The truth was that he did have a hand in it – and he wasn’t the only one. But if he did half a scene’s worth of passable scripting, it ended there. Greene’s writing hand was oftener busy on some rival project of his own, while the other was always in your pocket, scrabbling for an advance. He was an insult to trees and geese, even Winchester geese. I paid him off and re-drafted his scenes. He had no complaints at the time. Then when Harry became a hit, faring much better than his own plays at the Rose, Greene was all of a sudden a dropped co-author, unpaid collaborator, chronicler of genius, victim of my quill-filled envy, my fear of his fearful talent. That was the story that went the rounds of the taverns and was even dramatised extempore in Eastcheap. Nobody paid it much notice – they’d heard it all before. But Greene himself gave it his undivided attention and worked himself up into a jealous fury. On top of all of which, it cut deep with him that until quite recently he’d been principal writer for the Queen’s and now they’d been seen off the stage by Strange’s men whom I was with at the time. Fate was arsing him up again, using every arsehole from Stratford or wherever. Who’d be Robert Greene? Alas.
So he got roaring drunk on Rhenish wine with Nashe and gorged himself on pickled herring. That was his last big fling. His rotting, marinated carcass started to swell up with the dropsy as a hot dry summer hit the filthy city, and all the players just fucked off (as he put it) and stranded him among the turds and muck-middens they’d sweetly left behind. That was their gratitude for his genius. They’d lined their pockets with the money they’d made on his plays and now they’d gone off to fleece the rustics and rude mechanicals of the provinces, wringing what vile trash they could from their hard hands, while he stared starvation in the face. It was monstrous.
A couple of poor fools took him in. There was a shoemaker called Isam who had a shop in the Dowgate and he and his wife opened their hearts and their doors not only to the dying genius but to the genius’s decayed whore, their bastard brawling brat, Fortunatus, so cruelly named, and also to the decayed whore’s ruffian brother, Cutting Ball himself. Quite a happy family. And there, festering above the Dowgate, among fleas and vermin, the genius composed his shrill, self-pitying swansong. It was called – are you ready for this? – A Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance. Describing the folly of youth, the falsehood of makeshift flatterers, the misery of the negligent, and mischiefs of deceiving Courtesans. Written before his death and published at his dying request. These are the full works, Greene-style, known familiarly as Greenes Groatsworth.
It concerns – whom do you think, Francis? – one Roberto, the son of a greedy usurer. A picaro and a prodigal, a bookish lad who is left a solitary coin with which to buy himself a groatsworth of wit. He gets his rich brother tangled up with a whore and is kicked out to starve. Woe is he. Lamenting his lot, he comes across – wait for it, Will! – a common player from the country, a bumpkin with a thick provincial accent. The subtlety astonished me. But Roberto was also astonished – that such a clodhopper should be so successful on stage, and so Roberto decides to tread the boards himself and makes quite a thing of it, becoming gruesomely rich. But in the end money’s not everything (an interesting philosophy, coming from Greene), it’s a lackey’s life and Roberto resolves that he should be above it. He throws it all up, falls in with a lewd crowd, and loses the lot, his whole fortune, except for this one solitary groat. How are the mighty fallen!
How indeed. Roberto, poet and dramatist of genius, despised and neglected of authors, most misunderstood of men, down on his luck and supine in gutterland. He looks up and sees the stars scattered about the sky like silver groats, a million of them. Roberto has only one in his pocket. But a poet with a star in his pocket – why man, what can he not achieve? Not an inapt argument from Roberto’s creator, who never had any golden words to spend, but this silver one will serve wherewith to purchase his million of repentance, Greene who swanned about the city eavesdropping on his own authorship, and had a lonely listening too.
And now comes his moment, the one he can’t resist. The author stands up and cries out from the page, casting off the cloak, confessing with sudden loudness – and no surprise! – that his own life has been just like Roberto’s, in much more than name, and he seizes this opportunity to warn his old cronies, Nashe and Marlowe and Peele, fellow scholars about this city, against the hated race of players, who pay talented playwrights a mere pittance and grow fat on their genius, one of them in particular even having the nerve to imitate his betters by writing his own plays. And a great pity it is that men of rare wits should be subject to the pleasure of such rude grooms.
‘Trust them not,’ (he says), ‘for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’ – ‘beautified’ is a vile phrase – ‘that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country. O that I might entreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses: and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you will never prove an Usurer…’
‘Your first public notice, Will.’
Very pointed, you may say – glad you’re still listening, Francis – and the point envenomed too. A grammar school upstart, a parvenu with thick provincial speech and ungainly country manners, like the crows in Macrobius and Martial and old Aesop, conceited and vain. Or like the one in Horace, a plagiarist and a thief. A commoner, a tradesman, Jack of all and master of none – and not a Master of Arts for sure. An opportunist with ideas above his station, an actor-turned-dramatist, too big for his buskins. Able to scribble plays for the companies he’s working for, and killing literature by killing the Wits – the poor abused Wits who depend for their commissions on such scum of players. And those amount to something short of nothing.
‘Is it really you, Will?’
Yes, it’s me and my kind. My acting cronies and myself, pinchfists and muckworms that we are, pay these literary giants their miserable pittance, and while they starve, we rude grooms (is that the phrase?) catch all the credit for mouthing the fine lines that emanate from their inspired minds. To crown it all, an ignorant oaf, a thick privy seat such as myself has not only had the effrontery to compete as a dramatist with his academic betters but seems to be better at it to boot. This above all: I’m a cruel and ungrateful colleague, a vicious rascal masquerading as a harmless country boy and humble player. The truth is, I’m the very devil got up on stage. I’m a tiger in disguise.
‘Ah, he stabbed you with your own line!’
Harry was not even in print when Greene wrote this, but all three parts had been staged and you may suppose that Greene had a good ear and remembered well when he parodied the line about the tiger’s heart. Well, you would suppose wrong, Francis. He didn’t. It was one of the few lines Greene actually wrote himself in his capacity as so-called co-author, and one of that even rarer scattering of lines, the favoured few that I let remain in the script. No wonder he remembered it and flung it back in my face, together with the veiled hint that I’d refused him financial help. But lest you miss the point of the allusion, Francis, he went on from there to make sure of it, with a concluding allegory about a grasshopper and an ant.
‘A tale within a tale.’
A poor starving grasshopper (think now who that might be) asks a busy ant for assistance as winter begins to bite, and the ant answers him that he should find his own food, ‘for toiling labour hates an idle guest.’ And now Greene did remember well exactly what I’d said to him when he last came to beg. Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and be wise, I told him. He had gone to the ant – and the ant had refused him out of the cruelty of its nature, possessing the spirit of a ‘waspish little worm’.
A waspish little worm, that was me. The ant, prudent and thrifty rather than inspired, seems to be gloating over the grasshopper’s plight. Y
et it’s the dying grasshopper that is the real genius. Leaping geniuses, you see, take no account of the coming winter – their thoughts are far above the fields and the loamy affairs of anthood. Ants may live longer, plodders as they are, but they will never see what has been seen on his higher flights by grasshopping Greene, who now takes his last farewell of his public and of his life.
‘A good hatchet job – it must have made him feel better.’
Perhaps not. You spit poison and the taste stays in the mouth – bitterness at the thought that all those Oxford degrees and the graces and favours had failed to win the groundlings, while a social cipher didn’t even have to learn to speak their language. Greene’s trouble was not the lack of genius, he too lacked the common touch. And to rub salt in his wounds he was dying in the most awful squalor. His end was shitty – which unwiped lay upon his deathbed sheets, quipped the callous Marlowe, cackling falsetto – and his death was equally excremental.
‘I wouldn’t have cared to see either of them.’
Return you nonetheless to that lice-laden shoemaker’s house in the Dowgate, where he lay abandoned by every one of his friends, attended only by an entourage of insects. His body, growing grosser by the hour, was crawling with them, and death was less than a month away, so he scratched furiously – not just at his rotting flesh but at his Groatsworth. It was all he had left. Even his stockings had been sold, together with the cloak and sword. His enemies sneered and cheered in their drinking circles and some of the sneers found their way into print.
A rakehell, a makeshift, a scribbling fool,
A famous bayard in city and school,
Now sick as a dog and ever brainsick,
Where such a raving and desperate Dick?
There were prayers, confessions, tears, scribbled letters, a world of sighs. And another of pain. All precursors to the much-feared next world, an uncertain venture for such a scapegrace. After the Groatsworth was completed he scribbled off his last letter – to his long-suffering, long-abandoned wife Dorothea (she whose price was above rubies) begging for her forgiveness. Oh – and tapping her for ten pounds, by the way, to pay his hosts, the Isams. ‘For if they had not succoured me I had died in the streets.’
‘Just couldn’t help his nature, could he?’
Even on his death bed. Of your charity, dear Doll, and remembering all our former love, send the money for the love of God.
After that he cried out for a penny-pot of malmsey wine, so the story went about, starting from his tear-blubbered hostess. He may even have babbled of green fields for all I know. Then he went as cold as any stone, and the grasshopper out in the fields fell silent. Only the letters were left after his name. His hostess, following his pathetic last request, crowned the dead head with a garland of laurels, a tributary funeral wreath for a would-be poet. So the stricken scribbler lay for a day in death, lay in state above a vile shoemaker’s shop – Marlowe laughed at that – wearing the laurels that life, the bitch, had denied him, and which only an illiterate idiot could have awarded him: the cherished bays he grudged to see decorating any other brows than his own. A sham king wearing his paper crown. Death had come at last and bored through his castle walls. A pin was all it took. And that long red flame of a beard frozen and gone out.
It was the third day of September, ’92. They took him out and buried him in Moorfields, close to the madhouse, the Bethlehem Hospital – to its hellish requiem become a clod.
As soon as the bloated body began to stiffen and grow cold, the vultures gathered: Burby and Chettle and Wright. Chettle, the bastard, smelling scandal, was first out with the Groatsworth. Greene hadn’t even been three weeks gone when it arrived on the bookstalls and everyone got the point, or so they thought. The genius was in his grave, the usual place for genius, all too familiar. The upstart crow was puffing up his ugly feathers and coining it in, courtesy of Harry, a play touched by the talent of the swindled Wit himself. And Henslowe wanted another Shakescene out of it for the Rose later in the year. The following month Ned Alleyn married Henslowe’s daughter and there was yet another common player feathering his nest while genuine genius lay low. Meanwhile Tiger Will hadn’t even had the common charity, had he, to save a fellow writer (and a greater writer) from starvation and the grave? A lousy lubber and a skinflint too. Whereas if truth were known, I’d slipped Greene a groat too many, till I then grew wise to him, in our brief partnership.
Not brief enough. I went straight to Chettle and protested, menacing him with a powerful friend and the feel of a fist round his genitals. These were damaging accusations. Greene had been a sick man – let’s be charitable – when he penned them and Chettle ought to have taken account of this when he went to press. The grasshopper himself might even have toned down his chirping had he lived to see his last piece go through. Might even have refrained from publication in the end, who knows? And he was well known for his literary chicanery and playing the neglected genius. Speak ill of the dead, but what was he after all but an attitudinizing ass? And an arsehole to boot – added the powerful friend.
Chettle took the point, smiled wincingly when the pressure came off his own, and printed a handsome apology. Greene’s rantings had been largely libellous and ought to have been edited. The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanour, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip.
‘I scarcely recognized you.’
I didn’t recognise myself. Is that really me? Only the angels see that far into a man.
Still, all this was more than good enough at the time, though a memorial volume for Greene, published the following year, wrote of those who eclipsed his fame and purloined his plumes. And if the familiar feathers image wasn’t a dark enough hint, a passing play of that same year satirised a certain Stratford sparrow, a lecherous bird of Venus and a cock of the game who had left his wife in the lurch.
But that came later. In ’92 it was reputation saved and hurt pride salved. Henslowe put on Harry in December in front of the biggest crowds ever to keep coming back howling for more. The takings burst the box. Alleyn was ecstatic. By that time Robert Greene was busy fertilising Moorfields. If his dead ears had been capable of hearing they’d have caught the huge roars and rounds of applause rising up from the Rose and wafting over the Thames all the way to Moorfields and the Bedlam, making him writhe in his grave, drowning out the screams of the criminally insane.
34
‘Do you know what goes into a great pie, Will?’
I feel you’re going to tell me.
‘Why not foretaste the pleasure, eh? It can’t be that much longer now.’
Never took much interest in food myself, never really had the time, always eating on the hoof, never noticing what it was I was bolting down.
‘You’d have noticed a great pie all right.’
Francis lay back down on the truckle-bed, closed his eyes, folded his fat fingers together across his vast paunch, and smiled dreamily.
‘Let me whet your appetite.’
I have none.
‘Apparently I’m to work on you. Doctor’s orders. Now here goes. Into a great pie goes a piece of fair young beef and the suet of a nice fat one, though mutton will do just as well, and for my money it’s even nicer. It’ll be all minced up with onions and salt and pepper and prunes and dates, and put into an enormous pastry coffin.’
They’ll need a big coffin when your time comes, Francis, but I’d rather you change that subject.
‘Ah, of course. Well, that’s only the start. After the coffin – saving your presence – heaven’s the limit. You can take capons, mallards, woodcocks – I don’t like pork myself, not in a great pie – and add all manner of spices, cinnamon, saffron, thyme and cloves, and more fruits too, currants and raisins and plums. Just picture all that in layers, piled a good foot high, and then the lid placed on the coffin – ’
Francis.
‘I cry you mercy. Cove
r the whole thing with good thick slitted pastry, glazed with eggs – and there’s a feast fit for a king.’
But not for a dying man.
‘The Halls are coming later. And so is Tom Russell. And there is Mistress Anne, of course, though she eats like a mouse.’
More like a shrew.
‘And then there’s me.’
Ah, say no more.
‘Will you get up for it, Will?’
I’ll see – when it comes.
Francis worked his mouth – a surprisingly small gateway to gluttony, for such a massive moon-faced man – and behind shut smiling eyes he said, ‘I see swans gliding gracefully on pastry seas, all ready for roasting. Roast swan – to give it that indefinably noble touch.’
You’re fantasising again, Francis. It’ll be chicken and beef at the most – and a stray sparrow if you’re lucky.
‘Even a sparrow is welcome fare – with just a touch of saffron, boiled in wine.’
They say it keeps the moths away – and keeps your pistol’s cock up too.
‘Well, they say all sorts of things.’
Leeks and onions added, Francis, to provoke your procreative powers, though that’s a fantasy, I’m sure, sprung from their shape.
‘What’s that?’
A leek and two onions – cock and balls.
‘I’m as manly as the next man, Will, but I don’t mix my pleasures, if you’ll be so kind. When I see leeks and onions it’s my belly I mind, not my softer parts.’
Will Page 29
