by Ros Barber
and Edward Alleyn’s striding off the stage,
dressed as the thunderous Tamburlaine. ‘Some beer!’
He claps me on the back. ‘Look what you’ve made.
It seems they love a monster. As do I.’
Six years ago is now a life away.
Yet I close my eyes and put my feet up there
as solid as a tavern tabletop,
comfortable as a chair that I rock back
to balancing point, and just sustain in air
because I am young, full of success and praise,
and not yet too much ale.
‘My love! Some more!’
Dear Ned upbraids the tapster’s wife for beer,
orders a double supper, beef and bread,
then closes his eyes as if he hears the crowd
and shakes his head.
‘Oh, that was something, Kit.
I had them in my pocket from the first.
Your words, I tell you. If I had your words
three hours a night, I’d set the world on fire.’
I say, ‘You gave him life, they’re clapping you.
My words, but someone had to speak them, Ned.
An author cannot speak his words himself,
the world would lynch him. And his mother, too,
were she to hear.’
‘The world will hear of this!’
‘As far as the world might go. Perhaps not Kent.’
He laughs. ‘As far as Beckenham at least!
Come, man, your mother would love the show tonight,
if she had dreams for her son of better things.
A simple shepherd can become a king –
you show us how. And with a crown of words
make kings of both of us. This hollow town
will ring to the name of Tamburlaine for years!’
The man who sidles up behind his back
is red and pointy-bearded, greenly cloaked:
‘May it not be so. London’s tortured ears
are sick of it already. Is it news?
Congratulations.’ Proffers up his hand
as if it were a prodding stick. ‘Your name?’
Ned stands to introduce us: mizzen tall.
‘Christopher Marley,’ Ned says, ‘scholar poet –
Robert Greene, author of ladies’ romances.’
Greene slides his palm away. ‘And scholar too
at both the universities. I write
because I need to eat. There’s quite a crowd
of educated masters wielding pens
in London now. You’ve come to join the throng?’
‘He’s come to be head of it!’ says Ned, quite drunk
on the crowd’s applause, and sitting down as hard
as a man will sit on his conscience. ‘Come now, Robert.
Did you not see the play? A masterpiece.’
Greene’s sigh could strip his beard. ‘Not see, exactly,
but rather heard in roars along the street
when I was on my way here. And the chat,’
he motions round the tavern, ‘tells the plot.
Tell me, young Master Marlowe, scholar poet.
Is violence poetic? Should you write
so beautifully about atrocities?
I hear your hero has a monstrous rage
and murders his own children. What of love?
Do modern poets not have time for love?
Is it extinct?’
How wrong a man can judge.
And he heard my second syllable as ‘low’.
I let it pass. ‘Love is a mystery,’
I say, as a wench’s hips sway past my eyes.
‘Each person craves it, yet it doesn’t sell.
Or so I’m told. We cannot dine on love.
Perhaps too few believe in it.’
‘It’s true,’
Ned elbows in, ‘the modern public like
their entertainments savage. Buckets of blood,
and heartlessness. Or how could we compete
with public executions? Hanging’s free.’
Greene stays with me. ‘A Cambridge boy, I’m right?
We might have shared a tutor. William Gage?
I was at Benet first.’ He rubs his chin,
as though his beard’s a bet he’s bringing in
against the fluff of my young moustache. ‘You were
a sizar? Not a pensioner?’ He trawls,
fishing for scraps that he might hang on me.
What is my father’s trade? For he smells trade.
He guesses it straight away, as if my name
has come to him before.
‘A cobbler’s son?’
‘But then Our Lord’s son was a carpenter.
The trades are honest. Everyone needs shoes.’
My father’s words, my mouth. ‘Whose son are you?’
‘A petty miser. Hard as gold is soft
and can be clipped. He has disowned me, though.
I’m disinherited. A writer’s lot,
as you will learn, is not all sweet applause,
and there’s no wealth in it. There’s ladies, though’
– exchanging winks with one – ‘if you’re not bent
or too high-minded.’
‘Robert, will you join us?’
Ned doesn’t catch the slurs, his beery speech
too full of them to find a fault elsewhere.
I motion at the chair. Greene hesitates.
‘You don’t prefer to celebrate alone?
I wouldn’t want to steal your evening.’
‘I’d
be happy to hear how you live by the pen.
There must be quite an art to it,’ I say.
Greene eyes me carefully. ‘I don’t give tips
to the competition. Nose out. But I’ll stay.
So long as there’s wine and Ned is paying for it.
The good stuff. French. None of that sherry stuff.’
He pulls a chair in. Ned is scandalised.
‘Seems one too many free dinners has spoiled your palate!’
‘Too many? Who can have too many?’ Greene
twiddles his beard to dislodge evidence.
An hour he drank with us before a whore
was his excuse to leave us. All that hour
he talked about his books and of the plays
he promised to Ned. Occasionally he smiled,
but only sidewise, flinching every time
a groundling came to give Alleyn a slap
for his performance. ‘How to follow that?
Great Tamburlaine has clearly conquered all.’
He eyed me shrewdly. ‘After such a play,
the next must surely disappoint us, no?’
‘More of the same!’ cries Ned, still full in sail.
‘Tell us what happens next. How does he die?
Who overthrows him?’
None but God himself,
as I have learnt, but didn’t answer then.
I let the bluffers fill the empty space.
Ned offered up a plot. I had my own:
to guard my tongue, but give rein to my pen.
THE LOW COUNTRIES
A room above an inn. The foreign words
on floors beneath me, drifting up like smoke
from kitchen servants, say I’m the stranger here.
The fields are almost marsh. Two days of rain
and still the skies are pouring. Clothing, soaked,
sweating before the open fire. My skin
is wrinkled as the elderly, my feet
as white and sodden as the Dover cliffs
stood out in water. All my papers soaked,
the ink cried out of them: a blot, a streak,
then blank again. Last night, I dreamt of rape.
From the space under my cot, from all the quiet
beneath my sleeping body, came the shift
of someone who had waited for my
breath
to slow and mark that I was vulnerable.
A shadow consolidated into flesh,
some man who needed, more than meat or drink,
my soul’s destruction. Not a face, no voice,
but the cold desire for what he couldn’t have
I recognised. Intrusion was his name.
And the cry of fear he stuffed back in my throat
with fists of bedclothes echoed in the room:
a room with no one in it. Yet, afraid,
I kept my eyes on the door until the first
dull light began to detail me, alone.
I drifted back to sleep just after dawn,
exhausted by my vigilance and fear,
and found myself at the nightmare’s end, distressed
and running room to room in some great palace,
with no one recognising me as friend,
and, bursting finally into a hall,
my nightshirt torn, my privacy exposed,
I found myself half dressed before a court
of witnesses. The room was thick with them,
the walled-up souls who manage history.
‘Hold her down fast,’ they said. ‘Cut out her tongue.’
The rain falls still. It’s two hours after noon.
The silent shame that followed from my dream
is reeking from the dampness of the clothes
I took a walk in, trying to be clean,
though all the dirt is on the inside now.
And bursting to be told, to be let out,
but, with the stain of it, who can I tell
who wouldn’t blame me for inflaming it?
I take my driest paper, mix the ink,
and open where the daughter stumbles in
with bleeding stumps for hands, a bloody chin,
and blood ballooning as she tries to speak;
each word a victim of her absent tongue
translated to an empty sphere of air;
anguished to tell some caring heart who wreaked
this violent silence over their guilty deed.
But speechlessness has rendered her a worm:
no hands to write, no tongue to speak until
she spies the book that spells another’s tale –
the silenced woman turned to nightingale
who sings, and in her singing, is avenged.
ARMADA YEAR
London. How fondly, thinking of her now,
I conjure up her smells: her market stalls,
the horse manure, the river’s fishy taint.
Can hear her in my ears like old advice:
the racket of the carts, the coster-wife
who’d shout out, ‘Flowers are lovely,’ to the rich
as I wandered back from breakfast to my desk.
I’d make the world in words, I’d show it things
you’d only see in mirrored glass, and then
scratch off the silver, let the truth go through.
The loveliness of youth. The innocence.
Government duty helped me pay the rent.
From time to time, called up as messenger:
the small thrill when my strict instructions were
to give the message personally to men
as close to princes as pond lilies are
to the water’s edge. Each courtier, each swain,
was study for my second Tamburlaine.
Watson was newly married: he and Ann
took up a lease above a draper’s shop
in Norton Folgate. I lodged in the roof.
‘So, Kit, how goes it?’ Watson, entering
the room I wrote in through those early months;
the smell of starch and boiled onions.
‘Tom,
can I greet you first?’
I feel that warm embrace
as if his arms are round me now, and not
this blanket. Missing him wells up, like blood
from a fresh wound, as I let my memory bathe
in that early evening as we pulled apart.
‘How’s the writing going?’
‘How was France?’
He laughed,
‘You first! You know I’m paid for my discretion.
No gossip for you before the third beer. So.
The shepherd king, sir? How’s your second part?’
‘Obscene. I had to pump the horror up;
dear Ned insisted.’
‘Have you eaten yet?
Can I tempt you to the tavern? All the light’s
gone out of the day. What say you? Save your wax
and dine with me. The Queen is paying for it.’
‘I’m halfway through a scene.’
‘And stuck?’
He read
my mind most clearly when he was relaxed.
‘Come back to it tomorrow when you’re fresh.
Your brain can solve it overnight, if greased
and given sustenance. Come on.’
He was
persuasive, warm. The most insistent arm
ever to link with mine and march me down
three flights of stairs and out into the night
to marvel at mud and stars. He was the shape
I moulded myself to, because he made
such wondrous things as him seem possible.
We strode into the tavern, earned a wink
from Kate the barmaid as she wiggled by,
two trays of food well-balanced. ‘Christopher,
you may slip in there; I’m a married man.’
To neighbours, ‘Well met, Harry! How’s the boil?
My wife can brew an unction. Hunt her down!’
We took the private corner he preferred.
‘How do you fare for money?’
‘Not so well.’
‘Still hiring the horse, though.’
‘I must have the horse.
Tom, without the horse, I’m five foot five
and half the world looks down on me.’
‘I know.
Create the show and men believe it’s true.
Dress rich, ride rich, be rich. When will it work
do you think?’
‘Don’t doubt me, Tom. I’m come this far
with nothing but belief. A cobbler’s son
who now is qualified a gentleman.’
The corners of his mouth twitched like a fly
in a spider’s web that movement fast reveals.
‘Don’t toy with me, Tom.’
‘Oh, we are serious.
I’m glad you have the horse, still. As for money,
the horse might get you more of it.’
‘How’s that?’
He leant in closer, made our wall-less room.
‘A Spanish invasion fleet is being prepared.’
My pulse leapt like a stag. ‘Twelve dozen ships
bearing three thousand guns. There will be peace
negotiations. But. We believe they’ll fail.’
‘The execution of the Queen of Scots –’
‘– has angered the Catholics greatly, yes, my friend.’
He dropped his voice two registers, as Kate
yawed to the side to fill our cups with ale.
‘A horse eats up the distances,’ he smiled
until she passed, ‘between the enemy
and us. We need a network on the ground.’
Watson took two short sips beneath the froth
and smacked his lips.
‘Pack and be ready to go.
You’ll not be called until the chain’s in place
through which to pass your information. But
be ready to serve your country.’
‘Tamburlaine!’
The room filled with his roar as Edward Alleyn
created a stage around him. ‘Is it done?
I thought I’d find you here. Where is my play?
Have you got time for drinking?’
‘It’s my first!’
‘He’s lying, this is number three,’ Tom said,
and shook his hand.
‘You poets. Always thirsty.
Can a humble actor join you?’
‘Certainly!
Where is this man, sir? Let us be introduced.’
Ned bellowed with laughter. ‘You are very rude!’
‘In the meanwhile,’ Watson said, ‘please be our guest.
Though our purse is empty, if you might chip in.’
Tom had been writing plays for Ned for months,
though secretly, without his name to them.
‘If it’s not Latin, it’s not scholarly;
I cannot own the thing,’ he told me once.
Ned’s quick riposte, ‘Both spent my money, then?’
was subtle as a knife in an oyster shell.
‘I may have information,’ Watson said.
‘Some advance notice. What will be on the minds
of summer’s audience. You could plan ahead.’
Alleyn was interested. ‘Go on, then, speak.’
‘Better not speak,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll write it down.
Read it and cast it on the fire. And should
anyone ask how you’re so prescient,
say you consulted an astrologer.’
Ned tapped his nose. ‘Come on, then.’ Watson tore
the corner off a playbill on the wall,
borrowed the quill the tapster kept for sums
and scratched some words for Ned.
His brows rose up
like a crowd for an ovation.
‘This is news.’
‘Valuable news?’
‘I’ll double the summer gates