manuscripts, the original manuscripts of the many and varied plays by William Shakespeare, will be in the handwriting of the original authors, for all that one or two may have trusted the writing to a treasured clerk.'
Shakespeare's head shot up. A hit! Which of Shakespeare's wealthy clients had sent his manuscript in by a clerk's hand, and not his own?
'No wonder you're being torn apart,' said Jane. 'You poor, poor man. You just can't win, can you?'
'How did you guess?' asked Shakespeare, looking bleakly at Gresham.
'The pamphlet. There, in the chest. 'To our English Terence, Mr Will. ShakeS 'Speare' Terence. Wasn't he the impoverished Roman writer who agreed to publish under his own name works that Roman noblemen had written but for one reason or another didn't care to acknowledge? Congratulations. Ben Jonson would be proud of you. For all your lack of classical learning, you've acted in a true classical tradition.'
'You think you know it all, don't you?' Shakespeare had gone beyond despair, into a region Gresham did not recognise.
'No,' said Gresham truthfully, i never. think I know it all. I like to find out enough to survive.'
An agony of thought passed over Shakespeare's raddled face. Finally, he came to a decision, i was a nobody! I was struggling in the company. I can't act, you know. I'm hopeless! They were going to get rid of me, a poor country boy with no talent except a way with poems. Poems never filled a house. Then this manuscript arrived. A complete play! Addressed to me, with a covering letter and a promise of money if I did what I was told. I knew it was Marlowe, from the writing, the words, the way he used language… so 1 took it. And I gave it my name. I told Hemminge and Condell. My friends, no one else. They thought it was a gold mine. The others in the company, the ones who wanted to get rid of me, looked at me with new respect. 'It's good, Will,' they said, patronising me, when I produced the first script under my name. 'We'll put it on, for a trial, you understand. See how it goes down. See if it works.' And it meant 1 could stop working for Cecil. Say goodbye to William Hall. Be William Shakespeare only.'
'Poor old Marlowe, not wanting to be dead at all,' said Gresham. 'And most of all not wanting to be a dead dramatist.' He stopped for a moment. 'So what went wrong with the system?' i don't know!' said Shakespeare. His hands were running over his bald pate, as if the hair was still there. 'Marlowe's plays stopped, ten, maybe twelve years ago. They just stopped. Until now. When he came back. Mad. Diseased. Barking.'
'Any others know?'
'Ah the bloody world and their grandma for all I care!' exploded Shakespeare. 'Lots of people have suspicions. Jonson does, I know.
As for anyone else who knows for certain, well, you're the spy. You tell me!'
'But it didn't end with Marlowe, did it?' said Gresham, relentless. Shakespeare rocked back, hit hard. 'I knew Marlowe. I know the works he wrote under his own name. I know the plays you've written. My favourites?' Gresham was pacing around the room. 'Hamlet. King heir. Marlowe could never have written those! Marlowe's heroes never pause to worry about what other people think. Hamlet's crippled because he can think of nothing else. Leir's damned because he never listens until it's too late! Who else writes plays with your name on themV
'Oxford,' whispered Shakespeare, seeming to draw into himself as a penis will shrink and shrivel with intense cold.
'Who?' said Gresham with intense rudeness.
'Edward De Vere!' Shakespeare shouted back. 'The fucking Earl of fucking Oxford! There were lots of people who wanted to write plays back then. People who didn't dare to have it known.'
'The one who couldn't forget the fart?' said Mannion, who had been listening, engrossed, to the developing conversation.
'What?' said Gresham.
'Oxford. De Vere. The one who couldn't forget the fart.' Mannion gave a guffaw of laughter. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, had been a fierce patron of the players. He had equipped and served on-board a ship for the Armada. Then he had farted. Before his Queen. In full assembly. He had run from the Court before a word could be said and exiled himself to Europe for years. There he had developed a fondness for the most extravagant Italian style of dress. On his return, he had presented himself before his Queen in all his finery. Whatever else she may have possessed, Queen Elizabeth had a raucous sense of humour. Faced with this extraordinary vision of Italian fashion, she had received his supplications of loyalty with regal splendour. Then she had reduced the Court to fits of suppressed laughter by her next statement.
'My lord, I had forgot the fart.'
De Vere could not now forget it. He had fled the Court a second time, permanently humiliated. He had died of the plague in 1604.
'So who were these others?' asked Gresham in a sibilant hiss.
If Shakespeare had made himself any smaller he would have vanished. 'Don't ask me any more!' he pleaded. 'You've a horde of men to protect you, against Marlowe and the rest of them! I've no one!'
'Who eke?'
'Rutland.' It was said in a very, very small voice. 'Who?'
'Rutland. Roger. Roger Manners. Fifth Earl of Rutland. He died, in May. Just after your lord and master Robert Cecil! There! You've got it now, haven't you? Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland.'
'Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland,' said Gresham thoughtfully. 'What do they want of you?'
'Marlowe wants it shouted from the rooftops that he wrote my plays. All of them. Not just the handful he sent in a manuscript for. And he wants me to get The King's Men to perform his play, The Fall of Lucifer. He's tried to kill me once. Oxford and Rutland's heirs, they demand I keep silent. They don't want their illustrious parents damned by association with the theatre, don't want them seen as cheap conspirators. They've threatened me. Serious threats. Men with knives. I'm dead if I tell the truth, as Marlowe demands. I'm dead if I hide the truth, as the others want me to do.'
There were tears in Shakespeare's eyes, Gresham noted. There would have to be. He was an actor, after all.
'Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland. Are they the only ones whose plays you put your name to?' *'Isn't that enough?' Shakespeare shot back. 'How many more do you want?'
'One of the people you name is as mad as a hatter and likely to drop down dead of the pox at any moment. I can hardly be in ignorance of him. One tends to remember anyone who's tried to skewer your wife on a crossbow bolt. The other two are dead.' 'So?*
'So I think you're only telling me the names of the people I can't talk to.'
Stalemate. Whatever Shakespeare was hiding, even his very visible fear of Gresham was not bringing it out.
'And you remained a spy, didn't you? Long enough to infiltrate the Bye Plot and place Sir Walter Raleigh in the dock?'
Shakespeare flushed. Yet he also fought back. 'I was seduced into the whole wretched business when I was too young to know better — as perhaps were you! It was exciting, wasn't it, when we were young? You were working for the greatest in the land, there was money in your pocket and you travelled as a king's messenger. And you, and Sir Walter Raleigh, greatly overestimate my part in his downfall. Sir Walter's always been his own worst enemy. Challenge him to be silent and you've a guarantee that he'll shout out loud.'
The problem was, Gresham thought, he was not far off the mark. Raleigh, one of the very few people Gresham had ever considered a hero, was too large for life. 'Your reward for Raleigh, and for acting as a front to other authors, was to have your company made The King's Men?' asked Gresham.
'Much more due to the latter than the former. My lord Cecil was amused to have a spy in the camp of a company of actors.'
Yes, I can see that, thought Gresham. The actors, the common players, despised of the Church, anarchic, a potential hot-bed of sedition and revolution and riot — and all the time, one of Cecil's men in a pivotal position in their midst. It would have amused Cecil, all the more so for the fact that no one would know.
'And if he was to have a spy in a company of actors, then of course it had to be the greatest, the best company of actors. Which meant we had to cease to be The Lord Chamberlain's Men and become The King's Men. And yes, Hemminge, Condell and
Burbage, they knew I was the reason. I told them. Though I didn't tell them why.'
'So William Shakespeare's plays aren't William Shakespeare's plays at all.' It was Jane, breaking a long
