The Playmakers
Shakespeare and Marlowe – murder and deceit
Graeme Johnstone
A novel based on a story as told, and a concept devised by, Kevin Heeney
The Playmakers
Shakespeare and Marlowe – murder and deceit
Copyright © 2005, 2015 by Graeme Johnstone
G. & E. Johnstone
978-0-9925059-3-6
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
1st Edition (2005)
BeWrite Books UK
ISBN 978-1-9052020-8-9
Dedicated to all those in the world who recognize that not everything is what it seems.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PLAYMAKERS
PROLOGUE
1589
Norwich, England
Execution was not their usual job. The two men were normally messengers, occasionally spies, and, more often than not, musclemen proficient at persuading a wavering soul to support the Protestant ethic of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
Now, here they were, on a chilly April evening - in front of a large, noisy mob of traders, smiths, wives, layabouts, drunkards, thieves, rowdy low-lifers, and the Norwich village comedian - struggling to set fire to a man chained to a stake.
“Come on, get it going, we’re freezing over here!” came a voice from the onlookers, inspiring a burst of laughter.
One of the two appointed agents of the Court of the Star Chamber, a bearded, beefy man with short bowlegs, struggled up from the lifeless fire, intent on chastising the unsighted heckler. His senior partner, taller, thinner and clean-shaven, summoned him back to the task, throwing him a neatly tied bundle of sticks.
“Just get these faggots in place,” the boss hissed. “Strike the flint and let’s get it over and done with.”
“These faggots is green,” his deputy sullenly replied, examining the bundle. He was right. Some of the twigs had only recently been cut from the oak trees of the nearby forests in Norfolk.
“Oh, I see, you’re going to let him freeze to death, instead!” came the voice again.
Cavernous mouths containing blackened and missing teeth opened in unison, and more laughter echoed through the town square. The frivolity encouraged more observers to come out of the shops to witness the burning of Francis Kett at the stake.
The junior of the two executioners, his round face flushed with anger, wiped his hands on a battered leather waistcoat, which barely touched each side of his belly, and rose again to snare the invisible miscreant. “Listen,” he shouted, “if I catch whoever is saying that, he’ll be going up in flames along with this bleedin’ atheist, all right?”
“At least I’d have a warm arse,” came the mystery voice.
The crowd laughed again. But it was suddenly stilled, not only by the executioner’s malevolent glare as he waddled over to the faces in the front row, but a defiant burst of sound from the person chained to the single wooden upright.
“I am not an atheist,” came the cry. “I am not an atheist.”
It was the same phrase that Francis Kett, poet, writer, visionary and Free Thinker, had shouted at the Star Chamber hearing earlier in the day. He had screamed it in frustration after hours of vainly presenting logical, intellectual argument that his views on the earth, life, and the after-life were not heretical. The bishops, sitting behind a high wooden table at the end of the dimly lit room in Norwich Castle, had been unmoved.
They did not brook thoughts that ran contrary to the views of the Church of England. Thoughts that besmirched the name of God. Thoughts that ran against all proper-thinking Christian doctrine. Thoughts that could threaten their control …
The guilty verdict had been a formality.
Francis Kett had repeated his protest as a dozen hooded men had slowly marched him across the drawbridge out of the castle where forty years before, another Kett, the wealthy landowner Robert, had been beheaded for leading a rebellion against social and religious change.
“I am not an atheist,” he had declared again, as they passed through the unruly, jeering crowd and down the muddy road to the centre of the east England village.
“What’s an atheist?” a poorly-clad pig farmer, wiping his nose with the back of a grubby hand, had said to a man standing next to him as the entourage walked by.
“An atheist? You don’t know what an atheist is?” his friend said. “You’ve been spending too much time on them pigs of yours.”
“Just tell me.”
“It means that he don’t believe in what you and I believe in.”
“And what’s that, then?”
“You know, all things right and proper.”
“Right and proper, hey? That could mean anything.”
“Exactly. It can, and does, mean anything …”
And now, the crowd stood silent as the words rang through the square.
“I am not an atheist!” Kett cried, his beard wet with spittle, his dark hair matted, his once-sparkling brown eyes dimming with resignation.
A cheery, well-rounded woman, her bonnet tied tightly around puffy red cheeks, nudged a tall, skinny, redheaded fellow next to her. “Go on, George, give them another!”
The tall man looked down, his blue eyes sparkling from under a battered leather hat. He nodded, stroked his ginger goatee for a second, cleared this throat and shouted, “Well, mate, you may not be an atheist now, but you won’t be anything once Gog and Magog can get this bleedin’ fire going!”
But on this occasion, the timing was wrong and the joke fell flat.
Amid the awkward silence, the two bemused executioners grabbed some drier wood, got down on their knees in the stinking mud, and huffed and puffed the twigs into life. They had chosen the method favoured by the Spanish and perfected through the Inquisition – arranging the faggots so that they just reached the victim’s waist. This gave the leering witnesses a clear view of the offender writhing in agony, rather than dying behind a barrier of flame from wood stacked too high.
The flames first danced around Kett’s legs, setting fire to his breeches and
singeing the skin, giving him a terrible preview of what was to come. As they roared into life, under stimulation from a small pair of bellows borrowed from a nearby blacksmith, only Kett’s strong will and defiant intellect enabled him to block out the excruciating pain and hold back from screaming – the very response the crowd had come along to hear.
Nevertheless, the mob roared in glee as the flames finally start to lick around his upper body, setting fire to his shirt, forcing him to throw his head from side to side in anguish.
Their joy was not shared by two men standing at the back, their clothes and demeanour setting them apart from the crowd.
On one, an undernourished, wispy fuzz purporting to be a beard clung tenuously to the outer edges of an almost perfectly oval face. A similarly reedy moustache battled for credence against the authority of two handsome eyebrows and a wonderful shock of brown hair drawn back from an expansive forehead. The symmetrical curve of the sallow face was complemented by two almond-shape brown eyes. Sharp eyes. Quick eyes. The eyes of an observer.
On the other, the hazel eyes had an edge about them, an element of alarm, an indication that the owner was not comfortable yet with his life and his role. He was slightly shorter than his companion, clean-shaven, with sandy hair and paler skin.
Amid the crowd wearing crudely-cut leather trousers and rough shirts, the pair stood out with their tailored breeches, calf-high leather boots, capes, rakish hats with feathers, and colourful doublets over spotless silk shirts.
The shorter of the two men, Thomas Kyd, spoke first. “Why are we here? There is no comfort to be had watching a friend burn at the stake.”
The man with the oval face, Christopher Marlowe, replied, “But there may be some small comfort for him to know that there are people here who believe in what he said.”
It was not uncommon for the well-educated pair of young men to talk about death. They were both writers, with Kyd working on a play, The Spanish Tragedy, in which practically every character meets his demise. An intense young man, Kyd saw this work-in-progress as his big opportunity to break from the humdrum of academia and teaching, and establish himself as a writer.
Cambridge-educated Marlowe, on the other hand, had stolen a march on his friend, and was already becoming the darling of the theatre set. His first play had been performed, a masterpiece about the doomed Dr Faustus, and he was riding high on the triumph.
But the deadly scene before them was no fiction scrawled in longhand on a piece of scrappy parchment. This was the real thing.
The pair fell silent again, watching as the cruel flames began to sear Francis Kett’s flesh so badly it was beginning to melt. Eventually he could hold out no longer and let out an agonized bray. Such was its loudness, so sorrowful did it sound, that it momentarily stilled the bubbling noise of the crowd.
There was an eerie fragment of silence, and then they burst into more shouts of glee.
“My God,” whispered Kyd, as tears welled, “these animals think it’s fun.”
“Did you say God? Is there a God?” answered Marlowe, as the eyes of their friend began to bulge from their sockets and the flesh of his face drained into the flames. “How could you even remotely consider there is a God, a God who would allow such a monstrous thing to happen? Is death a deserved punishment for letting the mind wander into fresh fields of thought that others are so ignorant or so scared to even consider entering?”
“Especially death like this,” said Kyd angrily, “when the men who organise such a disgrace say they are of the cloth and …”
Kyd stopped mid-sentence as he felt the force of Marlowe’s right elbow into his left ribcage. He was about to protest at the rough handling when he saw Marlowe cock his head to a point in space behind Kyd’s right shoulder. “Shhh …”
Standing behind them and to the right was a man looking fixedly at the grotesque scene, apparently oblivious of their discussion. Marlowe had seen this face before. And he knew this man was straining to hear every scrap of their talk over the roar of the crowd.
Richard Baines was not the sort of person you would want gleaning the slightest syllable of your conversation. His weasel face and whippet-like frame matched his role in life as an informer, the ultimate ferret of information for the Court of the Star Chamber – some of it true, most of it not. He thrived in these times of deep suspicion and organised spying, often being seen in dark recesses of the Court, relaying in his familiar hoarse whisper venomous reportage of yet another alleged indiscretion.
Marlowe leaned imperceptibly towards Kyd’s left ear and whispered, “The sewerage runs in the streets of England, and Richard Baines swims in it.”
Kyd cocked his head to Marlowe, indicating that they exit to the side of the square as quickly as possible. Marlowe smiled, looked at Kyd for a moment, then suddenly jumped up on his toes and shouted above the noise of the crowd, “Mr Baines! Mr Baines! You have duties here in Norwich?”
Kyd turned sharply again, looking at Marlowe in shock, puzzled at this senseless turn of events, his face pleading that this conversation be taken no further.
Baines slowly turned to his left, gave a frozen smile, nodded slightly, and moved toward them. “My business takes me everywhere, Mr Marlowe,” he said stiffly, seemingly uncomfortable at being spotted by his quarry.
“You must tire of some of the more distressing elements of the job,” replied Marlowe, nodding toward the flames.
“Some might say this is distressing, Mr Marlowe. I call it a result. Your reward may be the sound of hands clapping. Mine is of flames crackling.”
“I only write of death, Mr Baines. Not engineer it.”
“Let’s hope your words will not one day engineer your own death, Mr Marlowe.”
“Engineer my own death? Now there’s a thought, Mr Baines …”
Baines baulked for a second and then stepped forward, his face an inch from that of Marlowe’s, his eyes glaring. “I hate your type, Marlowe. You and your university friends, with your smart comments, and your scribbling away under patronage, thinking that what you write is important. As the Lord is my God, and Elizabeth is my Queen, I swear I’ll get you.”
And suddenly he was gone, melting into the heaving, foul-smelling crowd.
Kyd shook his head and turned to his friend. “Are you mad, Christopher?” he screamed. “He’s the number one informer! He’ll hightail it back to London tonight, to plant the seeds of our destruction. They’ll never leave us alone.”
“Thomas, just keep writing and making a name for yourself. The more you write, the greater the chance they will not touch you.”
“I can’t believe you would be so brash to do such a thing.”
“I may be a university graduate, Thomas, but don’t forget, I’m still the son of a shoemaker.”
“Then don’t come running to me in your father’s lovingly made shoes when they throw you on the rack.”
“Nor you me, Thomas. Nor you me …”
A mighty roar from the crowd, responding as the flames consumed more of Kett’s body, forced them to look back at the stake. They fell silent, their eyes misting over. It did not matter that they could no longer clearly see the awful image through their tears. The odour of burning flesh told them their friend was dead, destroyed for daring to think.
The flames ultimately died, as did the noise, and the crowd began to disperse.
Even tall, thin George, who had kept up his comments at the executioners all night, had mellowed and was now making friends with his former rivals.
“Well done, lads,” he said to the pair, as they collected their belongings. “A little fire like this every night, and Norwich’ll be the warmest place in all of England.”
Marlowe and Kyd left the square dazed, and wandered off to a nearby inn, seeking ale to block out the sadness.
A pretty, dark-haired, buxom serving wench, her breasts barely contained by her low-cut blouse, brought them drinks at a rickety wooden table in a corner of the tavern.
“There you are, gen
tlemen, you look a little down. This might cheer you up,” she said.
“Nothing can inspire us after what we have witnessed today,” said Kyd.
“You mean,” she said nodding toward the square, “out there.”
“He was our friend,” said Marlowe.
“A lot of us have lost friends in the name of God,” she replied before heading off to serve the next table.
Around them, George and other witnesses of the execution rushed to the bar to lubricate their excited discussion of the event.
“What a world we live in,” mused Kyd, as he watched the unbearably gleeful scene.
“It’s not a world,” said Marlowe, “it’s a state of mind. And of mind control.”
Kyd stared into his beer for several moments. “When Mary left the stage,” he finally said, “they said the killing would stop. How many was it? Two hundred and seventy-four Protestants she burned at the stake in the name of the Pope? Her father, old Henry, the original Protestant himself, he must have turned in his grave.”
“If there was room in there to roll that bloated body of his over.”
“Christopher!!” Kyd hissed. “Sometimes I can never make sense of what goes on in that head of yours.”
“Sense?” said Marlowe, waving his hand expansively at the scene in front of them. “Can anyone make any sense of any of this?”
Marlowe had touched on the heart of the matter, the lack of reasoning - if there could be any sense or reasoning behind religious vengeance - for the death of their friend Francis Kett, and many others. They were living in a country racked with suspicion as Elizabeth restored the Protestant views of her father, Henry VIII. There were still people around who remembered the five long years when her predecessor, her half-sister Mary, had insisted on making post-Henry England Catholic again. Her technique was immortalised in her enduring nickname, Bloody Mary.
Now, under Elizabeth’s encouragement, the bishops of the Church of England had regained the upper hand, and their methods were proving just as brutal.
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