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I didn’t go to the Theatre myself. I went home instead, sat down among the morning’s breadcrumbs and bits of bacon and stared at the wall, two feet from my face. I closed my eyes. I could still see Hartley’s insides slopped out on the scaffold beside him, steaming like puddings in a pile. I could see his heart still twitching in the hangman’s raised fist. His privities had been thrown off the stage after being plucked from his dead gaping mouth. The dogs devoured them. Then out came the big choppers. They were going to quarter the corpse. Soon it would be a gutted torso, two arms, two legs, a severed head, for distribution, moral exhortation, political instruction, and dire threat.
Right then a huge roar went up from the nearby Theatre. Alleyn had come onstage as Tamburlaine. He was Burbage’s for the day – that would change when he married Miss Henslowe. But for the next two hours the Theatre belonged to the scourge of God. Put but money in thy purse, Will, a voice in my head advised me. Any company that puts on your play is a good company, the gob of the groundlings in Finsbury Fields, and the spit turning to silver in Southwark. Put but money in thy purse. Another roar, and a rabble rolled past my window, singing hoarsely. By the sound of them they’d been too drunk even to make it into the performance and were out on the rampage instead. Somebody shouted ‘Fuck Tamburlaine!’ And somebody else ‘Fuck the Papists!’ Then the tune changed to ‘Fuck the Spaniards!’ and the chant was taken up.
The cries grew fainter. I shut my eyes again. It all went round in my head: Tarleton, Hartley, Jackie Vautrollier, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, the Armada, the drunken crowd, fuck the Pope, fuck Parma, long live the Queen! I swept aside the breadcrumbs with my sleeve, dipped a quill into the inkpot and held it over the paper. It didn’t drip and I knew this would be a good pen and one without blots. Excellent, i’faith! I knew precisely what I was going to write. The Muse had flashed her garter at me and the urge had struck, sudden and sweet as Marlowe’s Elysium, hot as Marlowe’s hell. I could feel it like lust. That crowd down there in the street, full of blind energy and leonine pride – it was loose in London and it had no theatre for its will. It needed a stage. It needed to see itself up there. It needed a glass and a chronicler of the time. The future was out there.
Look out of the window, Will, and what do you see? A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Look in the streets and write. Look in Holinshed. Read and hear. Fuck Tamburlaine! Fuck the Spaniards! Fuck France! Long live England! England forever. You said it, sirs. The answer to Marlowe was ringing in my ears. It was the noise of the national theatre. It was good old Harry the Sixth, carnage and catastrophe and the country gone to the dogs, led by a crowd of bunglers and butchers, with thousands of brave Englishmen cut down like cattle and gone to their graves like beds. They were still lying out there, under the skies of France, embedded in English clay, just a few generations away. And on this boneyard I would build my big scene.
I scratched out most of Harry the following year, when the Spaniards, crushed and incensed by the Armada shambles, were planning another invasion, this time from Brittany. Things couldn’t have suited me better. Who was this Tamburlaine anyway? A onetime warlord from Scythia. But what was Scythia compared to English national pride? I saw it in Holinshed and Hall, I heard it in the streets and it unfurled in my head in a flash. I had it in the palm of my closed fist, a hot secret, and I didn’t want to miss the moment, the chance to reply to Marlowe, the new-come conjurer from Canterbury, the wizard of the Rose.
I drew the direful pageant of Harry the Sixth, a set of pictures to dazzle and entertain, a gallery for the illiterate, and my star went up over London. I’d resurrected the dead, they said. I’d made brave Talbot bleed again. Even Nashe came out on my side, his bitter ink turning to milk and honey. Talbot himself, he said, would have been happy to think that his dry old bones would be embalmed all over again with the patriotic tears of ten thousand cheering spectators.
It was my first taste of praise. It was also the hour of the crowd, time to let it have its say on stage. When Harry Six struck them, the groundlings stared open-mouthed – because what they saw up there on stage was none other than themselves. They were looking into a talking mirror, they heard their own voices echoing on the London air, the cadences of Jack Cade and his tribe. It was the sound of piss-heads in the streets and it was music to their ears.
And that was my first move against the mighty Marlowe, coming out as The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster. It struck an unaccustomed hour in the life of the theatre and opened to huge crowds at the Rose on the Bankside, where the takings poured in like golden rain. The late winter of ’92 was not a winter of discontent for Philip Henslowe.
But Robert Greene saw Harry at the Theatre, which gave him a winter in his spleen. There was more than one winter tale’s worth in this, and Greene had an even bigger problem than his spleen. His liver and kidneys had rotted by this time and the rest of his body had followed suit. Greene’s been dead and rotten these two dozen years. Be gracious then to a fallen enemy, Will, let him re-live his brief hour of fame, so at last his bitter ghost may quit the stage and leave yours free to speak.
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Robert Greene, late deceased – and much diseased – in beggary. Six years older than me and dead at thirty-four. A legend in his lifetime and now a dead letter in the alphabet of literary England. More’s the pity – he had vim and vigour in his pen, if too much Rhenish in his liver. A sad talent was that of Robert Greene: hell-raiser, hallelujah man, romancer, dramatist, pamphleteer, scholar, wit. Son of a saddler from Norwich, his beginnings were no better than mine, except that he went on to cover himself with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge and never let himself or the world forget that he was Robert Greene, Master of Arseholes, with honours hung.
After that the rot set in. He began to follow the frettings of his own desires, as early pricks the tree that will prove a thorn. And prick is now the word. Fancied himself as a young Faust figure did Greene, doing a tour of Europe as the devil incarnate. He went off the rails in Italy and in Spain but came back home to hear the so-called Apostle of Norwich, John More, preach so blood-curdlingly about God’s Judgement and how the flames of hell would frizzle his wicked willie to a white-hot worm, that he got down on his knees at once and became a new man. That was in St Andrew’s church, Norwich. The new man rose to his feet, walked out of its doors, took yet one more degree from Clare Hall just to make certain, and married the virtuous Dorothea, whose patience was above Job’s and her price above rubies – her biblical price, that is, not the price of her tail. Not for sale was this Dorothea – no hot whore for the once lascivious Faustus.
Ah, but it wasn’t long before the old Adam got back under the skin of the new. He put dear Doll in the pudding club, left her in the lurch in Lincolnshire to beg or starve, and buggered off back to London to look up his old cronies of the bars and brothels, falling again, as he himself put it in that endearingly second-hand way he had of expressing himself, ‘with the dog to his old vomit’. Incorrigible? Ah yes, incorrigible and as nasty and intractable as hell makes them. Hear Marlowe on Greene. ‘Hang him up by that weird beard of his and he’d turn into the wind of any man’s fart to get himself a groat. He’d crawl up the closest arsehole, truffling for excrements. He was a time-pleaser, an anus-appraiser, a rectum-rodder. Low-life was his middle name. Greene? He didn’t deserve the name. It speaks of the fields and of the fraternity of the flesh, which is grass.’Thank you, Marlowe. On the other hand it speaks of the green-eyed monster, which is jealousy, that mocks the meat it feeds on. And that is apt to the purpose – because what happened next was that Master of Arts Greene aspired to be a writer.
Aspired indeed, aimed high as ever, but sold his soul too oft for the quick shilling, seldom rising above the shoulders of the greasy grubbing hacks, rubbed by Greene on a daily basis. So to cover the smell of his chosen company he kept a pocketful of posies, a bouquet of real-life cheap
morality to season his ridiculous romances. Who did he think he was fooling? He couldn’t even gull the groundlings, gormless as they were. They saw through his garbage. He was a seedy Bohemian, ready to waste his time in guttersniping and streetfighting. A churner-out of chapbooks and admonitory addresses, pamphlets about the cony-catchers and whores among whom he lived out his brief dissolute life – and from whom he purported to wish to save the young, the innocent, and the unwary. Excrement. Greene should have stripped his own back. He was a hair-raiser and a hypocrite, determined to wallow in the life-style he pretended to abhor.
And he achieved a fatal fluency, dodging deadlines, dashing off articles to cover the cost of the next quart of ale or bottle of German beer. A freelancer, making free with words on a free scale for a full belly of booze. A piece-worker and a hack, keeping the wolf from the door with increasing lack of success – till one day he felt the fangs clamp shut, fast on his balls. And it was goodbye Greene. But in the meantime give him a pin and he’d write about angels. There was something cheaply but impregnably professional about him, as there is about whores. Blowing the froth of a pint of yours (unreturned, naturally), he’d moralise about the Fall of Man as if he’d invented the whole concept.
But even he had his brief hour. And he dressed for the part. Like a scholar gentleman he swanned around London, cloaking his necessities and bitter existence under a gown with sleeves of a grave goose-turd green. Green? Yes, that was my word, green as goose-turd, though his hair, as long as Absalom’s for vanity, was also as red as Judas’s in the Mysteries, emblem of his evil. And he had that beard to match. A famous sight in the city, the beard – a long tapering affair like the inverted spire of a steeple. You could hang a jewel from the extreme tip of it, like a drop of bright piss trembling at the end of a phallus. A vaporous drop, but unprofound. Got up in this fashion, Greene embarked on his writing career.
It began – and ended – with imitation. He did a fair attempt at imitating John Lyly in a stack of prose romances. (Later I quarried his Pandosto for The Winter’s Tale.) He went on to set himself up as a playwright, imitating Marlowe, and achieved a travesty of Tamburlaine – Alphonsus, King of Aragon. He then re-wrote Orlando Furioso as a play, shamelessly selling it first to the Queen’s Men and then to Strange’s as soon as the Queen’s had left town. A complete swindler too, well qualified to write about the London con-trade. But he captured the capital with Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, bringing in more than twenty shillings a day for Henslowe. That was his hour. Except of course that it belonged as much to Nashe as to Greene, and I’ve heard it said that when they were collaborating on this one it was Nashe who held the pen while Greene did more of holding the bottle – and holding forth, as was his way, singing encouragement. Nashe said that in one day he pissed as much against the wall as nine men put together could have produced in the same space of time. Still it came out under both their names and gave Greene his long-hungered and half-borrowed moment of triumph.
After that came the waves of repentance pamphlets: Greenes mourning garment, Greenes never too late, The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts. The titles make you cringe. ‘He’d have printed his name and letters on each and every one of his turds if he’d had the art’ – Marlowe again – ‘and would have counted such ordure sacred to God and Man.’ By this time he had much need of repentance, having slid into unrestrained debauchery on a scale well beyond his licentious Italian Englishman period. His plays began to pall and he puked up sour grapes, professing contempt for such an unscholarly arena as the theatre, where his immortal words were made, as he put it, to jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine. Where can such genius go but downhill?
So, he pawned his doublet and sword, drifted and shifted among the lowest lodgings and stews of the city, and rioted madly in pubs, known, as they said, in the revelry of taverns and the stink of brothels, becoming a fast favourite with the hostess of The Red Lattice in Turnbull Street, and finally taking up with that rotten old tart, Em Ball (once the regular whore of dead Tarleton) who bore him a bastard inaptly named Fortunatus, and whose brother, Cutting Ball, was, as the nickname implies, a notorious thief, destined for death on the Tyburn gibbet. This cutpurse was a cunt of the first class – so Jonson said in his blunt manner, even blunter than Marlowe – but attended Greene as faithfully as the lice that never left him in his last miserable and godforsaken days. He became a sort of bodyguard to him and creditors were scared to come too close for fear of the knife, preferring to serve writs instead. In time even the writ-servers lost their nerve. Greene forced one of them to eat the entire writ, complete with wax seal, while Cutting Ball held his dagger at the man’s throat, wishing him bon appetit and threatening to slit his gizzard if he left a single scrap.
‘Why waste time on such a turd in the teeth?’
Ah, Greene was one of the Wits, the quintessence of Oxford scum, the life-form out of which he grew, the roaring boys of the ’80s, drunken, dangerous and wild. Nashe spoke for them. ‘We scoff and are jocund’ – he said – ‘when the sword is ready to go through us. On our wine-benches we bid a Fico for ten thousand plagues.’ But it was other plagues that killed them, mostly drink and the pox. Meanwhile they were poets and pamphleteers and they also wrote dramas, lowering themselves to provide for the theatre and sell their arses to Henslowe. How to be a Wit, was the question, and the answer was not hard. Requisites were: a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, a rare degree of envy, a taste for licentious living and early death, and arrant arrogance, with unfeigned contempt for commoners such as Will Shakespeare, especially if they had the temerity to take the bread out of your mouth by writing plays. More of which anon. The best of them apart from Marlowe (too talented to be a Wit) were Nashe and Lodge and Peele.
Nashe was well named, forever grinding his teeth on the emptiness of an unfulfilled talent. It was the same with Peele, George Peele, the English Ovid as some called him, when they weren’t calling him frivolous, shiftless, sensual, drunken, dissipated and depraved. Dangerously like Greene again, the product of the London streets and gutters, not forgetting two degrees from Oxford. Filthy complexion, a squinting eye, the voice of a goat, the legs of a tortoise, a swart and stumpy lump of a man, but with lyrics singing in his head. Dead of the pox, poor Peele, picked up in the Clerkenwell stews, dead at forty and buried in Clerkenwell one old autumn afternoon, dead and rotten these twenty years, George Peele. Went whining to Burghley for a back-hander in his last illness, I remember: ten shillings, for the love of Christ, ten shillings to stupefy the timor mortis with a stoup of wine and a warm fire. The thick-skinned skinflint Lord Treasurer didn’t even send back an answer. Peele died unsuccoured, while Burghley kept on pickling his liver, knocking back the next bottle of Bordeaux. Thinking of Peele now, I recall that poem of his about the old knight, turned from citadels to psalms. His helmet now shall make a hive for bees… In which particular part of this low thing of the gutters were poems spawned? The soul – a beautiful songbird, no matter in what vile nest it may fleetingly lodge.
No pun intended, for once, but speaking of Lodge – well, there was little enough talent lodged there. But little wits sometimes turn out books like Rosalind: a neat little story that set me thinking. Out of such sufficiently successful mush sometimes come plays – I scooped from it As You Like It. Thanks be to Lodge, then. Another Oxford man, he gave up the law for literature, at which he tried his hand at every conceivable style and strain, with a notable lack of success. To say truth he wasn’t that much of a success as a Wit either: he lacked one serious qualification – the ability to die young, unlike Peele and Greene and Nashe and Marlowe. So he gave up being a Wit, tried medicine instead – and it worked. He lives still.
Panic ye not, Master Lodge. Living is not so much of a burden, even if it gets you kicked out of the Wit Club. I didn’t belong myself. Never had the class, the charisma, the doctorate. Couldn’t compete w
ith all sorts of oddballs living on the fringes or in God’s red-hot forge: mad Jack Donne, iconoclast Marlowe, duelling Jonson, or all those threadbare geniuses with their heads in the spires, in the Cambridge clouds, and for whom Oxford ordure was holy ground. Well-lettered down-and-outers. I was not of their element, keeping my head down, avoiding invitations, inventing excuses, and digesting my food sensibly, staying sensible and sane, refusing to kill myself with them, just as I’d refused to join the militant martyrs in their glorious deaths. Could have gone the way of Campion, could have gone the way of the Wits. But I had a revenge task to perform, to wrest back from fate what my father had lost. So I kept my eyes on the malleable mob with its shifting but eternal needs. I accepted their ready pennies, the gift of their praise. I was the man of their hour. I did not fear the Greeks.
The Wits hated men like me. Gossips and snobs, they were wolves in their academic sheepskin, which they wore like livery, though their Oxford and Cambridge degrees did them little good in the end. Nashe called me an excrementory dishlicker of learning, a Turkish target for the spit of the crowd in Finsbury Fields, in exchange for their vile trash. I was a shit-shifter, a base player, a vassal actor, a butcher and tradester, a Warwickshire clown. All that abuse. And this was the sullen brew on the floating scum of which Robert Greene was the bitterest bubble. Nobody hated me like Greene.
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Greene’s hatred had little to do with me – it was just part of the man and his bad-luck venture with life.
A born failure, such men as he be never at heart’s ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves, and therefore are they very dangerous.
And in Greene’s case he beheld every clerk with a quill in London as better than himself. But he fastened on me as the final victim on whom he would now empty all the concocted vials of his wrath. I say concocted because he had put it about among all those who cared to listen, that he, Robert Greene M. A., was the co-author of Harry the Sixth and that he’d been bought off to the tune of a few paltry pence, earning the quintessence of nothing from the huge takings that had so far been raked in. He’d been used and dumped – what else would you expect from a country con-man whose father was an usurer? That was his story and he may even have made himself believe it.
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