A Dead Man in Deptford

by Anthony Burgess

  And here was Ortygius:

  But there was iamburlaine:

  I cite the text I have, having forgotten what I once knew by heart. But in memory I hear still Ned Alleyn's thunder or, to me asZ_enocrate, the honey of wooing, and, from backstage, see his throat bared to the dust as to a dagger while he gulped what he termed his lubricant ale. Then back onstage to conquer Persia, Africa, Europe, Asia, India, ride in triumph through Persepolis, slaughter the Turks, the Tartars, the Babylonians and even yearn towards enchaining the meteors, the moon, Saturn, the sun. And always this lust not easily slaked, except when he turned to me, his divine Zenocrate, transformed to a manner of courtier no court could have taught.

  I say lust and lust again. It was all Kit lusting, a male body augmented to a world his prey and no retribution. In a dream of lust all is permitted, tear his throat out, madden him that he batter his brains to a pulp, harness him like a horse, lay on the whip. Some thought the beastliness went too far, when Tamburlaine offered captive Bajazeth meat on his sword-point with Here, eat sir, take it or I'll thrust the blade to thy heart, and Bajazeth taking it only to stamp on it, and then Tamburlaine crying Take it up villain and eat it, or I will make thee slice the brawns of thy arms into carbonadoes and eat them. And Usumcasane mocked: Nay, 'twere better he killed his wife, and then she shall be sure not to be starved, and he provided for a month's victual before hand. And then Tamburlaine: Here is my dagger, dispatch her while she is fat, for if she live but a while longer she will fall into a consumption with fretting, and then she will not be worth the eating.

  - A sniggering kind of brutality, Greene said in the Unicorn, unworthy. The anthropophagous is no subject even for tragedy, and here it is a kind of comedy.

  - That, Kit said, was Tom Watson's contribution. He is always calling for the seasoning of laughter.

  - It is the wrong laughter, it is the laughter of excess. All that could happen in the most fevered of nightmares is made to happen, and pathos is murdered by excess and the throat is tickled against its will to laughter. Have you not seen men being dragged to the scaffold laughing? Where there is laughter and no simple causative that is harmless and wholesome, well then you may suspect an excess of the brutal. It is unworthy.

  Kit looked on Robert Greene. He had seen him at Cambridge often enough, another profane one, drunken often, swearing much, taking his mastership at Clare College in Kit's own fourth year at Corpus Christi. He would now be thirty and looked more. His fiery beard was pointed like a steeple spire in a lake's reflection; his hair, uncut, stared to all the points of a compass rose. His teeth showed their rotting waists, his nails, much chewed by them, harboured the grease he scratched from his lousiness. His stockings were silk but foully twisted and the cloak tied at his breast but thrust over his shoulders was of the pitiful green, much spotted, of a duck's turd. He said:

  - And I utter this condemnation if you will take it, as you must, since you are my junior and backward in morality, that here is the atheist Tamburlaine and no hint of his wrong, no chorus warning of the downfall, no hovering Christian dove bespeaking judgement - You follow me? It is as though we are all to kneel before him and say yes yes, this is the crown of life to which we would all aspire an we were let. It is an immoral effusion.

  - Are you so much for morality?

  Greene looked suspiciously from his pig's eyes that were of a piss colour saying:

  - I know what you think. Here is one living with a trull whose brother is a cutpurse and who has begot a brat -

  - I approve the name Fortunatus. It could also be Faustus.

  - Whatever you approve, here it is. Now you must consider that a man may embrace the divide between body and spirit.

  - A divide is a nothing and cannot be embraced.

  - Let that pass. I have done wrong, no man more, but I recognise the heavenly light of goodness the better for splashing in the mud. I call myself a moral man. Am I not a moral man? he asked his companion, his minder and mistress's bully, also her brother.

  - If you will it be so, Cutting Ball said, a reeking ruffian in a black hat of exorbita-it but drooping brim.

  - He is one of the innocent, Greene said to Kit, who have never been oppressed with morality. He thinks a moral to be a mulberry. He would go as your Tamburlaine goes if he could, he altogether approves of the whipping and the killing.

  - You too. You are there many afternoons.

  - I thought to enter the game myself. Pamphlets are well enough but there is a pleasure in hearing one's fine lines mouthed.

  - This you know without the testing?

  - I have sung out some to the morning air. They promise well. I have a ten-year advantage over you. I have read more.

  - He is, Cutting Ball said, a magistrate arses.

  - Magister artis, artium, fool. So is he here, but his ink is hardly dry. I will out-Tamburlaine you, you will see else.

  - I must go. And he went, somewhat flown, to dig pen in (hardly dry was right. Learning stood out sophomorically) and endite Tamburlaine the second part. Paul Ive's The Treatise of Fortification. Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The lore of the physician:

  This is Tamburlaine dying not because of assassin's knife or blow in battle but from nature which framed him of four elements. And I died too, divine Zenocrate. But there was life enough, with Ned Alleyn in coat with copper lace and crimson velvet breeches drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria with bits in their mouths, lashing them and crying:

  It was in the November, with breath steaming from the groundlings, that true not pig's blood was drawn and, in a manner, the needful gory baptism, desired by all architects for their new erections but rarely fulfilled, was, in a rare fashion, fulfilled. The Governor of Babylon was tied to his turret post and was to be mock-killed with a caliver. Timmins, charged with this shooting, saw too late that the charge was live, and, in deflecting his piece, aimed at a child, a woman big with child, and a man near her. The woman was killed, as was the child in utero and the one ex utero, and the man hurt in his head very sore. The play, by consent of the majority of watchers, proceeded, as nothing would be served by feigned regret and mourning. This was the afternoon that there were viewers in the lord's box.

  This lord's box was a contrivance of Philip Henslowe, being a room curtained, supplied with good chairs and a fire and what of drink its occupiers wished, placed between left and right upper galleries and costing for the afternoon's hire some ten shillings. The better sort did not cavil at this, as a whole noble family, from tiny prattler to chumbling great grandfather, could with ease be accommodated, but this day there were only the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Walter Raleigh. They had come in a private boat with liveried oarsmen, in finery but masked, so none knew who they were until the play's end and the dispersal of the brawling, base and popular. Then they appeared unmasked in the greenroom to much fawning and twittering. Henslowe was near on his knees with obsequious adulation: what will your lordship take, and you your worship Sir Walter, it is no trouble, it may be sent out for, dust those chairs boy, we are highly honoured (with much breath on the honoured, though none on the highly). So the two were seated, and the Earl, who was young but reputed learned, indeed called the Wizard Earl for his skill in necromantics, enquired pleasantly if there was a true slaughter at every performance, and Henslowe replied in his fluster Alas no. It was as though, if his lordship wished, another could be contrived at their next visit with ease. And Sir Walter in his thick Devonian that appeared to encrust his utterance with sea salt said:

  - Well, it was done so in the plays of Nero's time. Were not condemned criminals made unwilling actors in the action, beheaded in bloody truth on the stage and not in histrionic fancy? Perhaps some link or marriage might be made between our hanging magistrates and your company, Mr Mr I know not your name.

  - Henslowe, Philip, Sir Walter, Henslowe, some say Hounslow.

  - Hounds low more than hens, no matter. And who is your Tamburlaine? Ah, I see him. A burden to the voice
, your part, sir. Slake, slake, continue, you need it.

  - And where is the poet? the Wizard Earl asked.

  The poet was with myself in the rear of the tiring house. I had appeared for the final jig in my Zenocrate skirt and bodice to show I was resurrected from my death, and, now naked, Kit had seized me with loving congratulations on my performance. He seemed unfaithful to Tom Walsingham, or else, sundered, they had made some bargain about vicarious coiling and thrusting unclear to any outside their covenant or compact. Now Kit heard himself called for, smacked a kiss on my lips heavy painted in ochre, then went to his summons.

  - So, he said to Sir Walter, I meet my poetic rebuker.

  - Oh that, oh that. The wisdom of age answered youth's hot avowals. Yet not hot either. A cool and sweet pastoral, very pretty. This that you gave us today was not so pretty. No rebuke, a balance rather.

  - The dramatic opposes the lyrical. But here was something of the lyrical.

  - To entertain divine Zenocrate, aye aye. Sitting's as cheap as standing, sit.

  - In his lordship's presence? Never.

  - There are kings and emperors and sultans enow about, his lordship said, seeing players not yet uncostumed. The beauty of your craft is the showing that rank is but show and no reality. Your true hierarchy is not decreed by birth's accidents. You have made some study of the colliding faiths, I see. Mohammedans and Christians embattled and neither better than the other. You have had your sharp eyes about the court. What was the line, Sir Walter?

  - I'll ride in golden armour like the sun. There is only one man I know of with golden armour.

  - I had heard of it, sir, Kit said, from Mr Watson. He heard it from others.

  - Well, my ostentation as Captain of the Queen's Guard is for the first time exalted. Like the sun, eh? And why not like the sun? You have heard of the Priest of the Sun?

  - You mean Bruno?

  - So you know of him. He left us two years agone and a loss to us despite his Italianate Latin. Chaelum, indeed. Exchelsis, indeed. Your play opened doors, sir. I could smell the dust dispersed by your broom. I must reward you with the quintessence of newness. I had thought of a play to spread the news of it. You know where I am?

  - Indeed, sir. Durham House.

  - That. Haunted by Durham's Catholic bishops, but they are easily smoked out.

  - Talking of that, his lordship said, rising and hatting.

  - Yes, yes. The nymph beckons. And Sir Walter too rose, his hat very ornate with shed feathers from a whole aviary. Gentlemen, it was diverting, oh more. Very earnest. Keep your powder dry.

  This was the prologue to Kit's, it may so be termed with little exaggeration, tragedy.

  FIGHTING, sir? You look belaboured.

  For Kit presented himself at Durham House with a bruised cheek and a torn collar.

  - Perhaps, he said, I should have gone home to change or else cancelled my visit. But you will be habituated to frays and the frayed in frays. A man in the street accused me of the murder of his wife and unborn child. He said it was in the play and I had writ the play. The watch had to be called. One of the rarer hazards of the poetic craft.

  - I have somewhat to soothe. But perhaps not yet. You like my turret?

  It had maps and a mappamundi, Florentine Raleigh said. Books, of course. And the wide window looked on the Thames that bristled with masts under boiling clouds of early winter. Raleigh was not in his costly finery whose intention was to amaze; Kit was not to be amazed. He wore a shabby black gown and was in old slippers; the bare legs were haired like a satyr's. A fine seacoal fire smoked, following the caprices of the wind. Read this, Raleigh said. Read it aloud. I think Hariot has an inner music even when he discourses practicalities. Kit took the open book and read:

  - The leaves being dried and brought into powder, the inhabitants of Virginia take the smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head from whence it purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours, openeth all the pores and passages of the body and not only preserveth the body from obstructions but, if they have been of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them... So, Kit said, what is this panacea?

  - Panacea is right, and Raleigh slapped his thigh. We need a play to disseminate the truth of it. This kneaded and daubed gallimaufry of Anthony Chute - you know the man? No, why should you - is meant for the stage, but none will have it.

  Kit read the title from the ill-ordered manuscript Raleigh took from his ill-ordered table: The Transformation of the King of Triniidado's two daughters, Madam Panacea and the Nymph Tobacco. He said:

  - This last name, which I do not know, seems not a feminine name.

  - Well, she may at first strike you with a masculine buffet, but thereafter she is gentler than love. And all that Hariot says is true. You know Hariot? No, but you will. There are many that you are yet to know. Are you willing to yield to the nymph? You look doubtful. Well, I will demonstrate.

  And Raleigh opened up a cabinet under his window. It held rows of long tubes, as he showed, curved gracefully and ending in a shallow bowl. Clay, he said, as in Virginia, but here I have one especially fashioned in silver. It glinted in the firelight. And here is the nymph. From a drawer of the cabinet he took a fair pinch of a herb, strands of yellow, brown, black, and stuffed this in the silver bowl. Smell, he said, proffering. Kit sniffed. Heady, outlandish, altogether new. And now, Raleigh said, her enlivening and curative spirit riseth in smoke. He took from a pot a spill and enflamed it at his fire. Then he inflamed the herb, the herb smouldered, he drew in smoke and, in a blue jet, emitted it. The aroma sidled towards Kit; Kit coughed gently. Aye, you will cough more when you kiss her. But the cough will be in the manner of a cleansing, a disgorgement of the grosser humours, you may even vomit them up. There is a bowl beneath that table. And then no more coughing, only the bliss of inhalation. Curse it, my talking has doused her. And he refired his spill and relighted. The blue jet bore his words: Will you try?

  Kit tried. He held the warming clay bowl in his fist; the fumes crept up the narrow tube. He drank to his lungs. And then his whole body burst in the manic fit. Aye aye, Raleigh said, kicking the spew-bowl from under. Be not shamed by it. I too when I began. Cough cough, my boy, cough out the rottenness of the age. And then gently draw. Gently but gently.

  The one draw was for the moment enough. His stomach settled, his lungs shrugged an acquiescence, but his head danced. His eyes took in a reeling room then bade a stiller image ensue. There sat Sir Walter, calm, drinking in his smoke, saying:

  - There is a philosophy in this. As some say the love of boys is the higher refinement of coupling - I cannot agree, being by temperament given only to the enjoyment of women, nevertheless - they say this, I say, meaning that appetite is no longer chained to what nature wills, as with animals, so with tobacco eating and drinking are refined to an essence beyond the reach of gross nutriment. You follow me? I think you do. Harlot will give you a lecture on this at our next meeting, which to you will be the first. Now draw gently and say how you are to grow in love with the nymph. She enjoys the company of wine.

  Raleigh rose, took from a corner table with sextants and astrolabes on it what seemed to be the new-born child of a ship's bell. He tolled and soon a man that seemed a salted mariner in livery entered and was told to bring Malmsey. Soon, smoking intermitted by both, Raleigh settled to a musing discourse, saying:

  - Your Tamburlaine rang certain bells within me. It seemed that you were not at the business of easy diversion but pouring out a truth of the times. And the truth is that a man may rise from nothing, and it is the man that doth this that is most likely to gain the summit. For me, I was nothing, one of lowly Devon family that had not even joined in the ennobling pillage of the Reform. You know them, at least you know one, and that is Walsingham of what he terms the Service. There are others - Leicester, the Cecils, others. Now I grow old, I am in the middle of the road of the Italian poet Bruno was ever citing, yet I hold favour. This house was the Quee
n's when she was a princess, now it is mine, a royal bestowal. I have but the rank of a mean knighthood but that is at least a signum of things done. I have founded a colony in the name of her virginity, though the founding has been done by means of an unworthy remoteness, since she would not let me go, holding me to the court as her minion. But there you have the greatness of Harlot, no man like him, sailor, mathematician, skilled in the arts of navigation and all else needful, myself in spirit on the raging ocean. Ocean, Ocean, aye, I call myself but am by royal decree land-bound, beached. 'Take more of this Malmsey. Well, in your Tamburlaine you caught me, the passionate shepherd riding in triumph through where was it?

  - Persepolis. You are unjust to yourself. Tamburlaine is all cruelty.

  - And so am I, of necessity. Machiavelli has unveiled the truth of our natures. The slaughter in Ireland and my cold eyes looking on at the massacre of women. You have that in your play.

  - So you saw the first part?

  - I was told of it, but soon I will see it, it is ever being revived. You too, eh, a passionate shepherd riding in triumph through wherever it is. Bruno talked much of what he called mezzi and fini, meaning means and ends. Some ends, he was always saying, might not be justified because of the baseness of the means. He was sometimes more in the past than the present. The present, as indeed the future, tells us, tells us that this is outmoded and rubbishy doctrine. The condemned Babington sent me a thousand pound to speak up for him. I did not so speak but I kept the thousand. I needed all I could get for the Virginia venture. What is your view of the morality of this?

  - My breath goes. It will come back.

  - A tobacco shock, call it. It is you and myself that are not of the ancient nobility that have to be weaned out of the old way of sorting among the means and rejecting, coughing out I would say, it is apt, it is a response uncontrollable, spewing out the mezzo that harms the innocent. And yet if the world could be saved by the slaughter of one such innocent, a child say, would we not do it?