A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  Praise for Anthony Burgess's

  A Dead Man in Deptford

  "It's a splendidly atmospheric re-creation of the life of eminent Elizabethan playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe... . lush, elegant writing ... Burgess's sense of smelly bodies, religious fanaticism, and death lurking around every corner is immaculate. A delicious engagement of the past for every fiction lover."

  -Booklist

  "A dishy historical tabloid laced with an intriguing portrait of Marlowe."

  -Chicago Sun-Times

  "A tour de force re-creation of Elizabethan life... . No reader can fail to be deeply moved."

  -Detroit Free Press

  "A brilliant and totally reliable historical novel ... An amazing tour de force."

  -Houston Chronicle

  "A daring romp through history, theology, sex, language, and espionage... . A disarmingly realistic literary thriller with Marlowe as its hero... . Burgess has mastered, as perhaps only he could, the arch, quasipoetic diction of the period, along with a welter of details, from clothes to cuisine... . A fitting final tribute from one great English writer to the genius of another."

  -Kirkus Reviews (starred) "One of this prolific author's finest books. Burgess brilliantly evokes the murky world of Elizabethan politics."

  -Library Journal

  "A vivid, mordant portrait ... a remarkably quick read."

  -Miami Herald

  "A humdinger ... from one of the finest writers of the last half of this century."

  -Minneapolis Star-Tribune "A lushly written novel of international intrigue ... This gripping novel contains magnificent re-creations."

  -Newsday

  "A lavish display of linguistics and historical erudition worn lightly. A vivid description of Elizabethan theatre."

  -Philadelphia Inquirer

  "A masterly piece of work [that] reflects the author's magical sense of language and his deep immersion in the Elizabethan ethos... . Burgess's command of his material is absolute and he brings a lifetime's linguistic and fictional gifts to this headlong, shining, cruel portrait of a terrifying-but posthumously gloriousage."

  -Publishers Weekly (starred) "A superb re-creation of the Age of Elizabeth ... giving us a correct view of Marlowe."

  -Richmond Times-Dispatch "An absorbing and rewarding story about a fascinating man."

  -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Much more than an artful thriller... . It is fitting and proper that this final novel should be a masterpiece of its kind-a true triumph."

  -Washington Times

  ANTHONY BURGESS was born John Burgess Wilson in 1917 in Manchester and educated at the University of Manchester, where he studied music. After fulfilling his National Service in Gibraltar, he joined the colonial service as an education officer and taught English literature in Malaya and Borneo. During this period he wrote the novels that would form The Malayan Trilogy, but it was not until he returned to England in 1960, having been incorrectly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, that he turned seriously to writing. In what he called his "pseudo-terminal year," he tried to provide his prospective widow with future income by writing four novels, including One Hand Clapping. Over the course of his literary career, spent in England, Europe, and America, he would write over fifty books and dozens of musical works, including operas, choral works and song cycles, as well as innumerable articles for British, American, French and Italian newspapers and magazines, which were partly collected in One Man's Chorus. His best-known novels are A Clockwork Orange, the Booker Prize-shortlisted Earthly Powers, and the Enderby novels-Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, and Enderby's Dark Lady-all collected in The Complete Enderby. Although his erudition never received formal scholarly certification, he was a Visiting Fellow of Princeton University and a Distinguished Professor of City College, New York. His lifelong love of Shakespeare found expression in his novel Nothing Like the Sun, a popular biography, and an unproduced epic screenplay, Will!. He died in 1993 after publishing A Dead Man in Deptford. His last novel, Byrne, was published a year after his death.

  A DEAD MAN

  IN DEPTFORD

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  novels

  The Long Day Wanes:

  Time for a Tiger

  The Enemy in the Blanket

  Beds in the East

  The Right to an Answer

  The Doctor is Sick

  The Worm and the Ring

  Devil of a State

  One Hand Clapping

  A Clockwork Orange

  The Wanting Seed

  Honey for the Bears

  Inside Mr. Enderby

  Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life

  The Eve of Saint Venus

  A Vision of Battlements

  Tremor of Intent

  Enderby Outside

  Napoleon Symphony

  The Clockwork Testament; or, Enderby's End

  Beard's Roman Women

  Abba Abba

  Man of Nazareth

  1985

  Earthly Powers

  The End of the World News

  Enderby's Dark Lady

  The Kingdom of the Wicked

  The Pianoplayers

  Any Old Iron

  The Devil's Mode (short stories)

  autobiography

  Little Wilson and Big God

  You've Had Your Time

  for children

  A Long Trip to Teatime

  The Land Where the Ice Cream Grows

  theatre

  Oberon Old and New

  Blooms of Dublin

  verse

  Moses

  non-fiction

  English Literature: A Survey for Students

  They Wrote in English (in Italy only)

  Language Made Plain

  Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader

  The Novel Now: A Student's

  Guide to Contemporary Fiction

  Urgent Copy: Literary Studies

  Shakespeare

  Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce

  New York

  Hemingway and His World

  On Going to Bed

  This Man and Music

  Homage to Quert Yuiop

  Mozart and the Wolf Gang

  A Mouthful of Air

  translations

  The New Aristocrats

  The Olive Trees of Justice

  The Man Who Robbed Poor Boxes

  Cyrano de Bergerac

  Oedipus the King

  editor

  A Shorter Finnegans Wake

  A DEAD MAN

  IN DEPTFORD

  Anthony Burgess

  To Sam Wanamaker (and family) as a tribute to his courage in bringing back from the dead a playhouse that Marlowe never knew

  PART ONE

  o U must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where's the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning. What though a man supposes is oft (often if you will) of the right and very substance of his seeing. There was a philosopher who spoke of the cat that mews to be let out and then mews to be let in again. In the interim, does it exist? There is in its all the solipsist tendency which is a simulacrum of the sustentive power of the Almighty, namely what we hold in the eye exists, remove the eye or let it be removed therefrom and there is disintegration total if temporary. But of the time of the cat's absence a man may also rightly suppose that it is fully and corporeally in the world down to its last whisker. And so let it be with my cat or Kit. I must suppose that what I suppose of his doings behind the back of my viewings is of the nature of a stout link in the chain of hi
s being, lost to my seeing, not palpable but of necessity existent. I know little. I was but a small actor and smaller play-botcher who observed him intermittently though indeed knew him in a very palpable sense (the Holy Bible speaks or speaketh of such unlawful knowing), that is to say on the margent of his life, though time is proving that dim eyes and dimmer wits confounded the periphery with the centre.

  I see, reading the above above the rim of my raised alemug, that I am in danger of falling into the dangerous orbit of the playman Jack Marston and being betrayed into use of the most reprehensible inkhornisms. It may well be that plain English cannot encompass a life so various, tortured and contradictory. And yet it was Marston who in his innocence called him Kind Kit. He did not know him. Words were moreover to him more than human reality. It was surely wrong of him to emend the verse about shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals to his gallimaufry of Cantant avians do vie with mellous fluminosity. And not in jest neither. There is a limit to all things.

  Cat or Kit I said, and indeed about Kit there was something of the cat. He blinked his green eyes much and evaded, as cats will, the straight gaze either from fear of fearful aggression or of some shame of one order or another. Even in the carnal act the eyes were not engaged, at least not often, and it may well be that the sodomitical seek to avoid ocular discourse as speaking too much of the (albeit temporary) union of hearts. Of Kit's heart I must be unsure and can but suppose, or so I suppose. Of his feline face I may add that the nose was wide of nostril and chill and moist. The underlip however was burning and thrustful. On the overlip, which was long and Kentish, it was a matter more of whiskers than of true mustachio, the beard scant also, and it may be said that he never grew to hirsute manhood. The hair of his head was an abundant harvest, though not of corn. Let me speak rather of hayricks burning. In dry weather that augured thunder it would grow horrent. Of his bared body I observed but little hair, the mane thin above the fairsized thursday. The flesh was smooth, the shape fair, the belly flat. It is, as I can personally avouch, untrue that he bore a supernumerary nipple.

  He ate little but drank much and vomited proportionally. He was given, when Sir Walter Stink, the Lord of Uppawaoc, brought the herb into fashion, to the rank tobacco of Barbados and filthy pipes that whistled and bubbled with brown juice. Sometimes, when he was pipeless, he smoked the cured leaves wrapped in a great outer leaf, but this opened and flowered and flared and he would cast it floorwards cursing. At first as at last he was a fair curser and ingenious in his blasphemies, as for example (God and the reader forgive me and the licensers of print, if this should attain print, avert their eyes in Kit's own manner; after all I do but report as to posterity's own Privy Council, this is not my mouth but his) by the stinking urine of John the Baptist, by the sour scant milk of God's putative mother the Jewish whore, by St Joseph's absent left ballock, by the sore buggered arses of the twelve apostles, by the abundant spending of the stiff prick of Christ crucified, and the like. I omit to mention his height, which was no more than five foot five inches. This is not to be considered pertinent to the cursing.

  Well then, let us have him at Cambridge, an undergraduate of the college of Corpus Christi, in his drab trunks, patched doublet, hose blobbed with darning, humilous scholar's gown, committed, by the nature of his Parker scholarship, to the tedious study of theology and the eventual taking of orders. His companions in the room for study he shares are all parsons' sons and so mindlessly devout that they invite such blasphemy as I above instance. So that Mr Theo Fawkes of the wry neck says: I cannot. I know I will fail. But how will you have your dialogues, reader? I will follow the foreign fashion and indent and lineate. So Mr Theo Fawkes of the wry neck and for good measure pustular says:

  - I cannot. I know I will fail. So Kit replies:

  - That is the sin of despair, one of the two against the Holy Ghost, hence unforgivable. And young Mr Fawkes:

  - Well, perhaps God will grant one so ready for his holy work the benison of a pass, however meagre. And Kit:

  - That is the sin of presumption, the other against his or her or its ghostliness and equally unforgivable. Mr Jno Battersby looks on Kit with wide eyes, though the left one does not keep exact direction with its fellow, saying:

  - I protest at your invoking pure papist sins since we have done with them. And Kit:

  - Yes, we found our faith upon protest. We protest against, not in holy fervour cry out for. Against the Pope in Rome and auricular confession and the sacred cannibalism of the mass. I protest against protest.

  - That means you must veer back to what is proscribed, says Mr Robert Whewell, son of a rural dean, scratching an armpit. Have a care. Kit says:

  - I am what Harry Eight, may devils ceaselessly prod his gross belly, I am what he and his mumbling ministers, may their fiery farts be bottled and uncorked on Unholy Shatterday, I am what we have been made. And all for a black-haired whore he had put in pod.

  - It is not of great pertinence, says Whewell. What is of import is that we have the Holy Word restored to us direct, not to be filtered through the addled brains of the foul tribe of priests.

  - And what is this Holy Word? sneers Kit. Addled prophecies and a God that loves the smell of roast meat and even, in its lack, of the raw blood of massacres. He makes light first and then the sun after. This sun is made to stand still by Joshua when, as all know, it was standing still already. And young Fawkes says:

  - For all I care you may blaspheme against the Old that the New supersedeth. Blaspheme against the New and we will have you.

  - Oh, the New is good in that it has wiped out the vindictive God of the Jews, though he is vindictive enough on Good Friday. But there are things that be unholy enough if we douse our protestant hypocrisy. Thus, the Archangel Gabriel is no more than a bawd for the lustful Holy Ghost. And Christ used his beloved disciple John in the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah. Will you now have me burned? It will relieve the tedium of your studies.

  - Mr Kett shall be told.

  - Mr Kett is not here to be told. Mr Kett was gently delivered into the arms of his parents, who came up from Exeter for the purpose. This was yesterday.

  - No.

  - Ah yes.

  Ah yes in truth. Francis Kett, Kit's tutor in theology, had been sequestered for some weeks and his cats had been let loose on the streets. Of these he had had many, but twelve in particular that he called his Apostles and named for them. Kit had now the stink of those cats in his nostrils still. He had sat often enough in Mr Kett's study, the cats playing ambushes with musty folios all over the filthy floor. And Kett, the last time, smiling in a manner of manic eagerness, had said:

  - All that is written may be subjected to the anatomising knife of the sincere enquirer. Holy Writ included. We need no book to tell us of God's existence nor convince us of the necessity of his taking on mortal flesh for our sins.

  A cat on Kett's knee had purred at him as in approbation. Kett had said:

  -Not that Christ is God as yet. No, not God but God in potentia, a mere good man that must suffer not once but many times for the world's iniquities. He will have his ultimate resurrection and then he will be God.

  - Have you delivered this heresy at high table?

  - Ah no. We must observe discretion. Machiavelli says that we must conform and show the world what we are not.

  - That is for men of power only.

  - What is great men's power to God's power? And Kett had inclined closer, the frowstiness of cat on his clothing bidding Kit close his nose holes. God has placed Jesus Christ in Judaea, together with his disciples, it is the gathering of his Church. We must all go in good time to Jerusalem to be fed on angel's food.

  He frowned at a black cat that boldly relieved itself on a Jerome Bible on the floor in a corner. He pointed a shaking finger at it and said:

  - That one, see, is Judas. Yes yes, we must go. Costly but needful. How much money do you have?

  - None. A poor scholar and a cobbler's son.

 
; - Well, I will go help prepare the way. I will walk thither and I will beg. Kneel with me now among these creatures made by God on the tenth day of Creation and let us pray for the realm's purgation, lustration, salvation. Kneel.

  - I am not here to kneel.

  - You are not? Kett spoke mildly with mild interest, his face thrusting into Kit's. You are not here to kneel?

  - There is a time and place for kneeling. Kett of a sudden boiled and cried aloud:

  - Kneel kneel kneel damn you kneel. You are to be blasted, sir. I know of your sins. And he trembled, a struggling cat in his arms.

  Did he know of his sins? Was that a sin that the Greeks approved, that was practised by holy Socrates? Kit said now to his fellow students:

  - Clearly out of his wits. No longer as he had been, intermittently in his senses. Religion can do this to a man, nay to a whole nation can it. See, look, there is sport outside.

  And indeed through their bottle-glass window they could see a sort of riot beginning to proceed outside the tavern opposite, the Eagle. Undergraduates, their gowns aswing, were kicking a man into the mud. There was much mud after long summer rain. Wonder of wonders, the Vice-Chancellor of the University stood afar looking, ordering no quelling of the riot.