The Conscience of the King

‘Ready for the big day?' John Hemminge grinned at Henry Condell.

'Are you sure this is… the right thing?' Condell answered.

'Look,' said Hemminge patiently, as if explaining to a child, 'we're actors, aren't we? We deal in drama. Kit Marlowe was a legend in his lifetime — for what he wrote, what he did and for who he was. There's been God knows what rumours about his death ever since it was meant to have happened. This revelation that the great Kit Marlowe didn't die in 1593, that we've been watching his work for twenty years — this is going to be the greatest defeat of death since Jesus! It's the most dramatic moment of our lives. Of anyone who's alive now! Remember poor old Will's speech in Henry V? About all those who would rue the day they weren't there at Agincourt? What will people give to have been there on the day when Kit Marlowe revealed himself at The Globe? In front of The King's men, with The King's Men putting on his cursed play a day later! Henry…' Hemminge moved over to Condell, put his arm around his shoulders. 'Sometimes history asks you a question, and you have to say yes.'

Condell thought for a moment. 'But it's not the truth!' he said. 'You know what those scripts Marlowe sent in were like — Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar. Oh, I know they had good bits — but most of them were raving, ranting gibberish! We know it was Will who turned them into plays that the likes of us could perform. Is it right to ditch Will in favour of a man who was nothing but trouble in his first incarnation, and who seems to have brought nothing but trouble in his second? We're denying our friend his inheritance, John. We're taking Will's art away from him.'

'Art!' Hemminge snorted. 'Sod art! What are we players to do with art? We're to do with whatever gets them flocking over the river to see us perform. I know we fancy ourselves. We don't put on bear-baiting or cock-fighting after a play,' and he started a mincing walk, affecting a high-pitched voice, 'not like some of those other low brow theatres. But we would, if it meant the difference between living like gentlemen or starving, wouldn't we? Would you starve for art? Would you?'

'Probably not,' said Condell with a long sigh, 'but if I was a king negotiating a treaty, I'd rather do it with Will Shakespeare than Kit Marlowe.'

'Forget it!' said Hemminge. 'We'll make it worth Will's while in money, and it's not as if he doesn't have enough of it already.' 'But 1 still worry-'

'Don't! He's claimed the credit all his life for stuff other people sent him. Now someone else wants a share. It's poetic justice. He's got his property and his business in Stratford. Not bad for a terrible actor. Don't worry about it! We'll be drinking with him and having a laugh about it in six months' time!'

Condell doubted that but did not show it. He had a part to play in the performance that was even now limbering up. His mind would not be on the show, he knew. It would be on the revelation that would follow it, at the point where the audience might have been expecting a jig. Christopher Marlowe. Killed in a bar-room brawl twenty years ago at the peak of his dramatic powers. Yet not dead. Alive, here in The Globe. And managing to talk to his audience these twenty years past as if from the grave. Dammit, they had to make Marlowe do a sequel to Doctor Faustus, before he really did die. Only a matter of time, and short time at that, given the look of him. It had to be a sell out.

Thank God Marlowe had come to them! Hemminge thought exultantly. What if he had gone to The Rose, or even The Red Bull? The mere thought made him grind his teeth. The Globe it was. As it should be. As it had always been.

'When's he turning up?' Condell asked aloud. He and Burbage had left the negotiations to Hemminge.

'He didn't — wouldn't — say,' answered Hemminge, rather distractedly. 'All I know is that he's going to make his appearance from the Lord's Gallery when we've finished the show. He's written ten lines for Burbage to say. Then he'll appear.'

The stage area was covered by a thrusting thatched roof, the underside of which had a painted canopy. Just above it was the turret, from which the cannons were fired for special effects and the flag hoisted and the trumpets blown to mark the start of a show. Sheltered by the roof, immediately under its protection, was the Lord's Gallery. Highly privileged members of the audience, who were willing to pay an extremely privileged price, could watch the play from there, on occasion having to share it with the musicians. For tonight's performance the musicians had been banished to the side of the stage, and no tickets sold to the Lord's Gallery. That would be Marlowe's platform, the podium from which he would return to life and reinvent it.

Hemminge and Condell disengaged, returned to the throng of actors ready and excited to present All Is True to a nearly full house.

For how many years had Christopher Marlowe been invisible? All those years of hiding, twenty in all, from the fact of which he was most proud: he was Christopher Marlowe. Twenty years of fearing above all to be recognised, of cultivating invisibility. And now this truly poetic opportunity to come back to life once and for all.

He would not enter for the start of the play. That would be too obvious, there could be too many people looking for him. One great moment, his liaison with Lady Jane Gresham and her children, had been spoiled by his being recognised. This time he would wait until the play had commenced, wait for its first great ceremonial moment and then slip in up the deserted stairs to the Lord's Gallery, hooded and cloaked. The knife he had with him was razor sharp. It would cut as a hot knife through butter into the hardened canvas that upheld the thatch in the Lord's Gallery. From out of the incision would tumble the manuscripts of that charlatan Shakespeare's plays, like a surgeon cutting out babies from a woman's flesh. The original manuscripts. He would pick up one or two. His Richard III for sure, his Richard II by choice, written so long ago in a faraway land, his version so greatly preferable to the one the upstart Shakespeare had chosen to write, with all his 'changes' and his 'improvements'. He would wait then for the end of All Is True. The great Burbage would make his announcement — instead of an epilogue for All Is True he would read the ten lines that Marlowe had penned and changed and corrected over twenty years of dreaming of this moment. Then he, Christopher Marlowe, would reveal himself. And when the double shock was over, he would announce that The Globe would be presenting tomorrow the first ever performance of his new masterpiece: The Fall of Lucifer.

It was a desert outside of The Globe ten minutes after All Is True had started. The hawkers had gone their way and only a few hopefuls guarding horses stood outside the whitewashed walls. He slipped in through the back gate, the attendant forewarned and granting him a brief nod. The stairs challenged him. How to climb such stairs when feet did not feel the bite of wood on flesh? The ferocious determination of his anger took him over. Ludicrously, stupidly, he raised each foot high and plotted with his eyes its course as it landed on firm surface.

He was in the Lord's Gallery. The bulge of the thatch was restrained by canvas strung underneath it. He put his own manuscript down, his Fall of Lucifer, took out the knife, slashed at the canvas. It hung, sliced, then spewed out two, three rolled papers, each tied with an innocuous ribbon. It was a truly Caesarian birth, except there was no blood on the papers.

On the main stage, Prologue came on, gloriously overdressed, to wolf-whistles from the Pit. There was a curtain drawn across the facade of the Lord's Gallery, blunting and dimming the words spoken beneath.

'I come no more to make you laugh…' Prologue pronounced.

'More's the pity!' came the cry from a wag in the Pit, and the audience roared.

… things now

That bear a mighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, We now present…

More and more manuscripts came tumbling from the thatch where they had been hidden. Marlowe crouched on the floor, fumbling, opening, reading.

They were due a great moment on stage. The cue came. The boy playing Anne Boleyn said pipingly, 'You cannot show me…' and Lord Sandys replied, ' I told your grace they would talk anon…' On cue, the trumpets sounded, the drums rolled and there were two cracks of thunder from above, shaking the building. Two brass cannon had been placed in the turret, loaded with blank shot, making a terrifying noise.

'Christ Almighty!' said the armourer in charge of the cannon. He had loaded the weak charge of powder that morning, in preparation, and had then gone off for his beer and cheese in the tavern. He knew from the sound of the discharge that something was wrong. Somehow the cannon had been double-shotted. From the mouth of both cannons flew a flaming wadge of powder, still half-burned, followed by two or three sheets of burning wadding that the armourer knew he had never placed in the barrels. It all landed on the thatch on either side of the roof, smouldering. The armourer turned for the buckets of water and sand they kept up there if ever a chamber was to be fired. Damn and blast! They were gone. Where the hell were they?

The thatch took light almost immediately. In the first moments there was more heat than smoke, the only sign of the fire the shimmering heat haze immediately above it. Then, when the fire penetrated the surface layer to the slightly less sun-drained straw, there was a tell-tale, deceptively gentle wisp of smoke.

The audience ignored it, their attention drawn by the noise of powder, drums and trumpets, oblivious to the fact that a fire had been set in the roof that already no man could put out. Or rather, two separate fires, one on either side of the stage, racing through the thatch to meet in the area above the Lord's Gallery.

A part of Marlowe's mind heard the growing panic as both word and sight of the fire spread among the crowd. Yet it was not that which stopped his hungry examination of the manuscripts he had torn from the roof. It was a noise. There was someone here in the room with him. Hemminge? Condell? He turned with an ingratiating smile on his face. It froze where it lay.

'Good afternoon,' said Henry Gresham casually. 'We've met before, haven't we? And, of course, you know my wife.'

Henry Condell pushed a disconsolate toe into a small pile of the still-smouldering ashes that were all that was left of The Globe. His Globe. They had hoped that 29th June would go down in history: the day that Christopher Marlowe returned from the grave. Well, his wish had been granted. It would go down in history, that was for sure: the day that The Globe burned down. God knew where Marlowe had got to. No one had seen him enter the theatre. Well, he could whistle for Will's precious manuscripts. They had gone up in smoke together with the theatre. Will would be relieved, at least. Marlowe would want his money back, of course, that ludicrous amount of money, and his bloody play performed.

Condell felt a slight lightening of his spirit. They could still fulfil that part of the bargain, couldn't they? They still had Blackfriars. All right, it was smaller, indoors, but it was a theatre, wasn't it? And they were still the best company of actors in the country, weren't they? All they needed was the script. Marlowe — and he was half beginning to doubt he had been who he said he was — had been due to bring it yesterday. Still, if he'd lived twenty years after his death, a couple of days probably didn't mean too much to him. When he turned up with the manuscript, they'd do a deal. He could have his comeback at Blackfriars, couldn't he?

Condell's eye caught a lump, something blackish, sticking out of the ashes. His nose curled as he advanced and caught an overripe stench. There must have been birds nesting in the thatch to produce that smell of burned flesh. Thank God no one had died in the fire, only birds. It had caught in the roof and the Lord's Gallery had gone first, but the actors had known to evacuate and Marlowe's gold had paid for the gallery to be empty. One man's clothes had caught fire as he ran from the theatre, but another customer had had the wit to put the fire out with bottled ale.

Condell took the stick he had with him and poked at the lump. Half of it had melted with the fierce heat of the fire but the rest was clear enough. An iron neck collar, with a section of chain leading off it. Where on earth had they used that as a prop? Tamburlaine, with all its prisoners? Strange he couldn't remember. It must have dropped from the turret or from the Lord's Gallery. A pity The Globe hadn't been built of iron, he thought. If it had, more of it might have survived.

Well, he consoled himself, at least it was an accident. No one, not even Marlowe and certainly not Will Shakespeare, was mad enough to burn down The Globe to make a point.