At last there was a hush and Will appeared, alone, in centre stage. He bowed to his brother, then spoke in a firm voice with no book of lines or paper to aid him.
‘The White Dog,’ he announced, ‘a play in two acts, by Christopher Marlowe.’ He stared at his brother gravely, but with a lightness of tone in his voice as though addressing a packed audience in the Rose.
‘Two realms within one border, one stained by blood and savage brutishness, the other exulting life, beauty and nature. Two realms, intertwined like a briar, full of bloody thorns, yet perfumed by the wild rose. Two realms, one of dark, one of light, and ruled by one sovereign.
‘In this land a feral dog runs free. Its maw drips pain, its teeth are as poisonous as any adder’s. When it is near, slavering through the streets, honest householders cower behind locked doors, for this dread cur has the mark of death all about its chill white fur.
‘Rabid, lethal, cruel, unspeakable, it is fit for nothing but the slaughter knife. Yet none dare destroy it, for this selfsame monarch of the twin realms claims ownership of the baleful mastiff, loves it like a child, and will hear no ill of it.
‘The dog has manlike appearance, metamorphosed as Apuleius’s golden ass reversed. It stands on two legs not four, nor has it tail. But be not deceived, for this beast is not a man. Though it take human form on this our humble stage, yet it is a dog, as you shall determine from its fangs as sharp as any wolf, its bark as wretched as any plague animal. This is our scene, this roundel the realm entire. Forgive us our poor bowl, but travel in your fancy, if you will, to a dungeon in the city of Nodnol. Enter, the white dog…’
As Will bowed low and retreated towards one of the screens, a squat man dressed all in black, yet with a shock of white hair, appeared from the side, dragging chains. He had a pipe in his mouth that belched forth tobacco fumes, and at his side, hunched and unctuous was a boy with slimed hair, rubbing his hands.
‘Where is this cat, Nick? Has it yet purred?’
‘It is racked, master, racked. It will not purr, though I stretch it into a leopard.’
From the other side of the stage, two men carried a young man, prostrate upon a wooden door, his arms above him with ties bound to nails, his feet likewise bound to the other end of the door.
The white-haired man looked at it closely. ‘You are certain it is a cat, Nick?’
‘Aye, master, for it has whiskers.’
‘Yet it will not admit it is a cat? Then tighten the rollers, stretch it yet more.’
‘I fear it may be dead, master.’
‘Then beat it!’
Shakespeare understood. This was about Topcliffe. The white dog dragging his chains was the torturer himself. The boy Nick at his side was his vicious young assistant Nicholas Jones. The cat on the rack was every poor Popish priest or playmaker such as Thomas Kyd or any other innocent who had ever crossed his path and ended up in his stinking chamber of torment. It was a play written as a comedy, but the humour to anyone who knew of Topcliffe was as black as a moonless night. Shakespeare sat, immovable, as if clamped in a pillory.
And then the dark humour vanished and only brutality remained. The story told was so grotesque as to make Tamburlaine and his conquests seem a light, sugared confection by comparison.
The White Dog was a tale of a brute so grown in pride and arrogance that he took sovereign powers unto himself. As Tamburlaine had been a tale of conquest after conquest, so this was a story of horror after horror. It was, too, a damning indictment of all who let the white dog go about his blood-lusting business unchecked.
Here in the cast, all too recognisable, was Heneage, there Cecil and his father Burghley. And Essex and Effingham and Ralegh and Francis Walsingham and Buckhurst and Whitgift and long-dead Leicester. No one in power escaped Marlowe’s savage satire. For these men stood aside and watched, muttering at the side of the stage, as the white dog disembowelled a tailor for making a doublet for a priest. They covered their eyes and ears and mouths with their hands as the white dog — Topcliffe — accepted payment to torture a family to death so that their kin might inherit their estates. They giggled and jested among themselves as the slavering beast raped a poor girl and demanded lands from her family. They washed their hands in water as he washed his in blood.
Yet the most bitter denunciation of all was saved for the monarch of these twin realms of good and evil. Though the sovereign was not named, nor even made clear whether it was king or queen, yet all who had eyes to see and ears to hear would know that it was Elizabeth, and that it was she that allowed the white dog its freedom, revelling in the tales of all its sordid doings.
Shakespeare sat and watched it all. He was bathed in sweat, not from the warmth of the evening but from the sheer sickening horror and force of the drama. He felt physically ill. His throat was parched, though he had drunk three pints, and his eyes were sore from not blinking.
And then, as the drama drew to its heart-stopping conclusion, with the crucifixion of the priest Robert Southwell — a notorious poet and Jesuit languishing in the Tower — the white dog himself arrived.
Chapter 41
Topcliffe raged in with unstoppable might. His men — thirty leather-clad pursuivants — beat down the door to the inn with a battering log, then crashed through the taproom, sweeping bottles, tankards and kegs across the sawdust-strewn floor.
All of those with him were made in his own image, hard-faced men with heavy weapons and a taste for brutality. They wore the Queen’s escutcheon to show in whose name they came. It gave them an authority which they did not have in other parts of their lives, as minor courtiers, apprentices or, in some case, prisoners of the Crown, released specifically to do Topcliffe’s brutal work.
Two men shouldered down the door leading to the yard. Had they bothered to try the latch, they would have discovered that it was neither locked nor bolted. And then they were standing there: thirty men with swords and pistols, ready to kill any who stood in their path.
Topcliffe was among the first through. He stood surveying the scene, legs astride in his aggressive, feral-dog pose. His pipe was in his mouth, his blackthorn stick in his hand, slapping down into the palm of the other. Without removing the pipe from his teeth, he blew forth a cloud of tobacco smoke.
‘What a nest of vermin have I uncovered here beneath this stone,’ he growled from the corners of his mouth.
And yet there was no play in progress. All those present were milling about the yard, drinking beer, talking of this and that, laughing without a care, ignoring him.
There had been no stage properties to hide, no costumes apart from the white wig worn by the player of Topcliffe, and that was easily concealed in his doublet. The stage had a few kegs ranged along it, so that it seemed just like a raised platform where such things were normally stored. The screens were quickly furled up and leant against the back of the inn. There was no evidence here that this was anything other than a group of men drinking and conversing on a summer’s evening.
Shakespeare ambled up to him. ‘What is this, Topcliffe? By what right do you intrude on this private gathering?’
‘By mine own authority, Shakespeare. For I am the Queen’s servant and there is treason here.’
Shakespeare frowned. ‘Here are gathered old friends, enjoying a pleasant evening of converse and beer. Where is the treason in that?’