evil, in the form of Lucifer, soundly trounces good. Damnation well and truly trumps salvation, which will, no doubt, foment a sense of dismay and bewilderment among the masses.’
‘Good,’ Dee said. ‘Very good.’
‘And I have aimed to cloud their minds with respect to the central precept of Protestant doctrine – absolute predestination. I need not remind you that, according to Calvin, God alone elects which men will be saved and which will be damned. Man has no control of his ultimate faith. The Papists, of course, see this as complete heresy and if any of their numbers see the play they will be sorely troubled. Protestants in the audience will see the hideous fate of my hero Faustus, who rejects God but later is utterly unable to repent, as a worthy tribute to Calvinism. But some, I suspect, will secretly despair at its sharp message and wallow in their certain torment over the fact that repentance is pointless and their fates are sealed. If that is the case, they will think, then why not continue to sin?’
‘Why indeed not?’ Cecil piped up.
‘While we despise the Catholics with all our might, I am happy enough to poke sticks at Protestants too. Faustus says this in a speech,’ Marlowe said, ‘The reward of sin is death. That’s hard. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so consequently die. Aye, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera. What will be, shall be.’
Walsingham said approvingly, ‘I can see how this will torture their fragile minds.’
‘And, as an homage to our traditions,’ Marlowe said, ‘Faustus summons the Devil from within a magic circle containing the star signs of the great Balbilus.’
Dee pounded the arm of his chair. ‘This! This pleases me greatly! Balbilus is my hero. Lost as he is to the memory of ordinary men, he is locked forever in our hearts.’ Dee let Walsingham refill his glass and said, ‘Have you told Marlowe what we are asking of him?’
‘I was waiting for you to put it to him,’ Cecil answered.
‘I will,’ Dee said. ‘Marlowe, have you ever heard of the Irish saint Malachy?’
‘I have not,’ Marlowe replied.
‘More’s the pity,’ Dee said. ‘He was the twelfth-century bishop of Armagh – well-traveled on the Continent, a confidant of Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent II. And he was a secret Lemures, a great one, an astrologer who ably carried the torch of his art. While visiting Pope Innocent in Rome, he witnessed, it is said, a particularly propitious eclipse of the moon and from his observation an important prophecy concerning the papacy emerged. He foresaw a finite number of future popes, numbering 112 – no more, no less. And he further foresaw an identifying feature of each of the popes. So, for the last pope, Sixtus V, Malachy foresaw and did write of him, ‘the axle in the midst of a sign’. Sixtus had a coat of arms which bore an axle in the middle of a lion. For the present pope, Urbanus VII, Malachy wrote, ‘from the dew of the sky’. Urbanus was Archbishop of Rossano in Calabria, where sap called ‘the dew of heaven’ is gathered from trees. You see?’
Marlowe nodded in fascination. ‘And when the number 112 is reached?’ he asked.
‘The prophecy is apocalyptic,’ Dee said evenly. ‘The Church will be no more, and I venture to say that a new order will ensue. Out of the chaos the Lemures will triumph.’
Marlowe narrowed his eyes. ‘What will happen?’
‘Alas, we shall not be there to see for ourselves. Have you read my Monas Hieroglyphica?’
‘I have labored at it. At college. It is a most challenging text,’ Marlowe admitted.
‘Well, our friend Walsingham, the code-master, will well appreciate it when I tell you that the work has one meaning, challenging as it may seem for the ordinary reader, but another altogether hidden message for our brethren. Do you recall my illustration of the Monad?’
‘I do, sir.’
‘My own prophecy is that the world will end at a time when both the moon and sun are in the House of Aries. Aries is a fire sign. The world will surely be consumed by fire. The Monad carries this meaning. Would that it might become our symbol!’
‘It can,’ Cecil said, raising his glass. ‘It shall.’
‘I cannot say whether my vision of the apocalypse will coincide with the prophecy of Malachy. No one can. But the possibility cannot be denied.’
‘Why is it that I have never seen Malachy’s prophecy?’ Marlowe asked.
‘This is the reason I am here,’ Dee said. ‘You will have a vital part to play in setting the next stage of our plan in motion. I cannot stress too strongly the importance of our collaboration in the achievement of the ultimate destiny of the Lemures. Malachy’s text has been passed from astrologer to astrologer and has stayed among us as a sacred document. We believe the time has come to make it more widely known.’
‘Indeed,’ Cecil muttered.
‘These are difficult times,’ Dee said. ‘In England we are well served by the Protestant zeal of the Queen. Here we have done well and we are safely established. But on the Continent things are not so favorable. The Pope is inflamed by the death of Queen Mary. He and his closest Cardinals are convin
ced there was a Lemures hand in the affair.’
Walsingham laughed. ‘They are despicable but they are not stupid.’
‘Quite so,’ Dee said. ‘They have captured a number of our agents in Italy, Spain and France and have tortured them most grievously. I am told that they have kept their tails as trophies to gloat over. We have become dispirited and this will not stand. Our brethren need inspiration and encouragement to maintain their fighting spirit. According to the prophecy, there are only thirty-eight popes left. While this may span some considerable time – indeed, centuries – it would be well if Malachy became a rallying flag for all Lemures to carry in their hearts. I have always said that he who foresees the future will control the future. The Lemures can and should prosper greatly in the period to come and I fervently believe that when the last grain of sand trickles through the hourglass of history and the last pope has come and gone, the world and all its riches will be within our hands.’
‘And there is more,’ Cecil said. ‘Tell him of our plot concerning the next Pope.’
Dee nodded enthusiastically. ‘We would like to realize something we have never achieved before: a Lemures pope. Imagine our power if we commanded the Papacy and, through out own influence at the English court, simultaneously controlled the Protestant Queen? With the help of Malachy we would like to assist our man, Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli, to attain the prize. Malachy identifies the next pope as ‘ex antiquitate urbis’ – from the antiquity of the city. Simoncelli fits the role admirably as he is presently Cardinal of Orvieto, which, in Italian, means “old city”.’
‘Tell me what I can do,’ Marlowe said, feeding off the fiery excitement in the old man’s eyes.
‘Walsingham, give him the box.’
Marlowe took the box in his hands and unlatched it. Inside was a rolled parchment secured with ribbons.
‘It is a copy of the prophecy in Malachy’s own hand,’ Dee said. ‘Keep it close to your person. Take it to Rome. We have a trusted friend there, an astronomer named Mascherino. Walsingham will provide you with good reason to be in Italy but when you are there you will, with Mascherino’s assistance, deposit the manuscript within the Pope’s Library and shortly thereafter Mascherino will, mirabile dictu, find it and make it known. Once it is read and appreciated, the Cardinals will see Malachy’s undeniable accuracy over the centuries and this will serve to make the case why they must elect Simoncelli as the next pope.’
