Martin Stephen: The Conscience of the King

'I was right to refuse the King!' Overbury said bitterly. The other prisoner nodded, taking a gulp of the putrid wine that was all Overbury had managed to get into The Tower. 'Me! To go as ambassador to some godforsaken frozen hole! Oh, I know what they all wanted. The plan's clear as day. Get me posted overseas and then, with my brains gone from the scene, get rid of Robert Carr.' Overbury lurched to his feet, taking a swig of his own wine. 'My friend Carr wouldn't last weeks in the… cess-pit of the Court once I was safely posted overseas!'

'You were offered an ambassadorship? By the King?' asked Overbury's companion, who had damned the King without ever actually seeing him, and might well die without seeing him too. He was not sure whether to laugh at Overbury or bow before him.

'I refused it! Of course! Who is the King to tell me what to do?'

The other prisoner blanched at that. He knew who the King was. The person in whose name he had been arrested. The person in whose name he would most likely be tortured, executed or left rotting in this place. A trace of fear swept into his mind. Was this person, this Sir Thomas Overbury, a wise man to drink with?

'This imprisonment won't last! It was necessary. The King has to do it, for the form's sake! Carr will weedle and charm James into releasing me soon enough.' Overbury was pacing the narrow room now. 'And then there'll be revenge for those who put me in this stinking pile of stone. Carr needs me. The King needs me!’

This man is mad, the other prisoner thought. He put his cheap cup down and started to edge towards the door.

'Damn this imprisonment!' Overbury raged, hardly noticing the other man. The Court was a whirlpool of intrigue, current and cross-current, and here he was with his vessel swept into a backwater, land-locked with no oars and no sail. The inaction was intolerable!

A few miles away, Henry Gresham felt a quiet satisfaction at the way Overbury had been neutralised. Yet even he did not realise that when one man causes a prey to stop alive in its tracks, he opens up a route for others to give it the death blow.

29th June, 1613 The Globe Theatre

‘Ready for the big day?' John Hemminge grinned at Henry Condell.

'Are you sure this is… the right thing?' Condell answered.

'Look,' said Hemminge patiently, as if explaining to a child, 'we're actors, aren't we? We deal in drama. Kit Marlowe was a legend in his lifetime — for what he wrote, what he did and for who he was. There's been God knows what rumours about his death ever since it was meant to have happened. This revelation that the great Kit Marlowe didn't die in 1593, that we've been watching his work for twenty years — this is going to be the greatest defeat of death since Jesus! It's the most dramatic moment of our lives. Of anyone who's alive now! Remember poor old Will's speech in Henry V? About all those who would rue the day they weren't there at Agincourt? What will people give to have been there on the day when Kit Marlowe revealed himself at The Globe? In front of The King's men, with The King's Men putting on his cursed play a day later! Henry…' Hemminge moved over to Condell, put his arm around his shoulders. 'Sometimes history asks you a question, and you have to say yes.'

Condell thought for a moment. 'But it's not the truth!' he said. 'You know what those scripts Marlowe sent in were like — Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar. Oh, I know they had good bits — but most of them were raving, ranting gibberish! We know it was Will who turned them into plays that the likes of us could perform. Is it right to ditch Will in favour of a man who was nothing but trouble in his first incarnation, and who seems to have brought nothing but trouble in his second? We're denying our friend his inheritance, John. We're taking Will's art away from him.'

'Art!' Hemminge snorted. 'Sod art! What are we players to do with art? We're to do with whatever gets them flocking over the river to see us perform. I know we fancy ourselves. We don't put on bear-baiting or cock-fighting after a play,' and he started a mincing walk, affecting a high-pitched voice, 'not like some of those other low brow theatres. But we would, if it meant the difference between living like gentlemen or starving, wouldn't we? Would you starve for art? Would you?'

'Probably not,' said Condell with a long sigh, 'but if I was a king negotiating a treaty, I'd rather do it with Will Shakespeare than Kit Marlowe.'

'Forget it!' said Hemminge. 'We'll make it worth Will's while in money, and it's not as if he doesn't have enough of it already.' 'But 1 still worry-'

'Don't! He's claimed the credit all his life for stuff other people sent him. Now someone else wants a share. It's poetic justice. He's got his property and his business in Stratford. Not bad for a terrible actor. Don't worry about it! We'll be drinking with him and having a laugh about it in six months' time!'

Condell doubted that but did not show it. He had a part to play in the performance that was even now limbering up. His mind would not be on the show, he knew. It would be on the revelation that would follow it, at the point where the audience might have been expecting a jig. Christopher Marlowe. Killed in a bar-room brawl twenty years ago at the peak of his dramatic powers. Yet not dead. Alive, here in The Globe. And managing to talk to his audience these twenty years past as if from the grave. Dammit, they had to make Marlowe do a sequel to Doctor Faustus, before he really did die. Only a matter of time, and short time at that, given the look of him. It had to be a sell out.

Thank God Marlowe had come to them! Hemminge thought exultantly. What if he had gone to The Rose, or even The Red Bull? The mere thought made him grind his teeth. The Globe it was. As it should be. As it had always been.

'When's he turning up?' Condell asked aloud. He and Burbage had left the negotiations to Hemminge.

'He didn't — wouldn't — say,' answered Hemminge, rather distractedly. 'All I know is that he's going to make his appearance from the Lord's Gallery when we've finished the show. He's written ten lines for Burbage to say. Then he'll appear.'

The stage area was covered by a thrusting thatched roof, the underside of which had a painted canopy. Just above it was the turret, from which the cannons were fired for special effects and the flag hoisted and the trumpets blown to mark the start of a show. Sheltered by the roof, immediately under its protection, was the Lord's Gallery. Highly privileged members of the audience, who were willing to pay an extremely privileged price, could watch the play from there, on occasion having to share it with the musicians. For tonight's performance the musicians had been banished to the side of the stage, and no tickets sold to the Lord's Gallery. That would be Marlowe's platform, the podium from which he would return to life and reinvent it.

Hemminge and Condell disengaged, returned to the throng of actors ready and excited to present All Is True to a nearly full house.

For how many years had Christopher Marlowe been invisible? All those years of hiding, twenty in all, from the fact of which he was most proud: he was Christopher Marlowe. Twenty years of fearing above all to be recognised, of cultivating invisibility. And now this truly poetic opportunity to come back to life once and for all.

He would not enter for the start of the play. That would be too obvious, there could be too many people looking for him. One great moment, his liaison with Lady Jane Gresham and her children, had been spoiled by his being recognised. This time he would wait until the play had commenced, wait for its first great ceremonial moment and then slip in up the deserted stairs to the Lord's Gallery, hooded and cloaked. The knife he had with him was razor sharp. It would cut as a hot knife through butter into the hardened canvas that upheld the thatch in the Lord's Gallery. From out of the incision would tumble the manuscripts of that charlatan Shakespeare's plays, like a surgeon cutting out babies from a woman's flesh. The original manuscripts. He would pick up one or two. His Richard III for sure, his Richard II by choice, written so long ago in a faraway land, his version so greatly preferable to the one the upstart Shakespeare had chosen to write, with all his 'changes' and his 'improvements'. He would wait then for the end of All Is True. The great Burbage would make his announcement — instead of an epilogue for All Is True he would read the ten lines that Marlowe had penned and changed and corrected over twenty years of dreaming of this moment. Then he, Christopher Marlowe, would reveal himself. And when the double shock was over, he would announce that The Globe would be presenting tomorrow the first ever performance of his new masterpiece: The Fall of Lucifer.