‘Witch! Bring the rain back!’
‘Unholy spells, and her cats be devils!’
‘Strip her to her skin!’
‘Lash the evil out!’
Some youngsters were beating her with sticks; her gown was torn, brown old dried flesh peering in the moonlight; she wept, she panted as she would die, trying to run from her tormentors; she tripped and fell; they laughed, whipping her up with birch-boughs. It was like a deadly parody of Tarleton and the prancing players.
‘On thy feet, witch! Out of town with her!’
Anne came from soothing the twins, both of whom had awakened crying. ‘What is it? Let me see.’ She brought her heavy breasts to the sill. She saw. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they are killing her.’ One young man carried a torch; he waved it about old Madge till she screamed in fear; her rags caught alight and she beat and beat the grinning flame out, yelling, then breathless, ready to drop. ‘Now,’ said Anne, panting. ‘Now, at the window.’ WS looked at her, sick, incredulous. ‘Now, now, oh, quickly!’ He shrank away from her, into the room’s shadows.
‘No!’ Here was the witch, here. The driving mob passed on raggedly, beating, jeering.
‘Is it the players?’ called his father from the corridor.
‘Yes, yes, the players,’ WS replied.
The voices were more distant:
‘She hath the Seven Deadly Sins! Beat her to church to pray!’
‘How, devils in church? Burn her!’
WS trembled, picking up his clothes from the chair where he had laid them. She was still at the window, moaning. ‘The end,’ he said, retching the words out, ‘that must be the end.’ She came staggering towards him in her nakedness. He cringed from the threat of her touching him. He dressed in a hopping fumbling dance, like a dressing Tarleton, comic, the jig after the bloody play.
At the street’s end the mob was quietening, shrinking away from what it, a thing, had done and tried to do, murmuring, breaking up into family pairs, companies of three. Some graver men and women had come out, some wrapped in their night-gowns. WS saw that it was Alderman Perkes, a bulky man, that had lifted Madge Bowyer. Her slack arms were swinging; her head lolled, tongue out, the moon showing blood on her mouth. And now the beadle in his shirt had appeared, driving the mob home with his staff of office. WS foresaw that house of hers, dock and nettle high around it in summer, forlorn at last in winter, the swinging door fallen from its hinges, the cats having taken to the fields to eat shrews, the mice in possession till the last of the mildewed bread should be gone, the flour-bin emptied. If not now, then next time.
He returned home calm enough to find Anne sleeping. Well then, tomorrow. Tomorrow to take those few hundred lines of pseudo-Plautus to the Queen’s Players, yawning in their inn, crapulous after their merry night but perhaps the less prone not to listen to the decently fashioned (though not in any fire) blank verse. He could not delay his growing up much longer, three-and-twenty, father of three. They might say no, they might laugh at him: canst act, lad? Wouldst be an actor, laddie? Aye, he might reply, the time is come for acting, no longer lying passive to wait on destiny to deal. He sat, looking out on the street now empty of people but washed all in a queenly dispensation of silver; he was sure as though there were a letter in his breast that tomorrow or the next day he would be off with the Queen’s Men. From a queen to a goddess, though first the capering, the self-abasement, the crawling through a dark tunnel of shame to that dark underworld where snakes coiled, heroes lay, a single goddess presided. Well, was not fate once more dealing, busy behind his back, so sure he was? The play we act in is still busily being written in that dark room behind, the final couplet not yet known even to the cloaked and anonymous writer.
Anne had sprawled her bare limbs all over the bed; she slept heavily. WS loosened his clothes and prepared for sleep in the chair by the window. Sinking gently to that simulacrum in his skull of the dark world that lay beyond, out, he became Endymion.
The moon awaits your sleeping. Fear to be kissed.
Tepid her light unblenching but will twist
Your features to strange shape. Though blind, those beams
Get in the mind’s slime monsters for dreams.
He did not fear. He had no fear at all.
1592–1599
I
‘THERE THEY GO.’ said Henslowe, wrinkling his face (though not with sweetness) to an applejohn’s. Kemp was still panting from his jig; he looked benignly out at the prentices brawling their way from the Rose. Perhaps they were off to tell their friends how good Kemp’s jig was, and the play that preceded it — A Knack to Know a Knave — not too bad (though inferior to the jig, naturally) neither. WS nodded grimly at Kemp’s crass back. A self-centred man; a man who would not learn lines; a man who would sooner or later have to go. Not, he hastened to tell himself, that he really cared. It was glove-making all over again, a craft only. Not, perhaps, so mean a craft but still a matter of fitting, taking orders — five feet instead of five fingers. And certainly a more corrupting craft.
‘The Knight Marshal’s Men,’ said Alleyn. ‘They should not have done it.’
‘They are naught,’ said Kemp happily. ‘They are but a sort of lawful ruffians.’
‘A sort of lawful ruffians that will have us closed down,’ said Henslowe gloomily. He knew all about it; he could foresee how one thing led to another; he was a business-man. That morning the Knight Marshal’s Men had arrested a felt-maker’s servant and thrown him into the Marshalsea. He had done, so far as one could tell, very little. He had but made a face at these swaggerers: a bilious tongue thrust out, eyes squinnying, the momentary gibber of an ape; he had breakfasted too well on ale. And then they had leaped upon him, beating him with merry cries — a thud here and a crack there — and dragged him off. Breaking the Queen’s Peace or some such thing. Causing a riot. And now he was in the Marshalsea. ‘This is a lawful place of assembly,’ said Henslowe. ‘And now they can march off in a body. Hark.’
There were mock sergeant yells from without. Into line! Take that man’s name! March! It sounded a ragged procession. They had drunk their fill not only of A Knack to Know a Knave and Kemp’s jig but also of the ale the Rose sold. And, thought WS, was not the playhouse for the peaceful quelling of the riotous spirits that haunt man’s blood, not for their further inflaming? So Aristotle had seemed to say. This, then, was not in the service of any true art, this inn where none could spend the night. He himself had had no hand in the making of A Knack to Know a Knave; he had said his few ridiculous lines (badly, he knew, for he could put no conviction into them) and gone off. But what of Harry the Sixth, which made his auditors shout against France? Well, France was the enemy as much as Spain. And what of Titus Andronicus, making men’s throats gargle with blood, eyes gloating over rape on a man’s corpse, mutilation, the flesh of boys served in a coffin of ground bones baked? Gratuitous, gratuitous. Well, no, the fashion (as with gloves). Out-kydding Kyd, so to say. ‘I will go see,’ he said now (gratuitous, gratuitous). ‘Perhaps it will come to nothing.’ He had promised money home. A trade was a trade.
‘Aye,’ said Heminges, ‘we will both go.’ He was a heavy man like a grocer, and he lowered himself from the apron to the yard by sitting on its edge and dropping his short legs to ground-level. WS, eight years junior, jumped. The money in his purse jangled. No longer a boy, for he had had his twenty-eighth birthday some six weeks past, he was still light and slim and quick. They walked through the yard to the gate, Heminges panting. It was a dry June day, the eleventh of a dry month, perhaps plague-weather.
When they saw the riot outside the Marshalsea they did not wish to get too near. WS took it all in — the impartial river with its swans, the indifferent sun, and, before the grey bricks of the prison, a prentice mob brawling, bawling, fist-shaking, picking up stones and loose gravel to hurl. Let him out! Release the prisoner! We want the prisoner! He nodded in something like satisfaction. This was the people, the plebs, the commons. They were not after justi
ce but riot for riot’s sake. He was confirmed in his view. True, the prentices were young, but they had been joined by grinning bravos of maturer years, stone-throwing, though many not knowing what this was all about. Let him out, whoever he is! It is not right that men be put into jail! How, a small matter of rape or theft or murder? Look you, we did fight King John for this, which is the rights of the subjects. You may not have his corpus. Let him out and we, if need be, will string him up. WS nodded again, noting the raw angry faces.
‘Here be the Marshal’s Men,’ panted Heminges, sweating under the sun. And there indeed they were, striding burly from the prison with their truncheons and cudgels; one or two drew daggers, tongues of silver in the fierce light. Their swords were sheathed. What, waste our cutting edges on this filth? At them now, thudding, cracking skulls. ‘We had best go back,’ said Heminges, fearful when he saw blood. Some prentices, their lout-faces already turning to big yelling babby-mouths, tried to get away; one or two had gone down, clawing at the legs that trampled on them. A fat waddling boy ran about, holding up a hand that fountained red, howling, for a finger had got cut off. The mob growled. It advanced. There were not many of the Marshal’s Men. Even though they started to draw now it was availing them little. Boys skipped away from the slashing (WS admired, coldly, the brightness of the swords; this was perfect weather for the showing of steel). Long laths struck at sword-arms. In a mad clownish tumble Marshal’s Men went down with prentices, thin young legs and thick older ones kicking the air. One defender, swordless now, was dragged to the crowd’s periphery; he cried himself, like any prentice, as a shag-bearded ruffian raised a stone to break his skull and send his brains spewing. Kites wheeled overhead. Then was to be heard the clop of horses. It was the Mayor’s men coming.
‘We had best go back,’ said WS. For these riders would trample everyone down, even the innocent watchers. But could any watcher be really innocent? We are all in love with violence and hate, he thought hopelessly. Only himself, perhaps, had seen all this truly from without — a scene from a story, a spectacle in red and silver, marking how sweat and blood will mingle, how a gash on one cheek was in the form of an L, how one man’s points had been slashed and the golden hair of his rump disclosed to further gilding from the sun. ‘Here is the Lord Mayor himself.’ An angry man in the robes of his office, the indignation of a city disturbed. The horses shook petulant heads, steaming; one neighed at the smell of blood; hoofs stumbled, recovered.
There was another acrid smell, that of burning bracken blown on a dry wind, as they walked back to the safety of the Rose. My Lord Strange’s Men would be out of work this summer, nothing more certain. Midsummer Eve was approaching, a time of madness, hallowed, Knight Marshal injustice or not, to the rioting of prentices. The Council would close the theatres down. Perhaps till Michaelmas. WS shrugged his shoulders. This was a less sure trade than the glover’s. If fear of disorders did not close the theatres, then plague would. If the weather did not break, the sewers and foul alleys flush with rain, then plague would leer with broken teeth and strike. An uncertain life, but all life was uncertain. There he had been, with the Queen’s Men, till poor Tarleton had jigged into his grave. And soon, perhaps, a quarrel with Alleyn or a harsh word of contempt to Henslowe with his eternal cash-book or Kemp saying that he would not learn a speech for any man, had he not always done all extempore and who had ever complained save the poets? But what were poets? Aye, soon he might be out of this company, tame word-boy to a loudmouth who called for more Tamburlaine fustian and the man who would soon be Alleyn’s step-father-in-law, the brothel-keeper who would brood over a lost farthing.
He was brooding now when WS and Heminges found him, peering at his accounts in the dark and airless room at the back of the Rose. It was an old vellum book, foxed, that had been thrifty Henslowe’s brother’s; Henslowe had turned it upside down to make a new clean first page. He was back to this page now, brooding. WS saw: JESUS; 1592. Oh, very pious, this pawnbroker and brothel-keeper. WS told him what he and Heminges had seen.
‘Well,’ said Henslowe, ‘nothing could be more certain. The Rose shut for the summer, and what do I do then?’
‘What do the Men do?’ said Heminges.
‘You can take your plays into the country. I must bide here and wait till better times come with the autumn. See what expense I have been put to this year, what with the making new of the Rose, a new thatch and the stage painted——’ He mumbled on. ‘One hundred pound, all told.’
‘Turn but a few pages,’ said WS quietly. ‘To that part that begins with the holy words “In the Name of God”.’ Henslowe gave him a sharp look. ‘Talbot has done well enough for you,’ said WS.
‘Talbot? Aye, Talbot. Harry the Sixth, that is,’ said Henslowe, sighing. ‘Well, there is no man like Ned, nor ever has been, Roscius nor anybody. Aye, Talbot brought them in.’
‘It was as much my Talbot as Ned Alleyn’s that acted him.’
‘We shall see,’ said Henslowe, appraising WS (the forehead’s height? his chances of longevity? the strength of his writing fingers?). ‘We shall see all, with Almighty God’s help.’ Such as how the bawdy-houses went when the town emptied for high summer. A busy man, he watched behind his eyes a holy trinity of figures dance; pounds, shillings and pence.
‘Greene is naught, though,’ said Heminges.
‘Less than naught,’ said Henslowe. ‘Or soon will be.’
ROBERT GREENE was in the mind of WS as they rode out of town. They were taking their plays north in this continuing heat; the Court would soon follow, on progress. Behind the actors on their horses their cart trundled, laden with properties. The playhouses shut till Michaelmas (Henslowe had foreseen it all), the rats darting through the filthy detritus of a close narrow city, the plague announced in tender swelling buboes. They were well out of it, riding to northern country towns to make the hayseeds gape. Money must still be earned. Greene, decayed master of arts, master of decayed kidneys, must stay in London to earn it. WS imagined his late rising, cursing in crapula, from a bed soiled with his body’s incontinence. Cutting Ball, the thief and killer that loved him, would be ready to fill a cup sour with last night’s dregs from the Rhenish bottle, if the Rhenish had not all gone; if it had, then the pen must race at once, over a growling belly, through the first pages of some new coney-catching pamphlet, these to be hurried to the printer as an earnest of the whole, Ball the messenger to translate at once the meagre advance into wine. In the corner, surrounded by filthy clouts, Greene’s blowsy mistress, Ball’s sister, would nurse the yelling bastard brat Fortunatus. A foul life, and WS was surprised at the whiff of envy that arose each time he caught an image of the wrecked poet and scholar, bloated with drink and disease but still rufously handsome. Why there should be even a scruple of envy he did not know. Because Greene, having no cheesy Puritan qualms, went one way or the other, embracing his fortune with a ready hug? Because, to fall, a man must have a height to fall from (master of arts, gentleman)? Because, most obscurely, Greene had failed as a playwright because he was truly a poet? His work was clogged with poetry: poetry held up action, drove all differentiation from the characters: all mouths became lyric bird-beaks. WS admired more than he would say that failed Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: there was poetry in it; the silliness of Margaret of Fressingfield, a mere dairymaid, purling a lyric stream about Paris and Œnone — was not this somehow transcended in a beauty higher than any one could catch in a truer mirror of life? Greene was no Marlowe, but he was closer to Marlowe than he, WS, would ever be.
’88. He thought back to that year. Prentice acting with the Queen’s Men, a patched play, and then Tarleton’s death, the company’s confusion, himself following Kemp’s waddle to Lord Strange’s Men. A lost Armada, the news of victory beacons, all men Queen’s Men. But, more than anything, Faustus. A play, yes, a mere play, but the smell of truth in it — not the truth of the present feel of his horse’s hot flanks, the sweat running down his nose, Kemp’s droning song, but the bigger truth t
hat lay behind this painted curtain. Greene embraced ruin and (it would come soon) a pauper’s death; Marlowe would embrace hell itself, if hell were all (and he seemed to believe it was all) that the curtain hid. If Tamburlaine had been one big empty boastful shout, yet Faustus was a true voice crying for damnation as though damnation were a mother. ‘My dam, damnation …’ No, not that. No mean quibbles in Marlowe. WS shuddered. He had been once, along with Marlowe, to a meeting of the School of Night. Sir Walter had drunk smoke and been reasonable (may not the mathematics be a way to God as sure as prayer? And yet we will end this night on our knees); Marlowe had raged against Christ as a charlatan saviour and mocked at the soul’s existence, daring God out of His heaven. Well, both Greene and Marlowe called on a dark goddess and expected some answer. They had no doubts. They marched, all or nothing, towards an all-consuming vision. That was true nobility of soul, despite the filthy lodgings of Greene, the bloodshot staring eyes of Marlowe.
And he, what did he, WS, desire? To be a gentleman, that, no more. A craftsman’s son, he must proceed through the mastery of a craft towards the house, the arms of a gentleman. It was towards the slow amassing of money that he rode through the hot summer.
He left behind a manner of a necropolis. The city baked in its corruption; flies crawled over the sleeping lips of a child; the rats twitched their whiskers at an old dead woman (shrunk to five stone) that lay among lice in a heap of rancid rags; the bells tolled all day for the plague-stricken; cold ale tasted as warm as a posset; the flesher shooed flies off with both hands before chopping his stinking beef; heaps of shit festered and heaved in the heat; tattered villains broke into houses where man, woman, child lay panting and calling feebly for water and, mocking their distress, stole what they had a mind to; the city grew a head, glowing over limbs of towers and houses in the rat-scurrying night, and its face was drawn, its eyes sunken, it vomited foul living matter down to ooze over the cobbles, in its delirium it cried Jesus Jesus.
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 8