THE MARLOWE PAPERS
Ros Barber
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author´s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
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.
Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.
As You Like It, III, iii
The way to really develop as a writer is to make yourself a political
outcast, so that you have to live in secret. This is how Marlowe
developed into Shakespeare.
Ted Hughes, Letters
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
Table of Contents
Title Page
TO THE WISE OR UNWISE READER
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE MARLOWE PAPERS
DEATH’S A GREAT DISGUISER
DECIPHERERS
CAPTAIN SILENCE
NON-CORRESPONDENT
THE SHAPE OF SILENCE
THE TRUNK
FORGE
CONJURORS
TOM WATSON
TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
THE LOW COUNTRIES
ARMADA YEAR
MIDDELBURG
TAMBURLAINE THE SECOND
HOTSPUR’S DESCENDANT
NORTHUMBERLAND’S SUBJECT
FIRST RENDEZVOUS
THE FIRST HEIR OF MY INVENTION
THE JEW OF MALTA
LURCH
THAT MEN SHOULD PUT AN ENEMY IN THEIR MOUTHS
THE UNIVERSITY MEN
THE PACT OF FAUSTUS
THE TUTOR
SMALL BEER
SOLILOQUY
THE HOG LANE AFFRAY
ENVOI
LIMBO
POOLE THE PRISONER
A TWIN
NECESSITY
THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT
THE BANISHMENT OF KENT
TOBACCO AND BOOZE
COPY OF MY LETTER TO POLEY
HOW DO I START THIS? LET ME TRY AGAIN
BURYING THE MOOR
SOUTHAMPTON
ARBELLA
ALPINE LETTER
WATSON’S VERSE-COMMENT ON MY FLUSHING ASSIGNMENT
POISONING THE WELL
DANGER IS IN WORDS
FLUSHING
FISHERS
A RESURRECTION
A COUNTERFEIT PROFESSION
THE FATAL LABYRINTH OF MISBELIEF
BETRAYED
RETURNED TO THE LORD TREASURER
COLLABORATION
THE SCHOOL OF ATHEISM
HOLYWELL STREET
A GROATSWORTH OF WIT
DISMISSED
THE COBBLERS SON
RE:SPITE
A FELLOW OF INFINITE JEST
SCADBURY
A SLAVE WHOSE GALL COINS SLANDERS LIKE A MINT
THE PLOT
WHITGIFT
FLY, FLYE, AND NEVER RETURNE
KYD’S TRAGEDY
SMOKE AND FIRE
BY ANY OTHER NAME
DRAKES
MY BEING
MY AFTERLIVES
A PASSPORT TO RETURN
DEPTFORD STRAND
I FORGET THE NAME OF THE VILLAGE
THE GOBLET
IN A MINUTE THERE ARE MANY DAYS
THE HOPE
SICKENING
MONTANUS
BISHOPSGATE STREET
MADAME LE DOUX
THE THEATRE
INTERVAL
A CHANGE OF ADDRESS
HOW RICHARD II FOLLOWED RICHARD III
BURLEY ON THE HILL
CORRESPONDENT
NOTHING LIKE THE SUN
THE GAME
PETIT
WILL HALL
MY TRUE LOVE SENT TO ME
STOPPED
DOGS
FRIEND
HAL
YOUR FOOL
THE AUTHORS OF SHAKESPEARE
MR DISORDER
REVENGE TRAGEDY
SO
IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES
ESSEX HOUSE
THE EARL OF ESSEX
SMALL GODS
MERRY WIVES
IN THE THEATRE OF GOD’S JUDGMENTS
WHO STEALS MY PURSE STEALS TRASH
SLANDER
A KIT MAY LOOK AT A KING
A ROSE
CHAPMAN’S CURSE
BARE RUINED CHOIRS
KNIVES
CONCERNING THE ENGLISH
ORSINO’S CASTLE, BRACCIANO
GHOST
THE AUTHOR OF HAMLET
IN PRAISE OF THE RED HERRING
SOJOURN
T.T. & W.H.
TWELFTH NIGHT
AN EXECUTION
WILLIAM PETER
ELSINORE
I LIE WITH HIM
DELIVERANCE
MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING
LIZ
IAGO
A NEVER WRITER TO AN EVER READER. NEWS.
THE MERMAID CLUB
EXIT STAGE LEFT
Also by Ros Barber
AUTHOR’S NOTE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ROS BARBER
Copyright Page
TO THE WISE OR UNWISE READER
What can a dead man say that you will hear?
Suppose you swear him underneath the earth,
stabbed to the brain with some almighty curse,
would you recognise his voice if it appeared?
The tapping on the coffin lid is heard
as death watch beetle. He becomes a name;
a cipher whose identity is plain
to anyone who understands a word.
So what divine device should he employ
to settle with the world beyond his grave,
unmask the life that learnt its human folly
from death’s warm distance; how else can he save
himself from oblivion, but with poetry?
Stop. Pay attention. Hear a dead man speak.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Writers and Actors
Christopher Marlowe poet, playwright, intelligencer
Tom Watson poet, playwright, intelligencer
Thomas Walsingham gentleman, literary patron
Robert Greene writer of prose romances, playwright
Edward (Ned) Alleyn lead actor, acting company manager/sharer
Thomas Nashe prose satirist
Thomas Kyd playwright
Government
Sir Francis Walsingham Secretary of State, head of intelligence
Lord Burghley William Cecil, Lord Treasurer
Sir Robert Sidney Governor of Flushing in the Low Countries
Nobility
Northumberland Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland
Southampton Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton
Essex Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, soldier
Sir John Harington 1st Baron Harington, first cousin to the Sidneys
Lucy, Countess of Bedford his married teenage daughter
Arbella Stuart first cousin to James VI of Scotland
Bess of Hardwick Countess of Shrewsbury, Arbella’s grandmother
Intelligence
Robin Poley intelligencer
Thomas Thorpe publisher, intelligen
cer
Richard Baines intelligencer
Gilbert Gifford intelligencer
Anthony Bacon head of the Earl of Essex’s intelligence network
Sundry
John Allen Ned Alleyn’s brother, innkeeper
William Bradley publican’s son
Hugh Swift lawyer, Watson’s brother-in-law
John Poole Catholic counterfeiter
Sir Walter Raleigh courtier, adventurer
Eleanor Bull Deptford gentlewoman with Court connections
Venetia a maiden of Venice
Jaques Petit Anthony Bacon’s servant
William Peter gentleman
THE MARLOWE PAPERS
DEATH’S A GREAT DISGUISER
Church-dead. And not a headstone in my name.
No brassy plaque, no monument, no tomb,
no whittled initials on a makeshift cross,
no pile of stones upon a mountain top.
The plague is the excuse; the age’s curse
that swells to life as spring gives way to summer,
to sun, unconscious kisser of a warmth
that wakens canker as it wakens bloom.
Now fear infects the wind, and every breath
that neighbour breathes on neighbour in the street
brings death so close you smell it on the stairs.
Rats multiply, as God would have them do.
And fear infects like mould; like fungus, spreads –
folk catch it from the chopped-off ears and thumbs,
the burning heretics and eyeless heads
that slow-revolve the poles on London Bridge.
The child of casual violence grows inured,
an audience too used to real blood;
they’ve watched a preacher butchered, still awake,
and handed his beating heart like it was love.
And now the sanctioned butchery of State
breeds sadists who delight to man the rack,
reduce men from divine belief and brain
to begging, and the rubble of their spines.
From all this, I am dead. Reduced to ink
that magicks up my spirit from the page:
a voice who knows what mortals cannot think of;
a ghost, whose words ring deeper from the grave.
Corpse-dead. A gory stab-hole for an eye;
and that’s what they must think. No, must believe,
those thug-head pursers bent on gagging speech,
if I’m to slip their noose and stay alive.
Now I’m as dead as any to the world,
the foulest rain of blackened corpses on
the body that is entered in my name:
the plague pit where Kit Marlowe now belongs.
For who could afford for that infected earth
to be dug up to check identities?
And so, I leave my former name behind.
Gone on the Deptford tide, the whole world blind.
Friend, I’m no one. If I write to you,
in fading light that distances the threat,
it’s as a breeze that strokes the Channel’s waves,
the spray that blesses some small vessel’s deck.
DECIPHERERS
I’ll write in code. Though my name melts away,
I’ll write in urine, onion juice and milk,
in words that can be summoned by a flame,
in ink as light and tough as spider silk.
I’ll send a ream of tamed rebellious thought
to seed a revolution in its sleep;
each letter glass-invisible to light,
each sheet as blank as signposts are to sheep.
The spy’s conventions, slipping edge to edge
among the shadows, under dirty night,
mislead the search. To fool intelligence,
we hide our greatest treasures in plain sight.
This poetry you have before your eyes:
the greatest code that man has yet devised.
CAPTAIN SILENCE
We dock in darkness. The skipper’s boy dispatched
to find our lodgings. Not a town for ghosts,
and with no wish to be remembered here
I’m wrapped in scholar’s garb, the bright man’s drab.
A quarter-moon is rationing its light
to smuggle us ashore without a fuss;
the fishermen are far away from port,
their wives inside and unaware of us.
You know I’ve come this way before; not here,
but in this manner, come as contraband
under the loose concealing cloak of night,
disguised as something of no interest,
as simple traveller. A man of books:
which words will make him interesting as dust
to folk who cannot read and do not care
they sign their papers only with a cross.
My name means more, and yet I shrug it off
like reptile skin, adopt some alias
that huffs forgettable, to snuff the flame
that now would be the death of me. Anon,
now Christopher is too much cross to bear.
The skipper calls me only with a cough.
Lugs, with his lanky son, my trunk of books.
No prop. For books will be my nourishment
in the sightless days without you. And if I
feel strange, or wordless, they will anchor thought,
ensure my brain is drowned in histories
that help me to remember who I am.
The skipper leads as shadows bolt from us
and streets fall back. And in his torch’s flame
a flicker of the tongue that can’t be bought,
which pirates sliced to secrecy. The rest,
that part he’d curl to make his consonants,
is long since fish-food on the Spanish main.
The boy speaks for him when we reach the door.
We’re hurried in, ‘Entrez,’ as though a storm
is savaging the calm still tail of May
and has the oak trees shaken by their roots.
The woman might be forty-five, or twelve.
A calculated innocence, a face
so open blank, it seems revealing as
it hides itself. This woman’s learnt to blanch
as bones will bleach when left to drink the sun,
as death will creep a pallor into skin
at just its mention. Clothed in widow’s weeds,
soft fingers straighten for gold. ‘Un angelot.’
Two months of food for sticking out her neck
for an Englishman. The payment’s hidden where
she’s still half warm. ‘So you will sleep above,’
she states as if she questions us, ‘the room
that slopes for Captain Silence and his boy.’
They heft my trunk upstairs between them, just.
‘The less we say, the better,’ she begins.
‘You want some ale? You’re thirsty? Or there’s sack
if you need something stronger.’ Then she pales,
as if she is reflecting me. Some look
betrays my loss to her, and in a blink
her loneliness has fastened on to mine.
‘You learnt the tongue from Huguenots?’ She nods
and answers her own question. ‘That is right.
And you. You are a religious man? But, no,
forget I ask you anything.’ In truth,
I am a scholar of divinity
and study the divine with open eyes.
Beyond all question, I would give her truth;
and yet, I cannot save her if I speak.
‘My husband was an Englishman, like you.
Or not like you. He had no love of books.
Ballads he liked. He used to sing this one—’
Her brain defends itself by giving way.
‘I don’t remember it.’ But here, her eyes
brim with the silence, break their trembling banks
as though she heard his funeral song. Then he,
her husband, a growl, is whispering in her ear
the rudest ballad he knows, clutching her waist
to spin her for a kiss. And then he’s gone,
and we are momentarily with ghosts.
‘Forgive me,’ she says. ‘The silence is poisonous.’
Upstairs, I’m with her still. She’s through the wall,
the spectre of a woman I might touch
on any other night but this. I don’t
undress so much as loosen up a notch,
for comfort now would later be exposed,
a gift to spot and clear as light to slay;
and bad enough, I’m running for my life
without my skin a beacon for the moon,
a human sheath that swallows blades. I sit
laced in my boots, my stomach tight, my ears
so strongly tuned they model sight from sound.
Next door, the widow braves into her gown
and lies awake. She listens to the house
and reads the whispers that pronounce her safe
though I would have her sacrificed for love.
I know her stares are pulling at the wall
I’m on the other side of, and her bed
feels colder for the want of me. And yet,
as time goes on, she’s bidding me adieu.
A woman’s skin might send a man to sleep,
but I must twitch and listen to the night
say Nothing’s here. The moon is out of sight
and something gnaws now, in the walls. I write,
the extra tallow that I paid her for
illuminating every sorry word.
How we are trapped in silence; how this night
has brought a silent shipwreck to her shore,
how silence unites us as it chokes us off,
how thick the silence hangs around the door
that dogs might almost sniff it, and the causes:
cutlass, lies or longing. Gathered here,
awake, or sleeping aware, are three full-grown