Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  “You have been working this miserable morning?”

  “Doing some service for the Book-keeper.”

  “Indeed. I have been working too.”

  “On another play?”

  “Since you mention it – though I do not much like to talk about my work while I am in medias res, if I may so express it to a learned man.”

  “You may,” I said, hating him very much at that moment. Which could be why I added, “This is after the success of your Whore?”

  “Well, I hope so, Nicholas, but I would not tempt fate by saying it. As you know, my play has not yet been staged and no man knows how it will be received.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Of what?”

  “That A Venetian Whore has never been mounted before.”

  “Oh ha, very good – ‘mounted’. I must remember to write down that piece of word-play.”

  I regretted giving him the opportunity for evasion. “I’m sure you will remember my joke easily enough, if only for its poverty of invention. But my question was about – what’sits-name – The Courtesan of Venice, and whether she has appeared before.”

  “She has not, but A Venetian Whore will be exposed to a wondering world at the end of this month,” he said, looking at me curiously and stressing the title.

  I struck my forehead lightly, as if in self-reproach at my own absence of mind.

  “Of course, A Venetian Whore. Not The Courtesan of Venice. Well, what’s a whore or a courtesan between friends or, come to that, a particle like ‘of’? What’s an ‘a’ or a ‘the’ among fellows?”

  “I might have called it that, The Whore of Venice, I mean,” said Richard, “but I wanted to distinguish my work from Master Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Not that I would dream of course – in any way – but who knows – one day—”

  “After all you are both from Warwickshire,” I said. “There must be some special virtue in the soil.”

  “It is rich ground, but how kind you are to say so, Nicholas.” He had recovered his balance now. “Are you sure you have not finished your drink yet so that I could show my appreciation for your words?”

  “Thank you but no. London still has to teach me how to drink deep. Tell me of your new play,” I said and was glad to see a blush creep back into his features. At last! There was something unnatural about an unblushing Milford.

  “I am reluctant to talk of what is only half-shaped.”

  “Then it does not spring from your brain fully formed?”

  “No. I have to do battle with my words, like a general with mutinous soldiers. Only when I have got them into line and order are they ready for the fray.”

  “I respect you, Richard, for owning to a struggle. Some in your profession would say that they wrote fast, without blotting a line.”

  He smiled slightly at this. Both of us recognised an allusion to WS.

  “In his case it is true enough, I expect.”

  “It must save on fair copies,” I said.

  I would willingly have abandoned the whole matter there and then. But the continuance of this conversation was like an itch that demands scratching. I could not stop. And besides I was still aggrieved at the way Richard Milford had tried to use me to forward ‘his’ play.

  “Yes,” said Milford thoughtfully. “Nicholas, what is it you wish to say? For sure there is something behind your kind words.”

  “My work for Allison this morning has been to catalogue the contents of the Book-keeper’s chest. To begin cataloguing, that is. There are hundreds and hundreds of works buried there.”

  “And millions of words in those works. That is not surprising.”

  The red was fixed firmly to his cheeks and he was looking at me with an alarming intensity. For the first time I noticed that one of Richard’s irises was heavily flecked with green while the other was pure blue.

  “I didn’t know where to start,” I said, “and to be honest with you I rather regretted volunteering for the task. But I plunged my hand to the bottom of the chest and began.”

  “Only fusty stuff down there, I expect.”

  “Mostly, but some of it looked serviceable enough at first glance. A few pieces there that might bear reviving.”

  “But there is so much that is new,” he said urgently. “Surely it is not fair to favour the past and exclude the new. Think of us playwrights that are young and tender, pushing through the dark soil of our forebears like so many shoots in spring.”

  “How poetical you are, Richard. You almost sound like Master Allison. A moment earlier you were likening yourself to a general marshalling his troops of words.”

  “Think of us young playwrights,” he repeated.

  He meant, of course, think of me.

  I made no reply but something in my look must have told him that further evasion was useless. His shoulders tensed.

  “I have tried to produce something new and fresh, God knows I have tried in the past,” he said, still fixing me with his parti-coloured gaze and now holding tight to my forearm with one hand. I observed that the knuckles of the other hand gripping his tankard were white. “I tried but it was poor thin stuff. I knew it even without showing it to anyone.”

  I still said nothing but detached my arm from his hold. There was something distasteful in his self-pity.

  “What harm is there in using a dead man’s words? Or an anonymous man’s? It’s the same thing. There was no name on the title-page. I didn’t think The Courtesan of Venice had ever been performed. It had a neglected air. I read it and considered that it deserved to see the sunlight.”

  “Metamorphosed into A Venetian Whore. You rifled through the Book-keeper’s chest, abstracted an old play, copied it off and passed it as your own work. And then you asked me to prefer it to Master Shakespeare.”

  “Be calm, Nicholas. Your conscience can be clear, for you refused to do what I should never have requested of you in the first place.”

  “It is your own conscience that you should be concerned with.”

  “There are worse things to have on it than a little plagiary.”

  “You were still taking a risk that the Courtesan – oh sorry, Whore – might be recognised,” I said. “She has been around for some time. Perhaps you are not the only one to have fiddled with her.”

  “You didn’t recognise it,” he said.

  “But one of the older members of the Chamberlain’s, one of the shareholders . . . ?”

  “I dropped one or two hints beforehand but no-one took them up. Besides . . .”

  “Besides?”

  “Where do you think Master Shakespeare got the idea for his Merchant of Venice from?”

  “Are you saying that he’d read this play as well?”

  “Well, it’s possible. After all, you yourself commented on one or two likenesses between – my – between that piece and his. Maybe that’s why he didn’t say anything. Maybe your precious Shakespeare is guilty of a little plagiary too.”

  “Absurd,” I said, but without complete conviction. Nevertheless I was angered by Milford’s aspersions. “Anyway there is a difference between borrowing a few figures and ideas, and taking over another man’s work wholesale. Look.”

  I dug out from beneath my shirt the few tattered sheets from the start of the Courtesan. Almost straightaway seeing what they were, he made a grab but I held them out of his reach.

  “Give them me. They are not yours. I left them behind.”

  I was amazed at his impudence.

  “Yes, you left them behind when you ransacked the trunk. Tell me, did you ask Allison for the keys – or just take them?”

  “Work it out for yourself, Nicholas, since you’ve proved yourself so clever this far.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But these few scraps of paper, they are the Book-keeper’s. Or they belong to the Chamberlain’s Company. Or even poor Master Anonymous, a greater author than you will ever be. For certain, they are not yours, Master Milford.”

  “What are y
ou going to do with them?”

  For a moment I savoured power. I knew that if I gave these paper fragments to Burbage or any of the seniors then Milford’s budding career as a playwright with the Chamberlain’s would be finished. It wasn’t so much the plagiary that mattered. No doubt it happened often enough, even if not in so blatant a form. Old clothes are the most comfortable. There is nothing new under the etc . . . If he’d only presented his Whore – sorry, Courtesan – honestly, as an old piece reworked, he’d probably have got away with it. But he’d played the cony-catcher with a whole Company – or with the section of the Company which counted – and for that he was unlikely to be forgiven.

  Richard’s face was bright red and his eyes stared hard as he asked the question. It was fortunate that the tavern was almost empty, and that none of our Globe fraternity had wandered in to join our hushed dialogue. While I pondered my reply, I had the leisure too to wonder at the change in this hitherto quiet and reflective man. I was almost glad that we weren’t alone in some isolated hole or corner for, in addition to to the fact that he was about my height, weight and age, he had the advantage of his desperation. If this is what it means to wield the writer’s pen then give me the player’s trumpery sword any day!

  “What do you mean to do?” he repeated.

  For answer, I tucked the incriminating papers inside my shirt once again. At that he broke.

  “Please, Nicholas, Master Revill, say nothing. My life is in your hands. And what is more than my life, my reputation.”

  “You’re being silly. You overstate the case,” I said after a moment. “No wonder you must borrow another’s words if that is the extent of your rhetoric.”

  Nevertheless, the pause and my words must have given him hope, for he went on, “You see, my Whore is about to be staged. No, very well [seeing the demurral in my eyes] not my Whore but anonymous’s Courtesan. She is about to be made an honest lady of. Surely that is an act of charity, of virtue.”

  “From Courtesan to Whore, that is a declension surely?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a blunter term, certainly.”

  “And for your next piece? Will that be honest and blunt too?”

  Never have I felt so severe. Never have I been so uncomfortable. The role of moralist is hard to play. Hard for me, at any rate. Although I can see that one might grow into it.

  “There is a strange thing, Nicholas. For you see that, when I said I had been struggling with my own words all morning, that is precisely what I have been doing. My own words. I promise you.”

  “Very well,” I said, rising from the bench. “I must return to my cataloguing.”

  “Be sure to destroy those sheets,” he said to my retreating back but I did not deign to answer him.

  I returned to the Book-keeper’s room, feeling that I’d acted justly in exposing to Richard Milford that I knew the secret of his ‘theft’, and yet unable to shake off the pulpit-taint, even the priggishness, of my words. By what right did I set myself up to judge a fellow of my own age and one who was in not altogether dissimilar circumstances? My bent was towards playing, it is true, whilst his was for words, but both of us were fired with ambition, both were hungry for recognition. Perhaps, if I’d been a word-wielder, rather than a stage-sword-shaker, and found my early efforts not yielding success, I too would have resorted to the same measures. Would have found an old, unnamed play and stamped it with my initials. To counterfeit coin is a capital crime but to arrogate another man’s words is, at worst, a venial offence. Particularly if the man is dead or unknown. Where was the harm? I had to confess that most of my anger with Richard had come from the fact that he’d fooled me, had wanted me to commend ‘his’ work to WS.

  I resolved to say and do nothing more. His secret was safe with me. Let the Whore be played before all, let him reap the small reward of a promising reputation. (For sure, he wouldn’t get much money by it.) Let him go on to produce honest work. I wouldn’t destroy the tell-tale title-page but I would not show it to anyone either unless directly asked about it, a thing which was not likely since nobody but he and I knew about it.

  Besides, I must confess that I was a little alarmed at the fierceness of the man. His eyes had stared, his face was all inflamed when he had tried to grab at the sheets of paper.

  I settled down again, cross-legged in front of the chest full of gold, of dust, of forgotten paper.

  And yet that was not the end of this difficult day.

  I had not been working for many minutes when there came an interruption – and one of a kind which threw into the shade the relatively trivial upsets of the morning.

  “In here. We shall be private enough.”

  I jumped. There was a shuffling of boot on board in the room on the other side of the wall from the Book-keeper’s office.

  “Sit you down,” said a voice which I couldn’t immediately place.

  A scraping of chairs, the squeak of a door closing.

  “We are private?”

  “No eyes but ours.”

  “Nor ears neither?”

  “This desk is mute, and this table-book is mute. This candle too. They will not talk. At least they did not answer when last I spoke to them.”

  “This is no laughing matter.”

  “I believe you,” said the first speaker.

  “Can I believe you? That we are private?”

  “Sure enough. I have said.”

  “You have locked the door?”

  “No need. No one will come into Dick Burbage’s room without knocking first.”

  “Why isn’t Master Burbage here?”

  “This is a quiet day for us, the winter, you know . . .”

  “Why isn’t Master Burbage here?” The question was sharply repeated.

  “Because he has deputed me to speak for him, for the whole Company if necessary.”

  “I expected to see him.”

  “And I tell you that, just as you are trusted to speak on behalf of others, so am I.”

  “Very well.”

  There was a kind of slackening in the visitor’s voice in these last words, as if he accepted and was grudgingly reassured by what he was being told. By now I had recognised the first speaker as Master Augustine Phillips, a senior share-holder in the Chamberlain’s, a player and a fine musician too, a man for all occasions. He and his guest were sitting in Burbage’s office, one of a cluster of small rooms back-stage and right next to the Book-keeper’s quarters where I was positioned on the floor, surrounded by scattered manuscripts. As must be evident from the completeness with which I have given the foregoing exchange between the two speakers, I was able to hear each word that passed between them. These interior walls were thin lath and plaster. Furthermore, Master Phillips had a beautifully clear voice which could make even a whisper resonate through the air.

  “Some refreshment?”

  “Later perhaps, when our business is concluded.”

  While these preliminary skirmishes to conversation were going on, and even as I listened with an attent ear, I was inwardly considering what to do. It is not altogether a comfortable thing – nor an honourable one – to be an eavesdropper, even if the blame was diverted in this instance because I had neither wished nor schemed to overhear. But in the next few moments there was a choice to be made.

  I might sneak out of the Book-keeper’s office and creep away altogether from this area of the playhouse, and so shield my ears from whatever important matters the two men in Burbage’s room intended to discuss. That they were important matters was not to be doubted: there was an anxiety, even a portentousness in the visitor’s voice, which was only underlined by Master Phillips’ lighter tones. On the other hand, I could draw attention to myself – by coughing, by humming a tune, by any one of a dozen bits of stage business which would alert my neighbours to my presence. This would be a polite and tactful way of signifying that the Book-room was occupied. As long as I acted now they could hardly consider that I’d overheard things of significance.

 
On yet another hand, I could stay precisely where I was, unmoving, silent, alert. And hear what followed.

  I ask: what would you do in this situation?

  I stayed (as, perhaps, you would have done). I did more than stay. Thinking of Robert Cecil’s ‘mission’ and that it might be important to have a record of what passed between these two men, I took one of the sheets of paper meant for the task of cataloguing and during the dialogue which followed made some fragmentary jottings.

  “Business before pleasure, eh, Sir Gelli?” said Augustine Phillips, referring to the other’s refusal of refeshment.

  And now I knew that I was in the right to remain exactly where I was, sitting by a great box of manuscripts in the Book-keeper’s room, and listening out. For, during my interview with Secretary Cecil, one of the persons he had told me to watch for was Sir Gelli Merrick, steward to the Earl of Essex. I felt the sweat break out on my brow and a strange stir in my bowels to know that I was only a feet away from an enemy to the state – if such he proved to be.

  “You wish us to play for you, I understand.”

  “Your usual business only, or a little more.”

  “Come, sir, if we are to pretend that this is ordinary business, then you may make your exit now.”

  “To be brief,” said Merrick, “our proposal is that the Chamberlain’s Men should stage – a particular play – on a given afternoon. There is not much that is out of the way of your ordinary business there.”

  “No, not much is out of the way there.”

  But Master Phillips did not sound to my ears as though he was really assenting to what the other was saying.

  “You are players. You are paid to perform.”

  “No, Sir Gelli,” said Phillips. “That is not altogether right. We perform and then we are paid.”

  “The difference escapes me.”

  “Never mind.”

  “I was led to believe that I would be better received than this, that I would find myself among friends.”

  A note of resentment had entered Sir Gelli’s voice. I almost expected him to say that he wasn’t used to being talked to like this.

  “You are, sir. You are among friends at the Globe.”