The Shakespeare Notebooks

  But is there no tale compassed in firmament of Earth?

  Lower my horizons from Jove’s thunders.

  MAGISTER

  Fair enough, Kit. Thou art a small town boy

  And this is a crazy world. Let us now

  Talk not of paradise or creation, but mark the show

  What Rome contains for to delight thine eyes?

  Pageant – enter CAESAR. He is stabbed by CONSPIRATORS. Following him in procession are many famous ROMANS

  MAGISTER

  The noblest Roman of them all, cut down.

  And here is Cleopatra coming at you,

  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

  Her infinite variety. She’s beautiful

  She’s beautiful indeed.

  Enter more characters

  MARLOWE

  And what means the sour looks of this sad prince?

  MAGISTER

  This is tragic Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

  ’Tis a mad world, ’tis a sad world for him.

  Followed by Scotland’s dark King Macbeth

  Here come massy Faerie throngs

  And there prosperous Prospero.

  Shall not I make dour Hamlet sing to thee?

  Here’s Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.

  MARLOWE

  All! All! These people cram up my brain with good ideas!

  Settle thy studies, Marlowe, and begin

  To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess

  Be a playwright, Marlowe, heap up gold,

  And be eternized for these wondrous parts.

  Couldst thou make men to live eternally,

  Or, being dead, raise them to life again?

  No emperor shall live but by my leave.

  What doctrine call you this?

  MAGISTER

  Che sera sera

  What will be, will be. Divinity adieu

  Here Marlowe, try thy brains to gain a deity.

  MARLOWE writes quickly as the pageant dances

  MARLOWE

  I have a thought.

  MAGISTER

  You have many.

  MARLOWE

  Yet more.

  Tell me, noble Mephistophilis, where

  Sprang these great stories that fill my mind?

  MAGISTER

  Ah, ask not that.

  MARLOWE

  I must and shall.

  MAGISTER

  When thou took’st the books

  To view the stories, then I turned the leaves

  And led thine eye. Shall we say

  Where there’s a will, there’s a way?

  MARLOWE

  Shakespeare?

  MAGISTER

  All his fine plays are laid before thee.

  His labouring brain

  Begets a world of idle fantasies.

  At risk of spoilers, I confide to thee

  These are all the works he has yet to write.

  And every one a winner.

  MARLOWE

  Quod me nutrit, me destruit

  What feeds me also brings me down.

  Magister, what have you done? I am undone!

  MAGISTER

  Say it ain’t so. Surely better the devil you know.

  This, here I swear by my royal seat.

  MARLOWE

  Well, you may kiss it then.

  O would I had never seen London, never read book

  Oh for the vain pleasure of four and thirty plays hath

  Marlowe lost eternal joy and felicity.

  False friend thou. My pen is overcast,

  It inks another’s brains. Forgive me, Will.

  Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

  MAGISTER

  Ungrateful wretch! I’ll make thee doll small.

  MARLOWE

  Fine. Lay on, sir. Magister do thy worst.

  All these glorious stories shall still be told.

  But not by me. I’ll write no more.

  Ah, I’ll burn my books.

  MAGISTER

  You’ll write no more?

  MARLOWE

  Not one word.

  MAGISTER

  Hadst thou kept on that way, Marlowe behold

  In what resplendent glory thou hadst sat

  In yonder throne, like that bright shining Shakes.

  Tea towels, mugs, placemats and penguin classics

  But, no, you suffered a loss of faith, and so must

  Your stories end.

  MARLOWE

  Come not near me, Magister.

  MAGISTER

  Come, gentle coz. Pick up they pen.

  Thou art bewitched, bothered and bewildered.

  Just one play more – Othello, why he’s a jolly fellow

  Or Sir John Falstaff, he’s good for a laugh.

  MARLOWE

  I’ll pen no more. My stop is full.

  If all the pens that ever poets held

  Had fed the feelings of this Master’s thoughts

  If all the heavenly quintessence that they still

  From their immortal flowers of poesy

  Yet should there hover in their restless breasts

  One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least

  Which into words no virtue can digest.

  MAGISTER

  Sometimes I find thee hard to follow. Does this mean you’re done?

  MARLOWE

  Ay.

  MAGISTER

  Then hear that drum?

  ’Tis the sound of the underground

  The beat of the drum goes round and round.

  These boots were made for walking

  And that is just what they shall do

  Today my boots shall walk all over you.

  Go back to thy tavern. I’ll not stop you.

  Your appointment with fate is overdue.

  MARLOWE

  Aye, I have done her majestie good service

  Under cloak and dagger, dagger and cloak.

  I have few friends at home, many enemies abroad

  I have long deserved to be rewarded for my faithfull dealinge.

  Return me to the inn where you found me

  My recknynge must at last be paid in full.

  MAGISTER

  I could have saved you. It is not yet too late.

  ’Tis your last chance of living and your first chance to die.

  I can yet keep you from the last chance saloon.

  MARLOWE

  Nay good close friend, for so I call thee Magister.

  O gentle Marlowe, leave this damned art

  This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell.

  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

  The devil will come and Marlowe must be damned.

  Exeunt

  MAGISTER

  Say thou won’t leave me no more

  And I shall take thee back again

  I shall forgive and forget

  If thou say thou shalt never go

  For ’tis always better the devil you know.

  SCENE VII – A TAVERN IN DEPTFORD

  MARLOWE

  Hulloa Dullberry, Adieu Dobbin

  Spials all. Unsheath thy curtle-axes

  For there sits Death, there sits imperious Death

  Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge

  Fall to friends.

  They slay MARLOWE

  MARLOWE

  My bloodless body waxes chill and cold

  And with my blood my life slides through my wound

  My soul begins to take her flight to hell

  And summons all my senses to depart.

  This is my mind and I will have it so.

  Dies

  MAGISTER

  Ah well. You can’t win them all.

  Pride comes before a fall.

  I have played all my cards

  And that is what you’ve done too

  Besides victory, there remains destiny.

/>   The loser stands right small

  And the winner takes it all.

  * * *

  Double, double, toil and trouble; if we are caught in a time bubble.

  * * *

  THE SONNETS

  These early drafts of some of Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnets appear throughout the Notebooks. Where they are prefaced by a dedication or other explanatory text, this is given. But most are simply presented as they appear here.

  Sonnet 1

  This version of the sonnet appears in the Notebooks addressed, a MS addition asserts, ‘To an Old Man by his Grand-daughter’.

  From fairest creatures we desire increase,

  That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

  Those Venus night-fish cooked on a caprice

  The plants of Esto when they sing and sigh.

  I have of late seen Daleks in the street,

  In Bedfordshire and on the Edgware Road.

  And though they suffered terrible defeat,

  Here thrive the weeds their seeds of war have sowed.

  To mine eye, though, this seems not the world’s end.

  ’Tis but a new one moving within reach.

  Rivers unchoke, skies clear and deep wounds mend,

  For here dwells my belov’d. Thus I beseech:

  Go forward in beliefs I know are thine

  To prove that I am not mistook in mine.

  Sonnet 2

  This sonnet is apparently ‘From a Lord departing into Exile’

  When fifty winters shall besiege my brow –

  Though add a thousand more to get it right –

  Yes, then, and only then, could I allow

  You lot to send me into that good night.

  I stand here in the dock before a screen

  On which you’ve thrown a hideous display.

  The most peculiar bunch I’ve ever seen:

  Too old, too young, too fat, too thin. I say,

  Is keeping my own head too much to ask?

  If I’m confined in exile in one place

  Defending it from monsters – onerous task! –

  It’s better done with a familiar face.

  I do maintain I have the right to choose!

  Oh dear. That nose! (And what’s with these tattoos?)

  Sonnet 3

  Again, this early version of what would become Sonnet 3 is prefaced in the Notebooks by a note: ‘From a friar to his pupil’.

  Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

  Now is the time that face should form another;

  Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

  Will fall past Artron’s power to recover.

  For thou hast trod this troubled way before:

  Worn thin by Mondas at the snowcapped pole;

  Redrawn by force in Time Lord court of law

  And cast as army helpmeet, or such role.

  But now, thou needs must face thy greatest fear.

  The Great One’s fire hath hollowed out each bone,

  And death, or death’s own spider creeps too near

  For thou to flee. ’Tis time to die alone.

  Old man, embrace the joy of thy removement.

  Methinks the nose a definite improvement.

  * * *

  This was the noblest Romana of them all.

  * * *

  Sonnet 12

  When I do count the clock that tells the time

  And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,

  When I behold the readings’ ceaseless climb.

  And mark the Fault Locator’s flick’ring light

  When scissor blades are sunk into the bed

  Tight hands around my neck increase their grip,

  And on the scanner images are read

  Of Quinnis where we nearly lost the Ship

  Then of thy motives do I question make,

  And think to banish thee into the void

  If not for mine, then for my Susan’s sake,

  As soon, it seems, we four will be destroyed;

  Unless some other cause I can construe

  Within these shapes of twisted ormolu.

  Sonnet 14

  From lights above I did my judgement pluck;

  Now I possess a new Astrology,

  But not to tell of good or evil luck,

  Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;

  My prophecies have changed their nature since

  A light fell from the heavens into mine eyes

  Now I do steer the fortune of a prince,

  Determine which duke lives and which king dies.

  There lives now here on Earth a fateful star

  It burns among my acolytes, and soon

  The fateful helix called Mandragora

  Will swallow up the pale face of the moon

  For San Marino I prognosticate:

  A holy darkness falls upon this date.

  Sonnet 15

  When I consider everything that grows

  Beneath the span of my cathedral green

  The liberated bonsai trees, the rose,

  The crabbed old pod no botanist has seen.

  When I perceive that men owe their increase

  To felling forests, gorging herbs and fruits;

  Despoiling precious verdure without cease

  Tearing defenceless nature at the roots,

  I am compelled to sow their seeds of doom,

  To found a green and silent paradise:

  O, let a million hungry flowers bloom

  Inspired by life from ’neath Antarctic ice.

  A revolution blossoms in these grounds

  My Floriana Requiem resounds.

  Sonnet 16

  A note prefaces this sonnet: ‘From an Exile to his Dead King’.

  But wherefore do not you a mightier way

  Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?

  And fortify your self in your decay,

  As I did, ’tombed within Jurassic lime?

  For years thrice fifty million I endured

  Sustained by hope of vengeance on my kind;

  A fragment lost beneath the earth, abjured

  By all the judges that I left behind.

  And here you sit, a corpse upon a chair –

  Old Rokon, monarch of an empty waste

  Mummified in Kastria’s glacial air;

  Cities and thrones and powers all quite erased.

  So I, as next in line, you now address

  As I become the king of nothingness.

  Sonnet 18

  Perhaps the best-known of all Shakespeare’s sonnets, this early draft appears without explanation.

  Shall I compare thee to a Type Fifty?

  Thou art more lovely and more temporal:

  Rough time winds shake the positronic flow,

  And Fast Return hath all too short a spring:

  Sometime too hot the Eye of Harmony

  Is by a Temporal Orbit stopped at last

  And every wheezing groan sometime declines,

  By chance, or Vortex changing course untrimmed:

  But thy materialisation shall not fade,

  Nor lose possession of thy Time Rotor,

  Nor shall death brag thou wander’st Gallifrey,

  Wherein eternal Rassilon dost thrive,

  So long as Time Lords plot, or Daleks kill,

  So long my TARDIS will you serve me still.

  Sonnet 19

  Devouring Time, blunt thou Urbankan claws

  And make Xeriphas’ brood devour its own.

  Pluck the keen teeth from dreaded Mara’s jaws,

  And bring the baleful Malus crashing down;

  Shipwreck the chill Eternals and despoil

  Whole fields of celery and orchids black.

  Let me pick chacaws or endure the toil

  Of heaving oars for monstrous Captain Wrack.

  But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:

  Let not Spectrox extract its deadly due

  From Peri
, newly travelled into time.

  Until I prove Professor Jackij true

  I’ll struggle on until my final breath.

  Feels different this time. Brave heart. Is this Death?

  Sonnet 27

  Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

  The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

  But then begins a journey in my head

  To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:

  Methinks I stood upon a high white tower

  Fell like a stone towards the grassy earth;

  Methinks I felt an occupying power

  Polluting me; disrupting my rebirth.

  Two faithful friends brought me from outer space

  To Castrovalva, shining on a hill.

  It seems to be tranquil, ordered place,

  And yet these painful dreams, they plague me still.

  A shadow now falls fast, it seems to me,

  Upon the dwellings of simplicity.

  Sonnet 29

  Again, there is an introductory note to this early draft: ‘The lament of a Great Engineer’.

  When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

  Wishing that I had found some safer course

  To gift my race with temporal power undreamed.

  When I absorbed that nova’s dreadful force

  I burnt within the sun. I died, it seemed.

  But now I know that firestorms worse than hell

  Corroded me to something like a ghost.

  And in this will-created world I dwell

  Denied the life that I desire the most.

  They think of me, and my achievements laud.

  But this I trow: I should have been a god.

  Sonnet 53

  What is your substance, whereof are you made,

  That millions of strange shadows on you tend,

  Black multitudes concealed in every shade?

  A death too horrible to comprehend

  Is met by those who stray into your maw.

  You are the twilight settling on the stair;

  The darkling form upon the marble floor;

  Who would have guessed that motes upon the air

  Could harbour such an appetite for flesh?

  Methinks I see you now, between the shelves;