Upstart Crow

by Ben Elton

  LUCY: This being the faith that says God sent his son from heaven via a miraculously inseminated virgin, which is so much more logical than a string of flying cows.

  KIT MARLOWE: Oh, do give it a rest, Greene. Just because you’ve managed to oil your way into a Walsingham spy team along with us hard guys doesn’t mean there’s a Catholic terrorist at every table.

  Greene pointeth in fury at Will and Marlowe’s table.

  ROBERT GREENE: Wafers and wine, wafers and wine, Mr Marlowe! Why, you and this cohort of unrepentant heretics be celebrating Catholic communion. You will burn for it!

  Greene’s henchmen threaten Will and Marlowe with their spears.

  WILL: Wafers and wine and cheese, Mr Greene. It’s not the eucharist, it’s a ploughman’s lunch.fn2

  KIT MARLOWE: I do hope you’re not gonna be such an utter arsemongle on the Warwickshire mission, Greene, otherwise it will get very boring.

  ROBERT GREENE: I shall do my duty, Mr Marlowe. The Queen’s life is ever threatened and none be above suspicion. (Threateningly) None.

  The odious Greene departeth.

  WILL: Warwickshire mission, Kit? My neck of the woods?

  KIT MARLOWE: Yeah. Another Jesuit snuck across the Channel from the English College at Douai, the Pope’s private spy factory.fn3 We’ve traced the swine to the Midlands. Right, better go and get the sword sharpened.

  WILL: Love you loads.

  Marlowe departeth.

  BURBAGE: Jesuit spies, papist assassins – these are dangerous times, Will, and indeed none be above suspicion. Essex is already frozen out.

  CONDELL: Sussex is under a dark cloud.

  BURBAGE: Norfolk awaits a storm.

  KEMPE: Mind you, I’ve heard Cornwall’s lovely this time of year. Joking, maybe, riffing, rolling with it, finding, oh, the funny.

  WILL: Or in this case, finding the not funny.

  KEMPE: Or taking the not funny and pushing it to that special place, beyond the funny.

  WILL: Thereby cunningly bypassing the actual funny altogether.

  KEMPE: Yeah.

  BURBAGE: Everyone’s loyalty be questioned. Even we poor players are under constant scrutiny. Our productions must be faultlessly patriotic, a farrago of mendacious propaganda.

  CONDELL: Like your Richard the Third, Will, whom you did depict as a brutal psychopath.

  WILL: Well, he was a bit of a psychopath. Murdered his own nephews in the tower – definitely not cool.

  BURBAGE: Yes, but in your play you had the hunchback king murder his own brother, which was a lie.

  WILL: I prefer the phrase ‘alternative fact’.fn4

  CONDELL: You also had Richard murder his brother’s wife.

  BURBAGE: Yes, and his wife’s former husband. And Henry the Sixth and Henry the Sixth’s son Edward, neither of which he actually did.

  CONDELL: And he wasn’t a hunchback.

  KEMPE: Just a bit of scoliosis.

  WILL: But the Queen loved it. Thus lies become truth. Perhaps in some future age despotic megalomaniacs will not secure power through lies, false news and the rewriting of history. But for now, the bigger the porkies you tell, the greater the power you wield. Gentlemen, I feel another Henry coming on.

  All do groan most wearily at the prospect of another play from Shakespeare about a Henry.

  WILL’S LONDON LODGINGS – DAY

  Will be at his papers. Kate doth berate him most vexedly.

  KATE: Henry the Eighth? You’re going to sanitize the reputation of the meanest, cruellest monarch that ever lived?

  WILL: Yes, I am. I’ll play it as light romantic comedy with plenty of sauce. When Harry met Cathy. And Anne. Also Jane … another Anne and two more Cathys. One king, six queens, will he get his Hampton Court?

  Bottom joins them.

  KATE: Mr Shakespeare, Henry the Eighth was a monster. You should do Henry the Fifth – such a heroic figure.

  WILL: Henry the Fifth was an utter bore and everyone knows it. A pious, humourless killjoy who attended three masses a day, forswore the company of women and marched round France killing people because apparently it was what God really, really wanted.fn5

  BOTTOM: It’s funny how the more religious a person is, the more murderous they seem to get.

  WILL: Hmm, a brutal lesson which I learnt at school, Bottom, where the master regularly asked God for strength as he flayed the flesh from my botty buttocks. He was quite simply the most terrifying child-care professional since King Herod opened the Bethlehem crèche. His name was Simon Hunt, so you can imagine what we called him.fn6

  BOTTOM: Open goal.

  WILL: Yeah.

  KATE: Don’t you think it’s deeply revealing and rather depressing that when wishing to express angry contempt men use imagery relating to the female sexual anatomy?

  WILL: Kate, the man’s name was Simon Hunt, what would you have had us call him? If his name had been Berty Venus, we’d have called him Spurty—

  To hide her blushes Kate doth speedily interrupt.

  KATE: Yes! But it wouldn’t have been as potent, would it?

  WILL: I don’t follow.

  KATE: Well, think about it. In the lexicon of male abuse, is any cod-dangle word ever as powerful an expression of hatred as a term that hails from the tufted lady grotto?

  BOTTOM: I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about. But I bet you’d like to tell that old bastable Hunt what you think of him now, wouldn’t you, master?

  WILL: Yes, I would, Bottom. I’d slaughter him with one of my brilliant insults. How about that cracker from Richard the Third? ‘Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog.’

  BOTTOM: You got anything stronger?

  WILL: Well, there’s that one from my Titus Andronicus: ‘Villain, I have done thy mother.’

  BOTTOM: Oh, that’ll hurt.

  KATE: And once again we see that for a really powerful insult, men must need resort to sexually degrading images of women.

  BOTTOM: I still don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate, but maybe we should look this Hunt up if we go to Stratters, see if he’s still living.

  WILL: He may still be living, but not in Stratford. He refused to recant the old religion and left England in 1575. I hardly think an avowed papist is likely to turn up with Liz on the throne. Not unless he’s planning to assassinate her.fn7

  The company departeth for Stratford.

  WILL’S STRATFORD HOME – DAY

  John and Mary sit before the fire. The twins do gambol about. Anne is at her women’s tasks and Susanna’s countenance be as ever most furious.

  WILL: Darling, I’m home. And if you want to know why I wasn’t home yesterday, blame the Pope for turning every Catholic in Britain into a suspected terrorist. We were delayed half a day when some dung-brained arsemongle on my coach claimed another passenger looked ‘a bit Italian’ and he thought he’d heard him muttering Latin under his breath. Turned out the man was Welsh and that his suspected lethal weapon was a particularly knobbly leek.

  ANNE: Still, lovely to have you home.

  WILL: Yes, I’m returned to write my latest play. It is to be a history and Kate has come as my research assistant.

  Kate doth enter, followed by Bottom, burdened with bags most cruelly.

  BOTTOM: Morning, Mrs S, Mr S, Mrs S, Miss S. Where do you want the bags? I presume I’m in with the cow?

  JOHN: Don’t be so bloody cheeky – where would I sleep?

  MARY: I do not find that funny, John Shakespeare.

  JOHN: She does, she loves it.

  MARY: I do not love it. I tolerate it because I feel sorry for you.

  JOHN: Sorry for me? Why would you feel sorry for me? I’m a right roister doister.

  MARY: You think you are but you’re not. You’ve turned the whole town against you. Nobody will drink with him any more because of his lies and cheating and scrounging money. Oh, they used to find him amusing, with his saucy tales and drunken japes, but all be sick of it.

  John pretendeth not to hear as Mary
doth berate him most firmly.

  MARY: They call him ‘foul-stuff’, John Foul-stuff. It’s why he wants that coat of arms, thinks it’ll make him friends again, but it won’t.

  ANNE: I expect you’re all famished after your long journey? Well, there’s a fine stew on the fire. Bottom, will you dish up?

  BOTTOM: I suppose I’d better had do. Whoever it was who coined the phrase ‘a change is as good as a rest’ obviously wasn’t a servant.

  WILL: That was me, wasn’t it? Yes, I think that’s definitely one of mine.

  BOTTOM: So when my gran used to say that to me when I was a tiny, tiny lad, she was quoting you then, was she?

  ANNE: You really have got to stop taking well-known sayings and claiming you wrote them, Will. You’re better than that, you know you are.fn8

  Moments pass and all do now attend the table.

  JOHN: So what’s this new historical crap you’re writing then, Will?

  WILL: I’m going for the biggie, Dad. Henry the Eighth.

  ANNE: Henry the Eighth? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch dramas about him or any of the Tudors.fn9

  MARY: That devil destroyed the one true faith.

  WILL: Mum, we do not call Catholicism the one true faith. It was the one true faith under the last queen. Under the current crazed harridan it is satanic heresy. Do try and keep up.

  KATE: I don’t think Mr Shakespeare should cover Henry the Eighth either, Mrs Shakespeare. The man’s life was one long catalogue of religious hypocrisy, domestic violence and murders of convenience.fn10

  JOHN: Sounds like my kind of play.

  WILL: I’m sure he had a good side, some redeeming features.

  SUSANNA: Dad, he cut off two of his wives’ heads.

  WILL: I am aware, my sweet.

  SUSANNA: He didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you don’t really get me any more, we need to give each other space.’ He cut off their heads.

  WILL: Well, sometimes with relationships it’s better to make a clean break. Now, now, come on, everyone, we’re looking for King Harry’s positive points.

  MARY: Well, he made Wales and England into one kingdom.

  WILL: Hmm, I think I’ll leave that out. Not making any friends on either side there.

  KATE: Although of course the union did make sound economic sense, promoting growth by breaking down trade barriers and allowing for free movements of goods, services and labour.

  WILL: Hmm, yes, Kate, but if there’s one thing we know about the British, be we Welsh, Scottish or, pardon me for living, English, it’s that when it comes to a choice between sound economic sense and bloody-minded petty nationalism, then the world can get stufflington because we want our countries back, no matter how small, cold, wet or utterly impoverished they may be. Anything else?

  ANNE: He wrote ‘Greensleeves’.

  WILL: He did not write ‘Greensleeves’. That is a common misconception which no doubt will be corrected with time.fn11

  KATE: He was a great scholar, for all his boorish, violent ways. He wrote Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, a staunch defence of Catholicism, for which Pope Leo the Tenth gave him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.fn12

  WILL: Hmm, this would be the faith that a week later he started burning people for believing in.

  MARY: The one true one.

  WILL: No, Mum, satanic heresy! You’ve gotta try and get your head around that. (To Kate) Anything else?

  KATE: Well, plenty, but none of it very nice. He passed the Succession Law, which declared his own daughters illegitimate.

  WILL: Yes, not a good look. One thing calling your kids a couple of little bastables, we all do that, but it’s another to make it an act of parliament. This is gonna be tougher than I thought.

  KATE: I’m telling you, Mr Shakespeare, do Henry the Fifth, the hero of Agincourt.

  WILL: I’m telling you, Kate, he was a self-righteous bore. If I wrote a play about him, I’d have to come up with some other, really memorable character to draw focus, some gross and bawdy but ultimately pathetic figure who could lead Prince Hal astray, thus mitigating his piety and creating a good dynamic for when Hal becomes king and must renounce his gadsome ways.

  KATE: Well, that sounds promising.

  WILL: Yes, but what form would this character take? Who could I base it on?

  JOHN: Here, Bottom, look at my parsnip. It’s like a giant cod-dangle with a couple of hairy bolingbrokes – brilliant.

  John doth hold up a parsnip that bears a remote resemblance to the outline of a cock and balls. All are most embarrassed at John’s boorish attempt at wit.

  BOTTOM: Yeah.

  There be a knock at the door.

  ANNE: Who can that be at this hour? (Goes to the window and peereth out) Oh my goodness, I don’t believe it! It’s the old town schoolmaster.

  Will jumpeth up, all of a doodah.

  WILL: Simon Hunt? Here? At our door?

  ANNE: Yes.

  BOTTOM: What a bit of luck! Here’s your chance to call him an abortive rooting hog and say you’ve done his mum, like you said you would.

  Will be covered in fear and jitters like a quaking palsy.

  WILL: Is my collar clean? My shoes, my fingernails? Oh my God, I must scrub my fingernails!

  Simon Hunt, a most stern old bastable, doth enter with angry countenance.

  HUNT: Ah, Shakespeare. Is it you? Turn around and bend over.

  To the astonishment of all, Will doth turn around and present his botty buttocks to the old man.

  HUNT: Yes, that’s you.

  WILL: Er, yes, er, please, sir, it’s me, sir, but may I ask, sir, what, what brings you here, sir?

  HUNT: I have come for a visit.

  WILL: Er, a visit? You, you want to stay?

  Hunt, filled with angry pride, doth sit at the table all uninvited. Anne taketh Will aside.

  ANNE: Will, this be Hunt. Many stories have you told me about his cruelty. Send him packing.

  WILL: Yes, absolutely. I will. I’ll, I’ll tell him to get out of my house right now.

  Will does nothing. Instead he quaketh like a quivering poltroon.

  UPSTAIRS – NIGHT

  Will and Anne are in John and Mary’s chamber. All four are in one bed and most cramped.

  ANNE: I can’t believe you gave him our bed.

  WILL: Oh, I know, but I’m emotionally scarred. I can’t stand up to him. The wounds run too deep. I’m sure he’ll leave soon, and he hasn’t been any trouble so far.

  The sound of Latin being chanted downstairs can be heard.

  ANNE: What’s that?

  MARY: What’s that? Why, ’tis a sound that’s ne’er been heard in England since the glory days of good Queen Mary.

  WILL: Oh my God.

  Will doth jumpeth out of bed. All do follow.

  DOWNSTAIRS – NIGHT

  All the household, awoken by the sound of Latin, have gathered on the stairs. Here they stand in shock as Simon Hunt conducts a service at the kitchen table.

  WILL: He’s celebrating Mass.

  Mary, as if in a trance, doth approach Hunt and kneel before him.

  JOHN: Oh God, she’s off. Once a bleeding Catholic …

  WILL: She’s eating the wafer! They burn you for eating a wafer.fn13

  JOHN: She’ll be insisting on having marital conjugation through a hole in the sheet again before you know it, like on our wedding night. I was so arsemongled I couldn’t find the hole. Ended up rogering the pocket in my puffling pants.

  ANNE: If we’re discovered—

  KATE: We will be burned alive.

  JOHN: Not me. It’s your house, son, he’s your old teacher.

  WILL: And that’s your wife on her knees drinking a nice fruity red with shades of walnut and vanilla and oh just a hint of Christ’s blood on the back of the palate.fn14

  ANNE: You’ve gotta stand up to him. You have gotta get rid of him.

  WILL: Obviously I have, or else live a coward in thine own esteem, letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’,
like the poor cat in the adage.fn15

  ANNE: Will, there is no time for obscure blank verse.

  WILL: How can you say that? There is always time for obscure blank verse or my whole life is a lie.

  ANNE: Well, are you gonna chuck him out?

  WILL: Yes, absolutely. In the morning.

  DOWNSTAIRS – DAY

  ’Tis morning and Mary be bathing Hunt’s feet before the fire in the kitchen. John, Anne and Will be also present. Will approacheth his old schoolmaster.

  WILL: Um, sir, excuse me, sir, I was just wondering how long—

  HUNT: Not now, Shakespeare. This poor and simple woman is washing my feet. It is a deep and symbolic communion between shepherd and flock.

  MARY: I’m in a state of grace.

  JOHN: You’re in some sort of bloody state, that’s for sure.

  WILL: Sir, tiny point, sir, from, from my small store of liturgical knowledge, sir, er, I had thought it was the priest who washed the feet of the poor and simple, not, not the other way round.

  HUNT: Don’t cross theological swords with me, boy! I’ve spent the last fifteen years in study at the English College at Douai.

  WILL: Of course, sir, absolutely, sir. I’m, I’m sorry. Did you say the English College at Douai?

  HUNT: Concentrate, boy. I’m not accustomed to repeating myself.

  WILL: Excuse me just one moment, sir. (Approacheth Anne in great fear) Wife, kindly prepare my reserve puffling trousers, for I fear my quakesome bowlingtons be ripe ready to barf forth a fulsome tempest of foul and steaming scaredy sludge.fn16

  ANNE: What ails thee, husband?

  WILL: He’s the spy.

  ANNE: What spy?

  WILL: Marlowe told me there’s a Jesuit terrorist in Warwickshire. It’s Simon Hunt, my old schoolteacher.fn17

  HUNT: Yes, Shakespeare, and you have given me shelter. Your mother has taken my communion. If I burn, boy, you’ll burn. I suggest you take pains to ensure my safety. I shall return this e’en.

  Hunt departeth.

  WILL: Lock the doors! Bar the windows! None must enter. None must ever know he’s staying here.

  As Anne begins to bar the windows, Marlowe entereth all cheery and merry.