Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

'And did they know that most of the original manuscripts were hugely enhanced when you put your hand to them? Did they know that the ideas came from others but that the real genius came from you, Master William Shakespeare? Did they know that most of these plays would be just another afternoon's entertainment if it weren't for the poetry you have in your soul?' Gresham's voice cut like a saw.

Shakespeare had wine in his hand now. It was forgotten. Two, three huge tears formed in his eyes, rolled down his muddy cheeks, carving a little wobbling path of white in the brown. 'They knew. And they were prepared to sell me out. My friends. My lifetime friends. That was the deal, you see. Marlowe would get all the manuscripts, after giving Burbage, Hemminge and Condell a great lump of money. There'd be a performance, a big one. And then Marlowe would appear. It's what he's always wanted, don't you understand? The biggest dramatic moment of his, of anyone's, life. Christopher Marlowe, the great Christopher Marlowe, the founder of the Elizabethan stage, the master of the blank verse line… and not dead after all! Here, alive, on stage. His great enemy Cecil vanquished by death.'

Something cold and still had entered Gresham's mind, speeding his thoughts as a sledge with razor-sharp edges cuts through snow, silent, powerful and vicious.

'And after he appears like a Jack-in-the-Box, and the audience is gasping with wonder and amazement,' said Gresham, 'then he makes his second announcement. That while they, his loyal public, thought he was dead, he was dead only in name. His writing continued, almost to the present day. They know the plays of William Shakespeare? Did they really think that such plays could be written by a poor country boy from Stratford with no education? No! He, Christopher Marlowe, in the long, long years of his exile, had used Shakespeare as other noble minds had used Terence thousands of years ago.' Gresham had risen to his feet now. He stood in the centre of the room and flung his arms wide in the manner of the great Burbage in a great tragic lead.

'I AM MARLOWE AND I AM ALIVE! I AM SHAKESPEARE, AND HAVE LIVED ALONGSIDE YOU IN THIS THEATRE AS HIM FOR TWENTY YEARS PAST! MY ENEMIES-ARE DEAD! THE MASTER HAS RETURNED!'

There was silence in the room.

'My God,' said Mannion, 'wouldn't the little bastard love that? ‘Wouldn't he really, really love that?'

Jane was struggling to overcome her revulsion, desperately seeking to prove to herself that she could think logically about Marlowe. 'But wouldn't the other authors complain? Claim the credit?'

'Don't you see?' said Shakespeare, almost in desperation now. 'He's cleverer than all of us. Many of the authors don't want to be revealed. They'll stay silent. Someone like the Countess of Pembroke will be laughed out of Court if she claims authorship — a woman, for heaven's sake, able to write like that? What a joke! Either that, or it will herald a very different attitude to women, for life. And without the manuscripts, and with half the original authors dead, where's the proof? If Hemminge, Condell and

Burbage are prepared to betray me — and they are — then he claims my plays as easily as a hawk cuts out of the sky and catches a newly born rabbit.'

'Are you sure they will betray you?' asked Gresham. This time he got up and poured anew measure of wine into the goblet of his old enemy.

'Yes. They've been different, strange with me recently, but that's not how I know. They did the deal with Marlowe in The Globe, over a meal they had brought in. They forgot the servant who served them the meal. Said enough to make him suspicious. He came to me. "Sorry, Master Shakespeare," he said. "Very sorry to intrude. But it sounds to me as if Masters Burbage and Condell and Hemminge are going to let someone else take the credit for all those plays what you wrote. And that ain't right…" Pathetic little man,' said Shakespeare with a sad and bitter laugh. 'His sense of justice was outraged by what he heard so he listened at the door. Didn't know it was Marlowe, of course.'

'Do servants often talk to you?' asked Gresham, remembering the grumpy old man at the Dominican Priory.

'All the time, actually,' said Shakespeare, rather wistfully. 'Don't know why. They always have. Remember that speech in King Lear’. ‘ About poor wretches who bide the pelting of the pitiless storm?'

Gresham nodded his head.

'That came from the same man who warned me about Burbage and the rest of them. He came in drenched one day. Said as how wretches like him had no defence against the rain. Pitiless it was, he said.'

'And from that you wrote what you did?'

Shakespeare looked surprised, his grief forgotten. He also looked confused. 'Why… of course I did. I mean, he virtually wrote it for me, didn't he?'

'No, he didn't actually,' said Gresham, looking at Shakespeare with new eyes. 'He gave you the raw material. Very raw material. God — if he exists, which I very much doubt — gave you the poetry.'

There was a long silence.

'Well, that's it, isn't it?' Shakespeare had changed again. He was now the Stratford grain merchant, rather plump, needing to go about his business because time waits for no man. i suppose he'll leave me alone at last once he's made his grand declaration and claimed my work as his own. No one will listen to plain old William Shakespeare, uneducated old William Shakespeare.' He turned to Jane. 'Do. you know, I shouldn't wonder if he claims my sonnets. And my Venus and Adonis. And The Rape of Lucrece. Why shouldn't he? He's got all the rest…'

And then he broke down into uncontrollable tears, the sobs racking his body as if each one was an arrow sinking into his flesh. Gresham did not stop Jane from going to him, putting her arms around him. She was holding him like a baby, rocking him back and forth. She was someone who knew what it was to have the products of one's imagination for ever claimed by someone else. She liked Ben Jonson, loved him in her own way. Yet what did it cost her to know that so much of his Volpone was her own work?

Gresham's voice came like a sudden cloudburst damping summer fire, ‘I think if anyone has the credit for your writing, Master Shakespeare, it should be you. I will see it is so.'

Shakespeare looked up. He wanted to laugh out loud, yet something stopped him from doing so. Something implacable, quite fearsome in nature.

'Where are the manuscripts stored?' asked Gresham very quietly.

Stunned, Shakespeare told him. 'They're all in the thatch of the Lord's Gallery. I hid them there after Marlowe raided the bookkeeper's room. I gambled he'd never think of my taking them back to The Globe.'

'Do you have a separate copy of all the plays? A fair copy? Kept somewhere else? Not in The Globe, I mean.'

'Yes, for almost all of them,' said Shakespeare.

'And when is the performance they're putting on to allow Marlowe to reveal himself?'

Two days from now. All Is True' said Shakespeare. 'The actors call it Henry VIII. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's the play written by the King. It's dreadful. But it's got lots of spectacle, lots of show. They decided it's the one that would drag the most people in.'

'Do you trust me to restore to you what Marlowe and the others are threatening to rob you of? The right to your work?' asked Gresham.

Shakespeare looked at the man who had been his sworn enemy, his tormentor, and had now offered to be his friend. 'Quite frankly, I don't,’ said Master William Shakespeare. 'I doubt the devil himself could do it.'

Sir Thomas Overbury sat slumped on his bed in the Tower of London. The other prisoner sat opposite, on a chair Overbury had arranged to be carried over from his apartments. He was a poor figure, his fellow prisoner. Someone Overbury would not have paused to spit at only a few weeks before.