Will

by Christopher Rush

  No, the stage was a far cry from the broad and pleasant path the Puritans spat and ranted of. Primrose path? Primrose pudding. As far as paths go, I recall only a cold and muddy one, trudging out of London behind the wet wagon and through the yelling sleet, with a hey-ho, the wind and the rain. Wind and rain – an actor’s guaranteed audience, co-mates and brothers in exile. Counsellors that feelingly persuade me what I am. Here we go again, lads, out on the pissing road. Where, let me repeat, there were precious few primroses. Pimps and prostitutes, yes, and an army of beggars and such-like scum, but if acting was the beflowered route to the everlasting bonfire, I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere along the way. Dalliance my arse. What I knew about was frozen feet and fingers, polecap knees, peeled carrot nose, dripping nostrils, brass balls bitten to buggery, head down, shoulders hunched, hearing the grinding of the cartwheels over the ruts and rubble, the dead rats and frozen turds, and some fool singing in the rain that bloody song again, the useless chump.

  But when I came to man’s estate,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gates

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  Every fucking day. Once the damp creeps up your behind, you’re never dry again – not till the spring, when the March winds invade your looped and windowed raggedness and blow up your bum, turning your bowels blue. That’s when you catch a fiery chill and start shitting crocodiles.

  And as to knaves and thieves, well, that’s what we were to the good and godlies of church and council – no better than drifters, derelicts, drunkards, drabs, and devils in disguise. And there were times I’d have agreed with their surly definitions. What were we, after all, but a cry of clowns putting on dumb shows and jumps, cracking jokes for stinkards and yokels, scratching the itching humours of scabby minds with execrable oaths, obscene speeches, lascivious actions, and jests and jigs that reeked of excrement and sperm, Tarleton style? Many’s the time we arrived at a town, they shook the whip and the rope in our faces and turned us from their gates. ‘Go on, you fuckers, on your filthy way! We want none of your sort here!’

  Fuck off was always the word, familiar as the frigging rain. I tell you, after a year I was fucking sick of it, the homelessness, the hard beds, the hard words, the hatred. I looked in my glass and what did I see? An ungodly, improvident, and obscene arsehole, dishonest and diseased: at worst a filthy pederast, at best a common beggar; a dazzling fraud on stage, offstage reckless and repellent, a source of unrest, infection, irresponsibility, of weird fantasies, wild feelings, fanaticism, and insurrection. Worse: a magnet of divine ire and an open invitation to God to bring down his scourge on the people in that worst of all forms, the plague. For the cause of plagues is sin and the cause of sin is plays, therefore the cause of plague is plays – so ran the argument.

  Such were the fruits and purposes of playing. In addition to which (and lest I forget) there were the following: to corrupt innocence, teach falsehood, hypocrisy, scorn; to play the vice, to deflower honest wives, to murder, flay, kill, pick and steal, rob and riot, rebel against princes, commit treason, consume treasures, sing of sex and venereal disease, mock and scoff, flout and flatter, play the whoremaster, the glutton, the drunkard, the blasphemer – and above all to engage in public and private deception, to self-delude and lead others astray. For what was playing, after all, but mass foolery and fraud, a grand illusion? And what was a player but a nasty charlatan? I was a trickster, a sham, jetting in silks on stage and the next minute back with the scum on the streets: from king to beggar in one quick change of skin. I was the enemy of apprentices, discouraging them from their trades, and planting sedition in their heads. I was a drawer of crowds, leading to stealing and whoring and damage to property, not to mention insurrection, anarchy, and fray. And I was thoroughly detested for putting on plays on the Sabbath, creating false idols, spouting scurrility and smut, wearing women’s clothes, keeping young boys as catamites and ill-minded ingles, and having the impudence to profit from a profession that was not even a legal occupation or decent calling at all, but a sheer blasphemy against God and man.

  And if I lacked the power to articulate or remember all of that, John Fucking Stubbes had beat it out on a drum and spelt it out for all to read or hear in his right righteous and savagely indignant Anatomy of Abuses. Do they not maintain bawdry, insinuate foolery, and renew remembrance of heathen idolatry? Do they not induce whoredoms and uncleanness? Nay, are they not rather plain devourers of maidenly virginity and chastity? For proof whereof mark but the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and leering, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold.

  And the like. If only the half of it had been true. If all of it was, it was only some of the time, and all of it goes on at one time or another, whether or not the players are in town. When were fucking and filching and groping and gambling not in fashion? As for wonderful to behold, there was precious little wonderful about it, though it might have looked that way from under a Puritan’s gown, where the balls burned in anguish, decades of sperm dammed up behind floodgates of fear and frustration. None but the lonely prick shall know mine anguish. It had seemed so in Stratford as I’d watched the Queen’s Men clanking southward, trailing dust and dreams. Closer up it was different by a long john and a far cry from the vision that did the damage when I was eleven years old and sat upon that promontory and saw that mermaid on the dolphin’s back, uttering her dulcet and harmonious breath. For all of the above simply substitute being breathed on at close quarters by a ranting old actor in whose filthy bowels and breath a plague of pickled herring has just come horribly to life. And that was the theatre. So a pox on that dolphin and fuck that fucking mermaid and all who sail on her!

  But why in particular blame Leicester’s mermaid? It was one of a great storm of seeds sown in my soul and now I was merely reaping the whirlwind. I’d seen the Slaughter of the Innocents and had staged it time and time over in the theatre of my mind. A boy in Stratford, king of the cornfields, I’d shouted to an audience of a million listening ears. I’d warned cities of grain of what would follow if they failed to surrender, and the sickle in my hand burned like a tartar’s bow, the crescent moon I’d plucked down from the sky. Surrender, dogs, or see your naked infants spitted upon pikes, while the mad mothers with their howls confused do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry at Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen! Jesus. And the ranting six-year-old king made them swear on their swords a binding oath. A terrifying consent to death, to mass infanticide, offence’s reddest seal, murder most foul. But we have sworn, my lord, already. Indeed, upon my sword, indeed, swear, swear by my sword.

  And so the thing began. All roads lead to London – and I was led by time and fate to my own acting days in and out of Shoreditch: King John, Henry Five, The True Chronicle of King Leir and His Three Daughters, and such like dire dramas. In which I often lent my hand, touching up the parts, stiffening up the play, enlarging the action, making it flow. That was a bonus for Burbage, and for me it was relief at least. Sometimes though the only relief that’s left is to discharge your part in private – and I did that to no applause but the twang of my own balls. Many a time and oft.

  How I stuck it Christ knows. Days uncounted I nearly left the road and went straight back to Stratford. Once I remember – it was my turn for walking – I just stopped in my tracks and watched the wagon clanking on into nowhere in particular till it turned into a tiny cloud on the skyline, and of no more consequence, so it seemed than any of the other spots and specks on landscape and skyscape. Nothing of it had anything to do with me – I could have gone like an arrow into Warwickshire. Then, suddenly, I heard the clown Kempe’s voice coming out of the cloud, a thin little birdsong on the wind.

  When that I was and a little tiny boy

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;<
br />
  A foolish thing was but a toy,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  Those were my lines Kempe was singing. I remembered he’d asked me for a song to help fill out a poor part and I’d dashed it off. When I heard it now wafting across the melancholy fields, made poignant by distance, it affected me strangely. The words transformed the landscape, turned it into a vast stage, while the landscape itself gave something back to the song: a context and a setting that made it echo and linger in the mind. It struck me as sadly pleasing. At the same time I thought the song a little too good for friend Kempe, a touch subtle for such an ordinary clown, though he was a cut or two above Tarleton. Even so, I thought, this song could grace another play. Or twinkle on the lips of a wiser fool than Kempe. Who knows? Cheered a little, I trudged on again after the wagon, in the wake of my own words about the wind and the rain, and through the wind and the rain themselves, somehow become a theatre, part of a vast setting, and the faceless actors in some impersonal universal play.

  ‘So it was a near thing?’

  There were many more hairline moments to come when I would have willingly given it all up and gone safely back to Stratford, back to the dungy comforts of obscurity. And might well have done so. Had it not been for Tamburlaine. The Scythian shepherd is as dead now as the dead shepherd of Canterbury, but in ’87 he was the living legend of London. Tamburlaine the Great.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  Tell you about the man who made him, you mean, and in so doing made himself into the star of the English stage and the golden idol of yours truly, right worshipful Will. Oh yes, I hated the bastard. He was my god.

  29

  Christopher Marlowe. I even hated the sound of the name: the crisply decisive dactyl, and the surname introduced by that emphatic nasal. Christopher Marlowe sounded named for success. He was even born in front of me, beating me by two months. A man can write a play in two months and in two hours that play can change the world, putting all London at his feet. Marlowe came up to London on foot just like me, by a different road, and he saw his London with a difference. He had big cat’s eyes, Kit Marlowe – Cat Marlowe to his rivals, and to his nancy boys with their claws out, ratcatcher Chris. His eyes burned wide and bright when he first saw the city stretched out in front of him.

  Like Elysium to a new-come soul.

  There was irony in these words, a mad Marlowe irony, because London turned out to be Marlowe’s exit to eternity. The house in Deptford was waiting for him, and three men already sitting there in God’s long look. They’d been waiting there since Genesis, three men spiked on the eyebeam of a cherub, an unholy trio who’d come by special arrangement to separate his soul from his body. Not quite a new-come soul – it was six years since he’d come through the gates of his imagined Elysium – but it was a lot sooner than even he could have conjectured, even with his feel for sudden tragic falls and his mind on fire with fate.

  I remember the first time I saw him. It was in a den in Deptford and I heard him even before he came in. You always heard Marlowe before you saw him. Beer and Burbage were my only thoughts at that moment – it wasn’t long after I’d acquired my new boots – when a gaggle of Ganymedes strutted in, demanding drink, and above their quack and chatter one voice stood out higher and more melodious than the rest, fluting like an oboe, and in Latin too, ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit,’ adding the gloss, ‘What feeds me kills me, lads – and I’m not referring to the sack you’re about to buy me!’

  Trills of dutiful laughter, over which the voice continued to preside. ‘Every woman feeds and kills you – and the Muse is a woman, more’s the pity!’

  More laughter.

  But it wasn’t the words that distinguished the speaker, it was the drawling delivery, shrill yet strong, lilting, lazy, languorous – and controlling. He was clearly in charge of the throng of queers that surrounded him. They parted to sit down, awarding me my first sight of Christopher Marlowe, and he of me, or so I thought.

  He saw a simple man in a drab jerkin but with glossy new boots. I saw a figure like Phoebus, framed by the open doorway. The sun was at his back, streaming through the windows, and his own corona seemed to grow from him. He fixed his wide eyes on me, taking in everything, a searching, fearless gaze that was almost insolent. The mouth was slightly pursed and impatient, as if he’d accept no lip from any man, unless a loving pair to match his own sensuous lower one; and this strong pout was accentuated by the close careful moustache and beard, also underlining the firm yet effeminate jaw. A face of contradictions. And not a face to forget, surrounded as it was by that shock of hair swept back over a high forehead.

  If you could have forgotten the face you would not forget the attire, the amply slashed black velvet doublet studded with gold buttons, and the gashes revealing gold beneath – dozens of dagger-slashes exuding golden blood. This was no poor playwright. And yet a simple cobweb lawn collar instead of lace. His boots were not as new as mine – the whole costume was well worn – but he stood in them nobly and made me feel suddenly more fitted for a return to the shambles. There was a scarcely subdued combativeness in his stare, tacitly taunting. He looked arrogant and unpredictable.

  ‘And what feeds you, Stratford man, apart from small beer?’

  He was sitting down opposite me and staring at me with that open mocking half ironic smile that I came to know so well – but not too well.

  ‘What feeds me is need,’ I answered him truthfully.

  ‘And beyond that?’

  ‘Beyond that, ambition. How did you know I was a Stratford man?’

  He smiled – very sweetly – commanded sack to be brought between us, swept my small beer aside, and relaxed.

  ‘I know everything,’ he said, glittering-eyed. ‘I make it my business. You’re Will Shakespeare, of good old Catholic stock, and you have a kinsman’s head on London bridge.’

  I resolved never to befriend this man. Religion was a forbidden subject with me, especially in taverns. He saw the sudden alarm in my face and laid his hand on mine. I noticed the other hand slide to his dagger, in case I misinterpreted the gesture. If I did, I didn’t show it.

  ‘Rest easy, friend, I’m no fleering tell-tale. Kit Marlowe at your service. And now, to set your mind more at ease, I’ll tell you all about myself, all you want to know, and more than you need to learn.’

  Of course he told me less than I might have needed to learn, and a lot more than I wanted to know. But when the sack was in him, Marlowe never stopped talking, and every line of his talk sounded like blank verse. He’d come to London at twenty-three, just like me, but with his heels in hell and his finger-ends scorched by stars – that was how he spoke – such was his blaze, such was his reach. ‘Ours is a world,’ he said, ‘in which bricklayers and butchers and grocers refuse to follow their callings, answering instead to a certain buzzing in their brains, a beating in the blood.’

  He could have beaten leather instead, son of a Canterbury cobbler and a dubious mother, and after seven years as a king’s Scholar at Cambridge, could have taken holy orders.

  ‘Father Marlowe – just imagine!’ he laughed with those cold eyes, blessing the sack with two rood-making fingers and bidding me drink.

  As things turned out, he said, his gifts were not for God. His leanings and bendings – and they were many – tended elsewhere: demonology, cosmography, politics, espionage, murder, oh yes, and the snares of Ovid. Quite a curriculum vitae. And that was leaving aside the hidden curriculum – the charms of boys and the addictions of alcohol, atheism and tobacco: a heady mixture.

  What was he, this vibrant vision of a man, sitting across the table from me in a Deptford den and quaffing sack? A Catholic unbeliever who spied on Catholics abroad, a bar-brawler and street-fighter, keeper of company with poets, publishers, and filthy intellectuals – not all bad, then. But a heavy reckoning in a little room was only six years on, and the meteoric display was brief but intense. If the stars in their courses fought against Marlowe, they added to th
e blaze that surrounded him, burnishing the sun. In my first London years he was the brightest luminary on the bill, stunning the punters by the sheer arrogance of his poetic reach, his cosmic contempt for authority, society and ordinary human bonds. To hell with that, he cried – literally, to hell. Family, loyalty, humility, kindness, order, degree, tolerance, belief – all were but toys to Marlowe. He was the great sceptic, and when he hit London the sparks flew and it looked as if nobody could come near him. Untouchable as the sun, dubious as a comet, he opened his lips and his tongue took fire, scorching the gods.

  ‘I have made a covenant with death,’ he said, ‘and with hell am I in agreement!’

  I nodded. This sort of language landed you in jail, especially the way he said it, and this was the way it always was with Marlowe, man and dramatist inseparable, jostling for the stage, stealing each other’s lines.

  But he was the prince of playwrights and he made the theatres blaze with his blank verse. I’d never heard anything like it. The pentameters of the past were like trundling carts beside his golden carriages, they were fustian, they were dust beside this glorious stuff. Even Kyd sounded now like a clanking old ghost: Hamlet, revenge! The Spanish Tragedy, that had been the rage of the Rose, died in an afternoon. Burbage had been right about this new man when he spoke to me outside the Theatre that day about Marlowe, phrase-making, breathtaking, outrageous Marlowe, drunk wordsmith and master of a thousand monstrosities. Where else could you find poisoned convents, massacres in monasteries, boiling oil, infants swimming in their parents’ blood, headless carcasses piled in heaps, virgins impaled on rings of pikes, and old men sprawled in the dust with swords stuck through their sides, their brains gushing out under the iron rain of blows? Where else does the seaman see the Hyades gather an army of Cimmerian clouds? Where else do you hear of Cubar where the negroes dwell, and the wide, the vast, the Euxine sea?