Roaring Boys (12 page)

The number of plague victims was growing inexorably. Alleyn, out on tour and increasingly worried, wrote to Joan, his ‘Mouse’:

I commend me heartily to you, and to my father and my mother and my sister, Bess, hoping in God though the sickness be round about you, yet by his mercy it may escape your house, which by the grace of God it shall. Therefore use this course: keep your house fair and clean, which I know you will, and every evening throw water before your door and in your back side, and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace, and with all the grace of God, which must be obtained by prayers and so doing, no doubt but that the Lord will mercifully defend you.
⁸

Henslowe replied on Joan’s behalf, possibly because she was illiterate, saying that she prayed day and night for his good health and ‘hoping in the Lord Jesus that we shall have again a merry meeting; for I have been flyted with fear of sickness, but thanks be unto God we are all at this time in good health in our house. But all round about us it hath been almost in every house, and whole households are dead. . . . There hath died this last week 1,603 . . . which has been the greatest that came yet.’ Among them was the entire family of one of his actors, Robert Browne. ‘Robert Browne’s wife in Shoreditch and all her children and household be dead, and her doors shut up.’

Many people, not least most of the physicians, fled London for the safety of the country – a point made somewhat acidly in his diary by Dr Forman. He had contracted the plague himself in April and ‘cured’ himself of it. In fairness, once he had recovered, he worked tirelessly among the sick going into houses where no other doctor would venture, to do what he could for the victims.
⁹
As is always the case there were those too who saw it as a way of making a quick guinea. One such was Simon Kellaway who published a
Defensative Against the Plague
, which lists a number of supposed prophylactics. Customers buying his pamphlet to find out how they might save their lives were informed that the most effective method was
‘fugi locis
’. Those unable to read Latin had to have it translated only to discover they had paid good money to be told to ‘flee the place’.

Robert Greene, meanwhile, had parted from Emma Ball and was now living as indigent as ever in lodgings with a cobbler and his wife. He had walked out on Emma when she was pregnant, leaving her to give birth to a sickly baby which she was now struggling to rear and to whom she had given the unsuitable name of Fortunatus. She no longer had any support from her brother either, for Cutting Ball Jack had finally paid the price for his activities – on the scaffold at Tyburn, an execution which had drawn large crowds.

In spite of having no money, Greene kept up his dissolute lifestyle, causing Gabriel Harvey to deliver one of his all-too-frequent homilies:

Who in London has not heard of his dissolute and licentious living; his fond disguising of a Master of Arts with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company; his vainglorious and Thrasonical bragging; his piperly extemporising and Tarletonising; his apish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy; his villainous cogging and foisting; his monstrous swearing and horrible forswearing; his impious profaning of sacred texts; his other riotous and outrageous surfeitings; his continual shifting of lodgings; his plausible mustering, and banqueting of roisterly acquaintance at his first coming; his beggardly departure in every hostess’s debt; his infamous resorting to the Bankside, Shoreditch, Southwark and other filthy haunts; his obscure lurking in the basest corners; his pawning of his sword, cloak and what not, when money came short; his impudent pamphleteering, fantastical interluding and desperate libelling; when other cozening shifts failed; his employing Ball (known as Cutting Ball), ’til he was intercepted at Tyburn, to lend a crew of his trustiest companions to guard him in danger of arrest; his keeping of the aforesaid Ball’s sister, a sorry ragged quean, of whom he has had a base born son, Infortunatus Greene; his forsaking of his own wife, too honest for such a husband. Particulars are infinite: his condemning of his superiors, deriding of others, and defying all good order?
¹⁰

Needless to say Greene responded in kind, insulting Harvey’s father as a mere ‘halter-maker’, following this up with scandalous gossip about his brothers, alleging that the eldest, although he was a parson, chased after his parishioners’ wives, that the second was a fool who dabbled in astrology, while the third, supposedly given to academic study, had recently been ‘clapped in the Fleet Prison’. Yet most of those who knew Greene had a soft spot for him, however appalling his behaviour, among them Henry Chettle who published the works of a number of dramatists including those of Greene. He described the poet/playwright at this time as ‘a man of indifferent years’ (actually he was thirty-five), ‘of face amiable, of body well proportioned, his attire after the habit of a gentleman, only his hair is somewhat long’.

But throughout that plague-ridden summer, Greene was becoming increasingly ill due, most likely, to years of heavy drinking added to past venereal infections, and by the end of it he was no longer writing plays or ‘Interludes’. By mid-August it was clear that he was dying, hounded to the end by his creditors and pursued by Harvey who was threatening to sue him for defamation of character. As death drew ever nearer, Greene became terrified of what was to come and, fearful of damnation, produced two pamphlets warning others of his fate, his
Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance
and
The Repentance of Robert Greene
in which he turned his venom on his friends and the players and writers among whom he had lived and worked for so many years.

His view of Shakespeare is well known:

for unto none of you, like me, sought these burrs (actors) to cleave; those puppets, I mean, that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they have all been beholding, shall – were that ye were in that case as I am now – be both at once of them forsaken? Yea, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’, supposes he is well able to bombast out blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-Scene in the country.

The lad from Warwickshire had never been truly accepted by the University Wits.

In fact by this time Shakespeare must already have become a highly respected dramatist, for the printer, Henry Chettle, who had published Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit
, wrote later that two of those mentioned in it had taken offence:

About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers’ hands, among them his
Groatsworth of Wit
, in which a letter, written to diverse playmakers is offensively by one or two of them taken; and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a living author; and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but it must light on me. How I have all the time of my conversing in printing scholars, it hath been very well known; and how on that I dealt, I can sufficiently prove. With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be. The other, whom at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that, as I have moderated in the heat of living writers, and might have used my own discretion – especially in such a case, the author being dead – that I am not as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil, than he excellent in the qualities he professes; – besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art.
¹¹

Which, all in all, is quite a testimonial. For Marlowe, so long his rival in the theatre and close companion in drink, roistering and the enjoyment of the low life, there is now only condemnation, especially of his ‘unnatural vice’. His final warning to his old friend echoes down the centuries with a prescient and chilling resonance: ‘I know the least of my demerits merit this miserable death but wilful striving against known truth exceedeth all the terrors of my soul. Defer not with me till this last point of extremity, for little knowest thou how, in the end, thou shalt be visited.’

Marlowe was to suffer a double blow as Tom Watson died at about the same time as Greene, probably of the plague. Watson was one of his greatest and most loyal friends. There is no date recorded for his death but given the scale of the epidemic that is hardly surprising, for Thomas Dekker records how plague victims of all degrees and ages were tumbled anonymously into the plague pits at dead of night, regardless of rank, age or sex.

Greene staged his own deathbed as theatrically as he had everything else in his short life, complaining loudly to those gathered around him that he was dying only as a result of eating too many pickled herrings washed down with Rhenish wine. To the end he behaved particularly unkindly to Emma Ball who came to see him, bringing the baby with her, to beg him to recognise little Fortunatus as his son but he refused to do so, sending her away without a kind word. Finally, aware that time was running out, he sent for paper and ink and wrote to his long-estranged wife, ‘from whose sight and company I have refrained these six years: I ask God and thee forgiveness for so greatly wronging thee, of whom I seldom or never thought until now. Pardon me, I pray you, wheresoever thou art, and God forgive me all my other offences.’ He then added: ‘Sweet Wife, as ever there was goodwill or friendship between thee and me, see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt. I owe him ten pounds and but for him, I had perished in the streets. Forget and forgive my wrongs done to thee, and Almighty God have mercy on my soul. Farewell till we meet again in heaven, for on earth thou shall never see me more. This second of September 1592. Written by thy dying husband, Robin Greene.’ He died the next day.

At the first whiff that the illness was fatal, Gabriel Harvey was knocking on the doors of Greene’s neighbours eager to learn all the gory details of his last days. Finally, hearing that ‘Greene had played his last part and gone to Tarlton’, he went directly to Greene’s landlady, who met him ‘with tears in her eyes and sighs from a deeper fountain (for she loved him dearly) and told me of his lamentable begging of a penny-pot of Malmsey . . .’. He then added, nastily and most likely untruthfully, that Greene’s only deathbed visitors had been two women, ‘Emma Ball, sister to the rogue, Cutting Ball lately hanged at Tyburn, demanding a name for her bastard, and a woman associate’.

However, in spite of Harvey’s bitching, tradition has it that Greene was buried in style, accompanied to his grave by his fellow writers, his corpse strewn by his landlady with garlands of bay as befitted a poet. The anonymous R.B. in Greene’s
Funerals
, published in 1594 writes:

Greene is the pleasing object of an eye:

Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked on him.

Greene is the ground of every painter’s dye:

Greene gave ground to all that wrote upon him,

Nay more, the men that so eclipsed his fame

Purloin his plumes: can they deny the same?

Quod me Nutrit me Destruit
.
(That which Nourishes me Destroys me)

Latin inscription on the portrait
thought to be that of Christopher Marlowe

T
he young man in the portrait stares out at us with dark, knowing eyes that are older than his years. His hair is long and he has a moustache and a small beard. He is obviously wearing his best clothes, a fashionably slashed black doublet with a fine gauze collar over that of his shirt. Even if we did not know who it might be, it is very striking.

That the portrait still exists is remarkable. In 1953 some workmen were making repairs to the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi College. Rubble, old plaster and pieces of wood were still in a heap outside as it had been raining for several days and it had remained uncollected when an undergraduate, who was walking by, just happened to see something sticking out of the rubbish and investigated further. It turned out to be one of two broken wooden panels. He took them out to discover that on the reverse side of the panels was a portrait of a young man in an Elizabethan doublet. The undergraduate took his find to the librarian who put the two pieces together, had it photographed, then sent it to the National Portrait Gallery to see if they might have any idea who it might be. After close examination the Gallery told the librarian that it was definitely an Elizabethan painting but they had no idea who the subject was. Since the portrait was in very poor condition it was then sent away to experts for restoration.

So why should it be Marlowe? It is dated 1585 when the subject was twenty-one years of age, which Marlowe would have been in the year he took his BA after his work as an intelligencer. The young man in the picture must have been a Corpus Christi student, otherwise it is unlikely that the picture would have been kept in the Master’s Lodge, where it must previously have been, hidden away somewhere, since it was found among the rubble from the renovations. Then there is the ‘motto’ or title on the left-hand side of the picture which could hardly be more apposite to what we know of Marlowe. It is not a well-known Latin tag of the day and has not been found anywhere else. The question is, why should Marlowe merit a portrait when there were far more important and wealthy students up at the same time? He was, after all, only a scholarship boy and still had his way to make as a poet and dramatist. The jury remains out and all one can say is that it looks like the Marlowe of one’s imagination.

In less fraught and difficult times theatre would simply have grown and evolved as new writers came on to the scene without dramatists having to fear for their lives, although no doubt the authorities would always have kept an eye on what was going on, given the conservative view of the subversive nature of what went on in playhouses. Heavens, no one knew what ideas such stuff might encourage in the groundlings! Even so, given his lifestyle, Greene is still likely to have died as he did at the age he did and, given also the prevalence of epidemics and casual violence, it is quite possible Marlowe and Kyd would never have seen old age anyway. But it was a combination of events – the continuing presence of the plague throughout 1593, the deeply paranoid political climate and an influx of refugees from religious persecution on the continent seeking asylum – which was to prove fatal for Kyd and Marlowe.