A Dead Man in Deptford Read Online Free

body, turn and
turn about. Under the elms by the water’s margent. Naked.
Altogether too animal, save that animals did not. The work of
breeding too urgent and life too short. Love? Mind and mind?
It did not apply.
    So, then, I suppose it to have been. I saw Kit for the first time
in London at Burbage’s theatre, named aptly the Theatre, when
I played Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy. He was on a stage
stool, next to Watson, much taken by Ned Alleyn, younger than
he by a year but altogether the quavering ancient as Hieronimo,
Marshal of Spain:

    - He would not say that, said Kit. This was after, in the
tiring room. I was unwigging myself, wiping off the white from my chubby boy’s face, easing myself out of bodice and fardingale.
Kit saw me an instant in a boy’s nakedness and seemed to glow.
The tiring room the afternoon sun had baked was a cram of players, Dawson, Hawkes, Crampson, Digges, Birkin, Timmes, the
rest, transformed now from Portugal and Spain their notabilities
into men and boys of the street, cursing at their thirst, thumping
each other over tripped entrances, slowness on cues, a stutter, a
finger-snapping momentary forgetting of a phrase put right by
Haddock the bookholder. Tom Kyd, whose play it was, was
there, a timid little man with bowed legs though not timid in
defence of his work. He said:

    - The distracted brain can oft turn to a kind of logic which
we see as mad, absurd also, but the absurd can be a face of the
tragic. This Seneca knew. This I know. You are one of these
university puppies that think they know better.
    - Cambridge has taught me Seneca. Puppy I may be, but
I am right to whimper at that whilom.
    - Whilom is very good, Ned Alleyn said. It is old-fangled
but so is the speaker. There is nothing wrong with whilom.
    - I defer, Kit said. I was moved. My back hairs bristled.
I sweated. It was hardly to be believed.
    And Ned Alleyn, removing from his young and blank face
the paint of lined age, smirked, a creature of null person as of
null features, the condition of his art, the empty vessel to be
filled with what the poet brewed, what there was of him so to
say with the buskins off was a nullity that nonetheless gave off
a manner of heat. He said in a voice as of song, wiping:
    - The skill is long to learn. Meaning he had been at it
some five or six years, starting like myself as a bound prentice
to his company. Long, yes, it seemed long. And then: We will
go drink. Then Smigg the door-gatherer came in swinging his
leathern bag, so Alleyn asked what was the take.
    - Two pounds thirteen and some odd bad coins.
    - Ruination, said James Burbage, who owned the Theatre
and the Curtain and whose son Richard had his own ambitions,
the chief of which was not to be an arm-swinging actor like
Alleyn. Dick Burbage, who had carried a pike, said:

    - The ruination will not come from low takings. We shall be
closed. An officer I know to be of the Lord Mayor was looking
in for another prentice riot.
    - They were quiet today. Besides, we are in Middlesex,
not London. The Mayor’s men may keep their long noses out.
    - London prentices, London laws. And Dick Burbage shook
his head. It is all a shaky business.
    The Unicorn on Bishopsgate Street had as landlord Ned
Alleyn’s elder brother Jack. Kit and Watson, Alleyn, Kyd and
I trod the slimy cobbles thither. I was young but, motherless
and fatherless, was under Ned Alleyn’s protection, lived with
him; he was as yet unmarried, but that was to change. In the
street we saw Philip Henslowe, who said Well met, I would
have a word. Alleyn nodded. It was Henslowe’s stepdaughter
Joan Woodward, no more than a girl, little older than I, in
whom Alleyn was said to have an interest.
    The main room of the Unicorn was a cram of drinkers who
had come from the Theatre, and some greeted Alleyn as ever
with What outcries pluck me, which had become a catchline of
the time. He waved his arm, smiled as from aloft, and led