All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  There was indeed to this man, Kit Marlowe, an unsoundness, as though.... Will looked up at the smiling face and frowned, in absent thought.

  As though the face Marlowe presented to the world were but a mask, as true as an actor’s painted false face; as though beneath it something lurked. Something unsound or sound, vile or great, golden or decayed, no one could tell.

  No one could tell anything but that a true face lay hidden and locked like a miser’s treasure behind the face so brazenly shown to all.

  Walking beside Will and a study in contrasts with Will’s rough russet suit, Marlowe displayed the latest fashion of the age, in a broad, almost wing-shouldered doublet cut of the finest blue velvet, ornamented with large gold buttons, its sleeves slashed through to show bright red silk. Marlowe’s pants, too, were of the same fine fabric, and cut in such a way that they molded his legs, and stopped just below his knee, displaying a fine length of white stocking beneath. The stockings shimmered with the subdued richness of silk. And the boots that shod Marlowe’s feet, laced and finely cut.... Well, the price of Will’s suit would not have sufficed for those boots.

  “I say, Will, have you gone distracted?” Kit Marlowe asked, leaning forward, and waving a hand in front of Will’s eyes. He wore clean white gloves. Kid gloves, Will thought. The best. Even in Stratford, the Shakespeare glover shop would never have sold those for less than seventeen pence.

  But this was not Will’s father’s glover shop where things were simple and attainable by coin. Will was in London, where the price of raiment was not always money.

  “No.” He blinked awake to Kit’s inquisitive stare. And, speaking out of his foreboding, he added, “I dreamed a dream tonight.”

  Marlowe smiled. “And so did I.”

  Will sighed inwardly, not confident enough to sigh outwardly. What game was there afoot? What joke did Marlowe mean to make? “Well, and what was yours?”

  Marlowe’s lips turned downward at the corners, a dangerous turn, and his eyes looked into the middle distance at the trolling bawds and lawyers and capering, begging urchins, as if not seeing them at all. “That dreamers often lie.”

  Will had the feeling that this conversation was not with him at all but with some unseen being, and he would gladly have disciplined his lips away from further talk.

  Yet his dream turned in his mind like a plague corpse, hastily buried and uncovered at first thaw. Marlowe would not jest so had he encountered the wolf in full malevolence.

  Aloud, Will said, in a voice as heavy as his heart, “Aye, dreamers do lie in bed asleep as they dream things true.”

  Marlowe cast him a disbelieving eye, then laughed a single cackle of delighted amusement. “Oh, then, I see Queen Mab has been with you.” He raised his eyebrows. “She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate-stone on the fore-finger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomies, athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep, her wagon spokes made of long spinner’s legs, the coer of the wings of grasshoppers, the traces of the smallest spider’s web, the collars of the moonshine’s watery beams.” His white-gloved hands drew out a wagon in mid air. “And her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film, her wagoner a small, gray-coated gnat, not half so big as a round little worm pricked from the lazy finger of a maid: her chariot is an empty hazel nut, made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, time out of mind the fairies’ coach makers. And in this state she gallops night by night thorough lovers’ brains and then they dream of love; over courtiers' knees, that dream on courtesies straight, over lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees, over ladies’ lips who straight on kisses dream, which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are; sometime she gallops over a courtier’s nose.” He drew a finger, feather light, across the bridge of Will’s nose. “And then dreams he of smelling out a suit, and sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail, tickling a parson’s nose as he lies asleep, then dreams he of another benefice; sometime she drives over a soldier’s neck, and then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, of healths five fathom deep; and then anon drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes; and, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two and sleeps again.” Kit’s smile had become fixed, his eyes alarmed, as though his mouth prattled independent of his mind, and in prattling so made Kit himself afraid. “This is that very Mab that plats the manes of horses in the night; and bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes; this is the hag, who comes upon my dreams and makes me dream on love that cannot be, and of death that must come, must always come, to all, no matter upon what glittering stage they thread, nor what words they spin from....”

  “Peace, peace, good Marlowe,” Will interrupted, tired of the jest that he felt must be at his expense. He lifted a hand as if to push away Marlowe, who’d stepped uncomfortably close while speaking. But he didn’t touch Marlowe. Instead Will stepped away, himself. “You speak of nothing.”

  Marlowe wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand, and took a deep breath, and sighed, and some fire in his eyes died down.

  “True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy, which is as thin a substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind who woes even now the frozen bosom of the North.” Marlowe’s eyes danced with strange mirth as, step by step, he kept pace with Will’s walk, slowing as Will slowed, only to start again, as Will hurried. “And being angered puffs away from thence, turning his face to the dew dropping south.”

  “Oh, I see your words are as brilliant as ever, and you keep them sharp like a well-honed knife, ready to unsheathe them again upon the stage as soon as the plague is gone and the theater reopens,” Will said, stung with something not quite jealousy, more like an irritation born of defeat. “But you have not a wife and children to worry about. You have not a family to feed, in these days when a poet can’t earn a meager living.”

  “Ah.” Marlowe’s lips arched upwards, in an ironic smile. His eyes remained cold. “The good wife. And how fares she and the.... Is it six little Waggstaffs you’ve left behind, all wearing your name?” As he spoke, he smirked at a man walking past -- a man that, by his attire was a puritan, as well clad in severe dark wool as Marlowe was in his manner -- who answered Kit’s smirk with a nod.

  Will didn’t dare question that acquaintance, nor did he bother correcting Marlowe’s butchering of his family name. He was sure it was no more than Marlowe’s affectation to not remember it.

  After all, Will had worked for Lord Strange’s company -- for whom Marlowe wrote. The company had put on three of Will’s plays in the last three years and, even if these plays two of them based on the War of the Roses and the third, Titus Andronicus, a desperate imitation of Tamburlaine, hadn’t been the gallery-packing hits that Marlowe’s were. Still, Will had often worked side by side with Marlowe, in the last three years.

  In fact, three years ago, the lord had consulted with Marlowe on whether or not to hire this strange newcomer. Maybe it was Will’s fancy, but he still thought that if it had rested with Marlowe’s petulant lips and darting wit, Will would never have got even his meager start in the theater.

  So, Marlowe must know Will’s name. Will frowned at Marlowe, and said, “Well and well, they are well as well as I know.”

  But did he in fact know all? Or was his dream last night, so suddenly come upon him, a way of showing him that Nan and the children needed him, that he could no longer bide in London and pursue his idle hopes? Or yet, was his family truly threatened? Did these creatures like the Hunter and the dogs in his pack truly exist? Aye, and elven kings too? Or were they dreams like other dreams Will had entertained while young which in adulthood proved the stuff of lunacy?

  Like the dream of making his living from poetry. Him, with a grammar school education.... Competing with wits such as Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, with their Cambridge training. Now, that had been
a dream indeed.

  Perhaps Will’s dream meant nothing. But that, too, he could not credit. Nothing does not haunt awaking hours till that nothing, turning itself in one’s mind swells and grows, like a grain of sand between foot and sole seems to grow and magnify itself by pain and grinding, till that little particle can consume all of a man’s thought.

  Will expected from Marlowe some facile word, some jest. But Marlowe, who had reproached Will’s heavy brooding, seemed himself absorbed in some preoccupation, his brows drawn down over his grey, cloudy-sky eyes, his mouth set and straight and rigid with worry.

  Marlowe brooded, dark and heavy, full of gloom and threat.

  Marlowe looked like any of the other dandies that clustered around Paul’s walk, and lived of their prosperous looks, with which they attracted the unwary investor, the trusting provincial fool, the enamored older woman.

  And yet, his voice was heavy, deep with thought, and his gaze darted fearfully here and there. He spoke as if out of a profound nightmare. “I pray you, good Shakestaff, let’s retire. This is no time for poets nor for fools. The day is hot, mischief is abroad. These hot days is the mad blood stirring.”

  Will turned to Marlowe, gave him the jaundiced eye from Marlowe’s dyed hair to his too-good boots. “It is not summer,” he said.

  “No,” Marlowe said. “And yet it were. The warmth in these days, unnatural as it is, brings the plague’s fetid breath upon our necks and drives men to mad fighting besides. These last weeks, I’ve seen seven acquaintances buried from pestilence or violence. And this heat dries the tender blossoms of May as though it were the dog days of summer. I feel as if disaster looms and waits, a monster with lolling tongue upon our back, which will pounce on us, should we relax.”

  “But what expect you to happen?” Will asked.

  “Oh, the blood stirs and men do things they would regret. And this unnatural May it is as if the underworld proper gave out its ghosts as exhalations from tombs,” Marlowe said.

  Casually, Marlowe side-stepped a bawd who, attracted by his expensive clothes or, perhaps, by his fair countenance, thrust her corseted body in his path. “The apprentices are threatening riot, know you that? The apprentices of London, the great boiling mass of them, have gathered and threatened to take their clubs and their blood-thirsty minds to the strangers who live in town.” Behind Marlowe, the wench who’d sought to tempt him, gave vent to a loud opinion of Marlowe’s manhood or its shortcomings.

  Looking at Marlowe, Will was surprised to see the other playwright smile at the words, as if they’d been compliments.

  “The strangers?” Will asked, thinking there could be no greater stranger than this man who worked for the same theater he did, and whose plays he watched, and whose poems Will had read, entranced.

  It wasn’t right. When you read a man’s poetry, you should touch his very soul.

  But if Marlowe had a soul, it remained secure. Perhaps, like some sorcerer of old Marlowe had stowed his soul upon an animal, aboard a swimming fish, or in a magic ring which he never entrusted to anyone. In fact, Will had heard somewhere, from a common acquaintance, that Marlowe believed himself the descendant of Merlin the sorcerer.

  Shivering despite the unnatural warmth of May, Will looked down at Marlowe’s gloved hands, and couldn’t tell if Marlowe wore a ring or, indeed, many.

  “The strangers are those poor souls who, persecuted for their religion in the lands of popery, have come and sought a living among us. You’ve seen them. Indeed, you probably deal with them: the French tailor, the Dutch potter, the Spanish fruit seller....”

  “My landlord is French,” Will said. “A finer, more worshipful family you could never see. And the apprentices threaten to riot against such?”

  Marlowe nodded, his chin almost touching his fine lawn collar. “Aye. The disturbing hot, rainy weather has thwarted the farmers, crops have been bad and the plague rages. Food is expensive and scarce. Without theater, the apprentices have nothing with which to occupy their lusty minds. They gather in taverns and there they seek someone to blame for their present troubles. Their designs light upon the strangers for those are different. Unusual people are always an easy target for the discontent of crowds.”

  For the first time since Will had met him Marlowe’s face displayed true gravity, and the sudden hardening of his features seemed to make him older, older than Will, more widely traveled and more bitterly tried.

  They’d come to the back door of Paul’s, overlooking the yard, and Will waved away a wizened man in a ratty grey velvet suit who thrust in Will’s face a collection of cards engraved with woodcuts of men and women, and men and men, and women and women, in explicit, improbable couplings.

  Marlowe slowed a step and appeared to glance at the cards, then shake his head slowly.

  They stepped from the dark, shadowy confines of Paul’s church and into the noonday light of a blazing day full too bright and hot for May.

  In front of them, the churchyard opened, filled with tents, and on the side of each tent, displayed, a sign or symbol of the printer: the white greyhound and the dying swan, and the knight in armor, and the swine rampant, each of them letting people know which printer abided within.

  Clipped to the side of each tent sheaves and clusters of paper, and thick pamphlets and thin booklets waved in the breeze, one proclaiming a sad tale, another recording a ballad, and another yet the taken down words of a play performed on the stage before the plague closed it.

  “And this with you?” Will asked. He was puzzled by Marlowe’s long soliloquy, centered as it seemed to be on another’s plight. “What matters to you if the strangers suffer in a riot?” He had never pegged Marlowe for a great, overflowing humanist that would take to his wounded bosom every persecuted thing.

  Marlowe tightened his gloved hands into fists, fists much too solid and aggressive for his fashionable clothes, his petulant look. “Some fool has set his pen to paper,” he said. “And that paper to the wall of the church where the Dutch are like to worship. In that paper he said how the strangers would be killed. And that paper he signed Tamburlaine, as if the character and creation of mine had written those libels.” He paused, looked away from Will. “Or if I had.”

  Will turned surprised eyes to Marlowe, trying to understand. He’d come across this riddle before, that when Marlowe spoke he often seemed to refer to a world which Will couldn’t divine, as though he were speaking of some truth plucked from distant star gazing.

  Will never felt so provincial, so inadequate, so ill-prepared for his life in London and the theater as when coming across Marlowe’s mind and getting a peek of what hid beneath Marlowe’s sophisticated mask.

  Like that, Marlowe’s countenance lightened, and the lines of his features loosened, making him look young, very young.

  A building chuckle climbed out from his chest, booming in the blazing morning son. But, like a flame ill lit, his laughter extinguished itself suddenly. And the voice in which he spoke was full slow and bitter. “It means, good Wagglance that, as I’ve told you, this is an ill time for poets and for fools.” Something like a shadow crossed the grey eyes, giving the impression of shutters fleetingly thrown open and then just as suddenly closed, affording no more than a glimpse into a darkened house. “They took poor Tom Kyd and tortured him, and Lord knows what that sort of lamb -- innocent of guile and clean of crime -- will say of such as me, when under torture. Lord knows what you would have said.”

  Will frowned, trying to follow the convoluted argument. Was he being threatened? “But I -- ”

  Marlowe nodded. “You’ve done nothing to deserve it, I know, Shakestaff. But then neither has Kyd. Except that he did write for Lord Strange’s acting troupe, which, unwisely, thought to enact a play on the life of Sir Thomas Moore, who held a dim view of strangers, himself.” Marlowe turned away quickly, from Will’s bewildered look, and Will wondered if this was fair warning. Had Marlowe denounced him to the Privy Council for imagined crimes?

  Will wished he was h
ome, wished he could rest his head on his kitchen table and watch his Nan rustle about, cooking, and hear his Nan say that Will worried about vain fantasies only.

  Nan had always been the strength of their family, and Will knew it. He wished he could have her strength now, and know that she would help him, protect him if needed.

  He’d never felt so heartily sorry he’d come to London, never longed so much for his small house in Stratford and the constrained limits of his father’s glover shop.

  At least in Stratford no one arrested you just because you knew guilty persons. Why, half of the Ardens, Will’s maternal relatives, were Catholic, and yet their allegiance to this forbidden faith hadn’t prevented John Shakespeare, Will’s father, from being alderman.

  In that moment, if Will could have transported himself to Stratford by the force of his thought alone, he would have done it. But he couldn’t. And going back would be admitting he was defeated, done once and for all with London. Nan would not laugh at him, but aye, even in Nan’s eyes, Will would mayhap be diminished.

  As for the neighbors, how they’d laugh and wag their tongues at the wit who’d thought to be a poet and come acrop, only to crawl humbly back to his father’s glover shop.

  Will looked at Marlowe, who looked away from Will, as if absorbed in the contemplation of the printed pamphlets hung beside the tents.

  Will wished he knew what was really happening and why the Privy Council should be meddling in the lives of poor play makers.

  Easier to interrogate a sphinx than Kit Marlowe.

  Having crossed a brief stretch of full sun, they now walked amid the printers tents, each tent displaying enticing books many of which Will would buy, had he the coin.

  But the coin was scarce and scant and that must last until Will could find new work of some sort in London and make more money to send to his family.