'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 silence. She was too old for there to be tears in her eyes. Yet the tears were there in her voice. 'Those plays that seemed so magical to me, they were nothing more than the playthings of noblemen too cowardly to admit their art, noblemen playing at writing plays, posturing beneath an adopted disguise. Well, my thanks to you, Master William Shakespeare. I used to think there was artistry and beauty and magic in the world of the theatre, even when it was stripped away from the world I actually lived in. Now I find it's just the same as everywhere else, just a little more dressed over. Thank you for educating me. Now 1 know there's no art. No magic. Only self-interest. How silly of me to need a reminder.'
She stood up and left the room, passing through the door to Shakespeare's sitting room, there presumably to commune with her own ghosts.
There were tears in Shakespeare's eyes, Gresham saw. One actually dribbled over his eyelid and fell down his cheek. It was a truism Gresham had heard countless times that a man could not counterfeit tears. His age respected emotion, not as something womanly in a man, but as a sign of genuine feeling. How good an actor was William Shakespeare? Gresham thought. Were his tears the burning mark of truth? Whatever the answer to that, Shakespeare was clearly a man who was down and out. Which, of course, was exactly the time for someone more ruthless to hit him twice as hard.
'How many plays. did Sir Francis Bacon and Bishop Lancelot Andrewes write under your name?'
It had to be that! To hell with love letters! It wasn't those that Andrewes had asked him to destroy if he found them! It was plays! Bacon was too clever ever to put down in writing his love for another man. Andrewes would sooner burn his balls off" with an altar candle than succumb to carnal temptation, if Gresham was any judge. But both men were prime candidates for the play-writing urge. They had fearsome intellects, the willingness to dare to be wise and the desire to try their hand at this new art form while knowing that their station and ambitions forbade them from so doing.
Gresham had never seen a man reduce in size before his eyes. Shakespeare seemed to wilt and shrink as he spoke his words. 'How much do you know?'
Gresham could have driven home then, taken all the advantage possible from his inspirational guesswork. Instead, remarkably, he decided to be merciful. Was it because the infinite compassion of Lancelot Andrewes had touched him to his soul? Or because he had seen his wife bid farewell to magic? Or was it because, all of a sudden, he was tired of the world, its double and treble deceptions?
'Far less than you might imagine,' he confided to Shakespeare. 'Yet I'd be willing to bet that Bacon and Andrewes were two of the men who submitted to your play-writing factory. Bacon wishes to be Attorney General. Andrewes wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Neither would be helped in their ambitions by the realisation among the general public that they'd also wished to be stars at The Globe. Yet they're both writers of some brilliance. Both have minds that are incredibly active. Catch them at the right time and I doubt either could resist the chance to try their hand at this whole new world of plays. Like lambs to the slaughter, I imagine they were.'