But is there no tale compassed in firmament of Earth?
Lower my horizons from Jove’s thunders.
MAGISTER
Fair enough, Kit. Thou art a small town boy
And this is a crazy world. Let us now
Talk not of paradise or creation, but mark the show
What Rome contains for to delight thine eyes?
Pageant – enter CAESAR. He is stabbed by CONSPIRATORS. Following him in procession are many famous ROMANS
MAGISTER
The noblest Roman of them all, cut down.
And here is Cleopatra coming at you,
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. She’s beautiful
She’s beautiful indeed.
Enter more characters
MARLOWE
And what means the sour looks of this sad prince?
MAGISTER
This is tragic Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
’Tis a mad world, ’tis a sad world for him.
Followed by Scotland’s dark King Macbeth
Here come massy Faerie throngs
And there prosperous Prospero.
Shall not I make dour Hamlet sing to thee?
Here’s Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.
MARLOWE
All! All! These people cram up my brain with good ideas!
Settle thy studies, Marlowe, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess
Be a playwright, Marlowe, heap up gold,
And be eternized for these wondrous parts.
Couldst thou make men to live eternally,
Or, being dead, raise them to life again?
No emperor shall live but by my leave.
What doctrine call you this?
MAGISTER
Che sera sera
What will be, will be. Divinity adieu
Here Marlowe, try thy brains to gain a deity.
MARLOWE writes quickly as the pageant dances
MARLOWE
I have a thought.
MAGISTER
You have many.
MARLOWE
Yet more.
Tell me, noble Mephistophilis, where
Sprang these great stories that fill my mind?
MAGISTER
Ah, ask not that.
MARLOWE
I must and shall.
MAGISTER
When thou took’st the books
To view the stories, then I turned the leaves
And led thine eye. Shall we say
Where there’s a will, there’s a way?
MARLOWE
Shakespeare?
MAGISTER
All his fine plays are laid before thee.
His labouring brain
Begets a world of idle fantasies.
At risk of spoilers, I confide to thee
These are all the works he has yet to write.
And every one a winner.
MARLOWE
Quod me nutrit, me destruit
What feeds me also brings me down.
Magister, what have you done? I am undone!
MAGISTER
Say it ain’t so. Surely better the devil you know.
This, here I swear by my royal seat.
MARLOWE
Well, you may kiss it then.
O would I had never seen London, never read book
Oh for the vain pleasure of four and thirty plays hath
Marlowe lost eternal joy and felicity.
False friend thou. My pen is overcast,
It inks another’s brains. Forgive me, Will.
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
MAGISTER
Ungrateful wretch! I’ll make thee doll small.
MARLOWE
Fine. Lay on, sir. Magister do thy worst.
All these glorious stories shall still be told.
But not by me. I’ll write no more.
Ah, I’ll burn my books.
MAGISTER
You’ll write no more?
MARLOWE
MAGISTER
Hadst thou kept on that way, Marlowe behold
In what resplendent glory thou hadst sat
In yonder throne, like that bright shining Shakes.
Tea towels, mugs, placemats and penguin classics
But, no, you suffered a loss of faith, and so must
Your stories end.
MARLOWE
Come not near me, Magister.
MAGISTER
Come, gentle coz. Pick up they pen.
Thou art bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Just one play more – Othello, why he’s a jolly fellow
Or Sir John Falstaff, he’s good for a laugh.
MARLOWE
I’ll pen no more. My stop is full.
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feelings of this Master’s thoughts
If all the heavenly quintessence that they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy
Yet should there hover in their restless breasts
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least
Which into words no virtue can digest.
MAGISTER
Sometimes I find thee hard to follow. Does this mean you’re done?
MARLOWE
Ay.
MAGISTER
Then hear that drum?
’Tis the sound of the underground
The beat of the drum goes round and round.
These boots were made for walking
And that is just what they shall do
Today my boots shall walk all over you.
Go back to thy tavern. I’ll not stop you.
Your appointment with fate is overdue.
MARLOWE
Aye, I have done her majestie good service
Under cloak and dagger, dagger and cloak.
I have few friends at home, many enemies abroad
I have long deserved to be rewarded for my faithfull dealinge.
Return me to the inn where you found me
My recknynge must at last be paid in full.
MAGISTER
I could have saved you. It is not yet too late.
’Tis your last chance of living and your first chance to die.
I can yet keep you from the last chance saloon.
MARLOWE
Nay good close friend, for so I call thee Magister.
O gentle Marlowe, leave this damned art
This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell.
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike
The devil will come and Marlowe must be damned.
Exeunt
MAGISTER
Say thou won’t leave me no more
And I shall take thee back again
I shall forgive and forget
If thou say thou shalt never go
For ’tis always better the devil you know.
SCENE VII – A TAVERN IN DEPTFORD
MARLOWE
Hulloa Dullberry, Adieu Dobbin
Spials all. Unsheath thy curtle-axes
For there sits Death, there sits imperious Death
Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge
Fall to friends.
They slay MARLOWE
MARLOWE
My bloodless body waxes chill and cold
And with my blood my life slides through my wound
My soul begins to take her flight to hell
And summons all my senses to depart.
This is my mind and I will have it so.
Dies
MAGISTER
Ah well. You can’t win them all.
Pride comes before a fall.
I have played all my cards
And that is what you’ve done too
Besides victory, there remains destiny.
The loser stands right small
And the winner takes it all.
* * *
Double, double, toil and trouble; if we are caught in a time bubble.
* * *
THE SONNETS
These early drafts of some of Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnets appear throughout the Notebooks. Where they are prefaced by a dedication or other explanatory text, this is given. But most are simply presented as they appear here.
Sonnet 1
This version of the sonnet appears in the Notebooks addressed, a MS addition asserts, ‘To an Old Man by his Grand-daughter’.
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
Those Venus night-fish cooked on a caprice
The plants of Esto when they sing and sigh.
I have of late seen Daleks in the street,
In Bedfordshire and on the Edgware Road.
And though they suffered terrible defeat,
Here thrive the weeds their seeds of war have sowed.
To mine eye, though, this seems not the world’s end.
’Tis but a new one moving within reach.
Rivers unchoke, skies clear and deep wounds mend,
For here dwells my belov’d. Thus I beseech:
Go forward in beliefs I know are thine
To prove that I am not mistook in mine.
Sonnet 2
This sonnet is apparently ‘From a Lord departing into Exile’
When fifty winters shall besiege my brow –
Though add a thousand more to get it right –
Yes, then, and only then, could I allow
You lot to send me into that good night.
I stand here in the dock before a screen
On which you’ve thrown a hideous display.
The most peculiar bunch I’ve ever seen:
Too old, too young, too fat, too thin. I say,
Is keeping my own head too much to ask?
If I’m confined in exile in one place
Defending it from monsters – onerous task! –
It’s better done with a familiar face.
I do maintain I have the right to choose!
Oh dear. That nose! (And what’s with these tattoos?)
Sonnet 3
Again, this early version of what would become Sonnet 3 is prefaced in the Notebooks by a note: ‘From a friar to his pupil’.
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Will fall past Artron’s power to recover.
For thou hast trod this troubled way before:
Worn thin by Mondas at the snowcapped pole;
Redrawn by force in Time Lord court of law
And cast as army helpmeet, or such role.
But now, thou needs must face thy greatest fear.
The Great One’s fire hath hollowed out each bone,
And death, or death’s own spider creeps too near
For thou to flee. ’Tis time to die alone.
Old man, embrace the joy of thy removement.
Methinks the nose a definite improvement.
* * *
This was the noblest Romana of them all.
* * *
Sonnet 12
When I do count the clock that tells the time
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the readings’ ceaseless climb.
And mark the Fault Locator’s flick’ring light
When scissor blades are sunk into the bed
Tight hands around my neck increase their grip,
And on the scanner images are read
Of Quinnis where we nearly lost the Ship
Then of thy motives do I question make,
And think to banish thee into the void
If not for mine, then for my Susan’s sake,
As soon, it seems, we four will be destroyed;
Unless some other cause I can construe
Within these shapes of twisted ormolu.
Sonnet 14
From lights above I did my judgement pluck;
Now I possess a new Astrology,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
My prophecies have changed their nature since
A light fell from the heavens into mine eyes
Now I do steer the fortune of a prince,
Determine which duke lives and which king dies.
There lives now here on Earth a fateful star
It burns among my acolytes, and soon
The fateful helix called Mandragora
Will swallow up the pale face of the moon
For San Marino I prognosticate:
A holy darkness falls upon this date.
Sonnet 15
When I consider everything that grows
Beneath the span of my cathedral green
The liberated bonsai trees, the rose,
The crabbed old pod no botanist has seen.
When I perceive that men owe their increase
To felling forests, gorging herbs and fruits;
Despoiling precious verdure without cease
Tearing defenceless nature at the roots,
I am compelled to sow their seeds of doom,
To found a green and silent paradise:
O, let a million hungry flowers bloom
Inspired by life from ’neath Antarctic ice.
A revolution blossoms in these grounds
My Floriana Requiem resounds.
Sonnet 16
A note prefaces this sonnet: ‘From an Exile to his Dead King’.
But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?
And fortify your self in your decay,
As I did, ’tombed within Jurassic lime?
For years thrice fifty million I endured
Sustained by hope of vengeance on my kind;
A fragment lost beneath the earth, abjured
By all the judges that I left behind.
And here you sit, a corpse upon a chair –
Old Rokon, monarch of an empty waste
Mummified in Kastria’s glacial air;
Cities and thrones and powers all quite erased.
So I, as next in line, you now address
As I become the king of nothingness.
Sonnet 18
Perhaps the best-known of all Shakespeare’s sonnets, this early draft appears without explanation.
Shall I compare thee to a Type Fifty?
Thou art more lovely and more temporal:
Rough time winds shake the positronic flow,
And Fast Return hath all too short a spring:
Sometime too hot the Eye of Harmony
Is by a Temporal Orbit stopped at last
And every wheezing groan sometime declines,
By chance, or Vortex changing course untrimmed:
But thy materialisation shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of thy Time Rotor,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st Gallifrey,
Wherein eternal Rassilon dost thrive,
So long as Time Lords plot, or Daleks kill,
So long my TARDIS will you serve me still.
Sonnet 19
Devouring Time, blunt thou Urbankan claws
And make Xeriphas’ brood devour its own.
Pluck the keen teeth from dreaded Mara’s jaws,
And bring the baleful Malus crashing down;
Shipwreck the chill Eternals and despoil
Whole fields of celery and orchids black.
Let me pick chacaws or endure the toil
Of heaving oars for monstrous Captain Wrack.
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
Let not Spectrox extract its deadly due
From Peri
, newly travelled into time.
Until I prove Professor Jackij true
I’ll struggle on until my final breath.
Feels different this time. Brave heart. Is this Death?
Sonnet 27
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
Methinks I stood upon a high white tower
Fell like a stone towards the grassy earth;
Methinks I felt an occupying power
Polluting me; disrupting my rebirth.
Two faithful friends brought me from outer space
To Castrovalva, shining on a hill.
It seems to be tranquil, ordered place,
And yet these painful dreams, they plague me still.
A shadow now falls fast, it seems to me,
Upon the dwellings of simplicity.
Sonnet 29
Again, there is an introductory note to this early draft: ‘The lament of a Great Engineer’.
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing that I had found some safer course
To gift my race with temporal power undreamed.
When I absorbed that nova’s dreadful force
I burnt within the sun. I died, it seemed.
But now I know that firestorms worse than hell
Corroded me to something like a ghost.
And in this will-created world I dwell
Denied the life that I desire the most.
They think of me, and my achievements laud.
But this I trow: I should have been a god.
Sonnet 53
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend,
Black multitudes concealed in every shade?
A death too horrible to comprehend
Is met by those who stray into your maw.
You are the twilight settling on the stair;
The darkling form upon the marble floor;
Who would have guessed that motes upon the air
Could harbour such an appetite for flesh?
Methinks I see you now, between the shelves;