Ink and Steel

Still our grip held steady, & I felt it safe to return to Annie & my children for lent when the playhouses were closed; I had seen to Robin and Francis comfort, & all in London quiet. & I thank the lord my God for the grace that I did that thing. Oh, Kit. London is terrible. I cannot know what has changed, or how what we have done was broken, but I feel the power gone out of our mighty lines & I feel Oxford must have poets to oppose us. Spenser is returned to London: lord Hunsdon has informed me that Edmund is one of ours & always has been (I wonder at the secrets kept & the acts of one hand kept hidden from the other, but who can truly trust whom in a game where crowns are hostage?), but I fear he is not well; although he struggles to complete his Faerie Queen I cannot feel but that we will soon lose his light. There is famine in the streets: it is all I can do to provide for Annie, as so many starve that there are carts come to collect the bodies as in a plague year. Babes swim not in their mother’s blood, but rather starve & sicken for there is no milk at the breast no, I will write no more of it. On Easter Sunday, Burghley saw men taken into service through the timely expedient of impressing those able-bodied who attended Easter service for communion, as is of course required by law. England’s stronghold at Calais is fallen to the Spanish: I see thy Fray Xalbador’s hand in this event. Drake’s ship has returned: Drake has not, & it has very much taken the heart out of our Queen that her other Sir Francis is dead. Essex won some favor, the knave, taking a fleet to Cadiz by leave of thine old patron the lord Admiral, where they sacked that Spanish city. There is a new playmaker in London, a University man & the son of a bricklayer or some would have it the posthumous son of a priest. I have enclosed some of his pages: he fancies himself a comedian. His name is Jonson, & I have some thought of bringing him into the fold if I can prove he is not Essex’s man. Not easy to do, as I myself have served Southampton a man’s patron does not show his heart. Chapman is too pompous to trust. Also there is a man Spencer, Gabriel is his Christian name, who is not related to Edmund the poet & who seems to wish to attach himself to lord Hunsdon’s Men. I have spoken to Richard of it. There are players & there are players, & I suspect this one is both. Thou wilt laugh to learn that I am under interdict with Francis Langley, owner of the Swan, by a Southwark justice of the peace, one William Gardner, who says we have threatened him bodily. I have not done so, but thou mayst be assured I will see to it does he trouble us further. These are petty lawsuits, & I, thou seest my hand is fairer now, & I write this by candlelight in the Davenant’s Inn where I rest my night before resuming my pell-mell flight on the morrow but I believe this Gardner is one of the whoresons in Poley’s employ. Of course if Oxford no longer believes the players under control such petty harassments can only continue. & since the death of Henry Carey & his son George’s accession to his place as lord Hunsdon we are less secure. The new lord Chamberlain, Cobham, is of Puritan sympathies, & he would the playhouses closed, torn down, & I think the players & playmenders hung, drawn, & quartered. Or at least whipped through the town. I wonder at how much of our famine is his doing, he must be Theirs. It is down to Burghley now, & the Queen still loves him, but he is ill, Kit, & in his dotage he grows enamored of oppressing the Catholics rather than defending his Gloriana. I am desperate. Soon it shall be only Tom, lord Hunsdon, Robert Cecil, & myself. We are not the men our forerunners were… . No. I will not send thee this letter. I will write it for mine ease of spirit & I will burn it, for I will not tempt thee with troubles to return to a world that thou hast sanely left. We starve & we bleed & we die. & yet the only grief in my heart that is too deep for speaking, the thing that I must write now & never send to thee. The reason I am again in thy Tom’s coach rattling over unsanded roads & Roman ditches, & yet there is no haste that can carry me home in time. I cannot write these words. Kit, I am going home to Stratford because my son is dead. Dead seven days now of this writing. Dead & in the ground before I knew of it. Kit, what have I done?

   Act II, scene xiii

She wore no gloves, for neither sun nor wind

Would burn or parch her hands, but to her mind,

Or warm or cool them: for they took delight

To play upon those hands, they were so white.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and leander

Kit and Amaranth strolled together through the airy corridors of the Mebd’s palace, her coils dragging behind like the train of a queen. He walked with a flute in his hands, practicing the fingerings, keeping the lamia on his left side where he could see her hair writhing.