The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

by Jude Morgan

  For this is part of the gathering too – wanting to be a success. Selfishly. Not to flounder here, and be fished back, half drowned and pitiable, to Stratford. Prove himself. Push his way up alongside the wits and the shits. Emulation is there, too – or call it by its proper name, envy. Will envies Marlowe so much he could be sick.

  Dipping his pen, he tries to think of everything but Marlowe. And it all keeps coming out like Marlowe. But he carries on. He writes on, adding, not subtracting. He does not like to still the pen. He even prefers not to cross out. Superstitiously, perhaps: unmaking what is made. The inscription of regret. No, write on.

  And in that suggestive soft pouch pushed clinking across the table there can, he knows, be as much as ten pounds. If I can get richer I can make things better. (See, my love, what I lay at your feet.) Practical motives, again – but, then, what makes a human being if not the practical? First of all a little lust in a bed; and after that, water and bread for the flesh, sleep, toilsome dullness, all go into the making. If there is anything else – some spark not of earth – well, that lies in the proving. He can’t say: he would be the last to say.

  * * *

  Christopher Marlowe: called Kit Marlowe by some, and not inappropriately, since there is something feline about him, a prowl, a purr. But, then, some have pronounced his surname Marley, and he hasn’t corrected them. So best be chary of hasty conclusions about Marlowe – since, above all, he seems to invite them.

  Marlowe has so many affectations, for instance, that in the end they cancel each other out. He challenges you to find the real self among them, like a sharper at the fair with the three cups and the elusive pea. At first sight you may think: How dazzling, I am not equal to him.

  This is how it happens with Will. Pembroke’s Men are rehearsing at the Curtain – not a Marlowe piece – when he appears. ‘Go on, go on,’ he bids them, but they don’t, not with him there; somehow they all feel like candles beside the sun. He has come to see the principal player – settlement of some sort of wager. They chuckle over it aside. Marlowe is dressed like a gallant: every inch of him slashed and panelled and jewelled, a short smudge of a cloak over one shoulder. No older than Will, but a remarkable fresh boy’s complexion that makes Will feel sallow, overused. His teeth when he laughs have a pointed look. He has a fox’s beauty.

  When his eyes briefly meet Will’s they seem to see and know everything about him – especially the low, grubby things – and find none of it very surprising.

  They do come to know each other, even before Tom Nashe introduces them. Inevitable, perhaps, when the theatre world is not large. But Marlowe, though he has written so magnificently for the stage, doesn’t have a great deal to do with it. Steps in occasionally at the Rose to lend an ear to his own work transfixing the general – but certainly has never acted himself. A player? Good God. (Or not, as the case may be, for it is mouthed rather than spoken that he does not believe – there’s another side to Marlowe, another facet of the diamond or slash in the silk, flashing into view and then gone.) No, he is here to ravish the theatre, not make love to it. No more jigging rhymes of mother wits, as he says. This homespun drama needs a hero. Here I come.

  The first time Marlowe and Will are together in company at a tavern – in a group of players and scribblers – he yawns in Will’s face. Yes: Marlowe does that as you’re talking, and shuts his mouth with a catlike snap and an unashamed blinking of his heavy-lidded eyes at how dull you’re being.

  Such arrogance: Will hardly knows what to do with it except laugh – but, then, Marlowe has a reputation for a quarrelsome temper, and it isn’t funny enough to bleed for. But now Marlowe laughs, high and nervously.

  ‘Do you hate me? Good, for now we’re on a level footing and we can talk.’

  ‘I don’t hate you.’

  ‘What, then?’

  Will shrugs. ‘Find you unmannerly.’

  Marlowe laughs again, gravelly this time. Which is his real laugh? Impossible to say. He has a peculiar husky, thickened, up-all-night voice that is almost like two voices laid one on the other, drone and descant. ‘Don’t I tell you I hate myself, good Master William? And don’t you believe me?’

  Will considers him. ‘I think a man who truly hated himself would not be so ready to say so.’

  All at once Marlowe is dark and remote. Slowly he pronounces: ‘Well, let me tell you I hate myself far more than you can ever imagine, Master William.’ He makes the impotency of Will’s imagination sound pathetic, a boy’s knock-kneed inadequacy. (And Will thinks: Damn it, I have a wife, I have children who call me father, I have laboured in the world. Yet his tongue sticks.) Soon Marlowe is talking animatedly and sunnily to someone else, though not for long. Marlowe is never around for long, wherever he may be. You feel that for him to linger would be an admission of terrible dreariness – nowhere to be but here.

  Where does he go? At some point, presumably, he retires to his lodging to read, study, write – the one thing that certainly isn’t put on for show is the genius. But otherwise, he is almost professionally elusive. Rumour has him all over the place. Cambridge, that was real, but even there he had these peculiar absences, which the university forgave him after a word from on high – from very high, rumour says. Services for Her Majesty, rumour adds, trips abroad, dealings with papists and anti-papists. Rumour states more firmly that Marlowe knows the Walsingham clan well, and that is enough to put you in the inner circle of circles.

  Personally Will finds Marlowe quite probable as a spy, simply because he seems so unlikely. If he were looking out for a spy, he would look out for someone neutral and self-effacing, whereas Marlowe cannot enter a room without turning it into a procession.

  Will admires his work extravagantly, he longs to know more about him – yet that encounter seems to set the tone for those that follow, bumpy exchanges of non sequiturs, smiles that don’t match. It’s especially galling for Will because rubbing along well with people is another of those minor talents he hopes will help him get by, in this tight world where men blow little damp quarrels into destructive flame.

  And Marlowe seems to spot that, too. ‘You like to please, don’t you?’ he says, from nowhere and about nothing, one day when they meet and pass the time of day in the street.

  Will stops. ‘I thought we were talking about the sweating-sickness at Westminster?’ Confrontation, of a sort.

  ‘Do you have to do it? Is it a compulsion, this desire to please?’ Please – Marlowe has a way of drawing out the vowel that makes the word vaguely obscene. And sometimes, for a moment, the whites of his eyes entirely circle his pupils so he looks flashingly mad; yet of course you don’t know if he’s worked that up in the mirror. There’s more than one kind of actor. ‘You were going quite the other way. But I put a hand on your shoulder and steered you my way as we talked and you simply went along with it. Why? I’m not so masterful.’ Marlowe is, in fact, as the steering and walking reveal, not very tall. ‘If I resisted, you’d take me up on that, too, wouldn’t you? Why, Master William, will you never please?’

  Will actually feels ready to hit him: feels keen for it, as if it were the answer to some niggling problem that has just occurred to him. But Marlowe laughs – warmly, appreciatively – and puts his arm through Will’s. ‘Come with me. I need a companion.’

  ‘And naturally I have nothing else to do.’

  ‘Ah, Master William, you are too good to be true.’

  ‘I certainly won’t come,’ Will says, stopping dead, ‘if you persist in calling me that.’

  ‘But I want you to come,’ Marlowe says, suddenly childlike, simply imploring.

  ‘You don’t listen, do you?’

  ‘No, never.’ Marlowe smiles as if a little misunderstanding has been cleared up.

  ‘How, then…’ Will wants to say: How do you make words do such enchanted things, if you never listen to them? Instead he says: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A dinner or banquet or debauch laid on by Henslowe. At the sign of the Ancho
r, Bishopsgate – do you know it? It’s one of his properties, I think, or he has a share in it, so the profit goes back to him. God bless him for a usurious grasping old sinner.’

  ‘I’m not invited.’

  ‘But I am. Besides, you’re a player. I’ve seen you in a dozen things in London, so you must know good Master Henslowe. Even if you only owe him money. Which is the strongest bond the old pawnbroker knows.’

  ‘I know him. I doubt he’ll remember me.’ Will has done a few jobs for Philip Henslowe, proprietor of the Rose theatre – correcting old play-scripts, putting some comedy into a tragedy. A consummate man of business: you felt he didn’t see your face any more than you saw the Queen’s head on a coin. ‘Every player knows him: half are in debt to him.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘I have a horror of belonging to anyone.’

  Marlowe hugs his arm. ‘Oh, Master William, man o’ my heart, we may after all be friends. What? For Jesu’s sake it’s a name. Adam’s privilege, you know, giving names to the creatures of the earth. D’you not recall the joy of it when you were a lad, bestowing a name on your favourite pup? Made him yours.’

  ‘I’m not yours.’

  ‘Made him real, then. Imagine a human creature without a name. Would he not seem less than human? Why else do we clap a name to a babe as soon as it’s born? We confer humanity on it. Give it a soul. I jest, of course: that belongs to almighty God and let none suggest otherwise. Master William suits you.’

  ‘You mean it suits you.’

  Marlowe pouts. ‘If you like. You see, you are rather older than me, and I feel the seniority should be honoured—’

  ‘Older, how? I’m not quite five-and-twenty.’

  ‘We’re the same, then. Here we are. Looks cleanly enough, but no telling. Henslowe is landlord to more than one brothel, and we were best have a care the waiting-maids aren’t queans o’ the stews, looking to your codpiece for vails.’ Marlowe’s expression of disgust is as elaborate as a painted vizard. But a mask is a real thing too.

  ‘Why did you think me older?’

  ‘My dear Will, if we are to be friends, you must understand something,’ Marlowe says, turning on the threshold and taking Will’s hand. His is surprisingly rough, as if from hot scrubbing. ‘I never answer questions.’

  But we are not going to be friends, thinks Will, as they go in. Not that he doesn’t think it possible, but something in him resists it. For some reason he thinks of his father, stockpiling wool, waiting for the price to go up, barring the barn door, moistening lips: the drug of it.

  Besides, Marlowe drops him as soon as they enter the supper-room where food in bushels and dripping meat-sides deck the long tables – the table-legs, Will sees, actually splay under the weight, like a poor man’s dream of a feast. Plentiful drink, too, though few of the two dozen men here seem drunk yet. ‘What are you?’ Marlowe shouts, attacking the best Rhenish. ‘A funeral procession stalled?’ No, theatre people, most of them known to Will, many beholden to Philip Henslowe, who disdains the host’s chair and comes genially among them. Everyone wants his favour: some hope for his mercy, to keep them out of debtors’ prison. He is a large, square-cut man with a loud, flat, frequent laugh that he uses on you like a father holding his little punching son at arm’s length. What the occasion is for this largesse no one seems to know, which is perhaps the idea: let everyone furiously speculate. Apparently on his way past Will, Henslowe shakes his hand sideways.

  ‘Master Shakespeare. You thrive, I hope. I have a play you might mend for me. We’ll talk.’

  Will feels himself rise a little in the estimation of watching eyes. He gets a nod from Ned Alleyn, who is standing around looking beautiful and pained with the burden of being the greatest actor in the world. Ned Alleyn created Tamburlaine, has a voice to fill a honeycomb or smite an anvil, and is responsible for Will’s firm conviction that he himself will never be anything more as an actor than goodish, fair, solid. Yes, good Master Shakespeare, my good sir, that’s how he’s coming to be known. He wonders how he should feel about that. The draught of Rhenish gives him no answers. As for Alleyn, the word is that Henslowe has him marked out for his daughter, who has a pretty penny and a face like a frog’s.

  The wine is strong, and even the cups seem subtly oversized, as if Henslowe wants you to be a little incapable, a little off-balance. He stalks benevolently among his company, occasionally rearranging them. The comparison with chess-pieces is almost too obvious: Will thinks, Am I a pawn? Here, undoubtedly. But how if you were a different sort of chess-piece, not pawn, or knight or rook or any of the recognised ranks? How would you move on the board?

  Marlowe appears beside him. He has drunk hugely, but looks merely refreshed, as if he has been swimming. There is a man with him, a chalk-pale, hollow-cheeked young fellow with a grey stare. Definitely a pawn, Will thinks, as Marlowe lugs him forward. And then: ‘Will, here’s my good friend Kyd, Thomas Kyd, d’you know him?’

  Liquor-loose, Will cries: ‘Yes. My God, Kyd. I mean, no. But I’ve played in Hieronimo a dozen times. Your pardon – I should say The Spanish Tragedy, but we always think of it as Hieronimo.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘To be sure. Only I was never more glad – Hieronimo is so fine, so mightily powerful, I’ve never known it fail.’

  ‘Aye, ghosts and revenge, and poor crack-brained old Hieronimo going mad with grief,’ says Marlowe, airily, ‘and all washed down with a watery draught of Seneca.’

  ‘And terror and pity,’ Will says, thinking: He’s jealous. It’s as if gods should have corns. But no, from first meeting with Marlowe – and now add awkward, baleful-looking Kyd – he has never felt in godlike presence. On the page, in the words, in the spaces between the words, that’s different. ‘And an audience held – perfectly held.’

  ‘You are very good,’ says Kyd, frozenly. ‘I confess once the piece is writ I am little concerned for its fate.’

  ‘Like a wise parent,’ says Marlowe, ‘send ’em out into the world with a blow and a sixpence, and give them welcome if they come back rich.’

  Kyd has a hungry, unhappily attentive way of looking at Marlowe, as if waiting for some word that never comes. ‘The theatre is a place for a man to try his talents,’ he says, looking reluctantly back to Will. ‘Not a place to stay in for ever.’

  ‘But you’ll write more for the stage?’ says Will, glancing at Henslowe, thinking: Why here, else?

  ‘Aye, what do you fear, Tom, that you won’t please again?’ Marlowe says, his gaze sliding mockingly to Will. ‘He’s being coy. Like a girl who’s yielded up her maidenhead but still wants to play the sly virgin. What’s become of your designing Dane, your Saxo-grammatical Hamlet? Must be ready by now. A very pretty tragedy, Will. He read me the first act and I stayed awake, oh, minutes at a time.’ He grips Kyd’s bony shoulder, bringing his face close. More wolf than Kit, Will thinks. ‘Lord. Won’t hit back, Tom? Won’t tell me to go fuck myself?’

  ‘I should be glad of a word with you on quite other matters than these,’ Kyd says through tight lips, with a wishing-away look at Will. ‘The matter of my lord Sussex?’

  ‘Oh, that. I’ve told you, I’ll try what I can do. There’s no hurrying great ones, my friend. If it’s money you need, sell your play.’

  ‘The question is not so simple…’

  Pawn he may be, but Will knows when to make himself scarce. He finds a window-seat untenanted and sits with the casement a little open, trying to quieten the drink inside him. Outside and separate, a cool, dull afternoon. He wonders whether he should be afraid of it. He thinks of Marlowe and Kyd, little wasp jealousies and fooleries. If I could write as they write, he thinks, I would rise and soar, fearing nothing. You would live in a state of recompense.

  ‘A good spot,’ Marlowe says, sitting down by him, and drawing out pipe and tobacco. ‘“Not here,” they’ll cry, “don’t drink smoke here,” as if I’m frigging myself or something worse. I have a second pipe if you want – no? Tut, and you’re scar
ce drunk neither. You need some vices, man.’

  ‘What for?’

  Marlowe laughs, then applies himself to the demanding business of getting the pipe going. Once it is, he smokes greedily: most men go puff-puff, pinched. ‘You write, don’t you, or try to? Nashe told me. Well, then. Get some vices for experience.’

  ‘Why does writing have to be from experience? Are you Tamburlaine?’

  Marlowe’s smile fades to a clench of teeth around the pipe-stem. ‘No. But I couldn’t have written him without being me.’

  Will feels small, slightly angry, intensely alive. He wants to marshal great arguments against this arrogance, but fears his army are all empty suits of armour and jerkins stuffed with straw. ‘A man may write outside himself, surely.’ Tentative, temperate it comes out, though he believes it with passion.

  Marlowe looks him over critically, dubiously. ‘I don’t know about a man. I don’t believe in a man, if it’s your common man you mean, or what’s the fellow in that fearful canting old play? Everyman. The common run, the many many. Ugh. What I only believe in is the exceptional man. Life is too brief to count the difference betwixt grains of wheat. I don’t include you. There’s something in you, though I can’t tell what.’ Marlowe lays a hand on Will’s thigh. ‘So, who is Will, what is he for? You came from the country, I know that. Is that where you’re fixed? Is that where you belong? Do you intend going back after you’ve saved fifty pound from playing Second Knight in sundry indifferent plays, and fit out a new barn, and live content for the rest of your days?’

  Will twitches his leg away. He is irritated and alarmed by his faint cock-stand, yet in a detached way fascinated too. Because up close he sees Marlowe is not as handsome as he looks, as it were – somehow coarser, fleshier, Not to my taste, begins the thought, before he catches it up with bemusement. What taste? Being with Marlowe force-feeds you such questions, until you feel sickened.

  ‘I have my ambitions like everyone else,’ Will says.