Death of Kings (7 page)

I examined another bundle drawn at random from the trunk and discovered a similar mix of the historical-pastoral-comical-tragical. Nor was there any unity as to authors. They were jumbled
swoopstake, so that a Baxter sat next to a Rawle, a Jonson nestled with a Jackson, while Shakespeare himself bedded down with Boscombe. Indeed, some of the manuscripts were not even graced with the
name of their author.

A smell now rose up from the trunk which was anything but magical. It was an unappetising, stale odour, as of things kept too long in the dark and now calling feebly for attention. I started to
wonder whether my belief that this chest was the equivalent of Jason’s fleece wasn’t rather fanciful. Instead, the contents suggested a ewe’s greasy fell, a memory I carried with
me from my country days.

Confronted with all this paper, my mood suddenly changed. I would like to have shown the chest and its contents to Master Richard Milford. Even unread – especially unread – they were
eloquent enough, for they spoke of the vanity of authorship, but in a different sense to that which I had originally applied to him. Oh high thoughts, oh great expectations! Here were piles of
paper bound together, here was great expenditure of ink, here were all the fruits of heart and mind. And to what purpose . . . ?

But enough of melancholy! I had a job to do. I returned to my examination of the chest’s contents.

I began to think that Master Allison was probably one of those men who have their own private manner of arranging things, a manner which is impenetrable to anyone else. I suspect that, if
you’d requested a copy of
The World Gone Mad
or
The Tragical History of Appius and Virginia,
he would have plunged a hand into his trunk and within moments have retrieved the
piece in question. Perhaps. Hadn’t he said that parts of this hoard were as unglimpsed as the sea-bed?

As far as I was concerned, however, sifting and cataloguing this heap of gold, this pile of dust, seemed likely to occupy more than the promised few hours of work. I regretted the alacrity with
which I’d agreed to do it. As I picked up pen and paper, I wondered how I might modestly indicate to Master Allison (to say nothing of Masters WS and Burbage) that, although this was a labour
of love, it was still a
labour.

I plunged my hand into the bottom of the chest and dragged up to the surface some mouldering manuscripts. Some of them lacked title-pages while others were no more than titles and a list of
characters. I began trying to put the pieces together, and achieved a match in three or four cases. These were fusty works, perhaps deserving their sea-bed obscurity. One, however, caught my eye.
It consisted of a frontispiece and only a couple of pages of dialogue. Fragments of string showed where the bulk – or the hulk – of the drama had come loose from its moorings on the
title-page. I was interested to note that the characters who figured in this prefatory scene were named Belladonna and Julia, and that the former was an heiress and the latter her personal servant.
So much could easily be gleaned from the expository conversation of the two. I was more interested still to register the title of this drama:
The Courtesan of Venice.
I checked the cast-list.
The other characters there sounded familiar too. No author was named.

Well, there are no favourites like the old favourites. If at first you don’t succeed, then go in search of someone who has and steal their work. This was, for sure, the source of Master
Milford’s
Venetian Whore,
the play to which I had given my faint stamp of approval and which I’d encouraged Richard to take direct to the Globe shareholders. No wonder the style
of the piece had seemed a little dated to me; it was probably more than a decade old. And the hulk – or the bulk – of the drama hadn’t so much come loose from its moorings on the
title-page as been wrenched from them.

Strangely, I found myself blushing as furiously as Master Milford, as furiously as if I myself were the book-thief. It’s odd how you can feel guilty on behalf of another.

Richard must have got hold of Allison’s keys, with or (more likely) without permission. I could visualise him scrabbling round the bottom of the chest, possibly grabbing at a handful of
manuscripts in his haste to find something suitable, something he might pass off as his own. Naturally he was taking a risk. Even if the play was more than ten years old, there might have been
someone in the Chamberlain’s who remembered it – if we had ever put on in the first place, of course. But when I thought of the hundreds of plays that must have moved into and then
moved out of the Chamberlain’s ken during the latter years of the last century, then Master Milford’s daring began to seem quite calculated. It might even be that
The Courtesan of
Venice
had strayed in from somewhere else, possibly another acting company, or that it harked back to the days when the Chamberlain’s were Lord Strange’s men. After all, a whore is
any man’s for the asking, and the sixpence in his pocket.

Now, nobody expects a playwright to be truly original. In fact, one who fashioned his own material out of himself would rightly be regarded wth suspicion. After all there are not so many plots
in the world. In any case, everyone knows it is the playwright’s duty to deck the familiar and make it seem new. But what Richard Milford had done was not so much adaptation as appropriation,
if the opening pages were anything to go by. And I grew hotter still to think how he had tried to use me to forward his schemes with the shareholders. I tucked the
Courtesan’s
fragments, her openings, into my shirt.

I returned to my cataloguing, but in an angry and fitful spirit, and as soon as it came to the dinner-hour I was able to justify quitting my task for a few minutes or more and break off for
refreshment in the Goat & Monkey. In truth I was hoping to see my Nell there, for if she had nothing better to do she sometimes frequented the tavern in the middle of the day. At that moment I
craved something familiar and wished to be taken back to her crib and diverted with a friendly tumble or, perhaps, nothing more strenuous than a friendly word. But she was either about her business
elsewhere or not yet up and about in the winter world, so I had to content myself instead with a pot of ale and some words with the landlord on the subject of the weather.

As I sat over my drink in the near-empty tavern I considered Richard Milford’s plagiary and decided that what grated with me wasn’t so much the theft of another’s words
(there’s nothing new under the sun, etc.) but the way he had humbly asked for my opinion and then attempted to use me as a kind of Trojan Horse to smuggle the work into the Globe playhouse.
My heart rose high in indignation in my breast and then sank low to see who had just walked through the door.

“Hello, Nicholas,” said Richard Milford. “I may join you?”

But he had already sat down and signalled the drawer for service. He offered to buy me a drink but I refused on the pretext that my tankard was still half full.

“I forget that you drink slow,” he said. “But with me, when I look down it’s usually to see an empty glass. Sometimes I wonder who’s drunk it.”

“Oh, the ghost of an author, I expect,” I said.

He was in a good humour, and this put my back up.

“You have been working this miserable morning?”

“Doing some service for the Book-keeper.”

“Indeed. I have been working too.”

“On another play?”

“Since you mention it – though I do not much like to talk about my work while I am
in medias res
, if I may so express it to a learned man.”

“You may,” I said, hating him very much at that moment. Which could be why I added, “This is after the success of your
Whore
?”

“Well, I hope so, Nicholas, but I would not tempt fate by saying it. As you know, my play has not yet been staged and no man knows how it will be received.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Of what?”

“That
A Venetian Whore
has never been mounted before.”

“Oh ha, very good – ‘mounted’. I must remember to write down that piece of word-play.”

I regretted giving him the opportunity for evasion. “I’m sure you will remember my joke easily enough, if only for its poverty of invention. But my question was about –
what’sits-name –
The Courtesan of Venice,
and whether she has appeared before.”

“
She
has not, but
A Venetian Whore
will be exposed to a wondering world at the end of this month,” he said, looking at me curiously and stressing the title.

I struck my forehead lightly, as if in self-reproach at my own absence of mind.

“Of course,
A  Venetian  Whore.
Not  
The Courtesan of Venice.
Well, what’s a whore or a courtesan between friends or, come to that, a particle like
‘of’? What’s an ‘a’ or a ‘the’ among fellows?”

“I might have called it that,
The Whore of Venice
, I mean,” said Richard, “but I wanted to distinguish my work from Master Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice.
Not that I would dream of course – in any way – but who knows – one day—”

“After all you are both from Warwickshire,” I said. “There must be some special virtue in the soil.”

“It is rich ground, but how kind you are to say so, Nicholas.” He had recovered his balance now. “Are you sure you have not finished your drink yet so that I could show my
appreciation for your words?”

“Thank you but no. London still has to teach me how to drink deep. Tell me of your new play,” I said and was glad to see a blush creep back into his features. At last! There was
something unnatural about an unblushing Milford.

“I am reluctant to talk of what is only half-shaped.”

“Then it does not spring from your brain fully formed?”

“No. I have to do battle with my words, like a general with mutinous soldiers. Only when I have got them into line and order are they ready for the fray.”

“I respect you, Richard, for owning to a struggle. Some in your profession would say that they wrote fast, without blotting a line.”

He smiled slightly at this. Both of us recognised an allusion to WS.

“In his case it is true enough, I expect.”

“It must save on fair copies,” I said.

I would willingly have abandoned the whole matter there and then. But the continuance of this conversation was like an itch that demands scratching. I could not stop. And besides I was still
aggrieved at the way Richard Milford had tried to use me to forward ‘his’ play.

“Yes,” said Milford thoughtfully. “Nicholas, what is it you wish to say? For sure there is something behind your kind words.”

“My work for Allison this morning has been to catalogue the contents of the Book-keeper’s chest. To begin cataloguing, that is. There are hundreds and hundreds of works buried
there.”

“And millions of words in those works. That is not surprising.”

The red was fixed firmly to his cheeks and he was looking at me with an alarming intensity. For the first time I noticed that one of Richard’s irises was heavily flecked with green while
the other was pure blue.

“I didn’t know where to start,” I said, “and to be honest with you I rather regretted volunteering for the task. But I plunged my hand to the bottom of the chest and
began.”

“Only fusty stuff down there, I expect.”

“Mostly, but some of it looked serviceable enough at first glance. A few pieces there that might bear reviving.”

“But there is so much that is new,” he said urgently. “Surely it is not fair to favour the past and exclude the new. Think of us playwrights that are young and tender, pushing
through the dark soil of our forebears like so many shoots in spring.”

“How poetical you are, Richard. You almost sound like Master Allison. A moment earlier you were likening yourself to a general marshalling his troops of words.”

“Think of us young playwrights,” he repeated.

He meant, of course,
think of me.

I made no reply but something in my look must have told him that further evasion was useless. His shoulders tensed.

“I have tried to produce something new and fresh, God knows I have tried in the past,” he said, still fixing me with his parti-coloured gaze and now holding tight to my forearm with
one hand. I observed that the knuckles of the other hand gripping his tankard were white. “I tried but it was poor thin stuff. I knew it even without showing it to anyone.”

I still said nothing but detached my arm from his hold. There was something distasteful in his self-pity.

“What harm is there in using a dead man’s words? Or an anonymous man’s? It’s the same thing. There was no name on the title-page. I didn’t think
The Courtesan of
Venice
had ever been performed. It had a neglected air. I read it and considered that it deserved to see the sunlight.”

“Metamorphosed into
A Venetian Whore.
You rifled through the Book-keeper’s chest, abstracted an old play, copied it off and passed it as your own work. And then you asked me
to prefer it to Master Shakespeare.”

“Be calm, Nicholas.
Your
conscience can be clear, for you refused to do what I should never have requested of you in the first place.”

“It is your own conscience that you should be concerned with.”

“There are worse things to have on it than a little plagiary.”

“You were still taking a risk that the
Courtesan –
oh sorry,
Whore
– might be recognised,” I said. “She has been around for some time. Perhaps you are
not the only one to have fiddled with her.”

“
You
didn’t recognise it,” he said.

“But one of the older members of the Chamberlain’s, one of the shareholders . . . ?”

“I dropped one or two hints beforehand but no-one took them up. Besides . . .”

“Besides?”

“Where do you think Master Shakespeare got the idea for his
Merchant of Venice
from?”

“Are you saying that he’d read this play as well?”

“Well, it’s possible. After all, you yourself commented on one or two likenesses between – my – between that piece and his. Maybe that’s why he didn’t say
anything. Maybe your precious Shakespeare is guilty of a little plagiary too.”