A Dead Man in Deptford (24 page)

With a proud galleon.

DUKE:

Captain, we must sende
A message to the King, how that the news
Will reach the English and the Huguenots
Whoss piracie at La Rochelle we know of.
Are we thenne trulie scatter’d? Captaine, speake.

CAPTAIN:

My hearte is heavie, good my lord, to see
This curse upon us. Doth God turne his backe
On this endeavour which in holinesse
Of spirit and intente we did embark on?
There is much sicknesse here among our men
And well you know our putting back to port
For refit, nay, and reinforcement too
Yells in the winde as it were God’s own worde.
Let us seek peace on honourable termes.
Such is my plea.

DUKE:

Do that and we are lost.
The King, may heaven protect him, obdurate
And obstinate, aye, and of volition deafe
To all but speedie victory, will not have it.
I hear such stories of the English fleete,
How the ships leap like greyhounds, how their guns
Bristle about like hedgepig quilles, that know
I am made sicke yet, sicke or not, obey
A summons that will lead to more than sicknesse.
Is Parma coming from the Netherland?
Has there been news?

CAPTAIN:

No news. The winds from north
And east and west and south forbid it.

(That touch was Kit’s, who loved to believe that news was
made up of the cardinal compass points.)

DUKE:

Dios,
Cristo, Maria, see us tempest-tost.
Grant us your aid or certes we are lost.

And then Tom Kyd moved his play to Devon, but briefly,
that he might have dry land between two naval scenes, and here
he had (this was most dangerous) Lord Howard of Effingham,
our High Admiral and patron of our company, with Sir Francis
Drake that was his deputy, awaiting the Spanish fleet that did
not come.

HOWARD:

How many troops has he?

DRAKE:

My lord, they say
Some fifteen thousand heading for Tor Bay,
A most commodious harbour.

HOWARD:

Tush, not so.
Stubborn and ill-advised our Devon ports
Where winds secluded are they do ignore,
So saith this signal. Portland or the Solent
Must be their aim. We followe.

DRAKE:

Aye, my lord.

Kyd returned lovingly to his flagship scene and had the engagement fought out as from the Spanish view.

DUKE:

Here safe in Calais roades, I am advis’d
Our brother Parma who is lodg’d in Bruges
Saith all is readie and the Narrow Seas
Await with loving zephyrs our approach.

CAPTAIN:

Your grace, you have but land-eyes, see you not
The English fleete assembled?

DUKE:

Where, where?

CAPTAIN:

There.
Mine eyes that temper’d are to the sea-gaze
Spie England’s shippe-force, less than a sea-mile,
Galleons and merchantmen and men of warre.
They seeke engagement.

DUKE:

No, they cannot.

CAPTAIN:

Yea,
With most pernicious treacherie the windes
Veer and the tyde is running to theyr wille.
Fire, I smelle smoake, see flame, now what is this?

DUKE:

They have sette some shipper aflame. ‘Tis burning tarre
Assails our noses. Dios, what be those
That make like ambulant helles toward our fleete?
They burne our pinnaces. Wilde, ‘tis a wildernesse
Of crashing woode and fire. Their cables cut,
Our captaines lose all order.

CAPTAIN:

Gales arising
Speake something divilish. That is not Goddes winde.

DUKE:

Theyr Godde, captain. All is done, our fleete
All broken and a maze of fire, and they
That with cut cables have escap’d its wrath
Like to be now by Boreas’ hideous breath
Swift driven to the dragons of the north
And shipwrack in the frozen Orcades.

It was too brief, there was not enough for the traffic of two
hours, and to have brought in, as Tom Kyd intended, triumphant
Gloriana striking a medal and granting the victory to the winds of a protestant God that loved the English and hated the Church his
own son founded would have met her scorn (I am no boy) and
shut the Rose down for ever. True, she was no boy, she was
all of fifty-five years and raddled and lacking teeth, and she
did not show herself at the thanksgiving service at Paul’s on
September 8, that was the morrow of her birthday. There was
a sermon delivered by a lawn-sleeved bishop at Paul’s Cross and
this spoke of the Queen’s happiness, though in truth she was far
from happy, for her great love was dead.

We may say that with no impugning of her virginity, though
this has been seen as a virtuous lie, a raising of her to the rank
of the Mother of God or the goddess Diana, or else a device
of diplomatic dealing that rendered her a prize of alliances.
That the Earl of Leicester, the Lieutenant and General of the
Queen’s Armies and Companies, was her one true love may
not be gainsaid, but now he had died after the stiff work of
raising troops to meet the invading Spaniard and was, some
say, poisoned by the salty waters of the springs of Buxton that
is in Derbyshire. Well, he was dead, and there was thus a great
emptiness in the procession to Paul’s, and it seemed that Sir
Walter Raleigh, in his bravery, having done as good work as
Leicester but greatly hissed, faced the dapper Earl of Essex as
one gamecock faces another in enmity, but these, being men of
ambition, yearned to fill that emptiness and by God one or other
would soon do it.

It was Leicester that had picked out Dick Tarleton, a swineherd on his estate, as a rustic witty clown to please her majesty,
and he had risen to head of the company that bore her name.
Now, one week before the rejoicing, he too was dead, lying on
the lousy second bed in Em Ball’s house in Holywell, a pace or so
from Burbage’s Theatre where he had played. The Queen’s Men,
despite their high name, were now nothing, and the Admiral’s
rose much, no little helped by the thrashing of the Spaniards
by my lord Howard. The Admiral’s banner waved high above
the Rose from the turret, and it was Kit’s play of the victorious
early autumn that was itself a victory for the craft, for its like
had not been seen before. He had read the life of the German necromancer John Faust, not yet in translation but extempore
rendered by the Wizard Earl, and here he had him on the
stage, calling up the devil and selling his soul for a few years
of pleasure and knowledge. I would not play Helen of Troy, I
was beyond it, and Ned Alleyn gave me though grudgingly the
part of the servant Wagner, who is a sort of Faustus in a lesser
figure.

- We will have a woman, Kit said. There be some of
Henslowe’s girl goslings that will for a shilling parade naked.

- We cannot, we cannot, Ned headshook, there has never
yet been a woman on the stage. And to have a woman naked
would close us down.

- Draped, not wholly bare of the arse and bubs. Walking
across the tarrass first with no words. Then, with no words,
below.

- And then I kiss her. Sweet Helen, make me immortal
with a.

- You would prefer to kiss a woman than a boy, unlike some.

- Joan would not like it, even in play.

- A boy then, well-draped.

Now this Doctor Faustus had somewhat in it that was beyond
itself and attached to Kit as it were a nimbus that was more than
atheistic, being truly devilish or demonic. When Faustus stood in
the dusky grove of what was in truth a bright afternoon, conjuring
Mephistophilis, his words were:

Orientis princeps, Belzebub inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demagorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appareat, et surgat Mephistophilis.
Quid to moraris? PerJehovam, Gehennam, et consecratam aquam
quam nunc spargo, signumque crucis quod nunc facto, et per vota
nostra, ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis.

And this Latin, doubtless donated by the Earl of Northumberland, though understood only by the learned, had an effect
of great devastation among the vulgar, who cried God’s my life
and Heaven save us, and one or two covertly made Faustus’s
signum crucis, though to a holier end. One woman in the lower
gallery screamed and swooned when Rob Gratton appeared as a devil. And at one performance where I was not present, being
plagued by a toothache and having handed my part to young
Theo Hawkes, who did it not well, there were cries that there
was another devil on the stage that was not in the company, and
again there was screaming and swooning. It is to the point here,
I believe, to say that there were more of these devils when we
played out of London, during the closings for plague and fear
of riot and the like, than in the city itself, for London the great
capital was mostly above being afraid of devils. There is in
Dulwich, which is a ride south from London, a great college
called Alleyn’s of God’s Gift, which was founded in this wise.
We were playing at Dulwich and the devil appeared grinning
during my scene with the clown, and there was an outcry, we
intermitted the play and, at Ned Alleyn’s command, spent much
of the night in praying and fasting. And Ned vowed some great
monument of gratitude for our delivery from diabolic infection
or the true Luciferian toils, so, when he had money enough, the
foundation was set in hand and the College is there for all to see
and for boys to be instructed under a master who shall, till time’s
end, be named Alleyn or Allen, and, as a kind of ironical aegis,
both Christopher and Lucifer remain as its ever more shadowy
presidents.

Christopher or Kit was known about the town, pointed at as
one that could raise the devil with Latin, and with Greek call
back Helen of Troy from the dead, and his frequent knocking
at the door of Durham House was noted and speculation raised
about what devils were to be conjured in the turret study whence
black fumes floated. In truth and as ever the talk and disputation
were on what undying truths could animate a new age unshackled
from superstition and cleansed of blood and bigots, with men
marching forward to reason’s pure dawn.

- And yet, Thomas Harlot said, reason has its limitations.
He stroked Kit’s arm, for they were now friends, saying: Why
should one line of poesy be better than another? Reason cannot
hammer together a frame of adjudication. Why did the flue of
my arms start up when Faustus cried that he saw Christ’s
blood stream in the firmament? I have hardly met this before.

I had and have pat: To believe that a nature subject to these
infirmities is God or any part of the Divine Essence is folly.

- And the objections are inept?

- Whether deliberately so I have never been sure. I can
bring the book.

-Too much, Sir Walter said. Copy out the pages that
are pertinent to our Brunonian thesis and bring those.

- I will. If I am low in spirits this day it is all a proposito. I
received a gleeful letter from one that was a fellow student and
is now curate of a parish. A foolish fellow and a bad poet. He
witnessed the burning of one that had once been my tutor in
divinity, a Mr Kett that held that Christ was not God yet but
would be after his second resurrection. It was folly, yes, but held
in sincerity. Well, he has been burnt alive at Ipswich, dressed in
sackcloth, leaping with joy in the flames, clapping his hands and
crying Blessed be God. I would join with the Puritans if I thought
they were of a lesser vindictiveness than the bishops.

- So Kit mourns for Kett, Harlot said, stroking. All the
martyrs will in time be vindicated, for whatever cause they
were burnt. For us here assembled, and others of our kind
in the cities of Europe, it is essential to avoid martyrdom.

- There is too much talk about, Kit said. There is leaking.

- If there is that, Raleigh said bluntly, it will be from one
that cannot keep sealed under drink what has been said in
sobriety.

- You mean?

- We are a sober company addicted only to tobacco.

- I see. I am not wanted.

- You are very much wanted, Hariot said, and he gripped
Kit’s arm. But you must learn discretion.

- Aye, I made a song about that once, and that was in
drink. How would it go now?

I analyse and find in Christ’s blood nothing to excite, and yet
the poetic supposition that that blood is the dying light of the
day, as also the force of that word firmament, make as it were a
fusion of elements that finds its analogue in the constitution of
chemical compounds. Something new is made and the outlawed
term miraculous coyly intrudes.

- I have spoken before, the Earl of Northumberland said,
of the occult power of words, and you would not accept it.
Streams in the evening sky, it would not do. Firmament has
occult strength beyond analysis.

- Leave this, Sir Walter said, and think of what you may
prepare for the making of a book while I am away in Ireland. You
see this damnable tome of a thousand pages and more extolling
the truth of the Church of England - I do not have it here, I will
not have it - and now the Brownists are peppering the bishops
to, I may say, the Queen’s secret delight though she may not say
so. To arraign alleged truths unproved is in our office, meaning
that the great book itself must, gently ever gently, submit to the
probing of reason.