Martin Stephen - The Conscience of the King

Jane was seated by Shakespeare on a stool, prattling away as if she had known him all her life. A storm of light flashed from her eyes as he entered, warning him off.

'And while I thought Volpone and The Alchemist were brilliant — and I told him so -1 thought Sejanus was awful. Told him that, too, and he threw a chair out of the window. Fortunately, it was open…'

Underneath it all, her heart is bursting with worry — for me, for herself, for her children, thought Gresham. She hates the world I live in, and lives in it simply for me. Not so long ago she was fighting for her life and manning a boat like an Amazon. Now she's sitting here, chattering away as if she is a stage-struck girl hardly out of swaddling clothes. In a minute she'll tell me something I was too stupid to spot, and, God willing, by the time. the night's over she'll have been a bed-mate for me and a true mother to her children. How many minds did God give this girl?

'I didn't think Sejanus was that bad…' said Shakespeare generously. Then he stopped. His eye had been caught by Gresham laying out a simple supper, two bottles of wine still under his arm. He was humming a tune to himself as he did so, Tom Campion's 'My Sweetest Lesbia'. The change from avenging fiend to table servant had startled Shakespeare. It had been meant to.

'But tell me about your plays, Master Shakespeare,' said Jane. 'I mean, I know he wants me to calm you down and soften you up so that you'll let out more information than you want to Shakespeare's eyes opened even wider. Well, thought Gresham, there's nothing like a dose of the truth to make things work. He had tried the tough way and lost. Let Jane do her worst. 'But I really, really do like your plays. And so, by the way, does he. More than that, in fact. He loves what you write almost as much as he hates the man who writes them.'

Why was this line of conversation seeming to make the man panic again? Gresham thought. i think you must be an amazing person, to write those comedies and then move on to histories and tragedies. If it was anyone else, they'd have stayed with one style, like Jonson has, and made it their speciality. Your plays — you seem to do each style better than anyone else and then move on! It's extraordinary.'

'Yes, isn't it?' said Shakespeare distractedly, as if he was trying to pass a large and sharp stone from his bottom. 'Actually, I prefer to talk about my poems, you know. The plays are how I earn my keep. The poems are where 1 feel I can write…' He wanted to talk about his Rape ofLucrece.

He babbled on, genuinely happier now he was off the subject of plays.

Gresham moved around the table. Shakespeare had only been renting these rooms for a month or so, Mannion had said. An old Dominican Priory, withmore bolt holes and secret passages than a Catholic household, Gresham guessed. The water was only a few paces away, down St Andrew's Hill to Puddle Wharf. Had he moved here so he could run when danger threatened? If you looked carefully you could see where the door in the panelling opened up, but the carpentry was superb and it could only be seen as a door if one knew where to examine. There were no bookcases, Gresham saw with surprise, no sign of a library. Not even copies of his own plays, those that had been published. Only three books. Venus and Adonis. The Rape of Lucrece. His poems. And there were his sonnets, of course. Brilliant. Gresham, who had published his own sonnets under a false name, had felt the sharp sting of envy when he had read Shakespeare's work, always the sign of real power in another writer. It was a pirate edition, with the famous acknowledgement to 'Mr W.H.' as the 'only begetter' of the sonnets. In any event, the book was there, stuffed carelessly along with the others, in a chest with its lid open, a chest stuffed otherwise with printed pamphlets and broadsheets. One of them caught Gresham's eye. It had been torn out of something. To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shakes'Speare.

Terence. The classical author.

Light exploded in Gresham's head. Of course! The explanation! It had to be! What a fool he had been!

'I'm sorry, Master Shakespeare,' Gresham said charmingly. None of the revelation in his mind showed. Shakespeare had paused in his explanation of Venus and Adonis to Gresham's own Venus. 'I really should have asked if you wanted to eat before I set your table. May I ask you to sit and sup of this very humble fare?'

Humble it might have been, but the way Shakespeare attacked the food after his initial hesitation confirmed what Gresham had thought. Master Shakespeare, who looked as if he had the capacity to be a good trencherman, had been feeding as Well as drinking out of the bottle in recent weeks.

The wine was good. Not excellent, but good. Gresham treated himself to two glasses. Shakespeare had adapted with some ease to his attackers becoming his dinner guests. Actors, thought Gresham, do not live by any known codes. They are outsiders, perhaps even outcasts. They make their own rules. Shakespeare had insisted on moving to the next room — Mannion had moved casually to the door to make sure another priest's escape route was not being utilised — and bringing back four exquisite glasses, clearly Venetian. In Mannion's paw the vessel looked like a new-born babe in the hands of a devil. Just pray he doesn't smash it, thought Gresham. And that Shakespeare doesn't drop one, as he had dropped the goblet, when I tell him what I now know.

There are moments when humanity thinks history is made, when a great battle is fought or a mighty coronation observed. Yet there are other moments, hidden in the warp and weave of everyday conversation, masquerading as normality, that change lives and sometimes even the world. Moments which expose or hide a truth for ever more, that write a new version of human history. Moments based on the chance of a particular pamphlet lying at the top of a pile, and the chance of a particular man seeing it there at a particular moment when two glasses of wine had been drunk just ever so slightly too fast.

Gresham let Shakespeare finish his meal. He would need all the strength he could muster. He waited until the man, garrulous by now, was telling Jane about his plans for a new sonnet sequence. It was as if the room shivered before him. It was an extraordinary sensation, one he had never experienced. He had dealt with kings and queens! He had held their fate in his hands! He had kept secrets the world would have shuddered for! So why now, with the plump and drunk figure of a nobody in front of him, did he feel that something inexplicably important for the future was taking place in this room? He shook his head to rid it of this nonsense. He must have drunk, more wine than he had thought. Then, in a pause while the actor reached for yet another glass, Gresham spoke.

'You didn't write your plays, did you, Master Shakespeare? You wrote your poems, I'm sure, but your plays — the work you've become famous for — you didn't write them, did you?'

Shakespeare looked at Gresham with an expression of such appalled horror that for a moment Gresham felt the most intense and cutting pity for the wreck of a man in front of him. Was he going to throw up the first food he had eaten in days? Or would he make it to speech first?

'I… how could you? Are you some devil incarnate?' There, it was out. And it was the truth, Gresham noted. If it were otherwise, the man would have denied it in his shock.

'No, no devil, as far as I know,' said Gresham. 'But I observe, and I listen. Manuscripts of plays are stolen, manuscripts pre-* sumably in the handwriting of their author. There's panic in the corridors of power. With the Catholics banished to hell for ever more after the gunpowder plot, there's a new power in the land. The Puritans. They get their Bible. They rail against the corrup' tion of King and Court. And they hate the theatre above all else! They call it Satan's chapel, and the actors the spawn of Lucifer.'