THE ONELY SHAKE-SCENE IN A COUNTREY
THE ONELY SHAKE-SCENE IN A COUNTREY
(Originally published in Century magazine in 2000,
and later in my short story collection Tales of Earth.)
You live in a world without Shakespeare. Come, and see how.
The boy William is born as history surmises on April 23, 1564, and baptized on April 26. Indeed, he survives into his teenage years. But in 1580 he and a Stratford girl, whose name—honest—is Kathleen Hamlet, decide to go swimming in the Avon, he for the pleasure of it but she with a plan, for her family is steeped in the old faith of Rome and she has found herself in an unfortunate situation, not of William’s doing, and can’t face the shame. She’s going where the shame can’t touch her, though she knows it will devastate her loved ones no matter what she does. There’s no impropriety in the swimming. Both are clothed, though less modestly, perhaps, than their parents would like.
William isn’t a strong swimmer and so Kathleen’s intentions should meet little resistance. “Will,” she says, “I am with child.”
There are ways to prevent conception, even in these strange times, and ways, afterward, to end it. Removing the unborn is not enough for her. She tries to explain what she means to do, to ask his forgiveness, in advance, from the only person who’s likely to give it. But in the year of our Lord MCLXXX William—yes, a genius with wild potential and only a few rough scribblings to show for it—is still an awkward fumbling boy, tinged by jealousy and incensed by the unnamed father’s unchivalric behavior. He promises, bravely, to “thrash the lout.”
And so, the boy who will be—who would have been—such a remarkable man at reading and expressing the soul of humanity, misses her point because he’s caught up in his own feelings.
While Will rants of the dishonor of men Kathleen smiles sweetly, kisses his cheek, and walks slowly to the bank of the river where a rock juts out. While he paces she turns away from the water and hums a pretty tune. While his back is to her she spreads her arms like a snow angel, her stomach still flat but wriggling with life, and lets herself tumble backwards. As she strikes her head on the rock, her body splashes, spasms, rolls. She floats face down.
Only then does Will look up from his preoccupation. Seeing her, he knows, too late, too late, what she was saying to him. He calls her name, he runs, he cries, “Oh God Katie no,” but—and this line, alas, will never be written—long it could not be till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.
He sees her body submerge, sucked into the current, a billow of fabric receding downstream. He doesn’t think, he simply jumps, trying in vain to save the already-dead. Had he time he might berate his failure to understand, to act, to prevent. But Will is not a strong swimmer, and though, as she wished, he finds an instant to forgive, his own guilt will remain, like his writing, mere speculation.
Their bodies wash up within yards of one another on a neighbor’s land. To their families they are two young lovers who chose, senselessly, to die together. They are buried in the old, and now forbidden, faith.
***
There are those who will say it doesn’t matter, Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare anyway, so the death of the Stratford boy changes nothing. He was in Greene’s words but an upstart crow: no great loss. Bacon, Oxford, Rutland, Essex, Pembroke, Marlowe, Spenser, Kyd, Nashe, Peele, Beaumont, Fletcher, Lyly, Jonson, Sidney, Watson ... Who else was alive then? Name your own candidate. It’s all such nonsense, of course Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, only now he’s dead, so he didn’t. Nobody did.
And you live on without him. Do you notice this lack? No. This is not the abrupt wrenching away of something you’ve spent a lifetime loving. This is an unfelt loss, an absence that isn’t an absence because it was never a presence. Is there a sudden creative explosion of writers rushing to fill that literary niche? A decline of others who no longer have a body of genius upon which to base their own work, from which to steal? Do the critics, the actors, the English majors now have to do something else with their lives? Do you even suspect that something’s missing?
No.
This boy need never have lived, for all the good he did. He’s a non-statistic, a nobody. Until this moment you’ve never heard his name. He has left no evidence, no tantalizing hints of talent. His small output, those rough teenage scribblings, are overlooked by bereaved parents or, if seen at all, pressed between the pages of a book he once gave to some sentimental object of pubescent affection; to Kathleen Hamlet, perhaps. His masters at Stratford grammar school shake their heads and sigh, for they alone may have glimpsed the what-might-have-been.
But you? You don’t know him, I tell you! You can’t miss what you never had. Hush now, the world will endure.
***
But you do still bemoan, don't you, the loss of the other writers mentioned here, many of whom also died young? Most of all you mourn for Marlowe. In the first history, of which you're no longer aware, before we disposed of the youthful Swan of Avon, Marlowe was the second brightest star in the Elizabethan heavens, and now, when his time to truly shine has come, he’s murdered at twenty-nine.
The sadness of it all, such a talent, cut down in the prime of life, wring your hands, tear your hair, blah blah blah. Here we do have the evidence of our loss, the hints of unfulfilled promise: Faustus; Dido; the two Tamerlanes; Hero and Leander; Edward II; The Jew of Malta; The Massacre of Paris. Yes, such a waste, the hand that penned the face that launched a thousand ships stilled tragically in for Christ’s sake a tavern brawl. How unfair, how empty—shouldn’t there be some grander purpose to his death than this? He was so gifted and so young, he could have been, oh if only, if only ...
And so you cry of cruel fate.
But wait. Be patient. This has possibilities. Having drowned the one, can we save the other?
Go back to 1593, early morning on the 30th of May, a Wednesday. Walk to Deptford, just to the east of London, to a—well, history does call it a tavern—owned by the widow Eleanor Bull. It’s another plague year, black and swollen death having ravaged London again, Lord have mercy on us; but the disease has finally run its course, or nearly so, and the day is fine and warm. Christopher—he prefers Kit—Marlowe has just arrived at the widow’s to meet three acquaintances, Skeres and Frizer and Poley. He’s come for one purpose, his companions for another.
Kit Marlowe is by all accounts a contentious bastard, quick to angry and violent behavior. He’s a sodomite and a smoker of tobacco. He disputes the virtue of the Queen and disdains the existence of God. He is everything good and true Englishmen despise. Disinterested in politics, he has spied in service to the Crown. Cynical of scripture, he’s earned a Master of Divinity degree from Cambridge. He’s Raleigh’s friend, Hariot’s follower, the younger Walsingham’s lover, and, oh, by the way, a genius.
You can save him.
Skeres and Frizer are already here. Poley’s been delayed by state business, for he too is a spy. They are all spies. That’s what this meeting is supposedly about. The Privy Council in London, men whose job it is to protect the realm against threats both physical and ideological, has sniffed out Marlowe’s atheism and, despite his past service to them, they’re turning the screws. Who they really want is Sir Walter, for their own reasons, but he’s a powerful and influential man, so they’re coming in the back door with his friend Kit. To get Kit they take another writer, Thomas Kyd, his one-time roommate, and put him to torture, destroying his right hand, his writing hand. Under such compelling prodding Mr. Kyd is quite willing to offer up Marlowe on an atheistical platter. There’s other evidence, too, a letter of some sort, and of course the published rantings of the bitterly less talented Robert Greene, who is now, happily, dead.
So the Council is pressuring this poet Marlowe, this maker of plays, and the pressure is considerable. Atheism is treason, and traitors are publicly hanged, their privates sliced from their bodies while they live, their flesh opened and entrails removed while they still live, forced to view the consequence of their actions or thoughts, and then when death mercifully ends the torment, their limbs are wrenched from their sockets and their heads displayed on spikes on London Bridge until time and the elements rot them to bone. It is not a good thing to be a traitor in Elizabethan England.
Kit Marlowe, despite his swagger, is scared. He’s come to borrow money from Skeres, to beg Poley’s influence in booking passage to the Low Countries. It is in fact Skeres and Poley who did the inviting, with the wink that implies friendship, the nod that encourages hope. Frizer is here because he’s a servant of the younger Walsingham, who is Kit’s friend, patron, and lover. Frizer does not like sodomites.
And now you’re here, too. Cut to later in the day, skip the pleasant and innocuous walks and talks in the garden, Poley’s belated arrival, and the widow Bull's tasty supper. That’s all prelude, stage-setting. You’re here to prevent a murder and extend the gift of literature to the world. Take a gun with you—oh they won’t expect that—and listen outside the door until the time is right. You’ll know what to do.
The famous argument over le recknynge has begun, the dispute about who has to pay the bill. It’s all a ruse. You’ve read the coroner’s report of the incident: Marlowe is lying on the bed while Skeres, Frizer, and Poley, in that order, crowd together on the bench at the table, their backs to him. Kit and Frizer begin to bicker, and Kit, quick to angry and violent behavior, grabs Frizer’s knife and attacks him, while Poley and Skeres sit placidly by, unable to move because of the cramped space and apparently unwilling to intervene. Frizer wrests the knife from Kit and, in defense of his life, plunges the weapon into the right eye socket of his adversary, “of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher [Marlowe] then and there instantly [dies].”
This is what Skeres and Frizer and Poley tell the coroner, and thus what history tells you. You suspect, however, the truth is something else; you suspect it is Skeres, Marlowe, and Poley, in that order, on the bench and Frizer on the bed. You suspect Skeres and Poley are not innocent bystanders but active participants, and that they are all facing Frizer. You suspect that they bearhug Marlowe’s arms so he can't act in defense of his life, vise-grip his head to give Frizer an easy target.
What are their motives? Frizer, you see, hates sodomites. He believes Marlowe has corrupted his master, the younger Walsingham. Poley, with the death of the elder Walsingham—cousin to the younger—may now be Kit’s superior in the spying trade. Maybe he’s unhappy with Marlowe’s performance or finds his attitudes dangerous, or maybe Marlowe wants out of “the Service” and there’s no getting out, except one way. Skeres? He’s the moneylender. You’d call him an extortionist, a shark, a hustler, a gangster, a crook. He’s a dirty and disreputable man who has no use for a maker of plays, but he’s the bait that drew Kit here. This is to be no “tavern brawl.” It’s murder, cool and calculated.
When the argument is at its most heated, its loudest, when you hear the unsheathing of metal, that’s when you burst through the door with your automatic pistol. The scenario is as you imagined, Skeres and Poley holding Marlowe, Frizer about to lunge. You say, “Hey, Kit, where you been, man? Been lookin’ for you all day.” And you coolly and with calculation pull the trigger three times, a single bullet each to the foreheads of Skeres and Frizer and Poley, who have turned their stunned faces to you. Let the coroner sort that out.
Kit, startled but relieved, thanks you and runs. You know you’ll never see him again, so you simply step back into now. You can read the rest in the history books.
Christopher Marlowe escapes to the Low Countries and waits until a new Privy Council can be seated and the passions he’s roused in the government have faded. He returns to England in 1618, fifty-four years old, and remains until 1649, when by coincidence he dies within days of the beheading of Charles I. He has not been idle. In those years, those lovely unexpected years, he’s dazzled the world with incomparable poetry and plays, heights of language never achieved before or since. He becomes the undisputed master of English verse, churning out classics very much like the unwritten Hamlet or Lear, far eclipsing his contemporaries and later claimants like Milton or Pope or Tennyson. He is the standard against which all others are judged.
You have done a wonderful thing with your intervention, given us a gift we have no way to measure or repay. Yes, three men had to die so that one could live, but who will notice or lament the premature departure, on Wednesday, May 30, 1593, of Skeres and Frizer and Poley? Indeed, this is the new history, history, now, the way it’s always been.
What about the lad from Stratford who drowned? What about him? You’ve never heard of him, and not a scrap of his writing was ever recorded for posterity. It could be argued, of course, that if you can save Marlowe you can save the boy, but why would you? You don’t realize he’s there for the saving. Besides, you can’t just go rescuing people willy-nilly, you’d likely get as many serial killers as poets laureate.
Kathleen Hamlet also died on that day in 1580. For all anyone will ever know she was the lost genius.