Chapter Sixty-Two About Mr Richard Field: another ruminating gentleman
When William Shakespeare first came to London he lodged for some while at the sign of the White Greyhound in Paul's Churchyard. This place was not a tavern but a building that housed a printing works. It was owned by a friend who had been his fellow at the Stratford Grammar School, a young man by the name of Richard Field.
Richard Field was an enterprising gentleman. Son of a Stratford tanner, he had got himself apprenticed to a London printer when he was eighteen years old. His second master was a Huguenot, Thomas Vautrollier, famous in his day for the beauty of his types and the excellence of his press-work. When Vautrollier died, young Dick married his widow, a Frenchwoman called Jacqueline. Thus, at an early age, he came into possession of one of the best printing establishments in England.
The house of Vautrollier had published some fine if heretical books. For example, the works of Calvin, and Luther and Theodore de Beze. For example, the works of Giordano Bruno. For example, new editions of Ovid and Plutarch. For example, Campo di Fiore or Singing in four languages to aid those who wish to learn Latin, French and English, but especially Italian. (I have this.) For example, that Treatise on Melancholy, by Dr Timothy Bright, which I have told you was of use to Mr Shakespeare when he was writing his Hamlet.
Under Field's control, the printing house became if anything even more distinguished. Having published Puttenham's important The Art of English Poesie, it went on to publish Mr Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in the translation made by Sir John Harington at Queen Elizabeth's request. But all this is to run ahead a bit too fast. I just want to show you that our hero had a knack of falling on his feet even when starting out in a strange city.
At the time when Mr Shakespeare came to London, as it turned out, his old school-friend had just married the merry Jacqueline. She was a sportive piece, a black-eyed beauty. It cannot have taken much pity on Mr Field's part to bed her or to wed her, especially since it was only by inheritance or marriage that any newcomer could enter the close corporation of master-printers. The Fields' house was at the south end of an acre known as Little Britain - the printers' quarter. This meant that Mr Shakespeare had not far to go to do his first job of horse-holding at the theatres on the north side.
Later in life, Dick Field had an even better shop, the Splayed Eagle, in Wood Street, Cheapside, where his widow carried on the business after his death. It was in the back room of that establishment, over a dish of strawberries, that I once asked this engimatic woman who she thought the Dark Lady of the sonnets might have been. She smiled into her fan. 'C'est moi,' she said.
Field's printer's device (inherited, like the dark Jacqueline, from old Vautrollier) was an anchor surrounded by laurels and accompanied by the motto ANCHORA SPEI.
His other claim to fame, apart from his friendship with Shakespeare, is that like the Reverend Bretchgirdle, Mr Richard Field was a ruminating gentleman.
This human chewing of the cud is not so singular a thing as you might suppose, dear reader. Dr Walter Warner told me once that he had just had the satisfaction of dissecting a ruminant man, and proving the falseness of Bartholin's theory that such people possess double stomachs. So neither are they freaks in their anatomy.
Richard Field the master printer used to commence ruminating about a quarter of an hour after a meal, and the process usually occupied him for an hour and a half, being attended with greater gratification than the first mastication, after which he claimed the food lay heavy in his lower throat. He was obliged to retire from the dining table at his house beside the printing works, and to go into a little room, star-ceilinged, which he called his 'rumination chamber', where he could ruminate away to his heart's content. Often he declared in my hearing that this second process of mastication was 'sweeter than honey' and 'accompanied with a delightful relish'. His son by Jacqueline inherited the same faculty, but with him it was under better control, he being able to defer its exercise until any convenient opportunity, and so needing no star chamber for the purpose.
Mr Field seldom made any breakfast in his later days. He generally dined about noon or one o'clock, eating heartily and quickly, and without much chewing. He never drank with his dinner, but afterwards he would sink a pint of such malt liquor as he could get. As I say, he usually went into his 'rumination chamber' and began his second chewing about fifteen minutes later, when he would claim that each and every morsel came up successively, sweeter and sweeter to the taste. Sometimes a gobbet might prove offensive and crude, in which case Richard Field would spit it out. The chewing continued usually about an hour or more. If he was interrupted in the act by a customer he found (alas) that he would be sick at stomach, and troubled with the heart burn, and foul breath. He could punctuate his second eating of the same meal by smoking a pipe of tobacco, and this was never to my knowledge attended by any ill consequences. It was not until a few weeks before his death, in 1624, that the faculty left him, and then poor Richard Field remained in tortures till the end.
I think it must have been one of the few sorrows of Mr Field's life that he parted with the copyrights of Shakespeare's narrative poems to a bookseller called Harrison. Both poems were extremely successful and went through many editions. Perhaps Field let them go because of his theological interests and because by then Mr S was getting big in the theatre. Field had no time at all for the world of the playhouse. He joined other residents of Blackfriars in signing a petition in 1596 - the year I came to London - against James Burbage's attempt to open a theatre there. The petition succeeded. I think that setback broke old Burbage's heart.
Chapter Sixty-Three About a great reckoning in a little room
I can never hear what they say but they haunt my mind's eye.
Look, there, as in a dumb-show, there are four of them. Four men come to a reckoning in a little room. Over and over, they act out for your delight the terrible scene. You always want it to be different, but each time the end is the same. The dagger thrust in the eye, the skull hacked open. Blood on the walls and the ceiling, the poet lying dead in a pool of his own hot blood on the floor.
From the start, from the moment when they meet together, you can see that two of these four men are ruffians, and one is not. It is none of these three, however, that you can't look away from. The fourth man, the victim, he is the natural magnet for your gaze. It is not just his sombre velvet doublet, his gold lace. It is not even that glittering ring hanging from his left ear, nor the gold buttons that seem far beyond his station. Neither is it, exactly, his sensual face, nor his dangerous smile. This is Christopher Marlowe, who is more than the sum of his parts. You can't take your eyes off a man like this.
The day has been hot. The place is a tavern in Deptford, three miles out of London, on the bank of the Thames. It's a low inn, and dirty, the house of a widow called Bull. There's a garden at the back of it, unkempt, full of thrusting May blossom, that runs down to the throbbing vein of the sunlit river.
These men met here this morning. All day they have been drinking and talking, and walking in the garden. They dined, too, at noon. Marlowe and the two ruffians have laughed a good deal - for the most part, you might think, at nothing. The third man, the gentleman, he does not laugh. His name is Robert Poley. He's a government agent. He sits still in his cloak, hands folded, his face in the shadows, while the others fool about. You will have noticed that he drinks much less than they do. You may also have noticed that the ruffians provide Mr Marlowe with two drinks for every one of their own.