Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

The undiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.

But for this the joyful hope of this,

Who's bear the scorns and flattery of the world,

Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor?

'What is this book?' he asked, looking at it distastefully.

'Published in 1603,' said Jane. 'Now look at this…' She thrust one of Marlowe's papers into his hands. The speech, that same speech, commenced just over halfway down, in a florid hand.

'It's the same,' said Gresham. 'Word for word. I still don't understand…'. 'Now read this.' Jane thrust the second of Marlowe's papers into his hands. 'There! Read it!'

To be, or not to be — that is the question;

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams might come…

'Magnificent,' he breathed. The words reverberating in his head were even more powerful now than they had been from the mouth of Burbage. He looked down the page for the lines he needed:

Who would these fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But mat the dread of something after death -

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns — puzzles the will…

Had the man who had written this been where Gresham had been? Had he also so nearly crossed the divide between life and death? Whoever had written these lines had been everywhere men go, and to places men could only dream of, thought Gresham.

'Don't you see it!' asked Jane. 'We've assumed that Bacon and Marlowe and Oxford and all those others sent plays to Shakespeare and he just fiddled around with them for a bit — got them dressed up for the stage and stuck his name on them. But what if the scripts they sent in were rubbish? What if they were awful? What if Shakespeare has this… talent, this… knack of taking other people's work and making something beautiful out of it?*

Gresham was thunderstruck.

'What if Shakespeare was the real genius behind the plays all along?'

Something massively simple fell into place inside Gresham's mind. 'So there's this bumpkin from Stratford, this front man for half the nobles in England, this man who can't write anything worthwhile from scratch but has this skill when other people seed his brain… the skill to create amazing, incredible language, probably something he never realised he had until other people's manuscripts landed on his desk… and he starts adding bits and improving on the original, small bits at first, almost despite himself, and then the bits he writes get the crowd cheering so he does it more and more…'

'And the nobles can't do anything about it without breaking cover, or revealing that what they write is rubbish. Or they pretend to each other that it's what they wrote in the first place because they love to bask in the glory…'

'What a truly wonderful, god-awful, inspirational, appalling mess!' said Gresham, unsure as to whether to laugh or cry. 'So what are these papers?'

'I bet the one with the real speech on it is Shakespeare's writing. And if you want me to guess, I'll lay odds on the dire version being in the Earl of Oxford's hand.'

'Why him?' asked Gresham.

'You remember when you went out to get the food when we were in Shakespeare's rooms? I was pumping him about the plays all the time, and he was giving nothing away. But I asked him about Hamlet, because it was your favourite play, and all he would say was that the Earl of Oxford hated the way it was performed. Then he looked shifty and backed off, and I didn't think anything about it because he was looking so shifty all the time. I bet the other paper is Oxford's writing. And I bet something else too — that Oxford published that book on the bed!'

'Why so?'

'He died in 1604, remember? Been ill for long before that. Everyone says he was a strange man at the end, half mad. Mad enough to think his version was the real one, the better one. Mad enough to publish it too, particularly when he felt he was dying.'

'The Earl of Oxford's last will and testament, you mean?' said Gresham. if he wanted to be remembered by that he must have been mad!'

'Perhaps it helped kill him, poor man,' mused Jane. 'The book was a disaster. That's why I could pick it up so cheaply at St Paul's. I wonder if Oxford waited for it to be hailed as a masterpiece, and then died when it was laughed off the bookstalls?'

'He died of the plague,' said Gresham. ‘In Hackney. Don't you remember? There was a scandal about it. Apparently he left no will, and his son forgot to put up a memorial to him.'

'So if there was a will, bequeathing his manuscripts…'

‘It's gone now,' said Gresham. 'Buried by the heir who wanted nothing to do with it all. It's a brilliant theory. But we need a copy of something in Shakespeare's handwriting to prove it.'

But they found something better than that.

There was a crash on the door and Mannion appeared, throwing something in front of him. It was a drenched Shakespeare, shivering to his bones, dripping foul water all over the floor. He was dressed as a housewife, his beard and moustache gone but the stubble on his lips ludicrously at odds with the lace around his neck and the full-flowing gown.

'Look what I found crawling out of the woodwork!' said Mannion proudly. 'Thought I'd just go and check up on our man outside The Globe, the one keepin' an eye on things. Lo and behold, this woman comes out of the play. 'Cept no woman I've ever met walks like that. So I goes up to him or her, curious, and the rest's history. Very fetching, he was, in his little bonnet. Got swept away, that did, in the river.'

'You great fat fool! You total idiot!' This was another new Shakespeare, standing eye to eye with Mannion, his rage seeming to run through his every fibre. For the first time in his life, Gresham saw someone actually physically shaking with rage. 'I was coming to see your master!'

Even Mannion was stunned by the intensity of the stupidly dressed man in front of him. What an extraordinary figure Shakespeare was, thought Gresham. He must have kept this rage in check for the boat journey over to The House and then unleashed it just now as he was thrust into the room. Could this man store moods, like others stored food, and bring them out of his emotional pantry on demand?

Shakespeare turned to Gresham. ' It's all over!' He was calming down, but like a boulder that has tumbled down a huge scarp and is now on more level ground, his range still had momentum and power.

'What is all over?' asked Gresham, beginning to feel his own anger rise within him. If this damned man had had the decency to be either an artist or a fraud then perhaps lives would have been saved, the sum total of human terror reduced if only by a little. Yet he had to be both a supreme artist and a fraud, complicating things beyond belief.

'Marlowe. Your friend Marlowe.'

Gresham felt rather than saw the tide of revulsion, the gasp of fear from Jane at the mention of the dread name.

'He went to Burbage, Hemminge and Condell. My friends! My friends who at the clink of coin and sight of a manuscript were willing to betray me!'

The tears were of anger, not self-pity. Gresham motioned Shakespeare to sit down, Mannion to bring wine. Shakespeare looked for a moment, then sat, suddenly deflating like a stuck bladder.

'How to betray you?' asked Gresham quietly.

'They told him where the manuscripts were kept. The original manuscripts. In the handwriting of the King, Andrewes, Bacon, Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Raleigh — ' there was the tiniest of flickers across Gresham's face — 'the Countess of Pembroke, you name it… and, of course, Christopher Marlowe. They knew, the three of them. Always have known. Encouraged me in the fraud…'