A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  - We'll Join, Kit said. It has happened at last.

  - What has?

  - You're deaf to all except God's doubtful Word. This has been coming. Walter Raleigh got the farm of wines. That means the right to license whatever vintners he chooses and collect one pound a year from each one in the country. The Queen gave him this right, but the Queen's writ does not run here. That is why there is no interference. The fists of the students are doing the Vice-Chancellor's work.

  - It is not godly to stick a man's face in the mud.

  - Ah come.

  Down there in the street the man enmudded was permitted to rise from his cursing misery only to be thudded down again. His wife at the tavern door howled. A man called from an upper window of the tavern:

  - Sir Walter shall know of this. I am Sir Walter's agent. You hear? There shall be writs. This is rampant breaking of the law.

  Kit saw flushed glee on raw student faces. They had done with the tavern-keeper, they would now have at his wife. But she slammed the door, giving her dripping dirty husband no chance to enter. He ran dripping down the street. He would turn at its end and make his way in by a rear door. It was all over, save for the crying of the man at the window. An official call of Arrest him from afar was translated into student stone-throwing. The man withdrew and fastened the casement. A gentleman by Kit, finely dressed and in a red cloak, whined:

  - See, there is mud over me. This is filth.

  - You take your chance, sir, Kit said. But the mud will scrape off. Though it must dry first.

  - I cannot ride on to Newmarket like this.

  - You had done better not to dismount, sir.

  - It is on my face too. I must wash. Where can I wash? As for my horse, it is at the farrier's, a matter of a loose shoe.

  - If you would deign to honour the humble lodging of a student, I can bring water in a bowl and find a tough brush for the brushing.

  - I must be in Newmarket by nightfall.

  - Night falls late this season. This way.

  The bedchamber Kit shared with young Ridley, at that time lovesick and gathering flowers by the Cam, was very bare. His visitor, cloakless now and displaying a slit doublet, black velvet over, gold silk under, also a collar of cobweb lawn, nodded at what he saw, saving:

  - Very bare. It was the same at Bologna. I took my degree there. I.V.

  - Ivy?

  - I.V. Iuris Vtriumque. Proficient in either law, civil, canon. Thomas Watsonus I.V. studiosus. And you?

  - Christopher. The other name is unsure. Marlin, Merlin, Marley, Morley. Marlowe will do. Wait. Thomas Watson. They were showing around Sophocles done into Latin. The Antigone. Are you the same Thomas Watson?

  - My Antigone was a mere boast. I prefer to be known for my Passionate Century of Love.

  - An honour, Kit said, though he did not know the work. I would send out for wine if I had money. A poor student of divinity, no more.

  Watson dug a shilling from his purse. Kit yelled for Tom. Watson started. But Tom was no uncommon name. The Tom that entered was a boy, tousled and with an incisor missing, bare feet filthy, in cast-off trunks and jerkin too large. Kit told him to bring sherris and be quick. Watson took from Kit's table a scrawled sheet. I-Ie read aloud:

  Ovid, he said. Fifth Elegy of Book One.

  - Correct. And not fitting for a divinity student.

  - I like the breasts prest. A rhyme confirming that there are two of them. You are a lover of breasts?

  - The swinging udders I was nursed at? I am given otherwise but here I am but the English voice of Ovid.

  - Otherwise? I see. The slim flanks of a boy. The choristers of the King's Chapel are known, I believe, for their delectability and amenability. Ability, in a word, to arouse.

  - I am of Canterbury. I was briefly in the cathedral choir. I learned early what men could do with boys.

  - Here you have your own ragged catamite?

  - Not young Tom. Young Tom is sacred. I take it you are not that way inclined.

  - I follow nature up to the point where nature says breed. There is something absurd about grown men rubbing their beards together and untrussing. Something pathetic but appealing about the traffic of man and boy. There is much of it in the theatre. This line of yours, where is it, yes - Ioue send me more such afternoones as this - it seems to me for some reason to be a theatre line. I hear it on the stage. You know plays?

  - In Canterbury we had visits from the Queen's Men. Dick Tarleton and his Seven Deadly Sins. The Earl of Surrey's troupe came to regale us here. We were not impressed.

  - And you propose for yourself life in a country vicarage? Kit looked at him. Watson was some ten years older than himself, fixed, he could see, in a world where country vicarages were a shuddering nightmare, sole end of men from the universities whose talents lay not in advancement in the secular fields. They must all come to it unless.

  -Unless, Kit said, fortune my foe becomes my friend. What is there? My ambition, you may have guessed, lies in poetry, but no man can live on it. Patrons are hard to find. The stage? I have not thought of the stage.

  - It diverts both the washed and unwashed. I shrug but I work at play-botching. They talk of Tom Watson's jests. In balductum plays. You know the word?

  - Trashy, tawdry. Groundling stuff.

  - You know of groundlings, then. Shillings slide into my purse and shillings, by mean alchemy, turn to gold. But my Passionate Century sold well. You must come to London.

  - To do what?

  Young Tom brought, panting, the sherris from the buttery in a crock. He dealt copper change. Watson lordily bade him keep it. Kit unhooked two battered college tankards from the wall. He poured. They drank, toasting what they did not know.

  - To prepare your advancement. But you must first dissemble your distaste at your prospects. You have a father in orders who sent you here to sustain a family line of comfortable clerisy?

  - My father makes shoes. I came on a scholarship from the King's School, holy orders being the one end in view. Your lips twitch at the shoemaking.

  They were meaty lips under a Turkish nose. The black eyes caught the summer afternoon light and dealt it at Kit more in compassion than merriment.

  -Who would laugh at shoes? We shall go on needing shoes until our feet are permitted to tread the golden street or dance on hot bricks. The trade is noble enough. Dissemble and take your degree. Be a master of arts, without that you are nothing. But you have the long vacation coming. You propose returning to Canterbury? Come to London. Stay at my house. In the Liberty of Norton Folgate.

  - Liberty?

  - It is in London and yet not in it. Outside the jurisdiction of the City officers. I am at the corner of Bishopsgate Street and Hog Lane. Close to the Theatre in the Liberty of Holywell. You shall see the Theatre. Also the Curtain. More important, you shall see Sir Francis Walsingham.

  - Walsingham. A holy name. And what is he?

  - Universities forbid universal knowledge. You are cut off. You know nothing of the Service?

  - Tell me. See, the mud is dried. It will soon come away.

  - I will tell you of Sir Francis, Frank as I call him. We met in Paris. I was seventeen, studying if it could be called that. He was England's ambassador. He was kind without condescension. He corrected my Latin verses, listened to the songs I wrote. It was perhaps a relief for him in the midst of such troublesome business St Bartholomew was preparing. You know surely of the massacre? The mob screaming for the blood of the Huguenots. Two thousand Huguenot corpses on the Paris streets.

  - We all know of this. See, it is as if there had never been mud. I will pour more.

  - Listen. The Queen has never been willing to see how the faith of the Huguenots is England's faith, or near to it. She sent a baptismal font, all gold, worth all of a hundred thousand, when the French king's daughter was born. She stood as godmother, imagine. The font was taken by Huguenot pirates in the Channel. Friendly with a France that murders Protestants. She calls it diplomacy.

&
nbsp; - Which means double-dealing. Go on.

  - Sir Francis is no double man. Perhaps it is easier for a woman to deal double, in state affairs as in the amorous life. They are all Eve's daughters, treacherous by nature. However, Sir Francis runs his service mostly from his own purse. This is love of country at its most shining and laudable. He knows the Catholic threat.

  - And not the Puritan one?

  - Pooh, that is nothing. There is no Puritan candidate for the throne. But there is a Catholic one, and she is the daughter-in-law of the Medici bitch who has all the French power. I weary you.

  - No, you do not. But I must consider myself unworthy to receive confidences about affairs of high state import.

  - Pish, all the world knows them. Sir Francis needs spies. There is money in spying. There, that is something new for you.

  - You wish to turn me into a spy?

  I wish nothing. I tell youu only a way of advancement. I shall be in London during the summer. You know where I am.

  - I shall note it on the verso of this Englished Ovid. There, you may dress again, as immaculate as before you were maculated.

  - Do not try your pretty wordplay with Frank Walsingham. He is a plain man. Well then, we shall meet. I thank you for your hospitality.

  - It was all yours. The wine, I mean. A cup for the stirrup. He poured. They drank, and Watson spat the lees from his lips: pt pt. He took Kit by the shoulders and seemed about to lift him to tell his weight.

  - To my mother in Newmarket, then. Master - what is it - Merlin? Marlin?

  - Marlowe will do. Or Marley. Marl is clay and lime, my name's lowly constant. I will he in London.

  Kit had copied from the manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Pocsie, then in circulation in Cambridge, these words: Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done. Her world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden. Kit thought: I am a poet, I must not be lowly. London must not terrify me. If I see London. As he stood with his eyes beyond the world (brazen'), his roomfellow young Barnabas Ridley came in, a different dream in his own eyes. He said:

  - Ah, she is cream and strawberries. Such a straight leg.

  - Which you saw entire?

  - Handled. In the hav of the barn I covered her with flowers.

  - Enough. There is a party of us going swimming in the river. You will come?

  - That is forbidden. Nakedness. A whipping in the college hall by the Proctor. I beg you not to.

  - Grantchester. There we shall not be seen. Cleanse from your body the sweat of the fornicator. I can smell it from here.

  - I do not fornicate. I am in love.

  As the summer moon came up Kit splashed and swam with George Taplow, Jack Fothergill, Abraham Curlew and small nameless boys of the village who loved the water games but ran home to their mothers when the play took a different turn. There. Now. Have at thee. Ease of the body, turn and turn about. Under the elms by the water's margent. Naked. Altogether too animal, save that animals did not. The work of breeding too urgent and life too short. Love? Mind and mind? It did not apply.

  So, then, I suppose it to have been. I saw Kit for the first time in London at Burbage's theatre, named aptly the Theatre, when I played Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy. He was on a stage stool, next to Watson, much taken by Ned Alleyn, younger than he by a year but altogether the quavering ancient as Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain:

  - He would not say that, said Kit. This was after, in the tiring room. I was unwigging myself, wiping off the white from my chubby boy's face, easing myself out of bodice and fardingale. Kit saw me an instant in a boy's nakedness and seemed to glow. The tiring room the afternoon sun had baked was a cram of players, Dawson, Hawkes, Crampson, Digges, Birkin, Timmes, the rest, transformed now from Portugal and Spain their notabilities into men and boys of the street, cursing at their thirst, thumping each other over tripped entrances, slowness on cues, a stutter, a finger-snapping momentary forgetting of a phrase put right by Haddock the bookholder. Tom Kyd, whose play it was, was there, a timid little man with bowed legs though not timid in defence of his work. He said:

  - The distracted brain can oft turn to a kind of logic which we see as mad, absurd also, but the absurd can be a face of the tragic. This Seneca knew. This I know. You are one of these university puppies that think they know better.

  - Cambridge has taught me Seneca. Puppy I may be, but I am right to whimper at that whilom.

  - Whilom is very good, Ned Alleyn said. It is old-fangled but so is the speaker. There is nothing wrong with whilom.

  - I defer, Kit said. I was moved. My back hairs bristled. I sweated. It was hardly to be believed.

  And Ned Alleyn, removing from his young and blank face the paint of lined age, smirked, a creature of null person as of null features, the condition of his art, the empty vessel to be filled with what the poet brewed, what there was of him so to say with the buskins off was a nullity that nonetheless gave off a manner of heat. He said in a voice as of song, wiping:

  - The skill is long to learn. Meaning he had been at it some five or six years, starting like myself as a bound prentice to his company. Long, yes, it seemed long. And then: We will go drink. Then Smigg the door-gatherer came in swinging his leathern bag, so Alleyn asked what was the take.

  - Two pounds thirteen and some odd bad coins.

  - Ruination, said James Burbage, who owned the Theatre and the Curtain and whose son Richard had his own ambitions, the chief of which was not to be an arm-swinging actor like Alleyn. Dick Burbage, who had carried a pike, said:

  - The ruination will not come from low takings. We shall be closed. An officer I know to be of the Lord Mayor was looking in for another prentice riot.

  - They were quiet today. Besides, we are in Middlesex, not London. The Mayor's men may keep their long noses out.

  - London prentices, London laws. And Dick Burbage shook his head. It is all a shaky business.

  The Unicorn on Bishopsgate Street had as landlord Ned Alleyn's elder brother Jack. Kit and Watson, Alleyn, Kyd and I trod the slimy cobbles thither. I was young but, motherless and fatherless, was under Ned Alleyn's protection, lived with him; he was as yet unmarried, but that was to change. In the street we saw Philip Henslowe, who said Well met, I would have a word. Alleyn nodded. It was Henslowe's stepdaughter Joan Woodward, no more than a girl, little older than I, in whom Alleyn was said to have an interest.

  The main room of the Unicorn was a cram of drinkers who had come from the Theatre, and some greeted Alleyn as ever with What outcries pluck me, which had become a catchline of the time. He waved his arm, smiled as from aloft, and led us to a back or private room. Jack Alleyn, as to make up for his brother, was of a face not easy to forget, with a black jutty beard, jutty eyebrows that were fierce, a fierce eye, one only, the other walled and sightless, and the flame cheeks of one that knew his own potions. He himself brought in my small beer, beer not so small for the others, save for Watson who had a pewter mug of sherris. Henslowe laid money on the humped and scarred table, saying:

  - Earned on the flat of their backs.

  He was a coarse man, and he alluded to one of his brothels. He had other interests and of one he now spoke, saying:

  - The situation is known well enough. James Burbage is spent out. Said ruination, did he, well, no wonder. Too much of Jack Brayne's money in it. His groceries do well but his soap-works in Whitechapel dissolves into suds, it will soon be no more. You know the strength of his investment. He says the playhouse is rightfully his. Now, as you know, Brayne is Burbage's wife's brother, so we shall see what we may call a family feud. There is no future there. I see you pull your beard in some dismay, Mr Watson. A matter of the lawyer who acts for Burbage, am I not right, Hugh Swift, and you to marry his sister, have I got it? You will be forced into the taking of sides, which you will not like, for the salt and sauce of your paid quips are spread over the whole players' commonalty and you would be neuter.

  - Neutral, Watson said. You know too
much, Henslowe.

  - That is my trade. I have a new one, and that is to build a theatre. Give me three months and it will fly its flag ready for autumn and the opening of parliament. The Burbage houses are wrongly placed. Bare fields like open country though full of dogmerds and dead cats. It will not do. The future of the business lies on the Bankside, among the other bringers of joy and diversion. The bullring and the bearpit and you know what.

  - So, Alleyn said, we play against roars and screams and the rapture of dying. He meant, as I knew, the spending of Henslowe's brothel clients.

  - Well, it is life, it is joy. I have bought a share in the bearpit and, a hundred yards off, a very pretty rose garden. In that garden I am ready to build what I shall call the Rose, which is an apt name. And you, Ned, shall help with the planning and the design of it.

  - So we are to leave poor Burbage and set up over the river. What will become of poor Burbage?

  - To each man his own misery. Drain those and we will refill. We shall need plays, Mr Kyd. Who is this one here (beetling at Kit), in the fine velvet cap with a pheasant feather? It was true that Kit was dressed not like a poor scholar but like a London gentleman, and I guessed that he was wearing some of Watson's discardments. Kit said:

  - How much is there in the writing of a play? Henslowe said:

  - Work you mean, or money? Kyd said:

  Too much work and too little money. What have you done then? He spoke jealously. Alleyn took sheets much blotted from his bosom and said:

  - Listen.

  He then went hm hm and spoke of a grammatic fault: one Greekish lad with all these poleaxes?

  - Licence, Kit said. Kyd said, more jealously:

  - Fantastical. Infants swimming, who taught them to swim, they are not fishes. And what is all this wantonness of cruelty? I would never go so far.

  - The Trojan war, Kit said. It is a play of Dido and Aeneas. Aeneas speaks.

  - Not the whole of the Trojan wars would have spilt enough blood for a fishpond.

  - You think in terms too literal. What you cannot show you will not have.

  - But that is how I have improved on Seneca. Seneca but reports, and that is bad playmaking. Our groundlings have read no Seneca, they come to see as well as hear.