The Merchant of Vengeance Page 12

  "And so is he," Elizabeth replied. "Or, I should say, was he," she added sadly. "Did he not go to church? I seem to recall Portia telling me that they had gone together."

  Smythe nodded. "Aye, since you mention it, I recall he did say so. Thomas told us that he had been raised in his father's faith, and not his mother's. Was that not the only way a Jew could have remained in England?"

  Elizabeth shook her head. "I truly know nothing of such things. But from what I understood from Portia, 'twould make no difference to her father yea or nay. Once he had discovered that Thomas's mother was a Jewess, then that made Thomas a Jew, as well, even by the standards of his own people."

  "Curious. I wonder how Mayhew would have known that," Smythe said. "And how did he happen to discover that Thomas's mother was a Jewess?"

  "Portia made no mention of it," Elizabeth replied. "But 'tis an interesting question, I must say. Unless he had found out from Thomas."

  "'Why would Thomas even mention it, especially to Mayhew?" asked Smythe. "Knowing that Jews had been barred from England since King Edward's time, one would think 'twould be the last thing he would do."

  Elizabeth glanced at him. "You have become all caught up in this, I see."

  "And you have not?"

  "To the extent that Portia is my friend, I have," she replied. "But for me, it ends with my concern for her. Not so with you, however."

  "Well, as I told you, I feel at least in part responsible for what has happened," he replied.

  "And as I have told you, even had you not spoken with Thomas at all, he still would have at least considered an elopement, if not purely on his own, then certainly after Portia told him that she was willing to run off with him."

  "Except by that time, he would already have been dead," said Smythe. "'Tis the timing of it all that troubles me. Like a hungry dog that worries at a bone, I cannot seem to let it go. Did Portia happen to mention if Thomas had any other enemies? Perhaps someone with whom he may have quarrelled of late?"

  Elizabeth frowned, thinking for a moment, then shook her head. "Nay, I do not think she mentioned Thomas having any enemies. Of course, that does not mean he did not have them. Are you thinking that Henry Mayhew may not have been the one who did it?"

  "Well, 'twould seem unlikely he would have done it by himself," said Smythe. "He could have hired someone and had it done, which would not have been very difficult at all." He glanced around. "We could probably find men willing to perform such work right here. And yet, the more I dwell upon it, the more it troubles me, Elizabeth. I do not think. Mayhew could have acted so quickly to have had it done within so brief a span of time."

  "Unless he had already planned to do it earlier," Elizabeth replied.

  "'Tis possible," said Smythe, nodding as he considered it.

  "And yet, methinks 'twould seem unlikely."

  "Why so?" she asked.

  "Consider this," he said. "Mayhew discovered somehow that Thomas was a Jew, and let us not trouble for the moment about how he happened to come by this knowledge, although that is a point which puzzles me considerably. We shall assume, for the moment, that he was outraged and infuriated by this knowledge to the point where he was willing to commit murder, or else hire someone else to do it. Well then, why not simply go ahead and have it done? "Why bother formally withdrawing his permission for the marriage? Why bother saying anything at all, to Portia or to Thomas or to anyone, for that matter, Would it not have been simpler by far for him to have poor Thomas killed, and then feign ignorance and commiserate with his daughter over the terrible tragedy that had occurred? In that event, would anyone have seen any reason at all to tie him in with it? Assuming that he was not an utter fool, which he could not have been, else he would not have made such a success in business, then would he not have found such a course much more expedient?"

  "Indeed, 'twould seem so," Elizabeth replied, after considering it a moment. "So then, why did he not do so?"

  "Perhaps," said Smythe, "because he was not the one who did it."

  "But… if that is true…" Elizabeth began with a worried frown.

  "Then the sheriff's men may very likely be arresting an innocent man even as we speak," said Smythe.

  Chapter 7

  Built to house the company of players known as the Lord Admiral's Men, the Rose Theatre was the crown jewel of Philip Henslowe's various enterprises, among which were also a pawnshop and a number of thriving Southwark brothels situated conveniently nearby. Originally hexagonal in shape, the playhouse was three stories high and timber framed, with thatch-roofed galleries and an open yard. At considerable expense, the Rose had recently been renovated and enlarged by pushing back the walls behind the stage, along with the stage itself and the tiring room behind it, then lengthening the sides of the building. This expansion increased the available area for the groundlings, those members of the audience who paid the cheapest admission price of one penny and stood in the open yard, the surface of which had been mortared and sloped upward, so that those who stood toward the rear could enjoy an unobstructed view. This sloping of the yard also facilitated drainage, so that rainwater and other natural fluids could run down to the wooden box drain that ran from just behind the stage to a ditch beyond the playhouse walls. This made cleanup after the performances easier and, with the regular changing of the rushes, helped keep down the smell. Now shaped like an asymmetrical polygon, the playhouse was currently home to both the Lord Admiral's Men and Lord Strange's Men, the company to which Smythe and Shakespeare now belonged.

  They had left their first company, the Queen's Men, though not without some regret, for they had thought of the Theatre as their home ever since they came to London. Dick Burbage, the son of the owner, James Burbage, was a fellow player and had become a good friend to them both. However, despite the Theatre's legacy of lending its name to other stages — all playhouses in London were now increasingly being called "theatres" -the Queen's Men had fallen upon hard times. The company had been in decline ever since the death of Dick Tarleton, their celebrated comic player, followed by the defection of their star, the celebrated Edward Alleyn, who had joined the Lord Admiral's Men. Ned had subsequently married Henslowe's daughter, thereby cementing his relationship to the entrepreneur and assuring his own future. To make matters worse, the Queen's Men had then lost both of their juvenile apprentice players when one had died of the plague and the other, perhaps fearing the same fate, ran off.

  After that, the company's bad luck only continued to grow worse.

  Will Kemp, for all his efforts, had never quite been able to fill Dick Tarleton's shoes, and before long he, too, had left the company, following Alleyn to the Lord Admiral's Men. The lengthy forced closure of the playhouses due to plague and a dismal touring season for the company had already strained the finances of the Queen's Men to the limit. Most of the players were broke, and a number of the hired men had quit and gone in search of other work. And in a time when work in London was becoming increasingly difficult to come by, this bespoke a degree of desperation that was telling. When the playhouses had at last reopened, the powerful combination of Ned Alleyn's bombastic acting and Kit Marlowe's luridly dramatic writing drew most of the Queen's Men's audience to the Rose. The wind was whistling through the empty galleries of the Theatre, and even the ever optimistic Dick Burbage had seen the ominous writing on the wall.

  "Go," he had told them, when Will received an invitation to join Lord Strange's Men. "Go on and join them. Never fear for me. 'Tis true that things do not look very promising at present. The company is but a shadow of what it once had been; our audiences have deserted us, and our greedy landlord keeps threatening not to renew our lease upon the property in the hope that he may seize the playhouse for himself. But though the carrion kites may circle overhead, my friends, my father and I are far from finished. For a time, Henslowe and the Lord Admiral's Men have us at a decided disadvantage, to be sure, but remember that fortunes ever change. We are already planning a new Theatre, much improved over
the present one, and although the time is not yet ripe, our plan…ill soon come to fruition. But in the meantime, you must eat, my friends, and you must pay your rent, and though your loyalty is the very nectar of sweet nourishment to me, I fear 'tis but poor provender for you. So please, I beg you, go with my blessings, both of you. There shall yet be another time for us to play together."

  And so, with a bittersweet mixture of sadness and anticipation, they had joined Lord Strange's Men, who in turn had combined forces with the Lord Admiral's Men shortly thereafter due to a poor season and hard times for all the companies in London. Over the next few months, players came and went; companies fanned, disbanded, and reformed. And sadly, the Queen's Men, once the nation's most illustrious company of players, did not survive the various upheavals.

  Bobby Speed came with them to Lord Strange's Men, as did John Hemings soon thereafter. The departure of a second shareholder in the company signalled the end to all the others. Hemings was in due course followed by Tom Pope, George Bryan, and Gus Phillips. Will Kemp had joined their new company, as well. He had not gotten on well in the Lord Admiral's Men, having managed to quickly raise the ire of both Ned Alleyn, their star player, and their resident poet, the young and irrepressible Kit Marlowe. Unfortunately for Kemp, when the two companies joined forces, he was once more thrown in with both of them.

  Alleyn had little patience with Kemp's ever increasing reluctance, or perhaps growing inability, to learn his lines, something he had previously covered with improvised songs and caperings. However, the conventions of the stage were changing, and Marlowe's sensational and gory dramas had no place for such buffoonish antics. Thus, when Kemp forgot his lines and resorted to his usual comic bag of tricks, Marlowe flew into hysterical rages, screaming and throwing things at him, at one point actually drawing steel and chasing him around the playhouse with his sword, threatening at the top of his lungs to disembowel him. Had it been anyone else but Marlowe, Kemp might well have taken it for nothing more than a grandiose display of temper and dramatics, something not at all uncommon in the world of players and poets. However, this was not just any player or poet, but Kit Marlowe, whose flamboyant excesses and mad, Dionysian behaviour were legendary throughout all of London. Kemp took fright and ran to his old friends for protection.

  So the old crowd, for the most part, was back together once again. But although the Rose was home now to both companies, and they often played together, sharing members back and forth depending on the needs of their productions, there was still a feeling of competitiveness and rivalry between them—and, in a few cases, even animosity. It was not the most harmonious of marriages.

  Ned Alleyn's ego ,vas as expansive as his gestures on the stage and, having been the star of two companies in succession, he had a natural tendency to lord it over everyone. Being widely acclaimed throughout the country as the greatest actor of the age had certainly done nothing to restrain him. Where he had once tolerated Kemp when they had played together in the Queen's Men, he now openly detested him and, knowing that Marlowe absolutely loathed Kemp, often tried co pit the one against the other. And Will Kemp was an all-too-easy victim. He simply could not restrain his wicked sarcasm, which was his natural defence, and Marlowe did not know the meaning of restraint to begin with, all of which meant that their rehearsals often became boisterous and tumultuous affairs that nearly degenerated into riots. On a number of occasions, Smythe had CO separate the two of them, able to do so only because his size and strength made him an effective barrier between them and because Marlowe, having once fought alongside him in a barroom brawl, was well disposed toward him.

  Fortunately, for all his passionate and violent nature, Marlowe was, at heart, neither evil nor mean-spirited, and his rages would usually dissipate as quickly as they would erupt. Nevertheless, Kemp had become so terrified of him that he had developed a nervous twitch that manifested itself whenever Marlowe was around, and this only served to irritate the flamboyant poet further.

  "And so I rose," boomed Alleyn from the stage, sweeping out his right arm in a grandiose gesture of encompassment, "and looking from a turret, did behold young infants swimming in their parents' blood…"

  Now Alleyn paused dramatically and posed, sweeping both arms out wide, right arm to the side and bent slightly at the elbow, left arm to the other side and raised, with elbow sharply bent, fingers splayed, eyes wide and staring, as if at a lurid vision of unimaginable horror. His voice rose and fell dramatically as he continued with the speech. … scores of headless carcasses piled up in heaps, and half-dead virgins, dragged by their golden hair and flung upon a ring of pikes…

  "And with main force flung on a ring of pikes'!" shouted Marlowe from the second-tier gallery, springing to his feet and pounding his fist on the railing. "And the line is 'headless carcasses piled up in heaps,' not 'scores of headless carcasses'! God blind me, Ned, must you always change the lines?"

  "Methinks that 'scores of headless carcasses' sounds ever so much more dramatic, Kit," Alleyn replied in his stentorian tones, gazing up him.

  "Well, if they are piled up in bloody fucking heaps, methinks 'tis likely that we may assume that there are bloody fucking scores of them!" shouted Marlowe, throwing up his hands in exasperation. "Why can you not read the lines the way I wrote them? And why is that man shaking?" he added, his voice rising to a screech as he leaned over the gallery rail and pointed an accusatory finger toward the stage, straight at Kemp.

  "Must be all those infants swimming in their parents' blood," Shakespeare murmured quietly to Smythe as they stood together near the back of the stage, holding spears up by their sides.

  Smythe snorted as he barely repressed a guffaw.

  "Kemp? Is that you again?" shouted Marlowe.

  In vain, the trembling Kemp tried to conceal himself behind

  John Hemings, who was far too thin to help conceal much of anything.

  "I can still see you, Kemp, you horrible man!" shouted Marlowe. "Why the devil are you twitching about so?"

  "Doubtless he is attempting to upstage me," Alleyn said petulantly. "Kemp is forever attempting to upstage me."

  "Liar! I . I was not!" protested Kemp, clutching at Hemings for protection. "John, tell them I was not!"

  "He was not trying to upstage you, Ned," said Hemings placatingly.

  "Well, Lord Strange's Company all stick together, to be sure," said Alleyn with a grimace. "No doubt, they all think that they are much too good to be stuck carrying spears at the back of the stage."

  "I have got a place to stick this spear," said Shakespeare wryly,

  "and 'tis not at the back of the stage."

  "What was that?" said Alleyn, spinning round.

  "'Twas nothing, Ned," said Smythe, giving Shakespeare an elbow in the ribs to stave off his reply.

  "I distinctly heard somebody say something," Alleyn said, narrowing his eyes.

  "I said—ooof!"

  Smythe elbowed him again and took hold of him as he doubled over. "Will said he was feeling poorly, Ned," he said. "Look, see how he suffers? It must be something that he ate."

  "Well, take him off the bloody stage, then!" Marlowe shouted from the gallery. "We have a play to perform tonight, people! And you, Kemp, you can go with them, until you can learn to stop twitching as if you had St. Vitus's bloody dance!"

  "Ohhh, how I despise that man," said Kemp through gritted teeth as they went through the doorway at the back of the stage and came into the tiring room, where the players changed their costumes and waited for their entrances.

  "Well, I shall grant you that he is not, perhaps, the most amenable of men," said Smythe, still supporting Shakespeare, .who was just getting his wind back, "but he is a decent sort at heart, Will."

  "Decent?" Kemp replied, with disbelief. "Marlowe? Are you mad? There is naught that is decent about him. The man is a wanton libertine of the first order!"

  "Hola, pot! You are black, the kettle sayeth," Shakespeare said, finally getting back his breath.

 
"And you can bloody well shut up." Kemp said, forgetting his usual cleverly acerbic banter in his frustration. "Poets." he added with contempt, throwing on his cloak with a flourish. "You are all mad as March hares, the lot of you! I say a pox upon all poets!"

  "Hmmpf! He wished a pox upon me, did you hear?" said Shakespeare, watching Kemp depart in a huff. "'Twasn't very nice of him, now, was it? Speaking of which, you might have broken my ribs with that elbow, you great, lumbering ox."

  "And Alleyn might have broken your jawbone with his fist had I not stopped you just then," Smythe replied. "To say naught of what Marlowe might have done had he heard you mocking him."

  "Ned frightens me about as much as the wind that makes up the greater part of him," said Shakespeare. "And as for Marlowe, well, you must admit, he truly begs for mockery. I mean, come on! Impaled golden virgins and infants swimming in their parents' blood? Lord save us, not even Sophocles would pen such an exaggerated, foolish line."

  "You must admit that it conjures up quite the lurid vision."

  Smythe replied.

  "It conjures up what I ate for breakfast," Shakespeare said with a grimace. "'Tis all a lot of knavish nonsense."

  "Perhaps, but 'tis what the audiences love about his work," said

  Smythe. He pointed a finger at Shakespeare's chest. "And 'tis why you are trying to emulate him."

  "I am not trying to emulate him, I am trying to better him," said Shakespeare irritably. 'There is a difference, you know."

  "Fine, I shall grant you that," said Smythe. "Nevertheless, the fact remains that audiences eat up Marlowe's 'knavish nonsense,' as you put it, and you know that as well as anyone. 'Tis why you are so determined to outdo him. His Jew of Malta and his Doctor Faustus and this new one about the queen of Carthage are all much more exciting than your own Henry the Sixth."