All Night Awake (41 page)

On that, as on other issues surrounding Marlowe’s life and death—his character, his supposed atheism, his supposed involvement in the secret service—for lack of space to address them all, I refer those interested to Charles Nicholl’s excellent (and deserving of more recognition than it has had)
The Reckoning, the murder of Christopher Marlowe
(Harcourt Brace, 1992).

I’m sure I’ve done Marlowe as much disservice as most of his other biographers.

Whatever he was as a human being, as a poet he was great and his death at twenty-nine was an injury done to the English language, a loss of what might have been its greatest riches. So, go forth and read because, to quote Shakespeare, “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

On another note—to those who will resent my implication that Will Shakespeare inherited Marlowe’s words—fear not. This is not—yet—the last explanation I’ll advance. As unable to explain Shakespeare’s genius as all others before me, I can do no more than advance all the same theories others have advanced and, by advancing them all preempt them all.

The truth is William Shakespeare’s genius is beyond our ken and far beyond our attempts at explanation. On that, I’ll let Kit Marlowe have the last word: “The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes” and by our insufficient imagination . . .

Sarah A. Hoyt

March, 2002

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Bibliography

These are some of the books used in researching for
All Night Awake
. I have also resorted again to all the books used to research
Ill Met by Moonlight
, as well as a few others. A more complete bibliographical list will be posted on my website at www.sarahahoyt.com. However, for now, here are the essential ones, in no particular order:

Nicholl, Charles.
The Reckoning, The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
. Harcourt & Brace, 1992.

Haynes, Alan.
The Elizabethan Secret Services
. Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1992.

Rowse, A. L.
Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work
. Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.

Christopher Marlowe
. Edited and introduced by Richard Wilson. Addison Wesley Longman, Ltd., 1999.

Bakeless, John.
Christopher Marlowe
. Haskell House Pub., 1938.

Weir, Alison.
The Life of Elizabeth I
. Ballantine Books, 1998.

Hibbert, Christopher.
The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age
. Perseus Books, 1991.

Salgado, Gamini.
The Elizabethan Underworld
. Sutton Pub. Ltd., 1992.

All Night Awake (Original Version)

Sarah A. Hoyt

One of the frequent questions I’m asked is about how a novel changes from the time the first glimmering of an idea is formed to when it finally appears in print. So, to give everyone an idea of just what can happen, here is the version of
All Night Awake
as I first submitted it. There are, as you will see, a number of changes – some of which I made kicking and screaming and tearing my hair out – between this and the final version.

Sarah

Prologue

Scene: The curtain opens upon a dense forest. Beneath the overspreading trees, three women sit spinning. The first one, a fresh-faced maiden in a pastel green dress, spins the wool. The middle aged one, a buxom matron in stronger green, winds the thread. The oldest one, dressed all in black, leans forward, and, over the white spun thread, holds a pair of glimmering golden sheers, poised to cut.

The first spinner, whose sparkling blond hair half covers a body wrapped only in a gauzy gown, speaks while bent over the spinning wheel. “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain?”

The second spinner, her hair confined by her bonnet, her rounded body within a sturdy dress, rolls the thread between her work-calloused fingers and looks not at the speaker, but at the foggy air as she answers, “When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won. When the poet’s got his crown, when the traitor’s web is spun, when the king’s got his throne.” While her fingers work, she smiles, revealing sharp teeth, with which fate has ever mauled every mortal between cradle and grave. “When the threat of evil is gone.”

The older woman, silver hair loose and wild over her dull black dress, looks up with pale blue eyes. In looking up, she reveals that she has no ears -- for she who cuts the thread of life must be deaf to mortal pleas. “When our thread is cut and spun. When evil’s worst is done. When punishment and reward are won.”

“Where the place?” the blonde girl asks. She lifts her face up and for the first time shows that, amid the delicate tracery of her features, shine no human eyes, such as light mortal way. No space exists for eyes on her perfect face, nor scars where eyes once were, nothing but a blankness where eyes should be, for, like newborn life, is she blind.

“In the heart of men,” the old woman says and, as she speaks, the still air trembles and tears, like a paper burned, leaving an irregular hole in the scene, a hole through which a rich chamber can be spied.

In the burn, a creature appears -- looking like a young man, dressed in light blue velvet breeches and doublet, his pale moonlight-colored hair combed over his left shoulder, his moss-green eyes amazed. He looks at himself, as though disbelieving where he is and the form he takes.

The hole closes behind him, leaving him stranded in this odd forest, with these strange companions. He stands, his hand reaching to his side, as if for the handle of an accustomed sword that is not there.

All three spinners look up, displaying one’s lack of ears, the other’s empty eye space and the other’s sharp teeth in a smile.

The youth notices the spinners and starts. “Oh, what are these?” he asks, looking frightened. “Live you? Are you aught that even an elf such as me ought to question?” He puts his hands around himself and looks lost, like a small child in an unknown house. “What a strange chill and what a strange dream. And yet, I am in Arden forest, where the palace of faerie kind is set and where I reign as the king for faerieland. And you look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are on it.” He frowns in wonder. “You seem to understand me, by each at once her chappy finger laying upon her skinny lips. You should be women, and yet strange women you are. Speak if you can; what are you?”

The maiden smiles. Her sweet smile makes her deformity all the more glaring. “All hail Quicksilver, king of Elves.”

The middle aged woman smiles in turn, displaying her carnivorous teeth, “And Lady Silver, his other aspect.”

As she speaks, the image of a beautiful lady with dark hair and pale, pale skin stands besides the blond youth. He spares it no more than an amazed look, because now the crone speaks, “Both Quicksilver and Silver will too soon be bereft -- of kingdom and happiness, and aye, of life itself.” She turns her intent eyes to Quicksilver. “Lest look you to your keeping and learn to be a king as king should be, and to be yourself, both entirely.”

“Bereft?” Quicksilver asks. Despite himself, his voice does waver. “Bereft how? Say from whence you woe this strange intelligence? Or why upon this forest you stop my nightly work with such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you.”

The maid smiles. “Such as us can no man charge, no man hold,” she says.

“Nor no elf either,” the matron says, “for you are no more to me than is a man -- a thread spun that may be rolled between my fingers as I see fit.”

“And cut as I list,” the crone speaks up in tremulous voice. “And yet we’d warn you, for you serve our purpose well.” She reaches into a basket at her feet, retrieves a thread sullied to an indifferent grey. “Listen to us, for your brother, Sylvanus, the king that was -- whom you entrusted in keeping to the ancient Hunter, and who’s become one of the Hunter’s dogs -- Sylvanus lives still and, uneasy within his confinement, he strives to cut the bonds that bind him.”

The middle-aged woman smiles, showing sharp teeth -- the merciless teeth of a famished wolf. Her voice descends to a confidential stage whisper, and her finger pauses not over the twisting thread. “You, fool that you are, Quicksilver, king of elves, have set old evil to guard newer evil. Old evil has blunted and aged like a dagger put to humble use chopping greens in a cottage kitchen. It cannot keep the edge off your brother’s pure malice that would devour the whole wide world with its open maw.

“If Sylvanus succeeds so shall the worlds go clashing, the spheres breaking, till nowhere is everywhere, all is nothing, and only that is which is not.”

The older woman sighs. Her scissors tremble over a white thread held beside the sullied one. “Aye, king, you are a fool indeed. As we speak your brother strives for the heart of those already touched by faerie. Should he find a human to give him asylum, then can he grow and grow and come back to defy you.”

“Touched by faerie?” Quicksilver sounds amazed, lost. “Mean you Will Shakespeare, or—?”

The three women shake their heads.

“Not for us to say how the thread should be woven, how the battle should be fought,” the maid says. “Only to spin and twist and cut.” She lifts the thread with her fingers.

The matron nods. “Then in the hearts of men shall we meet again.”

“After the hurlyburly is done,” the crone pipes in with her reedy voice. “And the battle is lost or won.”

They vanish into the air, and Quicksilver stands, alone, amazed, eyes wide. His lips shape a single word that his voice yet fears to utter.

“Sylvanus.”

The name of his unworthy brother whose throne and majesty Quicksilver has taken.

Scene One

The market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, nestled in the crook of gentle flowing Avon. It is spring, and the poplars that dot the town unfurl their new green glory. Above the town a thunderstorm brews. The roiling masses of clouds hang, threatening. No breeze moves the nascent buds or the fresh green leaves. In this uneasy calm, the good burghers sleep snug in their beds, by their good wives’ sides. But in the garden of a house on Henley street, on the edge of town, between the back alley that runs into Arden forest and the back doors of twin wattle and daub houses, a shadowy man stands, transparent and imperfect like a figure glimpsed in a dream.

H
ow came he here?

Will didn’t know.

Standing in the middle of his parents’ garden, Will had no memory of getting there, no memory at all except of lying down in his bed, in far-away London.

Yet, this was no dream.

Taking a deep breath, he smelled the ripe fruit in nearby orchards, savored the warm breeze on his skin, listened to the babble of the Avon.

No dream had ever felt this vivid, this alive. He pulled back his dark curls that brushed the collar of his cheap russet suit. Though Will’s hair had started receding in the front, making him look older than his twenty nine years, it remained lush and long in the back.

Will remembered, with a dew of tears in the eyes, how much he missed his native town. The last three years Will had been in London, where the smells the fresh spring wind transported were likely to be manure, or the perfume with which foolish Londoners masked the excessive human reek. Will had craved the familiar smells, the familiar sounds and tastes of his home town as a child craves his nurse’s bosom.