The London Bard
One poet’s Olympic struggle against tyranny
By L. A. Coltrane
The London Bard, One poet’s Olympic struggle against tyranny
L.A. Coltrane
Copyright 2012 by L. A. Coltrane
Smashwords Edition
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Cover by L.A. Coltrane
The London Bard
One Poet’s Olympic Struggle Against Tyranny
Contents
Black Friars’ Eastward Ho! By Ben Jonson!
As I stare at the banner, I’m thinking to myself, yeah, I do prefer it to ‘Every Man in his Humour’. ...starring William Shakespeare... they didn’t even mention I’d written that one.
Backstage I’m now hiding between props and the like, silently I place down my bricklaying tools for they’re too heavy for my shoulder.
One of my players, Leatherhead - he’s never told me his real name – is pushing a wooden shipwreck onstage, towards a signpost: ‘The Isle of Dogs’.
In front of the empty theatre, two English gents spar with wooden swords. I catch a glimpse of how this goes down with the other players backstage. They’re all poor, as I am, and they find these unpaid hobbyists tedious.
Leatherhead has his breath back and the stage keeper’s ushering him away. For, out of the ship’s porthole, he’s keen to have a clear view of Sir Petronel Flash’s debut, pardon the rhyming.
He’s one of the King’s knights and however hazardously, he's finally reached land. I almost jeopardize my spying place but manage to muffle my laughter in the drapery I’ve wrapped myself in. What a wonderful thing it is for me to portray the King’s purchasers of political allegiance with such playful mockery. For just thirty pounds, you can be a knight these days!
The aggrieved English Lords will love this and patronize me accordingly; at least that’s the plan. These days of adversity will soon be over.
‘Remember this is a story of virtuous love in battle with ignorance and greed.’
The stage keeper’s words make me feel a little guilty; I should be writing the final draft not spying. I look for an exit strategy that evades the players but suddenly Sir Petronel Flash pipes up and asks whether he’s landed on the French coast.
The English gentlemen have stopped sparring now. One of them, Ned, replies: This is not France but the Thames and recognizing Sir Petronel, he says to Tom, the other English gentleman:
‘I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty-pound knights!’
This has me in stitches for I’m still required to lock the laughter inside. For an English gentleman to have perfected the Scottish accent so quickly and accurately is quite a feat. I do not like the man but his acting skills have to be admired.
It could be King James onstage. But I’m glad it isn’t.
‘Jonson!’
I peek between the curtains. The stage keeper’s dedication has waned after seeing my face.
‘Chapman and Marston are writing the final draft. Black Friars’ doesn’t need you. They do. A licensed draft by five o’clock, it’s in the contract, if it’s not here by then, you won’t be paid and I will not be lending you any more money until you’ve repaid what you’ve borrowed already. They’re drinking in Cow Lane, now be gone.’
The Rising Sun is heaving inside. Searching for my collaborators through the tobacco smoke, a pair of wrestlers barge into me, keen they are to get to the bar.
Trouble from anyone else and I’d have stood my ground, but not these giants. After apologies, I lose myself to the smog, with the thought that once again, the fair is in town.
Pulling up a pew to an abandoned table piled high with papers, I see Marston returning from the toilets and I raise a finger to Chapman who’s purchasing ales from the far end of the bar.
After placing them down, I drag my pew closer, knocking the table and spilling ale across the title page.
‘Is that your contribution?’ Marston says. The hint of Italian in his accent turns a few heads at the bar. Chapman sniggers at me as he slots Act Two Scene Two into the pile.
Marston has irritated me many times in the past and I’m now used to it. I ignore him and flick through the play. My cement-dried hands scrape against the papers and seem external to the writer in me. As time passes, Chapman drowns his disloyalty to me in a large mouthful of ale pleased that the leading playwright is once again in the frame. He, being I if you get my meaning.
‘My mother’s a gentlewoman and my father’s a?’
I see a Judge peer into the pokey window. He frowns at the tavern dwellers.
‘A Justice of the Peace,’ I say.
Chapman looks at me. ‘Of course...Why didn’t I think of that?’ I laugh as he looks out the window for inspiration to find that the Judge has long gone. He’ll put that contribution down to my muse, I think to myself.
Having read Act Four Scene Two and Act Five Scene Five, I slot them into the pile and begin to write a new title page.
Marston, meanwhile, passes Act Three Scene Three to Chapman. Jaws are clenched. Glances are shared. I’m drawn in by the anxiety in the air.
‘This is too risky.’
My head sinks. I stare at my building tools; I’m tired of the hard labour that has funded my writing habit. For a moment, I resent Chapman’s conservatism.
‘Think of the possible rewards,’ I say, ‘humour an English lord and you’ll not be out of pocket for long.’
Chapman looks again at Marston. Whilst their minds connect, I retreat into memories of Black Friars’ and the scene in question.
Centre stage, Adams is playing the sea captain, Seagull. The false beak, stump leg, eye patch, they all mask his poor acting and the fact that he is still drunk. But to be honest they all are, including me.
‘Virginia longs for you,’ he shouts to the vacant theatre. ‘A whole country of the English is there, bred of those that were left in Seventy-Nine.’
Forgetting his lines, he goes onto edit what he can remember.
‘You shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers or intelligencers – only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who, indeed, are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England, when they are out on it, in the world, than when they are here. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand Scots were there. We should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here in England!’
I admit both at the theatre and in the tavern as I look back on writing that scene that I’m playing to the grievances of the English lords. Sidelined by the King’s Scottish Bedfellows it is only the memory of Elizabeth and England that keep the English Lords going in this new status quo that is King James and ‘Great Britain’. A forced abstraction is this union. I think it won’t last.
Am I being anti-Scottish? Not really, I, after all, would be the first to acknowledge my roots and beginnings north of the border. Nor am I against the King; I wrote half the Coronation after all. Tapping both markets, the British and the English, I have that on my gravestone, no doubt.
Back in the tavern, I have little pleasure watching Chapman cross out the words just uttered by Seagull in my mind.
There is, though, no time for dissent. I place the troublesome act into the play hoping this pack of cards will be favourable to us. It hasn’t been shuffled fairly, we’ve loaded it with our gains, I’m sure of that. The new cover’s signed, less hesitantly now, as if our lives are more assured even if our livelihoods aren’t.
‘Finally, it’s finished,’ says Chapman.
Picking up the draft, it turns out it has been flattening a copy of Westward Ho all this time.
‘Is it finished?’ I reply as I search for coinage, ‘when is anything ever finished.’
Chapman has no time for what he considers gloom, but I was trying to be more philosophical.
‘They’ll cut your lines in years to come, Benjamin Jonson, like we have today, they will tomorrow.’
I finish my ale hiding his face with the beaker. My search for money has come to nothing, though I hide it well.
‘A wandering peddler you’ll remain, Chapman. For, as long as you write with prudence, you’ll earn pittance. But I must thank you for translating Marston’s Latin back to English. The task must have been tedious. You need to find yourself a tutor, Marston,’ I say.
Marston ignores me. Eyeing a space at the bar, I think I see John Webster amongst the fair goers.
Chapman leaves. Passing the bar, he points out our table to Webster who triples his order after I’ve raised my hand again. His coach-making business can’t be leaving him short, so there’s justice in the turn of events, so I reckon.
Clearing the table I read Webster’s name beneath Westward Ho and remember Dekker wasn't its only author.
‘We shall bask in its glory,’ says Marston.
‘I think not,’ I say. ‘One of its authors is buying us drinks. Get rid of it.’
‘Webster will be proud...’
‘He’ll have us down as thieves to his intellect. Hide it.’
Marston, the bloody idiot, stuffs it into my tool bag.
‘Not there!’
Panicked, into the fire it goes as Webster approaches.
‘Thank you Mr. Webster, ever so kind,’ says Marston.
‘I must go and relieve the last ale, John. Good to see you.’ I say.
The toilets stink. Opening the window, London smells like a flower basket by comparison. Chapman’s walking down Cow Lane, draft in hand. By Smithfield’s clock, it’s ten to five. He should make it.
But as I’m urinating, a man grabs Chapman by the collar.
‘Have you a warrant?’ I hear him shout.
The words are spoken as if his mouth’s full of gravel and they turn the heads of passers-by.
This man is clearly mad. Scars pit his shaven head. What once looked like a court official’s uniform hangs about him in rags as if slashed by knives.
‘I thought you were the Lord Chamberlain,’ Chapman says with panic in his voice.
I worry we’ll miss the deadline and not be paid at all, even by Black Friars’, so, I poke my head out of the toilet window. ‘Mad child of the pie-powders,’ I shout, ‘you won’t urinate without a warrant, shortly. Let go of Chapman.’
The lunatic searches every window for me. But his sight seems frosted. Chapman shakes off the mad man’s hand and looks back.
‘He’s just reminded me, we’ve not the master of the revel’s hand for it.’
‘Leave that to me. Now hurry,’ I say.
When I’m returning downstairs, I see a door ajar. Inside, a woman has her black dress hitched to her waist.
A bulb shaped vessel is filling incessantly with urine.
But get this; once it’s full, a man replaces it with an empty.
And I haven’t told you this either... The woman appears to be praying.
I creep down the stairs. Up until then I thought the Cow-Lane confederacy was just a myth but what would a puritan want with these foul folk I wonder. Nothing pure about them...
I find Marston again.
Not Webster, though.
Half-burnt papers pepper the hearth. We finish our ales in an air of awkwardness until the thirst sets us off eyeing Webster’s untouched beaker for a share of the good stuff.
‘So he saw his work being burnt did he? Must be used to that by now.’
‘The cover fell out onto the hearth. The timing was…’
‘Unfortunate?’
Marston nods as he goes through the writing notes separating his from mine. Thomas More’s Utopia preoccupies me. It always has. Probably always will.
Marston, though, is intent on disturbing me. He starts reading something I’ve tried to forget.
‘An Epitaph to Ben Jonson. Here lies Benjamin Jonson dead, and hath no more wit than goose in his head. That as he was wont, so doth he still, live by his wit and evermore will. Who wrote this Ben?’
‘Some bloody lord,’ I say, ‘I can’t remember which.’
Smithfield’s clock chimes. ‘That’s time calling,’ I say keen to get out of Marston’s company.
I put Utopia on the tavern’s bookshelf from where it came and load my already shoulder breaking bag with papers and books:
Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.
Florio’s Second Fruits.
Tamburlaine.
The Spanish Tragedy.
Henry IV.
And last of all, of course, Hamlet. To perform or not to perform, that was the question, but not anymore. Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
The sunsets more like sunrise for us tavern dwellers leaving, but it’s short lived for no sooner am I out into the world than I’m back in the confines of another gloomy place, this time a church.
It seems foreign yet all too familiar. Last time I was here was over two years ago but I still recognise the Parish Official’s voice, he’s been here for decades and knows my handwriting well.
‘God! Defend thy servant James, our most gracious King,’ he says.
In the congregation are John and Win Whitlow, he, an attorney of the diocesan court, she, a plain clothed housewife, both respectable people, leading respectable lives. By Win’s side is Ann Lewis, my estranged partner. I try to count the months we’ve lived apart but it’s too painful.
By her side is the place I should be seated.
The Parish Official once again occupies my thoughts. ‘Frustrate their bloody and barbarous treason. Preserve him from the snares of the enemy, insurrections of wicked doers, all traitorous conspiracies.’ He’s talking about the King of course, every August we’re made to listen to this. We get the message. He’s not feeling particularly safe. But who’s going to trouble him in here? Further along the pew, I can see Guy Fawkes looking up from his prayers to survey the congregation. Funny bloke, Fawkes, but pleasant enough. He hasn’t seen me though so I slip back out into the world.
Along Cow Lane, I arrive at a more private place of worship. The priest welcomes me to the confessional. Through the wooden lattice, the last of the day’s sun, shines diamonds of light across my face. I have to find the diagonal lines of shade, so's not to be blinded.
‘You’ve avoided seditious material in this latest play, I do hope?’
‘They cut it all out, like corns from the King’s feet.’
‘Good. We’ve never spoken about Gabriel Spencer.’
I drop my building tools from my lap on hearing that name. No religious figure has uttered it since the trial, still sends a shiver up my spine, it does.
‘Do you regret killing him?’
‘For my sins, I employ his best friend.’
‘Adams?’
‘Yeah, that pitiful player has plagued me ever since but the guilt makes his employment...’
‘Morally binding?’
‘You could say. He was there when it happened. Gabriel begged him to do something.’
‘You should speak to me about what you did?’
Between the church bell chimes, I remember that fateful day when my band of players were just child actors; Edgworth, Nightingale and Alice, all witnesses to the fatal blade wound and the pleas from Gabriel to restore him to the world he was fading from.
‘You should be in church, like Mr. Fawkes,’ says the priest, ‘they keep a register of attendance, or lack of it, in your case.’
‘Yes... I will attend. Next week.’
‘The King’s assassination plots of years gone by are still very much in his mind still, I spoke...’
‘You don’t converse with the King! He wouldn’t be allowed in this hovel.’
‘I visit him. Now make way for Mr Fawkes, Ben. Hare and hound he can be, but not you it seems. Pass on my blessings to Esme D’Aubigney. No doubt he will be here soon seeking forgiveness for his sins of the flesh, if the King’s word is anything to go by.’
What the priest meant by that, I have no idea.
Back outside, the twilight does little to illuminate a horse and cart coming my way. I’m fortunate to avoid its path spotting it only in the latter moments. Calling back at them I see it's laden with corpses and I think, they were close to adding another one to the pile. That’d be one way to end the guilt I feel, but only for a moment do I have such bleak thoughts.
The plague is back with the same vengeance of two years past. Wooden crosses mark the graves in the fields I now tread upon. Thousands stake the common lands that flood out of the city whilst corpse-laden barrows destined for soil mounds silhouette the horizon ahead.
My graves are easy to identify thanks to Ann. She’s renewed the flowers. Their slender stems hang over nearly the entire length of Mary’s.
Above them, I appear almost as a giant. My handkerchief is dirty with masonry dust but my face is now clean with my tears and I hope they can see me in the flesh more clearly now, less consumed by the dust.
My children are more than just victims of the plague. They’re everything but foremost in my mind at the moment, they are the last things that bind me to Ann. The cruelty of the world has tired our union and it’s as weak as England and Scotland’s. But this sanctuary to our children is the ring that one day may bind us. It’s a ring, however, that only one can be in at a time, if we’re to avoid a fallout.
There have been moments when I’ve wished it were me and Ann deep beneath the earth, and our son and daughter mourning us in the evening’s air. But no, it is our heirs that have left the world first. Mary would be twelve years old now.
Every time I stand before these graves, the news of Ben’s passing visits me as if it were the present, as if no time had passed since that fateful day.
Robert Cotton and his family had provided me with respite from London at their country house. In the paralysis the news had caused, I’d lost the order of events but at some point, I’d seen an apparition in a looking glass.
A small boy, my son, looking back at me. No sign of my reflection.
But the more I concentrated upon him, the more he seemed to age until he was not three but thirty years old, a man, a contemporary.
And as present’s path led me into the future, with the same haste my son was swallowed up in the past, down sleep’s winding path, aging as he went till he was an old man.
And then, before or after, this I still can’t remember, came or preceded the news of his death.
I can always recognise Ann’s handwriting.
Robert consoled me as I read the letter, again and again, as if the relentless reinterpretation could possibly, if it was repeated enough, bring him back. To lose one was bad enough, but lose a second...
But the plague had swept its scythe through the city streets and nothing was going to change that. Guilt soon forged itself on every facet of my being once the realisation had set in that my wife and child should have left London, also. When I set out to Cotton’s house, I wasn’t aware the city was blighted but guilt had erased that fact and fiddled with the truth to impose as much pain on me as possible.
The graveyard now rests in a sleepy blackness.
The lantern flames from Esme D’Aubigney’s grand manor are all that light up the rolling vales beyond; a beacon I think, to lead me to my temporary residence.
But before I go, I search my tool bag, then my trousers, finally my lapel pocket.
The scribbles on the papers are illegible in the dark but I know every line to these poems, On My First Daughter and On My First Son.
I slip them in a little wooden box Ann has left. It’ll save them from the morning dew and tell her I’ve been to where our relationship might one day be salvaged.
Come in then... Welcome to my digs, bit of a mess but take note of the silk shirts, cravats, shoes, jackets hanging around you. This servant’s quarter, in part a store to the grand manor, has some very fine furniture indeed, far finer than anything a servant or poet like myself could ever afford.
But look down there. A simple rocking horse is in motion. It stops us dead in our tracks doesn’t it? I crouch down to the ghost and hold out my hand. The rocking stops. Below the horse’s crest, the letters, ‘b’, ‘E’, ‘n’, are scraped into the wood, one of the few words my son ever wrote, his name and mine.
They’re bells from the manor that you hear. Eastward Ho approaches. I lift up my son and place him back on the rocking horse, tilting it into motion.